MSX Builder Session Transcript

Speaker-labeled transcript generated with Gemini and lightly cleaned to remove false starts.

tornikeo: All right, guys. So, let's kick this off. Welcome, everyone, to the MSX Builder Session. And in this 40 minutes, we are going to share what we are working on, what this community is going to be like, and we are going to close it off with the plan for the future sessions. We plan to make this into a recurring session.

tornikeo: So, in MSX Builders, we expect to have a small, tightly knit group of founders that are solving issues related to market scouting, market signals, and AI's and automations role in it and to showcase what they have built and the challenges they have faced. In this first kickoff meeting, we will start by introducing ourselves, what we do. I'm Toronike. I'm from MSX. I work as the technical co-founder in MSX. Together with me is Ben, our co-founder, and Marco, also co-founder. And Anita is a spouse, she is also a very, very good builder, solo builder. She has built interesting applications. And let's talk about first of all, let's talk about let's introduce ourselves. Ben, please. Tell us about yourself.

Ben: Yes. My name is Ben Meisner. I'm also a co-founder of MSX. I'm involved in the strategy of the company and how we are positioning ourselves, looking at how we're going to grow and make it valuable for builders and users. So, yeah, that's my involvement. I'll pass over to Marco.

Marco: Yeah, hi, guys. So basically here, co-founder of MSX. I guess I've been building for the past 10 years and now my goal is to make sure that entrepreneurs don't fail too much in the next five years, and so I want to make sure that in the future there are going to be more successful entrepreneurs that they can actually build things that matter. And so that's why basically I'm building MSX with Ben and Toron and our goal is basically this: to help people become successful with their own ideas and, you know, make things that make sense in the world, essentially.

tornikeo: Thank you, Marco. Anita, would you like to add a word?

Anita: Hey, guys. So, I'm not as an experienced builder as all of you are, and first of all, it's a pleasure to meet you all. My experience is not as vast as yours, and I'm truly interested to find out what your path was to where you are currently at. So, what problems you had, what pivots you had, what ideas you had, what influenced you, and so on. And I think it's really, really important to find out your personal perspective on building today, where is it heading, and so on. So, very excited to be here, and good luck MSX.

tornikeo: Thank you. Let's talk about now the most interesting part, I think, of our story of MSX, which is our three pivots and our three different manifestations of MSX. I will start with the first one, and I think the first one was a bit of a hit. Marco headed that first variation of MSX.

tornikeo: Who is most qualified to mention and just say a few words about the first pivot? How did we come across it? And it was really a hit, right? It was really popular at the moment.

Marco: Yeah, basically the idea was to, first of all, create a platform that could help people find market signals all around the web so that they could actually know what to build and have a higher chance to create a startup that could actually be successful. Because when you know what to build based on a market signal, based on a pain point that you want to fix, you have a higher chance to make it in the market. So we started with that, and we built it exclusively for humans, right? And that was actually we had the first good traction, we were measuring our KPIs that was actually a good starting point. But then what happened was basically the OpenCo wave came, and the idea was to surf the wave as fast as possible and turn our platform into an agent-driven platform that could help people build things in an autonomous way via agents, autonomous agents using OpenCo protocol, right? So we were actually wanting to emulate Pose, which was actually a platform that was the first mover in the automation economy when it comes to using agents in that way. And so we tried to copy that too much. And so we essentially went too far from our vision of helping people become successful. We wanted to basically automate everything, and we realized that we lost a lot of time in building something that actually was not ready. I mean, the technology actually was not ready. Once we built it, we realized that, yes, you can actually do something that is interesting, but the technology is not ready to actually automate every single part of the business yet in 2026. And so every company that is trying to do this, actually they are relying a lot on marketing and less on technology, and our goal was not relying too much on marketing, was relying on technology. So at that point, we decided to shift back to our original vision and try to go back to making sure that people could actually find the best signals in the world to build the best startup in the world. And that was basically our third pivot and the current one. We built though from day one for agents, so thanks to this third pivot, we realized that simplicity was the key, and so we turned everything into a very simple platform that with one prompt can activate everything that we care about and help agents and humans find signals. And I think this is the last pivot that we did is interesting because we use it every day, and when it comes to building things, I want to use them personally. If I don't use them personally, I think it's a failing product because it has to solve, first of all, my problems, and then once I solve my problems, it's good because other people are going to do this, right? So every day now I'm using MSX for me, and we're trying to figure out the best way to market this in the next couple of weeks, but I think we are on the right track.

tornikeo: What was the, what was in your mind the combination, like what caused the two pivots to be necessary? Was it a technology problem? Was it more of a people being burnt out? Was it some sort of a shift in perception of this technology? What made it so that these two pivots were necessary, in your mind?

Marco: Yeah, I think in my mind, the first pivot that we did was basically driven by FOMO, to participate in an agentic economy, making sure that we could actually take a slice of the cake. And so it was not necessary in that moment actually because in our roadmap originally, it was supposed to be done way further in the year. But once we saw OpenCo, unfortunately, I mean, personally, yeah, I wanted to really take a slice of the cake immediately, and so I wanted to be part of that, right? So I anticipated actually the roadmap, and I was like, let's try to do it, right? But then what I learned is that, of course, especially in a FOMO market when technology goes super exponential, like these years where it is very, very difficult to build technological startups that are technology-driven because after one month everything is outdated, right? So once I realized that, it was necessary to go back...

Marco: the origin and so that the latest pivot was necessary to go back to the primal necessity of building something that makes sense and you can use every day. And so, there were two options. Like, the first one was FOMO-driven, and the other one was like karma-driven to restore the karma in the startup that we were trying to build, making sure that everyone was involved without burning out, essentially.

tornikeo: Yeah. I mean, it is. When you do pivots, I can say a few words about that, at least. When you start to build something first, then changing things, it gets tiresome and you really need stamina to do that. But, yeah, my personal experience would be basically that, too. The first one was driven by FOMO, and I also wanted a piece of that cake, and we basically bit off more than we could chew, in a sense. But

Marco: But I think it was that even if we pivoted during the first two pivots, we were experiencing some traffic and customers, and we were having like something like 500 MRR

tornikeo: We went up to 800. Oh, I'm in the CRM.

Marco: And the problem was that we were not able to keep up with the expectations of people at that moment because the technology was not ready. And so, the option two was to only do what's possible.

tornikeo: was like just like being marketing-driven and create FOMO around nothing. And I think you can do it. I mean, if you are in a specific market like US and you are able to raise money quickly, you can do marketing like they did without technology. But if you are in a different environment, you're going to die and burn out immediately because you're not able to keep up with that.

tornikeo: Yeah. I mean, AirPocs is a good example of, not a good example, but it's an example of faking it to

tornikeo: the death. I don't know how they are going to handle their technological death, but yeah, it's

Marco: I don't know either. I, when I created the AirPocs on Next door two days ago, I was like super, super aggressive because I want them to die essentially. But let's see, like, time will tell, you know?

tornikeo: It makes sense. I mean, it's essentially when a startup like that, I am not going to make any predictions, I'm not very good at those, but it doesn't seem very likely that they are going to deliver value to the people, in a way. So,

tornikeo: it's an interesting thing that can happen during these kinds of crazy markets. So, right now, when, I mean, we survived the first pivot caused by FOMO, then we did the second pivot when we basically accrued so much tech debt when we tried to make this company automation loop with the fully autonomous founder. You remember that, Marco, right? We made a fully autonomous founder that we wanted to integrate with every single API, every single provider, with money services, everything, and then it would run off by itself for maybe weeks on end, burn hundreds in tokens, and then it would found a startup. And that one never took off, right? Like, we tried, we had a few customers there. What do you think was the reason, like, in your gut feeling, what did we, what did you feel about that? Like, how would you diagnose it? Like, why the second iteration of this didn't take off?

Marco: Two reasons, basically, like, first of all, like, especially when you pivot too fast on something because you are FOMO-driven, you risk to burn out very quickly, you lose momentum. And so, that is like more like an esoteric thing, but actually, it's real because you lose momentum, you lose positivity, you lose energy, and whatever you are trying to do on the marketing side, it doesn't have effect because people can smell it from the way you write or you communicate that you're not convinced about your own product, right? So, you need to really like be positive from day one, and that means you don't have to lose momentum, and you have to be fresh. Second point is that, and this is the most important one, is that it was a little bit too much complicated without having a robust, I would say, marketing effort behind, meaning that you need to have at least a little bit of money if you want to do a project that is so complicated, because from the technological point of view, the platform was actually

Marco: But in order to survive that transition from being okay to being perfect, it has to go through months and months of iterations. And so that means you need to have money, and you need to be mentally stable to say, 'Okay, I have money behind me because some VC believed in me, and he gave me like 100k at the beginning. So I have like six months to turn this idea into a practical business,' right? But we didn't have that, so it was actually impossible to go in that direction. So my idea was to immediately shut down our effort and go back to the basics without losing extra weeks of work for nothing. And yeah, exactly.

tornikeo: That makes sense. Yeah, that makes... It was a bit overcomplicated, right, at the beginning?

Marco: That's point one. Point two, maybe it was also like I smelled a lot of market fatigue in April because it looks like not too much, but from end of January to early April, the market changed so much. Before, there was only OpenCall or Codex or CloudCode or whatever, and users were trying to catch up with all these innovations. And so it was very difficult even for normal startups to raise attention in that month and also in May. And so we were also like with the wrong timing in that moment. If we were like in end of January, maybe it was better, but yeah, it was another point.

tornikeo: Fully agreed, fully agreed. Let's talk about the let's talk about the latest iteration, right? So currently, we took away some lessons from the not mistakes, but learning opportunities we had. And let's talk about the modern day. What do we have right now, and what do we think this product or tool could do for an average user, and how we could position it as a thing that could help people really, solve some problems? What do you think, Marco, about that? Or I can mention that if you want.

Marco: No, I mean, in my opinion, the big vision is that we want to create actually the platform where any founder or SMBs can find the best signals on the web so that they can build on top of that and create something that can survive time and can survive the brutal market that we are in right now, made of competition and slops. And so if your starting point is being customer obsessive from day one and know what you have to build and why you need to build that, well, once you once you have these signals, well, at that point, every action you're going to do with your startup is going to be way easier compared to not having clear signals of what you have to build and why. And so our idea was, okay, let's build something that helps the next generation of entrepreneurs having a sense of the market 24/7 because I believe that in the next few years, people will build, of course, more than one startup per month. They're going to have a portfolio of startups they're going to run, right? Like, you know, music artists with albums after Spotify. Yeah, probably people will have like 20, 30 startups every year. Okay, they're going to have albums of startups. And so the problem is that if you have to do this, you need to be very, very selective with the ideas. You need to be very, very specific with the pain points or trends you want to catch, right? And so you need to have a machine behind you that does the job for you so that then you can jump on that and say, 'Okay, I know for sure that if I do this, it's going to work' because machine learning measured that previously and helped them like achieve that with some certainty, I would say. And so that's what we are trying to do. And of course, of course, at the beginning, it's a simple product because we wanted to make it like ultra, ultra, ultra simple. Like one prompt that you can copy paste on your cloud code and through your agents you can query basically what we're trying to search. Like we're going to surf the web, find the best signals coherent with your persona, with your niches that you want, and we're going to spit out essentially the best results available in the market for you to build. But I mean, I'm expecting in the next...

Marco: a couple of weeks and a few months, you become the go-to place for marketing intelligence, even for enterprises that are going to be able to access the voice of customers in a way that they couldn't do before, because right now they need to use different tools. And now, with the tool, they are going to be able to centralize every research effort through our platform. And so that's our next session.

tornikeo: That also brings me into this discussion of how have the tools changed, right? I mean, a year ago, maybe even two years ago, the things we did on the web, the things we did with images, videos, all sorts of assets were, you know, a grand list of Adobe products and other, a lot of tools. Everything had its own interface, GUI. Everything was custom, and you had to, you know, wire these tools together to make sense of the digital world. And I feel like things are changing, right? I mean, Ben, for instance, you also have a startup, a successful one before this, and you have started using CodeX, right? Initially, I remember you have solved a technical bug with it and it was successful. And could you comment a few words on how you feel like the toolkit for building startups is changing? Like, where are we going? Could you recommend or predict what could happen in the future?

Ben: Well, I can tell you my experience of having come from literally coding line by line, literally, occasionally heading to Stack Overflow and similar websites to find existing scripts that do certain things that people have done, you know, before, and you take that and you adopt it to your project. But working CodeX over the last month is revolutionary in that I think everything I've done before is useful and helpful, because I understand some of the underlying technologies like, you know, if you're creating a website, CSS, the different meta tags, and how it all pieces together and how to iteratively fit stuff into CodeX, but it's literally to a point where you don't care about the code anymore unless it's getting out of control. It's kind of handled by CodeX, which is a complete shift. Where that will go, CodeX, you know, and similar products are getting better at design. Once they can get better at signals, too, then the human is quickly getting removed from the loop. And I know there's taste and there's, you know, other things we can do, but I mean, I'm not saying this in a way like I'm scared, I think it's interesting, and I can't imagine not having a role in it. But, you know, I can see a shift here away from this manual building line by line towards an automated building. And I can see it becoming more and more automated, including design, including higher level than what we're building now. Yeah, I don't know what you guys think.

tornikeo: Well, do you also see a shift towards— I mean, I can also share my experience, but as I'm acting as a moderator, I don't want to share my opinions so much. But I want to ask you, Marco, Ben, and Anita, too. When you work with CodeX, is it that you look and try to look less on the graphical interface? When you work with CodeX, is there a fundamental laziness, so to speak, a desire to have everything driven by that thing and not go ahead and click on the UI? What are your opinions on that? Do you feel that UI has its place still, and it's fine to go to Cloudflare and do things there, or do you prefer to do everything, you know, delegate?

Ben: With the agent, I don't want to look at it, I'm going to go do something else. Do you see a ship there or not yet? Or whatever, whatever is also not.

Marco: But, I'm not technical. I'm not a developer of course, but my point is as a product guy and ex-product manager, I would say I want to be part of the process when we build things. Of course, I'm not comfortable too much in having like 100% delegated to Codex. So, of course, I always keep an eye on that, especially on the UI, because right now it's still not good, and I think we are very, very far from that because I really want to get a better design UI, and think Codex is not now able to do and will not be able to do for near future, for sure. So, I think that is the point. And right now I'm trying to maximize the time when I'm in my screen, in front of the screen. For example, I realize that sometimes I'm lazy in the sense that I am waiting for Codex to finish something. And instead of doing other things, I stare at the screen looking at what the Codex is doing, right? And instead, I should do something else in the meantime, like doing things. But there is this perceived laziness that you are productive when you're looking at your Codex working, right? But instead, you're just wasting time in front of a screen. And so, that's what I want to improve, I guess, in the next few months, but yeah.

Ben: I would agree with that feeling too, I had that as well.

Marco: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anita: Yeah, so this is probably always, always, whenever we talk about that and have discussions and we have arguments and so on. And I think initially especially, I felt very, I don't know, frustrated, and I felt like, why, what would I do when I was in Codex? Because I didn't have that momentum of writing each line of code by hand and then I go on to the second segment, like searching for what first bugs are, or what other bugs are, or what else, and jumping from that back to coding. At least coding itself is like in few minutes. And you're sitting and you're staring at the screen with like astonishment and frustrated because you don't have that momentum of, 'Oh, I accomplished something. I'm going to next.' And on the other hand, it's like, 'Oh my God, I have so much productivity. I can do 100 more things at the moment.' And on the other side, I'm like, 'I don't have that 100 things to do. Like, I don't know what other 100 things are to do.' And this was for my own product, very difficult to understand, like what should I be doing right now? Should I be, should I have like 10 other projects on my screen and do all of them together? Like, this was really, really difficult. But on the other hand, it also allowed me to think about the places or product that I never had a chance to think about earlier, like think of design, UI, UX for my other, some stuff, and be involved in other end-to-end...

Ben: So essentially, essentially, Codex allows you to scale a bit up on your capabilities, but it's also a bit of a, it is hard to look at everything it does, and it's a bit of a, you get almost nauseated by all all the stuff it does at the same time. Is that what you, that feeling you're describing right now, Anita?

Anita: Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it it enables you to do everything, like a lot of things at the same time. But then, more stuff like, 'What are these code for?' A lot of things for me. 'Like, what should I be doing?' Um, so that's that's that's something, but...

Marco: I think that's I think that's also the reason why MSX should be successful because at that point, if we actually this is the Anita is just describing the pain point, right? So, this solution is to have the MSX running 24/7, signals that can inspire Anita to...

Marco: Reducing the complexity too, right? I mean, that is a real pain point, and I think Ben just scratched that part of the problem, right? He doesn't really look at it, he doesn't really understand it as much. So, if some product or some tool were to solve that problem for you, like maybe agent runs in the cloud, maybe it does the complexity for you, then it might be a good product. That might be something to build.

Marco: Alright, so I think I've enjoyed the meeting quite well. We touched up on different topics from starting about who we are to talking about how we got into the formula of open source, no-code, potential wave, but then things started taking a turn. Then we almost burnt out on marketing and also got burnt out on technology development. I definitely felt a bit of a burnt out period for a while, thankfully it went away. And so for the next meeting, we shall invite more people to tell us their stories, tell us what they work on, what they want to see, and they share their experiences, especially in the area of AI automation, the tools that come out literally every single day, and you can't keep up with them. And hopefully, build a community of people that help each other to be better founders.

Ben: Let's go. Podcast, definitely.

Marco: Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys, for attending.

Anita: This is really incredible. Good luck. Bye-bye.

Marco: Catch you.