Building AI Products for the Other 95% | Brian McMullin, SVP Product (Network Solutions)

Most of the AI products getting hype right now are built for people like us, the tech industry. But your customers don’t care how the AI works — they just want their problem solved in a way that’s easy for them.

Brian McMullin, SVP and Head of Product at Network Solutions, has spent 15 years building for small businesses at companies including HubSpot, ezCater, Wayfair, and SamCart. In that time, he's yet to meet a business owner who wakes up thinking, "I can't wait to use AI today." For many of them, a prompt box might as well be a terminal window.

So his team doesn't ship the box. They ship the finished work artifact, and all the user has to do is claim it.

In this episode, Brian shares:

• Why doing the work for small businesses first, instead of handing them an empty prompt box, is what gets them to try AI
• His warning about baking inference into the core of your product before token pricing settles — and the two models he's testing to find out what small businesses will actually tolerate
• And what SamCart taught him about churn: customers left because basic things were broken, not because features were missing.

Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianemcmullin/
Network Solutions: https://www.networksolutions.com/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
00:48 Brian's product journey from developer to SMB product leader
02:42 How small businesses went from distrusting AI to have AI FOMO
06:10 SMBs don't wake up excited to use AI, they want to close the deal
08:42 Stop showing the agent, ship the finished work
11:48 Inference costs break the old SaaS margin math
15:00 Testing free credits and tiered usage with small businesses
16:47 What usage-based pricing does to ARR and predictability
22:28 Churn is a pile of micro-annoyances, not one event
25:06 What SamCart's churn data revealed about broken basics
28:55 Conclusion

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