Earlier this year, Thrive Market gave all 300 of its corporate employees Claude with no usage limits and told them to experiment. A food safety lead used it to build the tool her whole team now relies on to vet every new product. A self-described skeptic built an RFP tool and won Thriver of the Week for it.

April Lane is the chief merchandising officer at Thrive Market, an online grocer with 1.7 million members and more than 1,000 banned ingredients. She walks Noah Levin through how Thrive paired non-technical builders with engineers, and what has to be true before a company can open AI up to everyone without regretting it.

Topics covered

• The AI Dojo: two days pairing a business-team builder with an AI engineer, then a company science fair to show off what got built.
• Build vs. buy: why Thrive still pays for its product catalog system while building its own workflow tools.
• The hard part: why a prototype running on your laptop is a long way from a tool your team or your vendors can use.

Chapters
(00:00) What Happens When Everyone Gets Unfiltered Access

(01:09) Building Tools Without a Computer Science Degree

(02:11) Is an Online Grocer a Tech Company?

(02:53) Giving 300 Employees Claude With No Usage Limits

(05:16) The Six-Month Bottleneck Behind Every New Product

(10:37) Why Thrive Still Buys Some Software

(12:58) The AI Dojo: Pairing Business Teams With Engineers

(19:37) What Outside AI Training Is Good For

(20:50) Why the Person Doing the Work Should Build the Tool

(25:47) Inside the Ingredient Vetting Portal

(32:27) Teaching Claude How Your Business Works

(34:38) Where Prototypes Hit a Wall

(37:20) What She’d Do Differently

Links
Connect with April on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/april-lane-1876b1/
Thrive Market website: https://thrivemarket.com

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/
Noah’s Website: https://www.noahlevin.com/
Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/

• (00:00) - What Happens When Everyone Gets Unfiltered Access
• (01:09) - Building Tools Without a Computer Science Degree
• (02:11) - Is an Online Grocer a Tech Company?
• (02:53) - Giving 300 Employees Claude With No Usage Limits
• (05:16) - The Six-Month Bottleneck Behind Every New Product
• (10:37) - Why Thrive Still Buys Some Software
• (12:58) - The AI Dojo: Pairing Business Teams With Engineers
• (19:37) - What Outside AI Training Is Good For
• (20:50) - Why the Person Doing the Work Should Build the Tool
• (25:47) - Inside the Ingredient Vetting Portal
• (32:27) - Teaching Claude How Your Business Works
• (34:38) - Where Prototypes Hit a Wall
• (37:20) - What She’d Do Differently

Sally Slater keeps a list of more than 600 words and phrases that AI leans on too often. She considers that list the easy part. The harder problem is the sentence that sounds profound and says nothing, which no word list will catch.

Sally is the co-founder and managing partner of InnovAItion Partners, where she helps PR, marketing, and advertising agencies use AI without turning themselves into a commodity. She also built SlopSentry, a tool that edits the slop out of AI writing. In this episode, she walks Noah Levin through the writing system she builds for clients, using Noah's own podcast and newsletter as the test case.

Topics covered:

• Why every AI writing workflow needs human input, whether that's a transcript, a voice memo, or data only you have
• Writing in layers: how you want to sound, what you actually have to say, and a separate agent that strips out the slop
• Building a company brain in the folders your team already uses, with AI doing the filing

Chapters
(00:00) Introduction

(02:13) Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal

(07:52) What's Safe to Fully Automate

(09:43) Building the Weekly Newsletter

(16:36) Data Nobody Else Has

(18:54) The Hamburger Method

(23:28) Word Slop vs. Substance Slop

(25:53) Killing LinkedIn Broetry

(29:03) Building a Company Brain

(33:33) Keeping the Brain Current

(40:20) What Actually Works on LinkedIn

(44:04) Teaching AI From Your Edits

Resources
Connect with Sally on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyrslater

Sally’s website: https://www.sallyslater.com

InnovAItion Partners website: https://www.innovaitionpartners.com

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/
Noah's Website: https://www.noahlevin.com/
Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:13) - Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal
• (07:52) - What's Safe to Fully Automate
• (09:43) - Building the Weekly Newsletter
• (16:36) - Data Nobody Else Has
• (18:54) - The Hamburger Method
• (23:28) - Word Slop vs. Substance Slop
• (25:53) - Killing LinkedIn Broetry
• (29:03) - Building a Company Brain
• (33:33) - Keeping the Brain Current
• (40:20) - What Actually Works on LinkedIn
• (44:04) - Teaching AI From Your Edits

Scott Patterson changed the price on his website by talking for a few minutes. The agent did the rest, then reported back on how the new price was performing before he thought to ask.

Scott is the founder and CEO of Core Fiber, a prebiotic fiber brand sold on Amazon, TikTok Shop and its own site. He built it to be a large company with a small headcount, with an agent working in nearly every function, from supply chain to finance. In this episode he walks Noah Levin through the system that runs the business and what an operator without a technical team can take from it.

Topics covered:

• Building a company brain the agent maintains, so you never have to open it yourself
• Handing off whole projects, from a price change to the month-end close, and getting back only the human tasks
• Where to start: one real problem, one long dictation, and knowing when to stop optimizing

Chapters
(00:00) Introduction
(01:11) Agents Instead of Headcount
(05:43) Half the Day in ChatGPT
(07:45) Where the Company Brain Lives
(12:08) A Data Warehouse in Sheets
(16:30) The Brief That Nags You
(18:34) The Price Change He Dodged
(23:01) An R&D Team on Demand
(26:54) Hiring an AI CFO
(30:36) A Product Launch, Dictated
(32:29) Start With a Real Problem
(36:03) Stop Optimizing. Touch Grass.

Resources
Valet — Episode Sponsor
Valet is the founding sponsor of the Serious People Podcast.
AI is getting very good at making useful things: dashboards, analyses, internal websites, and small tools. Making those things available to the rest of a team is a separate problem.
Valet lets you publish AI-created artifacts to a stable URL. New sites are private by default, and members of your organization can access them after signing in.

Try Valet at https://valet.dev
And https://serious-people.valet.run/spp-scott-patterson-operator-field-guide

Connect with Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-patterson1/
Core Fiber Website: https://corefiber.co/

Connect with Noah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahlevin/
Noah's Website: https://www.noahlevin.com/
Serious People Website: https://seriouspeople.ai/