Build Real AI Products (Fast): Product Manager to Community Builder with Kurt Yang (Fintech & EdTech, RAG, Embedded Finance)

From banker to PM to community catalyst, Kurt Yang shares how non-engineers are shipping functional AI prototypes, validating with customers, and turning meetups into massive and strong ecosystems.

Chapters:
4:17 – Community lessons for PMs
8:34 – De-risking AI with stakeholders
12:50 – Tooling spotlight: Lovable in practice
17:07 – Prototyping workflows that scale
21:24 – Embedded finance & risk-based pricing
25:41 – RAG in fintech/edtech (what works)
29:57 – Stack, Supabase, and next steps

What you’ll learn

From frustration to community: how Kurt spun up GenAI for Fintech & EdTech and grew it to ~800 members.

Lean PM, real signals: why working, functional prototypes beat pretty mockups—and how to run smoke tests with real users.

Tooling that compounds: using Lovable + Supabase (+ ChatGPT) to ship usable prototypes you can measure.

RAG, demystified: practical walkthroughs and when retrieval-augmented generation actually reduces hallucinations.

Fintech shift: embedded finance + dynamic risk-based pricing and alternative credit scoring to hyper-personalised offers.

Enterprise adoption: winning over senior stakeholders in regulated industries (trust, governance, records).

Founder traps to avoid: solution-first bias, over-scoping; how to pick a lower-risk wedge to earn trust and revenue.

Mindset: “Don’t just think, start.” Momentum over perfection.

About Digital Nexus

A founder-led podcast where Australia’s AI builders go beyond the hype with real workflows, decisions, and lessons from shipping. Hosted by Mark Monfort & Chris Sinclair.

Support the show

Other Links
🎙️our podcast links here: https://digitalnexuspodcast.com/
👤Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcsinclair/
👤Mark on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmonfort/
👤 Mark on Twitter - https://twitter.com/captdefi

SHOWNOTE LINKS
🔗 SIKE - https://sike.ai/
🌐Digital Village - https://digitalvillage.network/
🌐NotCentralised - https://www.notcentralised.com/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalNexusPodcast
X (twitter): @DigitalNexus

Michelle Gilmore (CEO & Co-founder, Juno) built a digital twin of herself to scale her business. Juno conducts high-quality, qualitative interviews—turning Michelle's 20+ years, and 10,000+ research projects into an AI “listening engine.” We dive into how Juno runs real conversations at scale, why expertise-in-the-loop beats checkbox surveys, and how a digital twin lets a CEO focus on strategy while the AI handles the heavy lifting.

Guest & company:
Michelle Gilmore, CEO & Co-founder, Juno
Juno is an AI research platform that runs real interviews on your behalf

You’ll learn:
What Juno actually does (and how it differs from “conversational surveys”)
Why Michelle raised $2.8M from Blackbird Ventures to build a global “listening engine”
How she captured her tacit expertise to train agents (principles, role-plays, competencies)
Fear vs. reality: AI won’t replace her, it amplifies and scales her impact
When AI is a feature vs. a product and why the answer is “it depends”

Why this matters:
Most teams still send surveys and get thin, leading data. Juno probes, follows up, and helps people articulate what they actually think and feel, so product and research teams can act with confidence.

Key moments (chapters):
00:00 Cold open & why “clone the CEO”
06:00 From researcher to founder: Michelle’s path to Juno
12:00 What Juno actually does (beyond surveys)
18:00 Building the Digital Twin CEO: capturing tacit expertise
24:00 Co-CEO in practice: decisions, prioritisation, removing the founder bottleneck
33:00 Fear vs reality: risks, adoption, and what leaders get wrong about AI
38:00 Scaling quality without burnout: ops, team, and metrics
42:00 Founder playbook: what to delegate first + what’s next for Juno

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Support the show

Other Links
🎙️our podcast links here: https://digitalnexuspodcast.com/
👤Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcsinclair/
👤Mark on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmonfort/
👤 Mark on Twitter - https://twitter.com/captdefi

SHOWNOTE LINKS
🔗 SIKE - https://sike.ai/
🌐Digital Village - https://digitalvillage.network/
🌐NotCentralised - https://www.notcentralised.com/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalNexusPodcast
X (twitter): @DigitalNexus

From IBM strategist to startup founder, Serena Lam is building Fuzzy AI to reshape B2B sales with hyper-personalized outreach. In this candid conversation, she shares her founder journey, lessons from building in AI, and where sales tech is heading next.

👉 Expect practical founder advice, the realities of building with limited resources, and insights into how design thinking and AI workflows are changing the game.

⏱️ Chapter Timestamps

0:00 – Intro & why Serena flew budget class from Singapore
4:33 – How IBM shaped Serena’s mindset as a founder
8:32 – First startups, painful failures & losing money early
13:02 – The hardest part: finding (and keeping) the right tech co-founder
17:48 – Inside Fuzzy AI: turning content & trust into 5x higher conversions
22:01 – Killing the “spam cannon” & making outreach human again
26:41 – Why Serena prototypes in Figma before writing a single line of code
31:38 – AI tools Serena swears by (Claude, Perplexity, Bolt & more)
35:54 – Which jobs AI will replace… and which remain uniquely human
40:30 – The future of sales: cultural nuance, agentic AI & trust-based buying

🔑 Key Takeaways

🎯 Startups succeed when founders go all-in — half measures don’t work.

🤖 AI isn’t just automation — it’s strategy amplification when applied right.

🛠️ Design thinking + scrappy prototyping can save you months of wasted work.

💡 The future of sales = humans handling trust + negotiation, AI doing the grind.

💡 Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe for more AI founder stories & weekly Digital Nexus tech breakdowns!

Support the show

Other Links
🎙️our podcast links here: https://digitalnexuspodcast.com/
👤Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcsinclair/
👤Mark on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmonfort/
👤 Mark on Twitter - https://twitter.com/captdefi

SHOWNOTE LINKS
🔗 SIKE - https://sike.ai/
🌐Digital Village - https://digitalvillage.network/
🌐NotCentralised - https://www.notcentralised.com/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalNexusPodcast
X (twitter): @DigitalNexus