Zero to Launch · Session 01 · Wed Aug 5, 2026
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GTM Engineering
Go-to-market engineering, end to end
Ship AIPhoenix, ArizonaPress → to begin
Tonight
- 01The brief — thirty minutes of AI news worth arguing about
- 02Break — five minutes, timed by the slide
- 03GTM engineering — why it matters, what it is, what the systems look like
- 04Live demos — real systems, dashboards open
- 05What's next — and who made tonight happen
What Ship AI is
Builders showing each other the work.
- Builders & founders
- Phoenix
- Free, always
The best AI education isn't behind a paywall or on a stage — it's in the open, for free.
How the room works
- Free and openNo tickets, no tiers, no gatekeeping. You pay by teaching what you know back to the room.
- Demos over memosShow the build. Founders too — demo the product, skip the hard sell. If it ships, it speaks.
- Craft over hypeThe toolchain, the tradeoffs, the parts that hurt.
- Honest starting pointsSay where you actually are. Nothing solid gets built on an inflated baseline.
- Proof of workA small real result beats a big vague claim. Receipts over adjectives.
- Community-drivenEvery session ends in five-minute demos, and what you're stuck on shapes the next one.
Come as you are, if you build
Maybe not yet if
- You're here to hard-sell or fill a lead list
- "AI-powered" is the whole pitch, with no build behind it
This is for you if
- You're new to this — Day Zero takes you from a blank chat box to something running
- You've shipped something and nobody's using it yet — that's this program
- You'd rather watch a real demo, even one that breaks, than a canned pitch
- You want a room that argues about tradeoffs, not definitions
Your host
Santos Hernandez
Founder & Host
Founder and Lead Product Engineer building agentic AI systems. Founding product hire at ZBD — the money layer for games — $0 to $12M ARR, the EU's first MiCAR approval, and money transmitter licenses in 26 states and D.C. He started Ship AI to give Phoenix builders a room where you show the work, not talk about it.
Before we start
Join the Ship AI Discord
Everything from tonight lands there — the deck, the skills, the demos, the arguments we don't finish. Free, always.
shipai.club · Free, always
Community partners
WorkuityPlatinum sponsor · Venue
CEI GatewayCommunity partner
Venture Café PhoenixCommunityThe rooms, the nights, the coffee. Ship AI is free because these three show up for builders.
Current sponsors
desicGold · AI deployment
AutomationInterns.comGold · Everyday AISponsors
Ship AI is seeking corporate sponsors
Free for the room means funded by somebody. Published tiers run $1,000 to $10,000 — cash, credits, or hours all count — and we're flexible: there's opportunity at every price point, and a custom arrangement is always on the table.
shipai.club · Free, always
Segment one
The brief
Five stories from the last week, plus quick hits. Thirty minutes of the loudest room in AI — then we go build things with it.
The brief · 01 / 05
Meta ships Muse Code
@AIatMeta · @finkd · todayWatch
- A terminal coding agent, in beta today: plans changes, writes code, validates results across large repos. Powered by Muse Spark 1.2.
- The demo: feed it an mp4 fly-through of a house, get back a finished website.
- Stress test: 24-hour runs, 1,000+ tool calls, optimizing GPU kernels on Hopper past hand-tuned baselines.
Zuck says they're so back. Does Muse Code crack your terminal rotation, or is it a benchmark toy?
The brief · 02 / 05
OpenAI cuts Luna pricing 80% — forever
- GPT-5.6 Luna's price drop is permanent — "efficiency gains," not a promo, straight from OpenAI.
- The community read: "your usage will feel infinite." Max reasoning effort as the default, not the splurge.
- Cheap-and-smart is now a tier every lab has to answer.
When intelligence gets this cheap, what breaks first — per-seat pricing, agencies, or your roadmap?
The brief · 03 / 05
DeepSeek V4 Flash resets the price floor
- $0.024 median cost per task on Agent Arena — a new point on the cost-performance frontier, right past GPT-5.6 Luna on xHigh.
- #3 open-source model overall, measured on 12,500 real agentic sessions, not a benchmark suite.
- Open weights keep landing weeks behind the frontier, at a fraction of the price.
Is there any moat left for closed models under three cents a task?
The brief · 04 / 05
“Source code is the new assembly”
- Musk's claim: the next step is skipping source entirely — AI emitting efficient binaries directly.
- The spark: a 50-year engineer saying he trusts AI output the way he learned to trust compilers.
- 27K likes, 8M views, and every senior engineer on X has a take.
Provocation or roadmap? What would it take before you stopped reading your own code?
The brief · 05 / 05
SSI's first model, reportedly this month
- Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence is said to launch its first model in August 2026.
- The most-funded startup with zero shipped products is about to have one.
- Nobody outside knows what a "straight shot to superintelligence" looks like as a product.
What actually ships — a frontier model, a research demo, or nothing at all?
Quick hits
- Mayo Clinic sued by its own AI compliance leadThe allegation: a concealed 67% error rate in a deployed clinical tool. Deployment is the hard part.
- Cuban: AI datacenters are the next pickleball courtsHis bet — massively overbuilt capacity looking for a second life.
- Mathematicians report a “very rapid, very unsettling change”Open problems are falling to AI faster than the field can referee.
- Markets can't make up their mindS&P record high then a plunge, same day. AI capex argues both sides.
Anything we missed that deserved the top five? That's what the walk to the break is for.
Intermission
05:00
Stretch, refill, introduce yourself to somebody you haven't met. The bar knows when time's up.
Segment two
GTM engineering
Why distribution matters more than another feature, what go-to-market actually is, and the systems that do it while you sleep.
You can ship code forever and never launch anything.
That's the room. That's why this program exists.
Products rarely die of bad code. They die unseen.
Distribution is a system, and systems can be engineered — which is very good news for a room full of engineers.
Tonight is the bird's-eye view
- Aug 5GTM Engineering
- Aug 19Zero to $3,000
- Sep 2Outbound Agents
- Sep 16Unfair Advantage
- Oct 7Ship the Surface
- Oct 14Agentic Growth
- WeekendHackathon
Six workshops, then the October 16–18 weekend. Tonight is the whole go-to-market system in one pass — catch the shape now, collect the specifics as we go.
The map
The three acts
Every go-to-market motion is one of three jobs. Doing them out of order is the most common way a good product stays invisible.
Launch → Grow → Optimize
- Launchget to market, get to signal
- Growone channel that repeats
- Optimizesqueeze the funnel you have
Get it in front of anyone at all. The bar is a stranger using it — not a perfect product. Seed the first fifty users by hand, charge from day one, and instrument every event before you tell a soul.
Find one channel that repeats and feed it. One — run two at once and you learn nothing from either. Then turn users into distribution: community, referrals, building in public. Compounding beats bursts.
Know your numbers — CAC, LTV, payback, churn. Kill what doesn't convert and double down on what does. It's the cheapest act, and the one everybody wrongly starts with: you cannot optimize a funnel nobody is in.
The order is the point. Each act only pays off once the one before it has.
Most builders pick tactics before they have a model.
An ad account before a funnel. A blog before a keyword. A pricing page before unit economics.
The model
Model the funnel
Not the six stages from a template. The four you can actually put a number against this week.
Measure every stage, not the end
- Awarenessimpressions, referrers
- Interestsessions, time on page78%
- Activationsignup → first real use67%
- Revenuefirst paid event65%
- Retentionweek 4 still here65%
Revenue is a lagging number. It tells you something broke, never where. Activation — signup to first real use — is where most builder funnels actually leak.
Live walkthrough
Same funnel, two real businesses.
- desic.xyz — B2B
- ggbucks.com — B2C
Dashboards open: where each stage is measured, and where each one actually leaks.
What is GTM engineering
The intersection of growth, product, and distribution — built with code, not campaigns.
- Growth
- Product
- Distribution
The test is simple: if the work ships as software — pages, agents, pipelines, dashboards — it's GTM engineering. If it ships as spend, it's marketing.
Two ways to do this
By default
- Ads before the funnel exists
- Hire salespeople early
- Agency retainer
- Attribution by vibes
- Scale by spending more
GTM engineering
- Paid ads, wired to the funnel
- Outbound agents
- Programmatic pages
- Automated attribution
- Scale by shipping more
Nothing wrong with ads — performance marketing is core, and session 06 is a whole night on scaling it profitably. The left column fails because it's a budget without a system. The right one is a codebase, and you already know how to build a codebase.
One product, many routes to market
GTM engineering is the work of splitting one thing you built into every surface a stranger might find it on — and instrumenting each one so you know which of them worked.
- Search
- Community
- Outbound
- Paid
The distribution engine
Write it once. The engine does the rest — and every surface reports back.
A growth loop, not a to-do list
- 01Instrument — a data event fires at every stage
- 02Ship — a page, a sequence, an agent
- 03Measure — against the funnel, not vibes
- 04Cut or scale — kill losers fast, feed winners
Repeatable — four steps a week. Scalable — code runs it, not headcount. Dynamic — each pass steers the next.
The fork: B2C and B2B
| B2C | B2B | |
|---|---|---|
| Funnel | Awareness → Activation → Revenue → Referral | Awareness → Evaluation → Decision → Expansion |
| Shape | Many users, small cheques | Few customers, large cheques |
| The work | Channels and creative | Named accounts and conversations |
| Time to first sale | Minutes | Weeks |
| Your session | 02 — Aug 19 | 03 — Sep 2 |
Attend both anyway. Plenty transfers, and the one you think you are is sometimes wrong.
Every system in this deck takes the same three inputs.
Who it's for. What they get. Why you, and not the thing they already use. Get those wrong and the machine runs perfectly, aimed at nobody.
The input to everything
- WhoOne segment, narrow enough to name twenty real accounts.
- Instead ofThe real alternative is a spreadsheet or nothing. Rarely a competitor.
- Value propWhat they get, in their words. Not what it does, in yours.
- USPThe differentiators every competitor can't also claim.
- Sharp edgeThe one they can't copy this quarter.
Write these five once and they become your hero, your cold email, your ad and your pitch. Skip them and you write all four separately, and they disagree.
The systems
In production
Not theory — running systems. The day-one stack, three shapes you'll see everywhere, the toolkit behind them, and the numbers that say they're working.
Your launch stack — six day-one decisions
- ProductNext.js, Supabase, Clerk. A working MVP, not a prototype.
- MonetizationRevenue from day one — fees, subscriptions, or usage. Never ship free without a plan.
- DistributionProgrammatic SEO, content, social — built into the product itself.
- AttributionDub.co from day one. If you can't trace a user to a channel, you can't scale.
- CommunityA Discord from launch. Your first users are your feedback loop and your first superfans.
- AnalyticsPostHog. Instrument every event — no data, no decisions.
Ship in weeks, not months. Deciding these six up front is what makes every system after this slide possible.
System one: the programmatic SEO engine
- Datasetwhat buyers actually search
- Templateone component, n pages
- Publishpages ship like code
- Measurerevenue per page
Build a table of every competitor, alternative, use case, and city your buyer types into a search box. This is a data problem, not a writing problem — agents compile it in an afternoon.
One page component renders the whole dataset: comparison pages, "[X] alternative" pages, "[product] for [niche]" pages. Fifty good AI-drafted, human-edited pages beat five perfect ones.
Reviewed, deployed, indexed — the same pipeline as your product. Google rewards freshness and topical authority, so the engine keeps compounding while you sleep.
Track impressions → clicks → signups → revenue, per page. Kill pages that get traffic but never convert; scale the ones that do. SEO without attribution is just blogging.
Organic search is the cheapest compounding channel there is. Start it on day one.
System two: the outbound machine
- List200 perfect-fit accounts
- Enrichfind the hook
- Sequenceday 1 · 3 · 7 · 14
- Replya human closes
200 perfect-fit accounts beat 5,000 spray-and-pray contacts. Score by ICP fit, budget, and timeline — qualify ruthlessly before you write a single word.
Agents research each account and surface the specific thing worth mentioning — the launch, the hire, the public complaint. "I noticed [specific thing]" is the whole cold-email formula.
Automated follow-ups on days 1, 3, 7 and 14, a different angle each touch. 80% of deals close after the fifth touchpoint — the machine never forgets to follow up.
The moment someone answers, automation stops. A person books the call, runs the demo, closes the deal. That part shouldn't scale — that's the point.
Inbound compounds over months; outbound generates pipeline this week. Systems let one founder run both.
System three: your brand, built like code
- Tokenspick your look once
- Componentsthe same ten pieces everywhere
- Generatorslides and one-pagers from data
- Every surfacesite, deck, email, README
One file holds your colors, your fonts, your spacing. Everything you make reads from it. Spend an hour picking once — then never argue with yourself about it again.
Buttons, cards, headers — built once, reused everywhere. Your site, your deck, and your one-pager are made of the same pieces, so they can't drift apart.
Write the content; let the system make it look right. Decks, one-pagers, social images — all generated. These slides are a list in a file, and fixing a typo is a one-line change.
Someone might meet you on your site, your deck, or your GitHub first. All of them should look and sound like the same company. That's the whole trick.
An hour on day one. Everything you make after that matches — automatically.
Polish takes you from looking like a 4 to a 9.
Same product, same founder. The delta is consistency on every surface — a build step now, not a hire. Your product isn't behind the brand. It is the brand.
The toolkit, one job each
| Tool | Why it earns a slot | |
|---|---|---|
| Attribution | Dub.co | If you can't trace a user to a channel, you can't scale. |
| Analytics | PostHog | Events, replays, flags. No data, no decisions. |
| Outbound | Instantly | A thousand emails a day for thirty dollars. |
| CRM | Attio | The free tier gets you to $1M ARR. |
| Social | Postiz | Write once, post everywhere. |
| Content | AI SDK | Text, images, video on demand — a content team of one. |
| Demos | Screen Studio | Recordings good enough to be the ad. |
| Scheduling | Cal.com | "When are you free?" answered with a link. |
The stack is a rounding error next to one ad campaign. The moat isn't the tools — it's the loop you wire them into.
Know your numbers
3×
LTV over CAC — the golden ratio
6
Months to CAC payback, or it's broken
40%
D1 retention floor — or fix onboarding
If you don't know these, you're not running a business — you're running a hobby. The dashboard comes before month six, not after.
The rule
Doing it manually? Automate it — with Eve.
Every system in this deck started as a manual task somebody refused to do a third time. If you catch yourself doing one, that's the signal.
Your turn
Enough slides. Open Excalidraw.
- excalidraw.com
Sketch your funnel — the stages, the data event each one fires, and where you think it leaks. Then we'll put live dashboards next to it and see who guessed right.
Program mechanics
- Everything is open sourceThe template repo, the skill files, these slides. Take them and run the process years from now if you want.
- Attending is open to everyoneCompeting in October needs a registered repo and a deliverable per workshop. Catching up late is fine.
- Build window opens Aug 3Existing products welcome. That's the whole point.
- Five prize categoriesFour judged, plus a room-voted Crowd Favorite — the one you can win alongside a judged category.
How October is scored
- Shipped40
- Receipts30
- Growth engine20
- Craft10
Shipped is the biggest band on purpose — this is a launch weekend, not a build weekend. Receipts is the one most teams under-invest in, and it's worth almost as much.
What each session hands off
| When | You leave with | It feeds | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 · GTM Engineering | Tonight | The map — acts, funnel, systems | Every session after it |
| 02 · Zero to $3,000 | Aug 19 | The B2C playbook, receipts included | The paid ceiling in 06 |
| 03 · Outbound Agents | Sep 2 | Twenty named accounts | The sequence you send in October |
| 04 · Unfair Advantage | Sep 16 | Positioning brief and pitch | The hero, the bio, the ad, the pitch |
| 05 · Ship the Surface | Oct 7 | A deployed site, profiles fixed | What every channel points at |
| 06 · Agentic Growth | Oct 14 | Content automation, a CAC ceiling | The weekend |
Six deliverables, each one the input to the next. The chain is why the order is the order.
Work backwards from Oct 16
- AugRoadmap, first channel, funnel wired.
- SepPipeline or paid test. Positioning settled.
- Oct 7Site deployed, profiles fixed.
- Oct 16It goes public.
Ten weeks. A dated list with fewer than ten items on it — longer than that and it isn't a plan.
Ship. Measure. Iterate.
GTM engineering isn't a department. It's a mindset — and it's the whole curriculum between now and October.
Thank you
Dan & Workuity
Platinum sponsor · The venue
Workuity Biltmore hosts and sponsors every meetup in this series and the October weekend. Rooms like tonight don't happen without Dan and this community — thank him on your way out.
Thank you
AutomationInterns.com
Gold sponsor
Affordable AI for everyday business — and the newest name on the Ship AI sponsor wall. Welcome Jon S and the interns.
Sponsors
Your logo belongs on this wall
If tonight was useful, this is how it stays free. Every tier is published, every arrangement is negotiable — cash, credits, or hours, at every price point. Talk to Santos before you leave, or scan for the menu.
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Say hi
- X@5antoshernandezBuild in public — arguments welcome.
- Discorddiscord.gg/kZSJMNveYMWhere tonight's links, slides, and skills land.
- Work with medesic.xyzWant systems like these built and run for you? That's my team.
Everything tonight is open source — the deck, the skills, the template repo. Take it all.
Feel the fear and do it anyways.
Next
Zero to $3,000 — Wed Aug 19, Workuity Biltmore
One business, one dashboard, no redactions. $0 to $3,000 in 30 days with zero paid, then scaling into paid profitably. Bring somebody.
shipai.club · Free, always