AI Masterclass With Brian Casel From Builder Methods

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According to Brian Casel, AI is changing how company owners develop software, produce content, and manage their companies. He talks about how incorporating AI into everything from software development and strategic planning to writing, design, and content production helped him become more “AI native.” Brian talks about his experiments with AI agents, such as creating a virtual company where a chief-of-staff agent manages specialist agents for product creation, expansion, and upkeep throughout his companies.

By fusing AI’s engineering capabilities with their current subject expertise, he thinks AI is also opening up new chances for non-technical entrepreneurs to create their own software. Brian now concentrates on product strategy, architecture, user experience, processes, and verification rather than developing code by hand, with AI agents handling the majority of the execution. He is investigating new methods for entrepreneurs to become AI native, automate their processes, and produce more autonomously through Builder Methods and solutions like Flywrite and Mimeo.

His main point is that AI is transforming the way businesses are constructed and enabling a small, highly skilled team or even a single entrepreneur to achieve significantly more than previously. It is not just a tool for speeding up old labor.

Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Brian Casel. Brian is a prolific creator, software entrepreneur, designer, teacher, community builder. He does it all. You can find Brian over at briancasel.com, buildermethods.com mimeohq.com, Flyright, and many other places.

We’re gonna get in it, into it, but first, welcome back on the show, Brian. 

Brian Casel: Hey, Chris. Yeah, great to connect with you again. I don’t remember how many times I came on your show here. It’s been at least two or three over the years? 

Chris Badgett: This is probably three or four, something like that. Okay. And we’ve known each- Yeah

other for a long time. Yeah. And I do wanna say Brian’s YouTube channel is one of my favorite YouTube channels. Can you tell us what it is, how to find you and your approach to making videos? 

Brian Casel: Yeah, thanks. It’s been really interesting c- because I just took a little bit of a breather on the YouTube channel o- just in the last three or four weeks, but I’m trying to get back on it this week and record something.

But yeah, the, the YouTube chan- youtube/briancasel. I’ve been talking about AI and, building with AI, and also just how myself and others are adopting AI in e- everything we do. What I like to call, like, becoming AI native, because it really is in literally every type of work that I do at this point, from building software, to creating content, to even strategic thinking and planning designing, writing, all that kind of stuff I’m doing it with AI in, in the process. And obviously, we’re living through this time right now where it’s extremely rapid change and new stuff is dropping all the time.

The models and the harnesses and the products are getting so much better so fast. Literally just within the last six to eight months, things got so much better. And that’s a lot of rapid change, and we’re used to fast change in our industry, but not like this. This is a new level, and I think a lot of people are trying to deal with that, and it can be scary. It can be exciting. It, there’s a lot of anxiety out there, and I’m trying to… What I’m trying to do is just tr- identify workflows and mental models and patterns and business systems for how we can start to adopt things and change how we work, I think- And it’s been fun but also hard, especially on the YouTube channel where things change so fast. Literally a, a video that I published a month ago can easily go out of date that fast,

Chris Badgett: I think your channel is really cool. It… I look up to you.

We all… I bet you do, too. You feel like you’re behind. Everybody feels like they’re behind in AI, but I actually look to Brian as a leader and, in the early days of what’s OpenClaw, what’s… How do we think about agents? And you had this awesome video or how to use Claude to do this, and I look to you to for me to see what’s next and to shorten my learning curve, and it’s been extremely helpful.

Yeah. And one thing I saw on your channel, I was looking at your views and I saw that, They’re all over the place … oh, I need to make some more con- content about Claude, and put the giant splash on the thumbnail, and those videos get three, four times the normal views. Little things like that.

Brian Casel: Man, it is it is quite a game that the YouTube- Yeah … the YouTube thing. It’s, and I… And I’ve learned a ton. I’ve only really been serious about it for about a year and a half now. The channel went from almost nothing, like 1,000 or two subscribers. I think it’s o- over 70K right now.

It’s, it’s good, but it’s not massive. But I learned a lot. It… And that happened over a 12-month period. At least in this space of AI one of the things that I found as you… If you look at the views on a bunch of videos of mine from the past within the s- the last six months, some of them are…

went crazy. I did one on OpenClaude. Did over 800K views, and then I’ve done a bunch on around Claude Code, done a bunch on, on other stuff, and they… And a lot of… These days, a lot of my videos are back down to Earth, around five, 10K views. And I did find that, like, when I… When I’m chasing the news, when I do videos about something that is new, especially if I hit it within the n- the first week or two or three of it being around, the video is gonna go crazy.

Yeah. It’s gonna do… it’s just gonna catch that wave, but at the same time it falls off a cliff, like, two weeks later. Yeah. And I f- I found that added a lot of pressure for me. Number one, I always felt like I’m on this treadmill that I have to get… I have to, first of all, even have systems for me to stay ahead of it and research the industry, and then know get familiarized with stuff fast enough so that I can then record a video and then figure out my whole editing and production process to get it out within two days, hopefully before Claude Code or Cursor or whoever drops the next thing and the thing becomes out of date.

And that was just a, a treadmill that I got a little burnt out on. But then I also found that that game didn’t really send the best leads and traffic to my business. And so in the, in my more recent videos, like, in the last month or two- I’m trying not to chase the, the news stuff, although I’m still interested in new things.

But I’m just trying to teach. I’m just trying to be helpful and and take lessons that I’m, and patterns that I’m learning and share them. Even if it’s not gonna ride some wave. Hopefully, it’s a little bit more evergreen and a little bit more future-proof. And that … It’s lower views in general, but I think it, it brings better quality people into Builder Methods, 

Chris Badgett: totally. Totally. And your videos are so useful and refreshing. It’s not like how to make a million dollars in a week with Grok Bot. You show actual “Oh, this is how I use this. This is how I set this up. This is my strategy. This is how I work around this issue,” or whatever. It’s super refreshing in all the AI hype content out there.

Yeah. 

Brian Casel: That will probably be my next video, though. Like something about- Sure it 

Chris Badgett: will … 

Brian Casel: maybe not that title, but I am playing with … I’m going down deep in the rabbit hole with Grok Bot right now, so I’m gonna do something about what I’m learning there. There, there are a few patterns that I’m noticing, 

Chris Badgett: it’s … I’m overly simplifying it, but in my experience in watching the market, there’s like ChatGPT and OpenAI started it, then Anthropic and Claude, everybody got all up into that. We have an agent named Maurice that’s all Claude powered and all that. And now Grok Bot’s on the scene.

So I think that’s what’s going on. But it’s just interesting. So what- Yeah … on, on the Grok Bot front, I actually haven’t played with it yet. It’s on my list, but I keep hearing it’s the way it should work, and it’s so much more intuitive and all this. What do you love about Grok Bot, or how do you think about it?

Brian Casel: Yeah, I’m still very new to it, just a few days in, so I’m still setting it up and experimenting a little bit. But yeah, it is a lot easier and just a better overall product. The … It … So y- folks should think about it in comparison to OpenClaw or Hermes, whatever they s- however they pronounce that.

So it’s like those, it’s like a, a bot. The main difference is that it is hosted on on Cursor’s cloud infrastructure. So as soon as you fire up GroqBot, like it already has its own computer. And it’s persistent too so it can like save stuff to its computer. It is powered by Groq’s model which can be good or bad.

It has… they must have some sort of special sauce in the harness that makes it be a little bit more like helpful and proactive, and it helps and it does stuff. One of the patterns that I’m do- A lot of people are like excited about it, but also you’re seeing a lot of people tweet about like how they burn through their usage credits- Yeah

Very fast. And I know that like they, they’ve been, changing up the plans and the usage limits and stuff a lot lately. But one thing that I’m doing with it is like I’m not really burning through the usage at all because I’m not having GroqBot do a lot of the work. I’m using GroqBot as the orchestrator.

So if it’s like coding or design work or even like writing now I’m also playing around with this, this tool called Amp Amp Code for at… It’s like an alternative to Cursor or or one of these. And I’m having GroqBot just delegate to Amp. You can do the same thing with Cursor as well.

So in that way it’s like whenever… So I’ll chat with GroqBot, it’s like, “I wanna build this new feature in my app,” and then it’ll go and spin up the cloud coding agent and do it and then get back to me. And I have a much more complex process where I’ll, spec out a product a, and feature and whatnot.

But that’s the idea is I kinda wanna like delegate to the bot and then the bot will go use whatever tools or agents on my behalf and then get back to me. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: What do you think about org chart design for AI agents? So as an example, like it’s one thing just to get your own business second brain agent going, but then explain the value of sub-agents and having a chief of staff or orchestrator on top.

Brian Casel: Yeah. And this is also like a new pattern with GroqBot. ‘Cause I previously, I had OpenClaw at first, and then I switched to Hermes. But with those, I just had the one bot for everything. And I didn’t really use it in like a large scale way. It was… Like, I had Hermes just running in the background and doing some like maintenance tasks for me.

But yeah, with GroqBot, what a lot of people are doing and what I’m doing is, like I, I do have a chief of staff bot that’s like my primary go-to person, bot that I talk to. And I’ve been experimenting with different team str- like organization structures, right? So right now what I have is for each of my products, so I have Builder Methods, and then I have Flywrite, and Mimeo, and Clarityflow.

And so for each one of those products, I have a head of that product bot, and I have a growth bot which will be in charge of running like growth experiments for that product, and then I have a maintainer bot, so any sort of recurring, like admin work that needs to happen for that product. So it’s like those three.

Like that’s like a pod for each product, and each of them technically reports up to the chief of staff. Or if I say “Eh, I want to build a new feature on Flywrite this week,” I’ll say that to the chief of staff, and then the chief of staff will delegate it down to that head of product.

But I… that’s actually what my project is this week, is like figuring out those operations and who hands the baton off to who, and how do w- where do we document stuff, and how do we have the bots run different projects, whether it’s like building out features or running like growth experiments.

‘Cause o- one of my goals with this is like it, it’s easy to get i- like into the weeds of redesigning and playing with all these new, fun tools and stuff, but like what’s the point? Why even play with it? And for me, the big goal f- of mine right now is to move from- Being like, I feel like I’ve been very like one-to-one with Claude or, whatever agent I happen to be working with.

I’m usually only doing like one thread, maybe two or three- Yeah … in a couple different tabs, but like my brain can’t handle more than that. 

But my thought with GrokBot is if I could develop an actual team operation very similar to how I would build a real team of humans I c- we can be running on multiple cylinders multiple bots doing multiple things all the time if I have reporting structures and bots are running on their own loops and things.

That’s the goal is to make it… is to actually s- try to scale the team and I’m ki- I’m getting a little obsessed with this idea of building a company of one now. I’ve- Yeah … histor- historically I’ve built real teams, but like I, I kinda like working solo now. I wanna see how far I can get with actually scaling in a way.

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Chris Badgett: So the… It makes sense with three different business products to have the context not all mixed together. ‘Cause they d- they’re different products. But so do each of the sub-agents, like the growth agent, the maintainer, do they have different skills repositories, or they all, they just know when to pull a skill from the main one?

Th- or how does that work? 

Brian Casel: The way that I’m setting it up right now is they share the same skills. Yeah. Because I only have a, a small handful of like core skills that they’re all gonna use, right? So like- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah … 

Brian Casel: like today I’m developing my product development skill. It’s actually like a set of two or three skills for like planning a new feature, and then building it, and then reviewing it, and Q&A-ing and that’s a skill that will happen on Builder Methods, that will happen on Mimeo, that’ll happen on Flywrite.

So all of those bots should be able to use the same process,

Chris Badgett: and then, but some of them have their own skills that aren’t cross- 

Brian Casel: Yeah, a few, but yeah, the- so I do have skills that are built into specific repos. Okay … so if there is something that is specific to the Mimeo…

okay, so like for Flywrite I do have a couple of skills that are specific to pushing out a new feature update on Flywrite, like like releasing a- Yeah … a new feature, deploying it and pushing it out to customers. That’s very specific to Flywrite’s code base and how we do it there. So that is a skill that lives inside of the Flywrite repos not like part of the global skills.

And and so then it’s just available there,

Chris Badgett: that’s awesome. And what have you been able to automate that you would have thought three years ago would have been impossible using AI agents? 

Brian Casel: Everything. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah.

Brian Casel: It’s… And dude, like you, I try to explain this to my fr- friends and family like normies in the world- Yeah

who are not in the tech industry, and I don’t know how else to explain it. Everything about how we work has changed, like 100%. It’s yeah, okay, we still do podcasts. That basically looks the same. But like- Yeah … everything else about how we write and code and design and ship, it’s all different now, at least it is for me. I don’t write code anymore, like I don’t write a single line. I, I’m in, I’m very involved in architecture. I’ll plan stuff and I’ll… And I’m still obsessed with UI and UX, but even that I’m giving my rev- re- my revisions to the coding agent to have them change it, content is- I create a lot of content obviously with YouTube, and I write a newsletter and stuff, but it’s always, it always starts with a raw brain dump, and then I have an agent write the draft for me. Yeah. And then I tighten it up a little bit,

Chris Badgett: yeah. It’s am- it’s amazing. Do you, when you work with your your GroqBot set up, are you only ever talking to the chief of staff, or do you sometimes go direct to a sub-agent?

Brian Casel: I’m still working this out, but I think I will be talking to most of the… both the chief of staff and the head of products. So it’s like, “Okay, this week let’s build a new feature in Flyright,” and I’ll probably just kick that off with the chief of staff. Then the chief of staff will get the head of Flyright involved, and then the, the skill has Fly- has that Flyright head starting to do the things, get the process going, all right. Still working out those logistics, but I think I do want them all talking to each other, and I saw a thing the other day that I haven’t implemented this, but the idea of having the, the bots have their own stand-up meeting. Oh, yeah. And and report and I don’t know document what, what happens, yeah. I’m like, I’m still, like, experimenting and really interested in all these different patterns, and we’ll see what actually sticks,

Chris Badgett: yeah, the one-person business thing has always been a thing, but now it’s supercharged with AI. Tell us about there’s this idea that if you vibe code a product or a feature and you don’t actually know how it works or whatever it could be dangerous.

But you’re here as a developer saying, “I don’t write code anymore, and everything’s fine.” Like, how is it fine? 

Brian Casel: Okay, so I know this is a hot topic for a lot of people. There are two camps. There are the technical people who are, like, career developers or builders and they’ve had to transition from writing code to using coding agents, and then there are the non-technical business owners who are just discovering how to build their own tools for the very first time.

They’re… These people are gaining superpowers that they’ve never had. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: I’m– I, I love both of the- those groups, and I think that it’s an incredibly exciting time for both of those groups. I guess I’ll speak to the technical people first, which is if you’ve been around and you’ve been hand coding your code base forever yeah it could feel hard to let go and let go of that trust, especially if you’ve ha- if you’ve had a bad experience w-with, you know agents writing sloppy code.

That can turn a lot of engineers off and cause them to say “Nope, didn’t like it. I’m gonna shut the door on Cloud Code or Codex or whatever it is, and I’m… It’s not for me.” I… i’m sorry if you’re a professional in this industry. That type of attitude may fly a year or two ago. It doesn’t fly in 2026.

It… If you wanna do real work in the real professional world you have to get on board. That– Whether you like to hear that or not that’s how things are built now. But the other misconception if you have been a a skeptic of using AI- y- that, that could also cause you to fall behind the technical on like having the technical chops of managing coding agents.

You can go deep technically with managing coding agents, and we should. We sh- i- if you don’t trust the code, it’s your job now as a professional engineer to design the skills and the processes and the verification loops and the QA checks and the prompt techniques and the training material for how you want your agents to do things predictably so that you can not only have one single agent do it, but there are actual professional teams now that are scaling to a single engineer managing like 50 agents at the same time, and we– like that doesn’t mean 50 tabs across your screen where you have to go through and QA check each one. It’s actually engineering systems that can self-check and verify and actually ship like 50 PRs a day. And like that’s extreme and I’m not even there yet myself, but there are teams doing that, and that’s where it’s going. So it’s like the sooner that you can start to really embrace and lean into buil- becoming like a more agentic engineer I think the better, I just wanted to speak to the non-techni- like the, the business owners, ’cause I see a lot of these people come into Builder Methods where, guy runs a dental practice or a law firm or like an accounting firm or something, and they wanna build their own practice management software for their own office because all the off-the-shelf SaaS tools are either too expensive or they don’t quite fit the way that their business operates, or their industry has some special needs, or they do sales a certain special way.

They have superpowers now, and yeah, they don’t have the engineering product design experience that a seasoned SaaS founder or entrepreneur builder will have, of course not. So in that sense, we are at an advantage if we choose to use it. But, a lot of those people, th- they have the domain expertise that we don’t have.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: The, the dental practice owner knows the nuances, the, the actual workflows, and the actual pain points that a dentist and their admins are dealing with that we will never even know. Y- we can interview customers all we want, but we won’t really get it unless you’re actually in that industry, and they know it.

And and to me, building software is learnable now. The… You don’t have to learn how to code. You do need to learn the process. You do need to learn patterns. I teach some of that in Builder Methods, but And you won’t be the world’s best engineer, but you can build a simple tool for you and your office to use.

That’s totally possible now,

Chris Badgett: so let me give you a specific example. I know actually in the LifterLMS ecosystem some dental office training platforms for hygienists in various roles at a dental practice. Quite a lot, some large LMS’s in that niche. 

And I’ve always said that you should put your customer at the center of your business, not your product, which means okay, maybe you’re a course creator and a trainer, but these, dental office owners would also benefit from other tools like perhaps software.

So are you saying that today an entrepreneurial dental business practice owner who’s getting into the training game, and they do all their training and continuing ed training and everything, could also add a dental practice management software with their own unique angle to their offer? It’s possible without a developer?

I know you’re saying it’s one thing to use it internally for your own unique bespoke company, but are we entering a period where, a product-minded person who’s an entrepreneur in whatever niche could actually build software even if they’re not a developer and commercialize it? 

Brian Casel: I think so, yeah.

I mean- Yeah … I I think they’re s- probably still the mi- minority. Most of those types of people in my experience, they’re really just more in- interested in building their own internal tools. But there are some that I’ve met that are entrepreneurial and they’re also at an advantage there too.

They have distribution. They know their industry. They know people. They know influencers. They, maybe they are influencers in their industry,

Chris Badgett: yeah. 

Brian Casel: You and me come from the software, SaaS, WordPress entrepreneurial circles, and we know the classic thing in our world is yeah, you can build a SaaS, but can you market it?

And and that’s always the hardest thing is getting that distribution, and it… theoretically you would like to be able to build a… for me, like to build a tool for some foreign industry that I’m not a part of, but it’s gonna be such an uphill battle for me to sell that tool to- HVAC companies, if I’m not an HVAC operator and I don’t know anybody in the industry.

But there are people who do. And look, the vast majority of HVAC owners or construction firm owners, yeah, they’re not gonna get their hands dirty with software. They’re not interested, of course, it’s probably 99% of the world and I’m not saying they’re all gonna go out and start using Claude Code tomorrow.

But there are some, like they come into my world, and they’re like they- they’ve heard about this thing called Claude Code or Codex. They heard about it on CNBC or one of these, and they start googling. They start open up- o- opening up ChatGPT, and all of a sudden a, a weekend goes by and they’re down the rabbit hole and they’re building actual tools.

And again, like they’re not… That, that person is like the minority, but like they’re… Once you start to learn a little bit, you learn a little bit more, and you l- learn a little bit more and then it’s that’s, th- that person is dangerous. They can… In a good way, like they’ve got connect- And also, like I, a lot of these people have resources.

Like they run really successful businesses. They’ve got cash. They’ve got marketing chops. They are systems minded, they just haven’t written code before, but you don’t have to write it code anymore, so you know.

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Chris Badgett: So correct me if I’m wrong, but I think back in the day you built something called Restaurant Engine- Yep

which was a, a website as a service for restaurants. But I think what you’re saying is like a restaurant entrepreneur who’s wanting to get in the software game today with AI without being an engineer could potentially build a better restaurant platform because they have all that knowledge, connection, resources.

Brian Casel: In my opinion, yes, but not most restaurant owners. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. A, 

Brian Casel: a very special breed. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: But someone who is a little bit technically minded and curious and motivated they can absolutely build and launch and get customers in a way that was not even remotely possible for them to do j- just a couple of years ago.

I was speaking to a dental practice owner two months ago, and he said that two years ago he paid $800,000 to- Yeah … a, a software development firm to build a dental practice management software- … that di- that didn’t end up working. And then here he is in my system, he paid a couple of hundred bucks to, to learn Claude Code with some people and and he’s this works so much better,” a- again, like I don’t wanna like- Paint the picture that every single small business non-technical person in the world is gonna start doing this tomorrow, but they are there. There, there’s a certain subset of people who are curious and technical enough to be dangerous, 

Chris Badgett: you know what I think it is? This is a huge gap in my opinion in the education market, which is, I would call it the art of product. You can go to school for engineering or design or business, but product is the least understood discipline. But there are those people, like you say, it’s one in 1,000 dental practice owners or whatever, who might have that product DNA.

They just need to develop- Yeah … the skills around that, and the engineering- I- … piece can help, AI can help with that. AI can help with, the business side and prospecting and all kinds of things. But product is you can’t go to college and get a master’s in product. 

Brian Casel: Y- yeah, you’re right. I think, and there’s different elements of being good at product, right?

Yeah. W- the part that I think they are really good at, I, and I th- I call them domain experts, right? Yeah. Your den- your dental practice owner or some- someone like that. They’re really good at the domain expertise, so they really know the pain points and the things that are expensive that they are trying to solve, and that is

We can be really good product designers. We can r- we can create great interfaces. We know the patterns of how to build software. So we might be good at that side of product, but to really understand your end customer and really know how to solve their problem better than anyone else can figure out that is probably worth more.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: But also I would say that w- while that person definitely has the capability to go from zero to one or call it zero to 100 first customers w- without much help beyond AI- Yeah … yeah, at a certain point if you’re getting customers coming in every day you are probably gonna need to team up with a technical person or someone to make this thing real, I would say.

If your business is scaling to lots of customers, you’re definitely gonna need some sort of engineering help to, handle servers and whatnot and and may- and maybe redesign the, the interface and stuff. But validating a, a new product is totally possible now, 

Chris Badgett: tell us about Builder Methods. I’ve watched you build that over the years, and you’ve got the workshops, the tools, the training, the community. What’s it all about, and who’s a good fit for it? 

Brian Casel: Yeah, Builder Methods r- is really only one year in now a little bit more than one year, and it- it’s gone through a few iterations, and I’m, and right now I’m working through what, what year two is gonna look like.

But it has some training in there. I, I did a couple of big courses. One is called Become the Builder, which is aimed at hel- at helping non-technical business owners learn how to learn just enough to be able to build a real piece of software without needing to learn how to code. That’s the idea b- with behind the builder or Become the Builder.

And then the second flagship course that I just recently launched is called Become AI Native, which is… which gets into writing agent skills and us- weaving AI into your workflow. Not necessarily building software, but just anything you do, whether it’s sales or content creation or, bookkeeping.

You can create agent skills to start to help you automate and scale that side of the business as well. That’s like the training side. But yeah, we’ve got a really great community of other AI, interested AI-pilled builders of all types. Some are very technical, some are non-technical.

That’s been a wide range. One thing I’m learning, I know that you’re in the, education space and LMS space and I think going forward, especially in my space with AI, I think I’m gonna be getting a, a little bit away from doing these big training courses and leaning back into these workshops.

And I did a f- a lot of workshops a few months ago. I wanna bring it back because they’re much more timely, right? I’m overhauling the way that I build now. I’m getting into cloud agents now. That’s like a new thing. And I kinda wanna do a workshop on my updated process for how I build stuff in fall of 2026, right?

And then I’ll… I wanna– So the way that model has worked with Builder Methods is the workshop itself might be low price, like 50 bucks, and then you have the option to upgrade into becoming an annual member of Builder Methods, which, gives you access to all the workshops, gives you access to all the training, the community.

And I’m releasing th- these tools. Whether I have a bunch of free open source skills and tools and frameworks, and then I’m developing these new paid software products, but, members get discounts on those as well. 

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. And does the what are the advantages and disadvantages?

You’ve talked about it already, but a non-technical versus a technical member I think it’s really awesome you have both, but are they both doing equally as well? 

Brian Casel: It’s been a… it’s been, like, because I’ve shifted my focus on, it started out a year ago really focused on the technical builders, like the- Yeah

the actual software engineers, how to adopt Claude code and stuff like that. And then in the last couple of months I started to shift focus toward those non-technical people, and so now we have a pretty healthy mix, and it’s pretty cool. We… There’s a Discord community in there and it’s been pretty cool to see the, the more technical folks helping the non-technical folks understand ba- obviously, I’m in there every day answering questions too, but so that’s been fun and I’m still figuring out right now what, h- what is what are the most valuable things and where should I focus the framing of it all. I think, more technical people really just come for the community and to talk shop with other builders who are really interested in adopting AI.

And the non-technical people, they do engage in the community, but they’re here to learn and really upgrade their skills and unlock things that they were not able to do before. So that’s been interesting.

Chris Badgett: And one of the things that I know makes you a great teacher is you practice what you preach.

You’re learning on the ground. So tell us about Flywrite and Mimeo HQ. 

Brian Casel: Yeah, and that’s why I want to get back into these workshops, is like I, I feel like every couple of months I have something new that I’ve learned just from my actual work that it didn’t make it into the last course so I just wanna do a workshop on it.

So yeah, Flywrite was something that came out of my work every day. I think I mentioned that I’m not really writing code anymore, and a lot of professional engineers are not really writing code, and that has resulted in most of today’s coding tools Moving away from the IDE, the editor, right?

So today’s agentic coding tools are really just focused on speaking to agents, and you have a list of a- of agent chats that are going on. And most, most of these newer tools are either pushing the file list, like your list of files and being able to read and edit your actual files, they’re either pushing it off to the side, or some of these tools don’t even have it.

You’re just talking to agents, which is great if you’re working on software. Yeah. And I use tools like that where I’m … I don’t need to look at the files anymore. I’m just either in the terminal or in an agent chat of some kind. That’s great, but the other half of what I do is content.

I’m writing newsletters I’m writing scripts for YouTube videos I’m, creating courses and stuff. And that stuff I do need to put my hands in the file and draft and edit stuff. I still use, agents to help me draft stuff, but I still wanna hand edit and highlight and comment on and stuff like that.

And so- 

Chris Badgett: So it’s like Google Docs’ benefit of- K- … collaboration. 

Brian Casel: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: A- and it’s c- it’s also it’s more like a traditional software IDE, except the markdown editor is really nice really nice formatting and you can completely customize the fonts and the sizes and how markdown files are presented.

But then it has, the big thing is that it has a built-in terminal. Yeah. So with the terminal you can run Claude Code or Codex or, any, any coding agent right there integrated with your markdown files. Whereas again, like if you’re in like something like Cursor or VS Code or one of these, you can look at your markdown files, but it looks like code.

At least Flywrite gives you like a really nice readable customizable editor. Or there’s always like markdown tool- note taking apps like Obsidian or any of these, but they don’t really have the built-in coding or the built-in agent to help you draft and stuff, so this brings those together, 

Chris Badgett: I love it. As a non-technical, like as a non-engineer myself, I’ve recently gotten into VS Code with our agent and stuff, and I know exactly what you’re talking about. For me, when I see the markdown, I’m converting things to PDF way more than I should- … just so that I can- Just 

Brian Casel: so you can read it, right?

Chris Badgett: Yeah. 

Brian Casel: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And get a feel for what it’s actually gonna look and stuff like that, but that’s super cool. Tell us about Mimeo HQ. 

Brian Casel: Yeah, this is a new, newer one. I’m just starting to open the doors to it right now, but I’m using it myself. It’s email marketing software.

So if you use, Kit or A- or Active Campaign or, any of the many other email marketing software, like some of them are really great. A- and they’ve been around a long time, and they can do a lot of things. And for the mo- for most people, I think that they’re still gonna be a good fit.

What I got a little frustrated with has been, and I’ve used them all two things is obviously the, the cost. As your list of email subscribers grows, your monthly bill for your email marketing software or CRM, whatever you call it, is just gonna get really expensive. But more importantly for me, it’s been just more and more difficult to run the automations and the flows for how I want to communicate with my customers through email.

I’m not talking about one-to-one, like this isn’t like a Gmail alternative. This is like drip campaigns automated sequences to nurture new people in the list, get them into my workshops, get them into my products and things like that, send out my we- my weekly broadcast newsletter. I wanted my

More and more, m- more tools in my business, I just wanna own them and self-host them and have the code base so that I can run them with my agents. So now everything I do with email can run through my agents. I can have them draft up and send email newsletters. I can have them design a really complex automation sequence for people.

They’re plugged into my whole account and it just makes it really easy. And the nice thing about Mimeo is that you can purchase it, download it, self-host it, and you just plug in your own sender. So it works with Postmark or Resend or Amazon SES. And so you do pay for those to send out emails, but it’s much more cost-effective than paying for that through your own provider.

And it’s a little bit more, like- It works if you are good at emailing, which means if you’re sending quality emails to people who have actually subscribed to you and you’re not spamming people, then it’s not, quote-unquote, dangerous to have your own resend or your own postmark sending your emails.

As, as long as you have a quality list of people who’ve subscribed and they expect your emails, then deliverability is great. I my deliverability is up since moving to Memeo. ‘Cause that’s the other thing about sending through these big providers, right? The Kits and the and the Active Campaigns and all these.

They’re gonna put all these accounts on these big sending pools. We know that Chris sends high-quality emails to his audience, but the next customer or the next account that’s on the same s- Is a spammer they’re a spammer, and so then your list deliverability suffers from that, so I like to kinda… I think we’re seeing this in general. Most tools we’re now gonna get into this phase of unbundling, yeah. And I think Memeo is one example of that,

Chris Badgett: that’s 

Brian Casel: awesome. That’s really what I’m interested in now.

Like, all the tools I’m doing now, it’s not just about replacing the SaaS subscriptions. It’s like I just wanna unbundle stuff and Take it back in-house and have my, me and my agents run our own operations,

Chris Badgett: it kind of rhymes with WordPress, like the whole- Yeah … thing of owning versus renting and,

Brian Casel: Totally.

Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: infinite customizability and open source and all that. 

Brian Casel: Exactly, yeah. I 

Chris Badgett: agree. That’s very cool. Brian, it’s awesome to catch up. You’re a prolific builder, and it’s so cool. And I’m serious, man I learn… I keep an eye on your YouTube channel, ’cause I’m like, “You’re ahead of me.” And I’m like, “All right here’s what’s coming next.”

And you’re such a great teacher, and you don’t skip essential parts in what you talk about. For Builder Methods, how should somebody listening to this get started? You have a newsletter, you’ve got some workshops. Like, how should they dip their toe in the water of Builder Methods?

Brian Casel: Yeah, if you’re, if any of this resonated, come over to buildermethods.com, and there are two free workshops there that you’ll see. One is on building apps and one is about becoming AI native. And both of those are, like, hour-long free trainings. It gives you my best current ideas on that kind of stuff.

So that’s a good place to start. And yeah, the, the YouTube channel is great. You can see what I’ve been sharing over there as well, so yeah. Well- and Chris, thank, thanks again for having me on. I’m such a fan of yours as well. And you’ve been doing this, for so many years.

It’s awesome to see Lifter continuing to thrive and adapt in these new, th- this new era. And anytime you have a podcast going for 13 years it’s like, man, that’s impressive. 

Chris Badgett: Thanks. I appreciate it. One final just bonus question. If somebo- Because I get this question a lot, and I would actually, in my mind, I’m like what would Brian Casel do?”

If somebody wants to get started with a AI agent today, would you recommend just getting ’em started with GroqBot today? This is August 31st, 2026,

Brian Casel: yeah. Yeah, so this might change by September, ’26. But the, okay, like it, it really depends on where what your starting point is.

Grok Bot is good to dabble with if you really wanna get into the bot team- teammate thing. But if you’re totally new to really using AI in any real way, I would really just more encourage you to move away from just… ‘Cause there’s a lot of people in the world who are just using ChatGPT as like a Google replacement.

Yeah. That’s fine. That’s a good start, but you’re not really using it in a real way. Yeah … and what I mean by that is yeah, pay the 20 bucks, get a pro account, ’cause that’ll give you the latest models, much smarter than whatever they give you for free, and start to u- start to use it for real tasks.

If you need to write something this week create something, or I- my favorite thing is to use it as a thought strategic partner. I do deep planning with with multiple, chatbots. You could start to use it in more real useful ways. That- that’s the big thing. And then you can get into, like, how do I actually incorporate this into my operation and with Grok Bots or, whatever other tools are out there.

But yeah, move away from being just a dabbler and make like a fun game and start doing some real work with it. You’ll be amazed. 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. That’s Brian Casel, buildermethods.com. We’re gonna have to do this in a year ’cause I know so much has changed- … will have changed in the next year, and it’s- I’m sure, 

Brian Casel: yeah

Chris Badgett: moving exponentially, so it’ll be interesting to see where we land. But thanks so much again, Brian, for coming back on the show. We really appreciate it. 

Brian Casel: Yeah. Thanks, Chris.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.