Guest
Anthony Gustin
1 indexed appearance on the show — AI, Creative, Founder & Team, Retention & CX, Consumer Trends
Appearances
Takes from the episode
Extracted from the full conversation — a take may be the cowboys’ or the guest’s. The clip link settles it.
2026-03-28 Retention & CX
Pop Mart's business is really a subscription-like membership model in disguise, with a small loyal member base driving almost all revenue.
members who account for 91% of all sales... with a 51% repeat purchase rate... it's kind of like a subscription model in disguise
▶ 27:05 2026-03-28 AI
Meta's Tribe V2 brain-encoder model can predict how a person's brain will respond to content, and that data could be harnessed to engineer ads that reliably work.
they know what lights up your brain, where, what you like, what you don't... I want to harness this in some way and learn of myself so that I can make ads that work forever
▶ 18:25 2026-03-28 Founder & Team
The $180-220K salary posted for a senior SF digital director role is too low given 15+ years experience and San Francisco cost of living.
might need a few more Ks to afford to afford a dwelling there in San Fran... basically the same job
▶ 9:45 2026-03-28 Founder & Team
Hardware founders are starved for community because the high-stakes struggles of hardware startups can't be shared publicly, driving demand for a dedicated founder network like Hardware Nation.
there's a lot of things that you can't just go share online... if we can't figure it out, we have 3 months of runway and we die
▶ 1:19:05 2026-03-28 Consumer Trends
Humanoid/labor robots aren't yet backed by real consumer purchase behavior despite the hype and political will around them.
I want this to happen so bad, but I don't know that the consumer behavior is there to follow it just yet
▶ 35:45 2026-03-28 Brand Strategy
Regenerative/ancestral-food brands like Heart & Soil, Lineage, and Equip succeed because their founders carry genuine mission conviction, not just product claims.
they have conviction and they have a thought and a worldview about how health is supposed to work... that kind of mission undergirding what they are selling on the internet
▶ 1:01:45