As a founder, it’s really hard to know what people want. It's the classic "faster horses" problem—separating the signal from the noise requires truly original thinking combined with relentless iteration to get products distilled to their most simple, pure form.

We have a very simple, specific vision for Blaze. We've been quietly working towards it while everyone thought we're just making a better content tool. And executing it has been a yearslong quest to get it just right.

Today, I want to share my full vision for Blaze 2.0: what it is, how we're almost there, and why it's going to rewrite the rules of our entire economy.

AI that does marketing for you

At Blaze, we serve small business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, creatives, freelancers, agencies, and so many more teams of one.

They are the spine of our economy and just as diverse: fitness trainers to financial planners, landscapers to lawyers, photographers to podcasters.

But what unites them is what they’re not: marketers.

They often don't have the skills to create great social media posts, or write effective blog posts, or publish high-converting emails.

They also don't have a lot of time to learn them, or have extra resources to hire people who can do it for them.

The first version of our product gave them something they really needed—as the hero tagline on our first website said, "better content in half the time."

And we’ve made good on that value prop. With Blaze 1.0, you can brainstorm, generate, edit, post, and analyze content for social media, blogs, and newsletters with the help of AI.

But as great as it is, there’s a critical weakness in that vision: AI is helping, it’s not doing. You still have to do a bunch of stuff yourself to get the output.

The primary feedback we get on our product is that “it’s too complicated.” This often comes across across as a compliment: “There’s so much there.” Or as a self criticism: “I don’t think I’m getting full use out of it.” Or as a request: “can you make more help videos, or hold more events.” 

We’ve spent tens of thousands of hours over the past year simplifying our product. And it's worked: Blaze today is, by my estimation, 5x faster and easier than the product we launched with.

But what these customers are really saying is: I don’t have time to do all the things Blaze 1.0 requires to produce content. And I have better things to do with my time than to learn it.

Indeed, many hundreds of thousands of people have taken the time, and as a result, we have a huge and thriving business today.

But the question we started asking ourselves is: what if they didn’t have to? 

What if Blaze did marketing for you? 

That’s Blaze 2.0.

People want a pilot, not a copilot

I don’t spend a lot of time prognosticating about the future of AI, but my belief is that the current state of the technology is not its likely end state. There’s a future right around the corner that will serve what people really want.

The first phase of AI was general copilots, like ChatGPT and Claude, that allowed you to play with the technology and see what it could do. They are good enough for generic use cases, which is why broad search feels like such a natural application for them, but they aren't feature-rich enough to be great for specific jobs to be done.

That's led to a wave of vertical copilots, like Cursor for developers, Harvey for lawyers, and Blaze for marketers, that have built AI-native platforms that enable professionals to get high-quality outputs based on detailed prompts and bespoke features to the workflow.

But when I talk to customers, they don't want a copilot. They want a pilot. They want AI to replace the work they'd pay a full time human to do.

I believe the end state is AI that can strategize, execute, learn, and improve on its work. I also believe we are approaching a future where AI doesn't just communicate with humans, but can coordinate with other AI agents as well.

Some call this "agentic AI," which I think is a terrible name. The concept that's resonated with our customers is a "virtual marketer" - a tool that's as good as the best marketer you could ever hire, works nights and weekends without tiring or complaining, for 1/10,000th of the cost of a human.

How would a virtual marketer work?

So, what would it be like to hire the world's best marketer?

• First, from just your website or a few docs, they'd tell you what marketing you should be doing: where you should be marketing, who you should be talking to, what you should be saying, when you should be posting, and how to make it break through.

• After you approve the plan, they'd draft those posts for you and send you them weekly for review. They'd do everything from create videos and distinct visuals to the captions and tags. You could approve them all, go in and make specific edits, or tell them in a few sentences how they could be better.

• Then, they'd automatically schedule and post for you. They'd be able to manage organic social content on sites like Instagram and Facebook, your blog, your outbound emails, and your newsletters. Heck, they'd even respond to comments and likes to sustain engagement!

• Then, they'd analyze what they posted, and send you a weekly recap on your channel growth and best performing content. Importantly, they'd suggest next steps based on those learnings: what to repeat or amplify, what to cut, and what they need from you.

Making all of this work with technology, instead of a human, relies on one essential currency: your trust.

And so we believe that your experience with a virtual marketer requires certain preconditions for success:

• Transparency: you need to see what it's doing, why it made that decision, when it'll happen, and how it will execute the job

• Control: if anything is not up to your standards, you need the ability to change the inputs, edit the outputs, or ask it to do it again

• Learning: you need the AI to learn on its own, from your feedback and the market's, so that it gets better on its own

And ultimately, the virtual marketer needs to produce results: more impressions, leads, and revenue over time. Otherwise, it's fired.

Rewrite the rules of the game

But—what if every team of one had a virtual marketer growing their business for them?

It'd level the playing field in most industries—or even turn the field upside down.

With a virtual marketer, you won't need a lot of money or a big team or knowhow.

You'll be able to compete and beat far bigger competitors with few resources.

Your growth and success will really be about your idea, and ambition, and resilience.

You'll be able to raise awareness to literally millions of potential customers across the world.

And you'll be able to serve them better, in more personalized ways, than you can today.

More growth. Better service. Unconstrained by team size, money, or skills.

Playing this out across millions of businesses, Blaze 2.0 has the potential to rewrite the rules of the economy—about who gets to win in America.

The lip service we pay to the "American dream" can finally be real for people. Succeeding won't be about your existing wealth, power, or connections. Your future will truly be determined by your courage, creativity, and commitment.

And we can spread that dream across the world to anyone who wants to bet on themselves.

This future is already here with agentic code development tools like Cursor, Lovable, and Bolt. Coding as a first use case makes sense: code is just text, it either works or it doesn't, and it takes seconds to test to figure that out—meaning trust can be built quickly with humans.

But great content is a lot harder: it requires copy, images, and video in your authentic voice and style. It has to be scheduled and posted consistently for at least a few weeks to understand its quality. And it takes months to see real growth.

But we're almost there. We're about to start testing Blaze 2.0 with our first real customers. And when it's available to everyone, it's going to change the world.

If you’re excited about this vision, come join us. We're hiring product managers, designers, engineers, and growth marketers to build the world's first virtual marketer and rewrite the rules of the economy. It's a mission worth committing to.