Check out Mostly Growth and get episodes early. Available on all platforms.

* YouTube

* Spotify

* Apple

Conference season is back, and CJ and Kyle are swapping stories from the stage—how to nail a keynote, whether conferences are worth the money, and why your walkout song matters more than you think. From there, they dig into a new a16z report revealing where AI startups are actually spending their dollars, and CJ shares results from his summer survey showing that CFOs talk a big game about measuring AI ROI—but nobody knows how to do it. The crew also unpacks how SaaS companies like Slack are bundling AI into their products and hiking prices, before spiraling into a late-night “potentially reliable” rabbit hole featuring a Soviet pole vaulter, beat-and-raise forecasting, and J. Edgar Hoover. They close with lessons on pricing in the real world (yes, Amsterdam’s architecture is involved) and one experiment CJ tried this week.

Timestamps:

00:00 Preview and Intro

02:03 Walkout Songs & Kicking Off Conference Season

04:12 Sponsored Segment — Metronome

05:16 How To Give a Great Keynote and Not Bore the Room

11:16 Are Conferences Worth the Money

16:02 What AI Companies Are Actually Paying For — The a16z Report

21:56 Summer Survey Results: The Elusive ROI of AI

23:56 Why No One Knows How To Measure ROI on AI

29:38 SaaS Companies Forcing AI — Bundling, Pricing, and Pushback

35:32 A Potentially Reliable Thing I Read at 2 AM

36:02 Soviet Pole Vaulter, Beat-and-Raise Forecasting & Hoover’s Borders

41:02 Pricing in the Real World — Lessons from Amsterdam’s Skinny Houses

44:37 Something I Tried This Week — Fixyer

Episodes Referenced: ⁠Are You Bad at LinkedIn… or Is the Algorithm Lying?⁠

⁠Why Founders Are Posting Sad Dinners⁠

Links:

⁠

⁠

⁠

https://www.getmobly.com/⁠

⁠https://a16z.com/the-ai-application-spending-report-where-startup-dollars-really-go/⁠

⁠https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/how-to-nail-your-next-big-talk⁠

⁠https://www.leahtharin.com/p/113-vincent-pierri-how-to-deal-with⁠

⁠https://www.freepik.com/⁠

⁠https://cluely.com/⁠

⁠https://www.mostlymetrics.com/p/it-was-the-summer-of-25⁠

⁠https://www.crescendo.ai/⁠

⁠https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justintropic_slack-just-raised-prices-125-by-forcing-activity-7379132597009870848-XI6N/⁠

⁠https://www.mostlymetrics.com/p/what-a-soviet-era-pole-vaulter-can-teach-us-about-beating-and-raising⁠

⁠https://www.nytimes.com/1972/05/03/archives/j-edgar-hoover-made-the-fbi-formidable-with-politics-publicity-and.html⁠

⁠https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/73vh2j/til_that_the_dutch_government_once_enforced_a_tax/⁠

⁠https://www.clearspaceliving.com/blog/why-dutch-stairs-are-so-steep/⁠

⁠https://mjwrightnz.wordpress.com/2012/10/28/amsterdams-taxing-narrow-houses/⁠

⁠https://www.fyxer.com/

Today’s podcast is brought to you by Metronome

You just launched your new AI product. The new pricing page looks great. But behind it? Last-minute glue code, messy spreadsheets, and running ad-hoc queries to figure out what to bill. Customers get invoices they can’t understand. Engineers are chasing billing bugs. Finance can’t close the books.

With Metronome, you hand it all off to the real-time billing infrastructure that just works—reliable, flexible, and built to grow with you. We turn raw usage events into accurate invoices, give customers bills they actually understand, and keep every team in sync in real time.

Whether you’re launching usage-based pricing, managing enterprise contracts, or rolling out new AI services, Metronome does the heavy lifting so you can focus on your product, not your billing.

That’s why some of the fastest-growing companies in the world, like OpenAI and Anthropic, run their billing on Metronome.

Visit metronome.com to learn more.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cjgustafson.substack.com

How to Crush Your Keynote (Even If You’re Dying Inside)

Run the Numbers