Startup Stories - Mixergy

When YouTube kicked Pat Walls’ Starter Story channel off the platform, he spent a weekend getting Claude Code to build him a replacement. I wanted to see how it was done, so he walked me through it step-by-step. Turns out it was a mistake and he’s back on YouTube, but the site he made was so good that it’s his company’s new homebase. Pat Walls is the founder of Starter Story, a media and education company that helps entrepreneurs learn how real businesses get built. Starter Story generates over $2M a year through subscriptions, courses, and content, and its YouTube channel reaches millions of viewers each month. A former software engineer turned creator, Pat is known for experimenting publicly with new tools—most recently using AI to rebuild his own video platform when YouTube put his business at risk. Sponsored byZapier More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

Yevgeniy Matsay was a real estate broker who hated making cold calls. So he built an AI automation to do it for him. It worked so well that he created an agency that created cold calling automations for other brokers. Today he’s turning his automation service into Rozera, a cold calling SaaS for real estate brokers. Yevgeniy Matsay and Aidan Richards are the co-founders of Rezora, an AI-powered outbound calling platform built for real estate brokers. Yevgeniy is a former real estate agent with a background in computer science and cybersecurity, while Aiden leads sales, marketing, and operations. Together, they’re building AI voice agents designed specifically for real sales conversations—not generic chatbots—starting with real estate and expanding to other industries. Sponsored byZapier More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

On the surface, it looks like Ricardo Vice Santos is selling AI-created books for your kids. But he’s aiming for something much bigger: a world where TV, movies, and every other media will be customized to you, using AI. He’s starting with children’s books because that’s what people will buy and what AI can do well today. This is the story of how he’s building DreamStories and how you can build a similar company. Ricardo is the founder of DreamStories, a company creating AI-powered, personalized children’s books tailored to individual families. Previously, he worked in consumer media and was an early team member at Spotify, where he developed a deep understanding of long-tail content and personalization. Drawing on that experience, Ricardo is now building toward a future where books, videos, and even movies are generated uniquely for each person. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

Helen Hastings wanted to create better accounting software. To figure out what to build, she had humans do the work. This is the story of how she created Quanta, the accounting software that’s taking on QuickBooks with a more modern human+software approach. Helen Hastings is the founder and CEO of Quanta, an AI-powered accounting platform built for modern software and services companies. Before Quanta, she was a software engineer at Affirm, where she specialized in building financial ledgers and systems of record. She’s also worked at Google and NerdWallet, bringing deep fintech and infrastructure experience to one of accounting’s hardest problems. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

Pepper is creating content for clients like Shopify, Adobe and Instacart. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of posts & videos. And this is content that leads to sales. In this interview, founder Anirudh Singla tell us how they do it by using AI and humans. Anirudh Singla is the founder and CEO of Pepper, a global content marketing platform that blends AI and human creativity to produce content at scale. What began as his side hustle on Upwork has grown into a company serving Fortune 500s —recently crossing $10M in annual recurring revenue. Pepper now operates across writing, design, video, and localization, helping brands drive measurable growth through AI-powered content systems. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint

Coming into this interview I wasn’t even sure what “AI Transformation” was, let alone why so many companies pay for it. Here’s the deal: Tenex, the company founded by Alex Lieberman & Arman Hezarkhani, goes into companies hunting for ways to save or making them money using AI. Once they find that, it becomes a no brainer for companies to hire them to build it. But Tenex does more than AI Transformation. They also run a dev shop where their developers use AI to build super fast for clients. Alex Lieberman and Arman Hezarkhani are the co-founders of Tenex, a company blending high-performance engineering with AI transformation consulting. Their model aligns incentives around output rather than time, helping enterprises and startups build software faster and integrate AI across people, processes, and tools. Together, they’re building what they call the “McKinsey for AI”—a hybrid of dev shop, consultancy, and innovation lab helping companies thrive in the post-AI era. More interviews -> https://mixergy.com/moreint Rate this interview -> https://mixergy.com/rateint