14.ai Dispatch #28
Ab Workouts, Melted Cheese, and Gmail Witchcraft
Welcome to another week of whatever this is.
Forcing People to Do Barry’s 💪
Unclear if they loved it or if this counts as startup hazing. You decide. Everyone feels better about themselves after.
Coffee with Someone Who’s Actually Done This Before ☕
Sat down with Sabrina Riddle, cofounder of Madison Reed: a beauty and hair color brand doing 9 figures of revenue.
Every time I talk to someone who’s been through the full startup gauntlet, I’m reminded: this job is genuinely hard, and it gets way less lonely when you can be honest about the mess with people who’ve already lived it.
The best founders do two things at once: learn from people ahead of them, and teach people coming up behind them.
It becomes a circle. Grateful to be in it.
Michael Is Your Chatbot Now 🤖
Anytime we onboard a new customer, we spend time answering every ticket manually.
This is to train our model and see how customers ask questions, but it’s also hilarious to see our faces on the chatbots.
So if you see my face pop up in the chat... behave yourselves. 😉
TikTok Shop Reality Check 📈
Quick math that’ll make you reconsider everything:
To hit consistent revenue on TikTok Shop, brands need 300-500 videos posted per month.
That means 10,000-15,000 creator outreaches monthly just to keep the pipeline alive.
This is not a “get rich overnight” thing. It takes three to six months for a brand to actually gain traction.
Last week we talked to Jeremy Yaoxin Ding, founder of Euka AI, who broke down what’s really happening behind all those affiliate videos flooding your FYP.
The brands crushing it (like Goli Nutrition) weren’t even trying to profit on TikTok Shop initially. They treated it as a marketing channel, going aggressive with every creator they could find to get their brand everywhere.
Treat content as the product
Treat creators as distribution
Play the long game
Melted Cheese Diplomacy 🧀
Are you French?
Are you in SF?
Why were you not at our Raclette dinner?
We’ll let it slide this time but don’t let it happen again.
Is Your Chatbot Sneaking Out At Night? 🤫
They’re grounded. And we’ll get them right.
https://calendly.com/14ai/15minchat
Bored? Some recs:
Marie: From Pivot Hell To $1.4 Billion Unicorn, Y Combinator
Michael: An Economy of AI Agents, Gillian K Hadfield and Andrew Koh
Ugo: The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
Until next time - Keep working out, grinding, and cold emailing. Everything works out as it should.
Happy Sunday!🫡