Builder's Growth Lab

For the closer of season 1, Charlie Hernandez and Conor Douglas sit down with Martin Reed, founder of Insomnia Coach, to talk about the one thing every founder running on empty needs to hear: stop trying to fix your sleep. Martin built his business off a problem he lived through. After hitting sudden, severe sleep disruption for the first time in his life, he found that the harder he tried to fix...

No guest this week. Just Charlie and Conor breaking down what's actually moving the needle in AI and customer acquisition right now. Charlie walks through a new domain he bought live: PeptideMaps.ai. The peptides keyword pulls 9.4 million searches a month and the trend line is straight up. He breaks down the validation play, the local SEO angle borrowed from his Elevate Holistics days, and wh...

Episode 50 with Scott Simson, CEO of Raffiti Media. Scott runs a YouTube done-for-you agency that's generated over a billion views for clients across seven years and close to 20 employees. He sat down with Charlie and Conor to break down exactly how AI founders, indie hackers, and vibe coders should be thinking about YouTube as a customer acquisition channel. The takeaways: YouTube is the onl...

Roman Czerny, co-founder and CMO of Gojiberry AI, joins Charlie on episode 49 of Builders Growth Lab. A few months ago, Gojiberry was at zero. Today they're at $2M ARR. Roman sold his last SaaS for seven figures, failed two more in between, and just got into Y Combinator on his third application. He's in SF right now for the P26 batch. This is the full playbook. Real numbers, no founder...

No guest this week. Just Charlie and Conor handing over the exact prompts they use to run their SEO and paid ads agencies. The premise is simple. Copy the prompts, paste them into Claude (Opus 4.7 is live, shout out Anthropic), plug in your context, and skip the 20 to 30 hours of work. There's a free doc in the show notes with every prompt from the episode. What's inside: Charlie walks t...

Henrik Skagerlind Fasth spent 20+ years in the fashion industry before building Lumoo, an AI platform running 30 models in sync, entirely on Lovable. In under 9 months he hit 700K EUR in annual recurring revenue.  In this episode, Charlie and Conor sit down with Henrik to talk about why domain expertise is the real unfair advantage, what his first customer conversations looked like, how he vibe co...

What does it actually take to build a company in 2026? According to Ben Broca, not much more than a laptop, a stack of AI tools, and the willingness to trust the technology further than most founders are comfortable with. Ben is the founder of Polsia, an AI platform that builds and runs companies autonomously. You give it an idea and a team of AI agents handles the product, the marketing, the supp...

Charlie and Conor go solo this week. No guest, no Mallory -- just the two hosts doing a live audit of Beehiiv's digital marketing presence. Conor breaks down their paid search strategy, and Charlie runs through their SEO setup. A raw, off-script episode that turned into one of the more practical ones yet. https://buildersgrowthlab.ai/

Grace Ling built Design Buddies into a community of 150,000+ designers, cold-emailed 400 hiring managers to land her job at EA, got cancelled by people she trusted, was rejected from YC multiple times, quit her UX career to travel 21 countries, and came out the other side more unfiltered and more effective than ever. In this episode, Charlie Hernandez, Conor Douglas, and Mallory Loar sit down with...

No guest this week -- just Charlie, Connor, and Mallory getting into the weeds on the exact tools and workflows powering their agencies, their products, and this podcast. If you're an AI founder or indie hacker trying to figure out how to actually do marketing without a full team, this one's for you. What we cover: Connor's AI Content Flywheel -- Connor built a full content generati...

What does it actually take to grow a SaaS company through content marketing when AI is reshaping search as we know it? In this episode, Charlie sits down with Brendan Hufford, head of marketing at Grow Sprints, to dig into the strategies that actually move the needle and the ones that don't. Brendan's path to marketing is anything but typical. A former teacher turned web designer turned...

Most founders building AI products are ignoring a $700B+ market sitting right in front of them: government contracts. In this episode, Charlie, Conor, and Mallory sit down with Maurice Harari, co-founder and CEO of BidLab, to break down how small and mid-sized businesses can actually compete for and win government RFPs. Maurice shares how his company evolved from a hands-on consulting operation in...

Most AI companies are not losing on product. They are losing on positioning. And Josh Lowman says they are solving the wrong problem entirely. Josh runs Goldfront, a category design studio in San Francisco, and has worked with over 150 companies including Uber, Qualtrics, and Robinhood on one thing: helping companies stop competing inside a crowded category and start owning a new one. In this epis...

Andy Crestodina has spent 25 years building Orbit Media into one of the most respected content marketing agencies in the game. No paid ads. No outbound sales team. Just organic content that generates 900+ leads a year. In this episode, Andy breaks down exactly how he does it and why his approach still works even as AI reshapes search. We dig into what actually matters for SEO right now, how to cre...

OpenAI just opened up advertising inside ChatGPT, and the BGL crew breaks down what it actually means for builders, marketers, and AI companies. Conor shares his take from the paid media side, covering CPMs, attribution challenges, and what he's telling his clients. Charlie and Mallory weigh in on trust, discovery vs. purchase intent, and whether ChatGPT ads can compete with Google and Meta f...

Inside VC with Robert Harari 🎙️ We just dropped Episode 37 with Robert Harari, a VC since age 17 and co-founder of Raisy , an AI platform that connects founders with investors using behavioral data. What you'll learn: → How to craft cold emails that actually get VCs to respond (traction, team, product in that order) → The real difference between venture capital, angel investors, and family of...

We hit record and talked about what's actually on our minds this week: our canceled Breckenridge trip that makes our heart hurt, building CampaignPilots in public and what we're learning from sharing the journey, NFL bets we missed (and why we're still thinking about them), Sunday scaries as founders, how we actually approach networking without being cringe, and the mental health si...

Jon Cheney, Chief AI Officer and CEO of GenAIPI, joins the show to break down how he scaled from solo consultant to an 8-person AI services firm and what AI founders can steal from his playbook. We dig into his framework for customer acquisition in the critical first 60 days, how he landed free media coverage by pitching local news stations, and why building relationships with journalists beats pa...

Guest: Silvia Oviedo Lopez, Former Pinterest & Canva Leader, Now Building Stealth AI Startup Silvia spent two decades scaling Pinterest to 450 million users and leading AI-powered content discovery at Canva. Now she's building a stealth AI startup and just published her 2026 trend report. We dive into why the big consumer AI breakthrough still hasn't landed, where the real whitespace...

In this episode, Mallory Loar pulls back the curtain on her fundraising journey: raising nearly $800K for her app. She breaks down how she leveraged her network to get in front of angel investors, why early-stage investors bet on founders over ideas, and the brutal truth about fundraising as a female founder in tech (spoiler: less than 3% of VC funding goes to women-led startups). What you'll...

We chat where we started and where we're going/what's next for 2026. 

Katie Dunn closed $10B in real estate deals before becoming a full-time angel investor. She's invested in 30 companies, helped founders raise $27M+, and focuses on underrepresented founders in CPG and tech. In this episode, she breaks down what separates fundable founders from everyone else and the biggest mistakes AI founders make when pitching. What We Cover: What actually gets founders fun...

Customer success is becoming the next major frontier for AI agents. In this episode, we sit down with Teemu Kinos, co-founder of Skene.ai, to unpack how AI agents are reshaping onboarding, retention, and expansion for modern SaaS companies. Teemu shares how Skene helps teams deploy customer success agents that proactively guide users, surface friction, and drive activation without overwhelming hum...

Andre Albuquerque, who took Kitch from founding to Glovo acquisition in 18 months and now runs Builders Camp where he has trained over 4,000 product managers, joins the show to break down what AI founders get wrong about distribution. He shares his battle-tested frameworks including the 6 Pillars of PMF (proving that product-market fit requires marketing message, sales narrative, onboarding, suppo...

The moment yall have been waiting for.  The SEO 101 episode.  We start by talking turkey day, then get right into the SEO discussions.  Charlie talks SEO fundamentals (content/technical/backlinks) like parent/child pages, title tags and keywords.  How to do keyword research, have a clean domain and rank a new website.  Hint... new website are brutal to rank so buy (if possible) an old domain and c...