When AI Automation Costs You a Client: Steve Lauda

Hello Steve, pleasure to have you on the show. How you been?

Hi Jared. It's a pleasure. I'm great. How about you?

Yeah, doing well, thanks. Yeah. And sunny, sunny Perth here. live in a place called Fremantle and I hear you live in Bali, which is a beautiful part of the world.

Yeah, you too, I guess. From the way I

Yeah.

see it, like the environment, like it's kind of like sunny as well in there.

Yeah, yeah, we had a lot of coastline, a lot of beach. And at the moment it is a beautiful day, very sunny, not a cloud in the sky, so can't complain.

Nice.

So look, I have been following you on X for a while and I'm very happy you've joined today. I've noticed a lot of your work and for those that are watching from home, Steve's a craftsman. I love your posts. You spend a lot of time on small details and you have a decent sized team with your business as well. So it was important for me to get you on the show because I wanted to talk about not only the approach that you have to your work with this new technology, but also how you manage your team in a company that's the size you have and how you grow your business is poised as a Sort of a design growth for teams so you help your clients grow so I'm interested to learn how you do that so but before we start I'd love to hear from you your sort of journey to get to where you are now with blissful Because you've worked different roles in the past you've worked for other people and now you're working for yourself so I'd love to learn about the experience of previous roles and how you made that leap into creating your own studio and now where you are, which is really successful. I'd love to learn about it. So tell us your journey.

Okay, so thank you, Jared, for for the time and the chance given to me to tell about this. So a fun fact, I don't start as a designer. I started to work like officially as an employee when I was 17 years old. So back then it was in the high school. And my first job is you know, become the salesperson for life insurance. If you know like AXA. I think it's quite popular

Yep.

in Southeast Asia. and I need to do that is because like I'm growing in a struggling family economically and I have to make sure that I can pay my own tuition in the high school. And then yeah, I'm working when you know I went back from school and then I work up until evening. So I'm quite people called it naughty. Like I don't do my homework. and I'm quite rebellious towards my you know,

Mm-hmm.

my teachers because like I told them like I have to work because there's no other way for me to pay for my tuition if I don't work. So that's why I also cannot do my homework. And long story short, I graduated thankfully I can pay up until the graduation and then In the meantime, before I went to college, I feel like I kind of bored with the sales life because like

Mm-hmm.

I've been doing it for roughly two years. and then I started to look for more opportunities and I fall in love with photography, videography. I think back then in 2014, 2015, there's a lot of like videographer that blows up in in

Mm-hmm.

YouTube and I kind of like get inspired to do some sort of like a small scale business that doing the same thing in in Bali. And then I don't really have that much money back then, but I thankfully I can buy my own camera and then start to you know like doing sales in Facebook. I'm just like going into the Facebook group of wives and husbands

Mm-hmm.

that doing their hobbies like they're doing for example, they love to collect die cast for the husband. And then I

Okay.

ask them like, hey, do you want me to take pictures of your die cast and then like make a poster out of it? And then I will bring it to your home. And then from there I can make my own money and you know, pay my own tuition for for my college as well. And then I'm doing that for freelance during during my free time. And then I realized like a lot of people also doing the same thing. And then the competition is becoming really not yeah,

really competitive.

not really that healthy. And then I decided to focus on college because luckily I can pay my tuition up until fourth semester back then. And then I start to feel like college is not really for me. Like I feel the education in here is like being purposefully being delayed if if

Mm-hmm.

that makes sense. Like if something can be done within one semester, it it's kind of like being stretched out for two, three semesters out of it. So

Right. Right, right, right.

then like I got bored because like the the pace of the learning is very slow. And in the fifth semester I decided I think it's better for me to just like doing the work that I love. And I discoffer Design can make money. when I was in the fourth semester, because I have a multimedia may you know multimedia class back then. And then the lecturer told me like, you you are doing a a good enough design. I think if you do design business like a freelance, you can make money out of it. But at the time I kind of like not confident, but what I'm confident with is that Back then I thought it's better if if I'm like aiming for a local business that have a subjectively

Hmm.

bad design and then try to challenge the owner like, hey, if I can make better design within a day,

Yeah.

how about you hire me as a graphic designer? And then at that time I'm grateful that the owner accept the challenge and then ultimately accept me as a as an employee. Although I don't have the degree, but like he's quite impressed with the with the

Yeah.

design. And that the place that I'm working first time as a designer is called Monarch. It's

Okay.

it's a school actually for people that want to work in a cruise ship. So it's like training for hospitality if they want to become, you know, bartender, waiter, waitress, that kind of stuff. And what I'm doing is like redi redesigning the website, the marketing materials and stuff. And I'm kind of like growing in in that in that school. Like they at first they are struggling to find students. And then when I joined in the first year, by the next year of when they you know, opening the registration again, they are overflowed with applicants and they are quite impressed But then I decided to quit because I've been there for almost four years. And I feel

Mm-hmm.

like my career is like, you know, not going anywhere because it's a local business. I don't know anything beside what I'm doing there. And then I

Yeah.

want to find more challenge. And one of my friends working for a startup in Singapore. And he he said, like, hey, there's one startup in Singapore that wants to hire. a designer and

Hmm.

then at that time in twenty and eighteen I think at the time there's like two type of designers if I don't know like at

Right?

the time you there's a like creative designer the one that doing

Yep.

marketing and everything else and then product designer and then yeah yeah yeah yeah and then

Yeah, like a print and digital, so graphic designer and a digital designer. that was about as far as it went. Yeah.

there's a startup it's called Glens. back then they just finished their SIT funding and then they want to scale their team and I decided to join the Singapore team back then. But the funny thing is that when I joined they accept they give me the contract. They decided to also expand to Indonesia in Jakarta. So during my first year, second year I go back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore and 'Cause like you know, I have a desi designers meeting in Singapore, but I also need to grow the marketing in Indonesia and then I grow my career repeatedly there as a designer. but not the quality of the design. 'Cause like I'm not

So what was the main sort of thing you were learning there? it, you know,

I'll go.

learning the ropes with a big, client rather than your design skills? What was it? Yeah.

It's more towards like organization, 'cause like I s I started as a like kind of like the founding designer, just myself. And then there's like three product designers. But we are not really under the same umbrella because like product designer belong to the product team where

Yeah.

myself belong to the marketing team. But like I'm quite rebellious and then I say design doesn't make sense if they are like being separated and then they ultimately merge it together.

Mm-hmm. That's

merge it together

Yep.

and then like we are getting stronger back then and then because the the Indonesian part of the the startup is getting

Yep.

massively scaling like they make a lot of revenue and we are turning a lot of things and doing a lot of like experiment and then they give me the the chance to build my own team. So that's where I started to become like design manager, they call it. Like that. And then I

But so just because you are hungry, you are the kind of character it sounds to me that you're, someone that really likes to get after it. You don't sit still. And so just

Yeah.

just by showing that energy, they gave you that opportunity, right? That's great. Yeah.

Yeah, like I easily get bored if I just like doing things over and over again without any kind of like change of pace, change of challenges, and then I ultimately grow my team up until twenty six people at that time. And the the team is like being divided in Indonesia, in Singapore, in Vietnam and also Hong Kong and Thailand. And back then I start to feel also quote unquote bored because of the bureaucracy because I've been in the startup from sit funding up until Ceres D. They they magically able to raise fund in the middle of COVID, because like a lot of startups collapsed. Yeah. Like they cannot find

Mm-hmm. Challenging. Yeah. Yeah.

funding, but like I'm grateful Clintons can find the funding back then. And then like a few months after they raised fund, I ultimately decided to quit. And a lot of people questioning my decision because like, hey, it's f very difficult to find job during COVID, blah blah blah, but like

So what was pulling you towards that decision? Because that's a big jump and a lot of people I speak to wouldn't do that. They'd take sort of career security with a nice stable job. And I've been through it as well. I know the feeling. So what was the factor that you said, you know what, I think I've got enough experience. I think I can make this work. What made you take that leap?

Yeah. That's a great question. So I think the first one is like I think financial security. Back then I I have like enough saving for me to be able to not to work hypothetically for two years. if I live just like in a normal pace, not you know, like spending too much. and then

And does your locality help there as well? Because I mean, obviously you live in Denpasar. So is your cost

Yeah.

of living was a lot lower than let's say you live in Singapore.

Yeah.

So you were earning half decent money there and you were just you were just sort of saving a lot of that.

Yeah, correct.

Yeah, great. Yeah, good on you.

And then the second one is because like I think a few months prior for me to decide to quit is that my mom getting really sick and

Mm-hmm.

she ultimately passed away a year after, but like at that time I feel like I don't think I can juggle between the work with

Hmm.

and taking care of her, and I decided to quit. And then from there onward I joined a design studio in Indonesia.

Mm-hmm.

'Cause like I met this person when I was in Singapore and then at first I become the client of this design

Right.

studio. Like I outsource a lot of work to the studio because like we produce massive amount of

Mm-hmm.

work and like the in-house team, even though we are a lot of people, we also cannot handle that. And then we decided to hire external. And then you know, the the owner of the studio feels like my my work ethic is quite impressive considering my age and then he said like if you decided to quit from the startup, why why don't you join my studio? And then I joined and I stayed there for several months. But

you

like my key learnings there is that like I realized the life of startup and the life of studio surfing a lot of clients is very contrast. It

Yeah.

as opposed to just like surfing one brand, although they have like sub brands, you have the leniency to negotiate timeline and all of those bureaucracy, like you you kind of like have the high bar of tolerance if you don't really deliver the work. But in the studio like you need to always deliver on the certain amount of like quality that you whether you are sick. Yeah.

Yeah, have budgets and timeframes. So it's, yeah, it's pros and cons for each one, right? So if you're

Yeah.

working on a startup, you have focus and you can spend the time going deep in solving the problems. But ultimately you need growth. So it's all about what the user need is, but then working in an agency, yeah, it's fast paced. The benefit is you get to see all these different problems. So you can work on a lot of different work and it's quite fulfilling in that sense, but also the budgets are tight and the timeframes are often tighter. So it's a very, very

Yeah.

fast paced environment. It's, hard. So, so you did, you didn't, did that for a little bit and you enjoyed it, but then ultimately decided to go out on your own.

I'm not there yet. So back then is that when in the studio itself, like my mom passed away and then I got hit pretty heavily back then and then I decided like I don't want to work for I don't know how long it will be, but like the founder understand the situation and then he let me go for the sake of like I kind of like in the the in this state of like I don't know what to do anymore 'cause back then my main motivation is that I want to make my mom happy. Like that's like the North Star for me. And then when she passed away, I don't really know what else I want to do because like I'm very lesser focused to do that 'cause personally I want to like prove myself as a as the only son like, hey, this is your son. I want to make sure that you are proud of me but like she doesn't able to stay with us longer than I expected. And then I kind of like stay in that kind of like limbo state. Like I'm not sure like you can relate if you have ever faced that kind of situation, but like yeah. Like

have, yeah, I've been there. Yep. So I understand where you're coming from.

y w you wake up and then you You suddenly don't really have the energy to to

Mm.

just like keep going. 'Cause like yeah. and then I don't really know what I want to do. Mm-hmm.

So we went from that state, you were obviously, it's not a good place to be, but where you are now, you seem very accomplished. You seem quite successful. how did you find

I don't call me that.

that spark and how did you grow your current studio?

Yeah, that's a great question. So this is the the the the people moment I think in my career because back

Hmm.

then after like four months I'm not working, there's a CEO from a creative studio in Singapore reached out to me and then said that he want to hire a technical PM. So a PM that can do PM, like managing

Mm-hmm.

things, but also can do design and also can do code. A little bit on the front end part. And then at a time I was kind of like not really deciding, but I said simply to him no because like I'm not ready to jump back in to work again. Cause I explained my personal situation and then he said, I feel it's kind of surprising because he is very emp empathetic. His name is Jeffrey Nichta. So He's Dutch. And then

Shout out to Jeffrey.

he made couple of business in Indonesia and also Singapore. And then he said, I'm sorry for your loss. And he said a lot of like positive things. And he said, if you don't mind, would you mind to jump on a call for an hour? Let's just talk about this. And then usually when I reject people, they just like they disappear like without any reply.

Hmm.

But this guy He spent his time to just listen to to my personal things, which is I would say like one in a million. And up until today, like I feel really grateful because of him. And then he's like in the call itself, like I explain my struggle, my aspiration, and a lot of stuff I share my burden, because like back then I'm really like, you know, closing myself.

Mm.

I'm not reaching out to my friends. I'm just be alienated myself from the society. But then like Jeff kind of like pulled me out from those state kind of like in the call and then he said like what do you what do you want to do in your life? I want to make my own business. but I don't know where to start. And then he said, like, okay, how about this? If you join me as a technical PM, I will mentor you to make the business along the way. And then Because of that, I decided to join. And then I stayed there for like two years before. So back then it was 2000 and 2022. and then in 2024, I said to him, I think I learned quite a lot from you. I want to make my own business. And then I started to reach out to my old friends that previously You know, like asking me to like join their company and whatnot

Mm-hmm.

through LinkedIn and then say that I create this studio. would you mind to become my client? I'm happy if you just pay me this amount. And then they said, yeah, that's great. it's a great time for us to connect again. And then I just stay for like I think five months by myself just to serve two clients, which is like enough to keep me going.

Yeah. And so in that time you

but at the same time I'm still sorry.

were, that's great. So in that time of, you know, getting started. So it's great when you had Jeff sort of supporting you and skilling you up and easing you into your own business. And you had your network there to support you from a client base. So for like five months, you sort of work for a couple of clients, but then you were working on your processes. You were

Yeah.

solidify. Yes, it's actually turning into a company. That's good. That's great. So at that point, you've now got a couple of clients, you've got a fledgling studio. And when was this is about 2023 2024.

it was a in the late of two thousand and twenty four and then

Yep.

I started to again I feel like I don't have enough challenge back then. Like it started it started to feel like

You're a hustler. It sounds like you started in sales too. So I think that, you know, that is that is something that a lot of designers that are watching this can can take something from is that, you know, you've grown the studio and I think the sales piece is a key factor in that, you know, you know how to you know how to communicate and how to sell maybe so

Yeah, I think I think so, but I'm not really sure about that. But then like I started to feel like, okay, when I serve these two clients and I'm doing

Yeah.

this by myself, I started to feel comfortable. And when I'm being comfortable too long, I feel like life is getting bored in a way.

Yeah.

I think I think you can relate in that. and then I started to need to find a way on how to to grow the business and

Hmm.

so that Back then, what I'm trying to do is that I need to have a team to take care of the the in the business kind of thing where I'm working

Mm-hmm.

on the business. So then I already have the plan that Blissful Studio is like my stepping stone, so then like I can grow a another business that can make

Mm-hmm.

a stable revenue. Cause I think everyone knows that this you know, like surface business is always more volatile compared to product based business.

Yeah, a lot of ebb and flows. Yep.

And yeah, and then yeah, that that's my my goal actually. And then I started to like build the team bit by bit, but like in the beginning the the hardest part is actually finding people that doesn't know me.

Mmm.

Cause like in the beginning is because of my old network I can have those two clients, but now how can I how can I grow my audience? 'Cause like my LinkedIn is not really that popular. And I don't have Twitter at the time. I don't have X

Mm-hmm.

account. And then I met one designer on Twitter. I haven't like subscribed for the premium account back then in the late of 2024. I think it's August. And then I met a designer that kind of like hustling. His name is Bayou. I don't know if he's going to watch this but I'm I'm going to share this to him because like I'm going to give

Bye bye.

I give a shout out to him later for this. that he said, if you want to find clients, I think X is the best place for you to do so because on LinkedIn back then it's like they start to grow into those plays where people just like spamming replies everywhere. Yeah. Yeah.

They're still doing it. Yeah. It's funny, isn't it? LinkedIn is the AI slop social network and people are always posting the same types of content there. It's

Yeah.

not bad for your profile, but I agree with you in terms of reaching a global customer base. X is definitely a much better platform for that. It's quite, it's a different, it's a different feel. You know, it's much less formal, but you seem to do a really good job with your content. I heard you mentioned you you may have a coach now. So there is a, there is a, a tone and an approach to your content that I see seems to be focused on just quality output. You're just sharing the work that you're doing and the work that you're sharing has a very strong sense of detail. So

Here's your

you, you, you're not always showing like the whole interface. You might just show a snippet of something that you've spent a lot of time perfecting. Is that intentional?

yes. So back then like Bayou just told me like the the checklist of like how do we get the client? And then

Yeah, right.

I work on that checklist and I figure things by myself and there are people like tell me you need to plan things out and there are some people just like d just do it for fun. And then I tried both and then I ultimately feels

Mm-hmm.

like I think I'm naturally feeling more comfortable with the impromptu

Yep.

you know, approach. I think for some people they really love to plan things out and just like

Yeah.

plan out what they post, what they want to do for the rest of the day and just like plan out their posts. But for me, I feel genuinely more energized and not, you know, being drained out for my personal energy when

Mm.

I just do my my social media just for fun in a way. Like I don't really like think about like what I want to post, but when I work on something, I feel like, this is interesting to post. I just post it. And to your question, is that intentional for me to to post the details? At first not, because like back then in 2024, my design compared to now is like a lot s a lot less better. Like it's really

Hmm.

sucked. I think everyone have have that kind of like, you know, evolution phase.

Every designer thinks the same thing.

Yeah. And and I would say like, by joining Twitter like and seeing a lot of like great designers, including yourself, I love what you post and I love your design as well. Like

Thank

a lot of people like inspired me to get better and arguably I would say like throughout my career as a designer since two thousand and fifteen up until now, I think my my quality of design increasing a lot when I you know get exposed with designers from X because

Mm-hmm.

like people say it like designers on X are on bubble, but in a way you can just like see it in a in a positive lens because like whatever happening on Twitter it's it's like the the upper echelon of design. Like yeah.

It's a high quality bar. Yeah. I've got no problems with being a bubble because the quality bar is so high. So you see

Yeah.

a lot of great designers posting amazing things and it strives you to be that good. And if it's a bubble

Yeah, I agree.

of the top 1%, I don't mind being, it's great.

Yeah.

You know, pushes you to do better. So. I completely agree. It's a great platform for that. You people have a negative opinion of X sometimes, but I think if you prune it and you follow the right people and you get involved in the community, it's a wonderful place to grow and find clients. Okay. So you're posting content. It seems to be going well. And you started Bliss. Now, how many staff are you now? How many people do you manage in the studio at Blissful?

including myself, it's to be ten designers now, 'cause like in the begin

Right. Now, are they based everywhere? they all over the world?

No, it's Indonesia. I s I try to

great.

grow my team based on several places, but I d I realize like one is about culture 'cause like

Hmm.

people have different culture, they have different way of speaking their mind.

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes we have kind of like culture clashed because of that and then

Right.

we tend to, you know, have a miscommunication that is unnecessary in my opinion. And

Interesting.

And then the second one is about

So what's different? Give me an insight into that because that sounds really interesting. So what's an example of that with working with an international team? Like is it a certain people's more agreeable than others or certain people's too blunt? What's the difference?

I I I will not mention the country, but let's just say like this person is from country A and then they are very strict about like their holiday.

Mm-hmm.

whereas here we are quite lenient and I was just saying like okay, it's okay if you take the the the the day off for your holiday, but like because you know it it's a bit like case by case situation but

Hmm.

this person forgot to like put all of the work that he did in a separate file yeah

hand over. Right.

and then he doesn't bring it can you just like bring it and then this person said because of my culture I cannot touch my laptop during this day like what like and then I have to explain

Right. Okay. Right. And so you're stuck then you're left stuck. Yeah. But then you need a handover. You need that's fine. You of course you expect people's you know, time to have breaks and stuff. But you that's great. But if you need to pick it up, you need everything. Okay. So you found that quite

Yeah.

difficult of very various examples, I suppose over the years. And now you just focused on Indonesian time. Right.

Yeah. And that that's kind of like ticked me. Like, okay, I think it's better for me to just like build my team locally because I know what what to expect 'cause like I understand like the the culture and the nuances of like how people will

Yeah.

perceive certain things. Whereas when I work with other people

And does it make it? Yeah, it's make it much more easy. Also, obviously speaking in native tongue to your team. it's a lot of loss in loss of lesson. Lost in translation. Yeah, okay.

Correct.

That's great. So now you've got you've got a studio, you've got this decent sized team. So let's talk about I'd love I'm interested to know how you're utilizing AI across your team. And whether it be operational improvements, design improvements, because you struck me as more of a design studio. You've got a very broad experience, but I'm interested to know if you're using this technology to build for your clients as well, create the actual products. And the thing that struck me most about the studio is that you're focused on client growth. So you're working with startups and you're helping them grow. And I understand that now from your background, know, for your previous startup, you worked out in your sales background that that's probably built into your personality, but how are you actually doing that? And is AI helping?

Okay, so I think I think it's kind of like at at the beginning, if you I if you allow me to explain like how experiment in the first place, I

Yeah.

I think get into the bode of like how other founders also getting obsessed in the first place, like, I want to automate everything, I need to make this

Hmm.

become something that I don't need to touch again whatsoever. And then I start to make automation. blah blah blah and then integrate that to Slack because like my primary communication channel is Slack and then I

Mm-hmm.

start to feel like so long story short like I try to make AI to communicate to my clients on my behalf and

Mm-hmm.

then like I and then

Dangerous.

I keep like trying to make the AI better because like sometimes

Yep.

they respond in a way like my god, why can you send that? I need to I need to delete that.

It's not good. Exactly. Not very good at the moment. Yep.

And then the funny thing is that it happened when I'm sleeping because like we expect that we are able to communicate like almost 24-7, right? But then

Hmm. Hmm.

they I give unexpected replies when I am sleeping. And when I wake up,

Hmm.

I look at the conversation and then like, my god, what is happening here? And then And then I have to jump on a call with the client and explain like, look, I'm sorry with all of the with all of the things because like long story short, the conversation getting in a loop, it's just like when

Yeah.

you talk to cloud and cloud doesn't understand what you are trying to say, the cloud

Yeah. And so they're getting frustrated. So the customer experiences, what is Steve saying? What I've told him seven times that he keeps. Yeah.

And then the client said, Are you using AI to communicate with me? this is this is ridiculous. Like, let's stop

Yeah.

working together for from now on. And then like I apologize, but ultimately like the client has to let go because like the client feels really pissed off because of that, and then I

Yeah.

decided, I think I need to tone down the usage of AI because like it can make me lose money because of it. Because like be being too obsessed

Yes.

to automate everything is is also half a backlash on its own. And then I decided yeah.

And it's not as the human element right like you can't if you're you're a service-based business you're dealing with customers I guess you've learned the hard way, but yeah,

Yeah.

you can't unless it were you explicitly had you told the client I have a bot here that you can ask questions when I'm asleep and it'll do its best but uh Otherwise, it's it's a trust issue. The client feels

Yeah.

that you're you're being distrustful or you're automating away everything So then they think am I paying for what? It's hard.

Yeah.

And it's not very good at that yet. I would say like, yeah, you

Yeah.

work with Claude and the way it speaks is, I wouldn't put that in front of a client ever. It's just not great. Okay, so you learn your lesson, and

Yeah.

you stop doing that. And so where else have you been experimenting with?

I also do also obviously like I try to build my website with AI as well to certain extent. But like the final touch, I do the manual tweaking and then also based on my experience, because communication is also non negotiable now, like

Yep.

I have to do it manually. And then I also produce the invoice with AI, 'cause like that's a rep

What sorry?

invoice. Invoice.

Invoices, yep. Gotcha. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah, I produce that with AI and it's it's really time cipher, like it automatically

Hmm.

generates the invoice without without myself need to do that manually. And then for the email, because it's also correlated towards communication, I also do that manually. And one of my clients also said like I know that you wrote this yourself because it has a grammatical error. So like people now embrace fault we because th they kinda suspect when

Yes, Well...

when it's really perfect i mean it must be AI.

Yeah, I did. I did. I wrote an article about something like this. I wanted to understand whether or not AI generated content converted well. And it turns out that it doesn't really but because it can produce so much more of it, your conversion rates lower, but it's a volume game and you get results that way. But what was interesting was that the personal anecdotes of failure convert really high. So on LinkedIn, when you see people saying, you know, spend all this money and they lost all this money. And that's just like a strategic play.

Yeah.

So the faults work, right. And if you don't know DAS is and a few spelling errors, you train

Yeah.

your train your agent to make typos.

And I also use AI to study to do I mean like studying the the client background and and everything.

research.

Doing research, either like you know, business research, US research, and then

Yeah.

I also run the agent to if it's possible if I get a client and then work on the product and then I can just like run the agent to analyze the product by themselves by running the agent through browser. So they can just like do the experiment through the staging. I purposefully asked the client to give me a sandbox environment where

Yep.

if I do oopsie or like any mistakes, it doesn't bring any disadvantages for them. And

I the same. request no ability to push to production. don't want

Yeah.

to touch that. Yeah. Okay. So you are building with the tools as well. You're not just designing, is that right? Yeah. Okay.

Yep. Yeah, correct.

That's great. And so do you have a development background or are you employing people to help with that? Or are you just solely relying on a Gentic?

that's a great question. So my background is actually computer science. So

great.

yeah, my colleagues actually learn about how to make software. And then yeah, I don't really like it personally when I have to wrote the code myself back then. Because like

Mm-hmm.

manual coding, I can do it, but like you know, compared to just like jumping on a canvas and make the interface

Yeah.

you see the result immediately, but in code like you just see a bunch of like code lines

Yep.

and then when you back then before AI is like you run it and then you know the the result is the result is

Nothing happens.

pretty, you know, distant from what you expected. It's like you getting frustrated

Yeah

and then you have to open you know a lot of

So much time. There's a lot of time. I share the same. I did a multimedia degree as well. And I used to do actual script and flash and things. And it used to frustrate me that if I put it like a colon or semi-colon in the wrong spot or a column in the wrong spot, the whole thing would just crash. can't think computer figure this out. This is so frustrating. And like you, there's a joy of being able to just draw on a canvas and see the result. But what always bothered me about that was that, you know, it's not the real thing. You know, you, you, you're still an abstraction from the final product.

Yeah.

and you still had to work with the team over a long period of time to get that right. And you would annoy the hell out of engineers because you've won it. Perfect. You'd want the animations right. And they would just, you know, this is not worth the cost. and now you can, you can do that life. You know, I can, I can see the end product and build. So you guys are doing the same thing. That's great. Yeah.

Yeah.

So how are you using it? So you're doing a little bit of operations, so invoicing and things like that. What about on the design side of things? Are you using it

Mm.

to help iterate, do design research? What kind of workflows are you using to sort of speed up and improve your output?

Okay, so that's a great question. I think to put it in a in in a good way to explain this is like I would like imagine you as my client, like you have a startup

Yep.

and then you decided to work with me and then I invite you to Slack and then in Select I would just like explain what's the next step. So usually I just like explain to you like what's gonna happen in the first week. 'Cause like

Mm-hmm.

Prior to that, like you explain to me what you need from me. And let's just say like you need my help for everything. And we've discussed

Mm-hmm.

it in the call, like you need branding, you need website, you need to you need my help to also polish the product. So when we jump into the into the Slack channel, it's going to be like both of us know what to expect next. And then in Slack, I would just like sending to you like what is the next steps. And I usually just issue the invoice through email. I do the manual invoice and you know, manual emailing because like it feels more personal and there's also like the plus point, like they said like, I really appreciate this because like you put your thought in it and I suspect that this is something that you wrote by yourself and not by AI, and I love that. And I keep doing that. And then after that, I built the timeline and I have the timeline builder in Figma. like the same plate and then now

Mm-hmm.

agent also exists in Figma. You can just like ask the agent to change the date and like put like the actionable there. I usually when the client started with branding. be sorry, if branding is part of the of the work, I always start with the branding first because like that's like the the cornerstone of everything that encapsulates

Yeah.

all of the work because we need to make sure that I think you know like a i slob can generate a lot of average looking software, website and whatsoever.

What it does, it's an average generator. That's exactly what it does. It's very bad. My view is it's a very bad at design.

Yeah.

it might get better and we are seeing some improvements with like Claude design, but it doesn't have the nuance. It doesn't have the quality yet. And yeah, so I agree. If you, think a lot of people just use it and say that's, it's why we're seeing this prevalence of AI posters everywhere. You know, this, the, the gig poster, the festival poster,

Yeah.

everything, they all look the same. because people are just using it to just spit out the average. So I think the design studios like yourselves aren't going anywhere. The work changes of course, but yeah, quality still matters. So it sounds like you're doing the same sort of thing.

Yeah. And then I give you like a a quiz to to explain like what what you have in mind. what is your vision for your for your application for your business? What differentiate you from your competitors? Who is your competitors? who you are looking up to in terms of like pop culture. I I ask questions not just like things that related to the business, but also something that outside of the business because I draw inspiration everywhere because sometimes the click moment happened when you kind of like draw inspiration from things that unexpected for like

Mmm.

for example, I asked my clients like what is your top three musics and why? And it kind of like makes them thinking like why they like the in there are some clients that really appreciate the quiz because like it's kind of like uncommon for people to ask them

Yeah, they've never thought about it before. Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? Like, I mean, I've done a lot of workshops around sort of brand strategy over the years and product strategy. you you get some business in the room and you might have three co-founders. and you start asking these questions and you quickly realize that they've never been asked them before and they're not on the same page. You they'll all have different views of what something would be. And okay, well, you know, and unless you say it's like this outside thing, it sort of unlocks a whole bunch of different ways you can approach things. It's the right way to go. Yeah, that's really cool.

And I have also three uncommon questions that I asked in the quiz, which is like, do you have a very memorable dream that up until today you still remember it? And then can you explain that?

Haha, great!

And then the second one is like, if you can be a character, whatever that is, from a movie, or like it can be comic book or whatever, who that is and why. So it's like

Yeah, that's great. So you're learning some personal psychology

And then the desert one

to sort of help understand what kind of things I'd like to see. Is that how you apply it? So the answers

Yeah.

to those questions, is that like a helps with the stylistic output? yeah, okay, that's cool.

Yeah. It's kind of like helping me to understand like how they think as well. And kind

Yep.

of like I also now use the AI to also like try to find like pattern and also analyze what what kind of person this is. Although I'm not going to just like accept what the AI is trying to explain to me

Yeah.

based on the explanation, but it's kind of like giving me to a certain extent the the the angle or like perspective that I cannot think

Yeah.

about in the first place when I analyze it manually. And then after that, what I'm doing is like creating the direction for the branding. So branding usually like take two weeks more or less, up until we

Yep.

have like a essential brand guidelines and then have like minimal logo shape. And then

Yep.

after that we jump straight to do the the product and the website at the same time.

Yep.

and that that happened in parallel. And along the way, usually in the first month on the week three and week four, the branding itself will also evolve because in the in the first two weeks it's

Yeah.

all about like creating the artifacts, like creating the foundation,

Yep.

but it doesn't being stressed, you know, being stressed test in the real environment, like in the website, in the product, and we kind of like

Hmm. Yep. Different flow states, different visuals that you need. It evolves as you go, right? So it's just ever improving sort of organic approach to creation. That's quite a fast turnaround

And

in terms of the website and the product that you would do at the same time. So what, what kind of scale of the web apps is that you're building? they, you know, small, small scale apps, really large and how are you turning them around that quickly?

Yeah, so when it comes like within like the third week and fourth week, usually up when when it comes like the startup it it depends on like how complex the product is. But sometimes

Yeah.

w they just need certain features need to be done 'cause

Hmm.

like they need to demo that during the demo day, for example. If it's like

I see what you're

a a pre seat or like sit startup, they just want to show the the great things on a certain areas. Obviously they will not

Yeah.

Demo the entire app, but after that we spent around like three to four months to make everything perfect.

Right. So because you're primarily focused on startups, right? So guess that makes

Yeah.

sense. They just have some sort of presentation for capital raising and you're

Yeah.

honing in on that. Yeah, great. Which I did see on your website, you do do decks as well. So investment decks.

Yeah.

So that makes that makes a whole lot of sense. So is there any sort of like practical web workflow that you could share or show any any output you've created where AI has had a really positive impact that surprised you? I think for viewers, it'd be great to see something that you've created that would that would really help.

Okay, so I think nowadays is like the way how I leverage AI when it comes to like translating design into production directly are two. The first one is like either I design it directly in Figma or paper, or I

Mm-hmm.

just like jump straight into the coding agent and give them enough references and then like wrote

Yeah.

down a lot of things as a brief and I always utilize the plain mode. to to do it. So I think

Yep. Yep.

what I'm going to share is like the tool that I built internally. So I think

great. Amazing.

that that that's something that I would like to share now. if you give me time to find it.

Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. And whilst you're finding it. Yeah. So this is something that I am noticing a lot with design studios is that I'm, I do the same. I've built my own and you're operationally are building your own software to run things and support you. I see a lot of designers doing this on X and it just makes

Yeah.

so much sense because You know, you don't almost don't even need figma anymore. Um, for this type of work, I do actually quite like figuring out. think it's a great tool, especially at scale. But if you just need something to support you in whatever you need just to work directly with the agent, um, whether it be codex or, um, you know, Claude, or even if you use cursor to your point, you just give it a brief, you start talking to it and you can have something quite quickly that can support you. So, um, It makes a whole lot of sense. You know, I've done the same sort of thing. So I have a piece of software that I've built, which yeah, like yourself, it handles my meetings, my invoices, my contracts and proposals and things. also as a knowledge agent. So it's, it remembers everything of context across a lot of areas. And I can share, can get it to watch, client directories and ingest that context as well. I'm really forgetful. So I needed something that was going to remember better than me. And whenever I just talked to my agent now and remind me, no, Steve at, you know, seven minutes into the podcast said this, I'm like, that's right. Okay.

Yeah.

So, and, and, know, previously the cost of doing something like that was quite high. need a broad subscription to something that doesn't quite suit your need or

Yeah.

something very expensive. And so now you can kind of build it yourself and it's the cost of a, you know, a VPS or, you know, you can host it locally if you want. It's fine. So it's amazing. Yeah. So yeah, show me what have you made?

Okay, sure. Thank you so much for the chance to to share this with people

That's okay.

in the podcast. So this one is like I haven't really like have time now to really, you know, focus to build this, but like my first my my first initial thought when I want to build this is because like I don't really have a a platform where I can like just build a decent presentation without blowing off my budget. So then like why

Mm-hmm.

don't I build it myself? So at first the the the you know the feature that this app has is just like this shadow studio. So what it

Yeah.

what it does in the beginning is like just making this reveal animation.

wow. Just like a hero status. So this is a tool to help you experiment with shaders

And then Yeah Yeah.

and client effects and things. So it's like

Yeah.

an art, it holds your artifacts from, from work that you've been, wow. Okay.

Yeah. And then like you can like select where the the deform is going to be.

Wow, that's so cool.

It could be also from direction like like this. F and then I decided sorry. Go ahead.

incredible. And so I was just gonna say like, previous right, if you were you had that vision in your head, and you you wanted to get it made, you would go to an engineer with the vision and say, it's gonna be, it's gonna be like this, and it has to come out from here. And I said, I don't really know

Yeah.

how to do that. And they spend weeks browsing and building something. And how long did

Yeah.

this take you to produce?

for me to get this part, like at first like is this this feature is being here.

Hmm.

It takes me like four days to figure things out when it comes to like the shader on how it works. And I kind of like draw inspiration a lot from YouTube. Like I find some videos where this kind of things happened and then kind of like, you know, cut off the video and ask Cloud doesn't accept video. So I have to ask to like ChatGPT, like, can you describe what exactly is happening from this frame to this frame? What is the effect? And then kind of like come up with my own wording and then try to bring those a prompt to cloud, but still doesn't get

Yeah, correct.

it right. And then I kind of like always.

So you're iterating between different agents. You're you're using church BT, using Claude based on the capabilities that each one has, right? That's cool.

Yeah. I built this since since January. And

Mm-hmm.

now like it has I'm sorry like if my explanation is like going here and there.

It's okay.

I have this 2D glu gallery, so like you can switch between images and then you can

Nice.

export this as a code and you can like embed this to the website if you want. And then in here also you can have like effects. You can stack the effect, like you can add For example, half tone, and then you can tweak

Very cool.

the cell size kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And then like you can also rearrange the the stack. So if the arrangement is different, the output is also different. And you can just like delete it. This kind of stuff and also make this

Yeah, great. so this is a, oh wow. this is, it's something that you can experiment with different effects for the websites that you build. And

Yeah.

it allows you to just export and just dump it straight into the website.

Yeah, correct. And also building building this 3D gallery. you

Excellent.

can change like I haven't played this for quite a while. Kinda forget or like prospective stack like this.

nice.

Yeah. And then I also get inspired with like try to bring this into cinematic 'cause like I'm photographer, so I would like to have a tool where I can just like make

Hmm

this more a cinematic where you can just like build things in here, like it's actually from here, and then you can

Yep.

export it to the camera studio and then it will be in here. So

that's great. Yeah. I mean, I do something not as this as impressive, but my when I'm when working with effects, I do the same thing that when I'm working with an agent, I'll just get it to build the controls in the UI.

Mm.

So if I'm crafting something in a website, and we need you need an effect for a row, I'll just say, you know, this is how I want it. Here's some references. build me the controls to adjust it and have a copy button and I'll do the same thing.

Correct.

I'll dial it in. That's good. Copy paste and it will fix it like that. But you're taking it one step further. This is really cool.

So yeah, this is my internal tool and I plan to just like release this as kind of like something you pay once and then it's kind of like the person will just appreciate us and not as a subscription. But I don't really have time to to to really get into it yet, but hopefully by August I can make this happen and then I'll just also invite you to to use this. Once it's released.

I'd love to. Yeah, that's fantastic. It looks really useful and really fun. So that's something that you've built just to help support your own creative output, right? So you're using it across operations, using it across creative output. Is there anything in terms of capturing context, you know, you've got a lot of staff and a lot of clients, are you using it anyway to sort of bring all of that context together, help? ensure that everybody remembers what's happening. If you've got any sort of memory systems or anything like that, what other areas are you using AI for?

so in that case I still do that by myself. I have already like half those celebrities shared to my team as well. And unfortunately I cannot share it with you just yet for now. Okay.

That's okay.

It's because like it's messy and like I think people will just like, what the hell is that? it's not

Yeah.

it's not in a in a ready for presentation, but the way how I do it is like I connect cloud with my Apple note. And then

Mm-hmm.

I asked like cloud to also connect to Slack and then like capture the history of like how things are going in the Slack channel with the clients

Mm-hmm.

and then like create the summary, put it into Apple Note. So then like whenever 'cause

That was great.

like a lot of people using Obsidian or the other third party,

Yeah.

but like I feel I don't want to add more tools or apps into my stack

Yeah,

like It's kind of like overwhelming and just Yeah.

quite over complicated. That's brilliant. Just use Apple Notes as the database.

But like the the cons is that like Apple notes don't have those I will say like the note view. But but at the same time I

Yeah, connection points. This note relates to that note.

but at the same time I was just like thinking like let just clout remember everything for me so then whenever I need to remember something

Yeah.

And like when the client asks, do you know about this? What is this? I just screen capture it, put

Yeah.

it into cloud and then like, you know, try to find things in the Apple note that relevant to this and help me to

Yep. Correct.

to, you know, create the the diplomatic answer.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So using Claude's memory system is really how

Yeah.

you're managing your memory across the business and you're plugging, you're giving it extra context here and there,

Yeah.

but that's sort where you're storing it all. Yeah, that's interesting. It's probably the easiest way to do it right now is just let the big

Yeah.

frontier labs, you know, figure it all out and you just use their tooling. One sort of counterpoint to that is sort of vendor lock-in, which is something that I've been thinking about a lot is. They keep changing things, these guys, and the price keeps changing and one minute it works, one minutes it doesn't work. So I'm probably taking the harder road of like trying to build my own stuff where I can plug a different agent in, rather than just

Nice.

lean on, on their tools. But I have found that it is, challenging, you know, it's, it's really hard to get a memory system working very, very reliably, at scale. So maybe I just need to lean into these tools instead.

Yeah.

that's great. So where do you see this sort of stuff going? Right. So the, the doomerist, the doomer view is that, you know, every knowledge based work is, is dead and design is over. and you know, we're not really, why don't we all just become, I don't know, plumbers or something else.

Yeah.

where do you, based on your experimentation with the tooling, where do you see it going from a design standpoint and, and our design is safe?

I think I would say like I'm quite optimistic in terms of like how things are going moving forward, unless I think the caveat is that if if if AI can become like real AGI, can really think by themselves like they are becoming human to a certain extent, that's where I think we need to become really worried. But at at at this point I think human is still the pilot. Where AI is just the tool set that we have that depending on who is using it, it's kind of like be become the leverage. So like human beings

Yes.

always one and the tool always creates the leverage. So for example, like Figma can bring your value by five, like one

Yes.

by five is like five, and then AI is like five hundred or like five thousand, depending on how you s use it. And The way I see it is like AI is our accelerator in everything. It helps us to fail faster. So we learn

Yep.

faster as well. It also helps us to discover things that will take us weeks or even months to understand. But I think the caveat also is that if we rely too much on AI, indirectly we'll also become lazier, I would say. Cause like

Mm-hmm.

the mental model always put us in the look of like, let AI do it. let AI do it. let AI do it. So I would say for desire

You don't flex the muscle anymore. know, the brain is a muscle. So yeah, you're right.

So I think like if you are a designer and you really love to design, you need to s spare time to do things still manually in

Yes.

a way, like doing it in a canvas, not just for clo your clients, but for the sake of your for yourself, like satisfied your your crave to to build things with hands. Yeah, I think

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like any craft, right? The more you do it, the more you can, you know, what good is, you know, what great is.

Yeah.

and you see it with all of the output of these sorts of technologies is that it's not there yet, but it's dramatically improving. but it's, it's, if you put us very simple prompt into your point, if you get lazy, you, doesn't matter how good the system is, you're still going to have a bad outcome. especially with application design, you know, it's not very good at flows. It's not very good at, you know, mapping flows and making things quite concise and very easy to use. And it takes a very experienced diet to, you

Mm.

know, look at that and go, we can make those three clicks one and here's how we can do

Yeah.

it. Here's the design pattern that we can use. but you know, I, I will say, you know, I kind of flip flop between, this is just a tool and we're all going to be fine too. I'm seeing some very scary improvements here and

Yeah.

it's gonna change a lot of things beyond even just design.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know where we live at the moment, but I do feel like we're in that hard takeoff phase where we're seeing major model releases now fairly frequently. The capability

Yeah.

is increasing very, very rapidly, but I share your view. I'm optimistic about it and. use it to do more and use it for rather than just high volume, low quality. Maybe keep the volume slightly higher, but keep it make the quality a lot higher to do great

Yeah, I agree.

work. Yeah. And I feel, I feel that's what the market wants to, to your point about, you know, people getting upset about AI. AI Steve, it's the same thing, right? They want high quality work. They don't want output slop that they can get themselves from using Claude. So you have to be an experienced operator.

Correct.

Yeah, great. And what about your team as well? they all quite experienced? How are you driving through this sort of method of working with your team? Because that's quite a challenge. The change management of this technology is a hard thing to flush over a whole team.

So yeah, I think I captured that I saw it coming, like AI workflow is going to become the norm in two thousand twenty-six since the late of two thousand twenty five. But I'm not really sure when is the best time for me to like, you know, bring this to the team and make them have the the chance to experience it, learn about it and get along with it. And I kind of like spent early of this year, like January, almost not sleeping, because like I try to build out like kind of like internal curriculum of like how to get started with AI. Cause at the time,

Okay.

I think some of them already experiment by themselves, but not all of them. And also like they don't really have like the shared knowledge. They don't have the same level of experience of doing things with AI, including myself.

Yeah.

So I need to become like the one at giving the example. So I need to experiment, give them like the someone they can look up to. So when they ask questions, I know how to answer as well. So I I kind of like grind myself to get into the bottom of this to a certain extent where I can

Yeah.

just like understand the nuances and all of the necessary stuff. So I kind of like using AI to curate the popular videos, articles, I read I watch them manually, read the article

Mm-hmm. Yep.

manually, experiment day and night, and then like kind of like make make some sort of like the the talk where everyone can just like, if you want to

summarizing.

make with make with AI, this is how you get started, what you need to know, what you don't need to know in the beginning. Once you s

Right.

reach this point, you can start to learn this, this, this and stuff. So I think around like

That's great.

Two months to build that.

So you're spending all this time, you know, watching things closely and you're sort of filtering that down into sort of an instructional for people to just absorb at their own pace. It's a good way to do it. But how do you,

Yeah, correct. And then

you got to stay on top of that. You got to constantly keep.

Yeah. And then I think in the mid of March I kind of like give them kind of like a deadline. If you don't meet certain standard, I need to let you go. So ultimately by April, I kind of like let some people go because like I think I've been lenient enough, give them tolerance enough, but like they just I think I would say like Not everyone is a good fit in terms of like certain environment, in terms of like the pace of how you

Mm-hmm. Yep.

learn things and then I give them the compensation that is fair based on the law and also the the regulation in in the in the country. And

Yep.

they just like need to find another place or like do things that they enjoy based on their own terms. 'Cause like

Yep.

Apparently we are not a good fit anymore 'cause it's either we kind of like do the the filtering or it's just

you

going to burn the the whole ship altogether. Yeah.

It's very hard, isn't it? And I'm sure there's a lot of other agency owners facing this challenge at the moment is you want to keep every single staff member, you know, you're providing for their families, you're giving them a career, but the market doesn't wait. Your customers don't wait and you have to move. You're forced into this direction because you know, cost change, output quality, expectations change, and you have to adapt and you want to give people the chance to do that because you know, you don't want to let anyone go, but some people don't want to change.

Correct.

And that, and you said, well, you're kind of forced, right? Yeah. It's a very challenging thing as a business owner. And I would imagine that, you know, I see this, you know, and a lot of people are frustrated at company owners and monobot, you know, you're trying to do the same thing. You're trying to survive, you know? so you have to move this way. It's really hard is all I can say. I understand your concern, but it sounds like you're doing it right way. You're spending a lot of your own time creating tools to help people learn and adapt. Are you still using that? Is that still built? Are you still keeping it up to date yet? Great.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I kind of like connected with AI, so the way how I do it is like I tell Cloud like, I learned this, I found this articles, I found this video interesting, put it into the curriculum and then like AI can just

Yeah.

like put it together nicely without me doing it manually, which is going to be worse than what AI can do.

Yeah, that's saying something. Yeah, not everything though. Only certain things at the moment.

Yeah.

Yeah, great. And that's it's been well received by your team. they're learning a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. So I kind of like give them the the push as well, 'cause like as the one that led the team, like I need to to become someone that also know when I have to be soft and also hard at the same time. When I have to do the bad cop and also the good cop kind of thing.

the hat on. Yeah, okay. All Well, look, you've got a great time. It looks and the quality of the work speaks for itself.

Thank you.

Thank you for sharing everything that you have today. I think it's been I've loved it. And I think viewers will too. And very cool to see the experimentation you're doing. I just want to end with one question. And is there anything that you would you would share with budding designers? Think back to when before you started Blissful, anything you'd share with them now about lessons you've learned about how to grow your own business and how they can use AI to help them do so.

Okay, so if I imagine myself getting started now and not before and if you decided that you want to build your own studio, I think you need really to think about what is your end goal to be before you start the business, 'cause like your end goal probably doesn't need you to make it as a studio. Maybe you need just become a freelance to do it. Thank all thanks to AI as well. So You need to figure out like what you want to do with yourself, what you want to achieve with design. and I would say my biggest learning is that I I'm not rich. I don't really like that successful yet, but I realize like by the time that you make certain amount of money, it doesn't equate to like growing of happiness at the same time. I would say like the graph is that you're sort hit this point and then like your happiness changes incrementally where even though like you have more your happiness is not that much increasing in my opinion because ultimately in order for you to be able to enjoy the money money is just like a tool in my opinion is that you need to have time to to really enjoy it and when you make certain amount of money at the same time, you also need to sacrifice yourself a lot more to a certain extent. You need to maintain certain lifestyles, so it gives you more stress as well. So I don't know. I would

Yes, absolutely.

I would say like you need to understand what you want. My advice is that don't aim for specific amount of money because when you reach that, you will always aim for more. Like

Hmm.

For example, if you want one million USD once you risk that, you will always have the temptation to ten. Once you risk ten, you need more. But be more clear. Yeah.

You go for 10. Yeah. So the advice is life, lifestyle goal potentially, like how much time do you want with your kids or how many holidays

Yeah.

a year do you want or things like that? How many hours a day do you actually want to be working? So optimize your

Yeah.

studio to that kind of outcome rather than just money. That's good. It's

Correct. Yeah, that's a great way to to put it.

good advice. It's really good advice. Um, all right, great. Well, look, thanks so much for your time again. I really appreciate it. And we'll leave it there and I hope to see you soon one day. I love going to Bali and maybe next time I'm in town I can hit you up.

Yes, sure. Love to meet you as well, man. Looking forward to.

Thanks so much. Cheers.

Cheers.

Alright.