Startup Stories - Mixergy

Episode #2283: How Dan Shipper Uses AI to Build Artisanal AI Apps

Host: Andrew Warner
Guest: Dan Shipper, founder of Every
Date: October 30, 2025

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into how Dan Shipper and his team at Every build "artisanal" AI apps – purpose-driven, human-centric software grounded in personal need and curiosity. Shipper shares the philosophy and practical strategies behind product ideation, team culture, leveraging AI for productivity and self-understanding, and why he believes AI software creation is more like art than formula. The discussion also covers the impact of AI on future knowledge work, the challenge of maintaining culture as Every scales, and how their organic creation ethos stands out in the AI landscape.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Every Philosophy: Building What You Want

• Organic Ideation Process

  • Every’s apps originate from internal needs or interests rather than market studies or gaps.
  • Shipper describes their method as “a very non process-oriented process” (04:49), similar to how they write: “Whatever I'm currently into is the thing that I'm writing about… We do the same thing with our products.”
  • Quote: “Every new product we've built has always been like, hey, I just kind of want this, whether that's me or someone else on the team.” [00:10] – Dan Shipper

• AI as a Playground

  • The team experiments constantly with rapid prototyping, leveraging AI to quickly manifest ideas into MVPs within hours.

• Team as Early Adopters

  • Internal feedback loops: If the core team and their "early adopter" group love a tool, it likely resonates with the broader audience.
  • External launch follows proven internal enthusiasm.

2. Product Spotlight: Every’s AI Tools

• ARR and User Growth

  • 7,000 paid subscribers, $1.3 million ARR, 45% quarter growth (01:08).

• Products:

  • Spiral: Converts podcasts to social media content, now evolving into an “AI writing partner with taste.” [25:05]
  • Monologue: Dictation app for seamless voice-to-text, inspired and built by GM Naveen over a weekend to suit his unique bilingual workflow.
  • Sparkle: File organizer.
  • Quora: AI email assistant for prioritizing inboxes.

• Differentiation through Taste and Experience

  • Each product reflects genuine team needs and individuality—e.g., Monologue caters especially to people who often switch between languages and communication styles, as Naveen does.
  • Quote: “If you're making something that you actually want, it is going to be different because it's yours.” [07:48] – Dan Shipper

3. Bootstrapping and Company Growth

• Funding Approach

  • “Mostly bootstrapped”—only $1 million+ raised over 5.5 years, including a recent $2M “SIP seed” round (but only a fraction withdrawn). [02:30]
  • Commitment to breakeven operation and preserving the creative, risk-taking company spirit.

• Team and Culture

  • Grew from under 10 to 15-20 people, now with 6 business lines.
  • Most hires start as readers/fans; shared culture is implicit ("Every smell"), multidimensional and AI-curious. [38:30]
  • Scaling challenge: Maintaining intimacy, curiosity, and experimentation as the team grows.

4. Living an AI-First Life

• Personal Use Cases
  • Shipper describes integrating AI into daily life: journaling (using GPT-5 to analyze handwritten notes [13:29]), reading dense philosophy (getting summaries from ChatGPT), therapy-lite reflection, and company documentation extraction from meeting transcripts using tools like Granola.
  • Quote: “Every part of my life has been… involved in every part of my life.” [12:32] – Dan Shipper

5. Software as Content and Ghostwriting with AI

• Software = Content

  • Building apps is now as cheap and rapid as writing essays or tweets; the key is to iterate, ship, and share widely. [46:53]

• Spiral’s Evolution

  • Transition from generating generic posts to being a “ghostwriter” that interviews the user to capture unique voice and context.
  • Quote: “For the new version of Spiral, it’s an agentic ghostwriter for your short-form content.” [25:31] – Dan Shipper
  • “The new Spiral… has an interviewer agent that… kicks in and is like, okay Andrew, I want to understand you and why you care about this.” [27:59]

6. Prompt Sharing and Team Collaboration

• Editorial Prompts
  • The team shares prompts for editing, developmental feedback, and copywriting within collaborative AI projects (using Claude) instead of static docs. [32:42]
  • Desire for more frictionless, AI-driven document collaboration (pointing models at living documents).

7. The ‘Smuggled Intelligence’ Thesis and Future of AI Work

• Human Scaffolding in AI Benchmarks

  • Shipper argues that AI's supposed surpassing of experts on benchmarks is misleading, as these benchmarks rely heavily on human intelligence to frame, prompt, and evaluate tasks. [39:39]
  • Quote: "The eval is what I'm saying is smuggling a lot of human intelligence into it. Because… turning a job into a test… requires still a lot of human intelligence." [41:08]

• AI’s Impact on Knowledge Work

  • AI won't simply automate away knowledge jobs; work is too dynamic, unpredictable—unlike roads for self-driving cars.
  • The creation and curation of tasks, processes, and tools adapt over time, maintaining an ongoing human role. [43:27]

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On building for yourself:
  “When you're building software this way...you are a very special and unique person. Everybody is. And if you're making something that you actually want, it is going to be different because it's yours.” [07:48] – Dan Shipper

• On AI as a sparring partner:
  “I took a picture of [my journal], threw it into GPT-5…It was a very good sparring partner for me to pull out those reflections and then connect it to other things.” [13:29] – Dan Shipper

• On differentiating from generic AI tools:
  “For the new version of Spiral, it’s an agentic ghostwriter for your short-form content… it interviews you to get the essence of why you care, so it’s not just generic.” [25:31], [27:59] – Dan Shipper

• On company culture:
  “If you have a really solid first 10 people, the culture starts to self-perpetuate… everyone at Every, you probably have an 'Every smell.' You're probably pretty curious. You probably love AI. You're probably multidimensional.” [35:39], [38:30] – Dan Shipper

• On the AI ‘wraps’ criticism:
  “I'm very pro wrappers. I think of AI as a technology that's a little bit like Excel, where Excel is this very general purpose tool…” [30:08] – Dan Shipper

• On sharing and building:
  “If you're someone that likes to make things, just make a lot of stuff and share it widely...” [46:53] – Dan Shipper

• Personal touch:
  When asked if he’s in love: “No, I'm not. I have been, but currently single. So any ladies in New York listening who want to hang out with a Kierkegaardian AI lover, like, let me know.” [48:17] – Dan Shipper

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & Every’s growth figures: [00:10] – [02:18]
• Bootstrapping & funding philosophy: [02:19] – [04:17]
• Product ideation process & Monologue origin story: [04:17] – [10:23]
• Audience-first vs. creator-first building: [10:23] – [12:09]
• Personal uses of AI in daily life & introspection: [12:09] – [20:04]
• Collaborative AI use: prompt sharing & team practices: [32:42] – [34:38]
• Culture, hiring, and growth challenges: [35:39] – [38:54]
• ‘Smuggled intelligence’ & AI benchmarks: [39:39] – [44:44]
• Advice for creators launching new AI apps: [46:53] – [47:39]
• Personal question & close: [48:17] – [49:10]

Tone and Style

The conversation is casual, intellectually curious, introspective, and at times playful—combining deep dives into technical topics with vulnerable, personal anecdotes and honest critique. Both Shipper and Warner use humor and personal stories to engage the audience, staying true to the spirit of artisanal software crafting and reflective entrepreneurship.

This summary captures all the key topics, moments, quotes, and actionable insights from the episode, offering a comprehensive guide for anyone who missed the conversation.