🎧 Highlights:
[00:00:00] Humans doing the work of AI — before AI existed
[00:01:12] Why accounting is mostly about language, not numbers
[00:02:33] Shadowing bookkeepers to find automation opportunities
[00:06:00] Manual work Quanta knew software had to replace
[00:07:30] Why building on top of legacy systems wasn’t enough
[00:08:24] Rebuilding the ledger from the ground up
[00:10:12] Continuous reconciliation vs. monthly closes
[00:11:24] From Affirm to founding Quanta
[00:13:30] Why delayed financials are useless for startups
[00:16:03] Validating willingness to pay before building
[00:17:42] Using humans for the “last mile” while automating the rest
[00:20:15] Solving trust and data-ownership concerns
[00:22:48] Why most QuickBooks challengers failed
[00:26:33] Saying no to customers to protect quality
[00:33:36] Why AI makes real-time margins mandatory
[00:36:45] Raising $15M Series A ($20M total)
[00:37:21] Prism: asking your financials questions in plain English

In this episode, Andrew Warner interviews Helen Hastings, founder of Quanta, an AI-powered accounting platform built for modern software companies.

Before AI could reliably understand financial data, Helen and her team had humans doing what AI does today — reading receipts, interpreting memos, categorizing transactions, and reconciling books by hand. That hands-on approach helped her uncover where automation really mattered, leading to a ground-up rebuild of accounting software that works in near real time.

Helen shares how Quanta replaces legacy systems by owning the data end-to-end, combining clean ledgers, continuous reconciliation, and AI-powered analysis — and why this approach helped the company raise $15M in Series A funding (over $20M total) and land nearly 100 customers so far.

🎧 Highlights:
[00:00:00] From Makerpad to Factory — Ben Tossell’s journey
[00:01:33] Life after acquisition and redefining work
[00:05:06] Why AI might make things harder, not easier
[00:07:30] No-code lessons and the illusion of simplicity
[00:10:42] From teaching no-code to debugging workflows
[00:12:00] Learning to code with AI as your translator
[00:15:09] Curiosity as the new technical skill
[00:16:21] Building a “source of truth” AI system inside Factory
[00:23:42] How Ben uses AI to search across code, docs, and tickets
[00:27:36] Teaching AI to follow his workflow
[00:30:27] Getting comfortable with the command line
[00:33:45] The first time AI made him feel like a real builder
[00:35:42] Makerpad’s growth, Slack community, and hiring from within
[00:41:24] Newsletter growth hacks and lessons from Ben’s Bites
[00:46:03] Selling Makerpad and rediscovering purpose
[00:49:39] Investing through Ben’s Bites Fund
[00:50:33] Returning to his roots: teaching, learning, and building again
[00:53:18] The one-person billion-dollar company — myth or movement?

In this episode, Andrew Warner talks with Ben Tossell, creator of Makerpad — the #1 community for no-code builders, which he later sold to Zapier. Now at Factory, Ben is helping developers build with AI instead of code — and rethinking what “technical” even means.

Ben opens up about the post-acquisition burnout that came after his sale, why he avoided starting another company, and how AI has reignited his creativity. Together, they explore what it means to go from no-code to “AI-native,” and why the dream of one-person billion-dollar companies might be closer than it sounds.

👉 Join us: https://thenextnewthing.ai/

🎧 Highlights:
[00:00:00] From freelance writer to $10M ARR founder
[00:03:36] How Pepper scaled from a marketplace to an AI-powered content engine
[00:05:06] The hybrid model: humans and AI creating together
[00:07:12] Building “Nimbus” — Pepper’s internal AI platform
[00:08:24] Re-optimizing thousands of old pages automatically
[00:13:03] Why FAQs and freshness signals help you rank in AI results
[00:15:00] GEO: Generative Engine Optimization explained
[00:16:12] Tracking brand mentions across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity
[00:18:00] Using AI to generate videos, voices, and creative assets
[00:25:12] Scaling creative testing with 30,000+ AI-made ad banners
[00:27:18] How smaller creators can apply these lessons today
[00:30:27] Reddit, LinkedIn, and UGC as new AI search signals
[00:33:00] Cold-emailing OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and getting access to GPT-3
[00:34:21] Building PepperType.ai and learning from early AI adoption
[00:35:30] Using AI personally to optimize meetings and calendar time

In this episode, Andrew Warner interviews Anirudh Singla, founder and CEO of Pepper, a company that uses AI and human expertise to produce hundreds of thousands of pieces of content for enterprise brands.

Anirudh shares how he went from writing on Upwork to building a platform now doing over $10M ARR, powered by a blend of automation, creativity, and data. He reveals how Pepper uses AI agents to write, edit, and even refresh old content — and why the next big wave isn’t SEO, it’s GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.