Your Product Is Now a Wrapper Around Go-To-Market | Hiten Shah

Hiten Shah has built Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and a long list of products — and right now he’s shipping a new batch of AI tools while stepping back into Crazy Egg after nearly 20 years. In this conversation we get into what’s actually real in AI right now versus what’s hype.

We start with Noats, Hiten’s local-first meeting recorder, and why “the tech wasn’t there” a year ago. That leads into local models: how much hardware you really need, why open-weight models still have a “flavor” from how they’re trained, and why even the frontier labs don’t fully know what a model will be good at until it’s done.

Then we get tactical. Hiten explains how he evaluates new AI tools within minutes of launch, why he treats his work like an “AI factory,” and the big idea of the episode: in the past, go-to-market was a wrapper around the product — today, the product is a wrapper around the go-to-market. He walks through how that plays out across his own products (paid ads, freemium, and a niche community play), and then turns it on my business, Castos, to show what the “obvious future” of a commoditized category looks like.

Chapters0:00 Noats and local-first meeting notes4:10 What it really takes to run local models6:28 Why model training is still a black box10:22 Where are the US open-weight models?11:55 Local vs. frontier: how Hiten actually works13:18 “X is where everything breaks” — evaluating new AI tools fast15:46 Do you really need to switch tools every week?18:16 Big-company AI vs. startups for personal productivity20:39 How to think about growth for an AI product24:24 The product is now a wrapper around go-to-market26:30 Does every product need a free tier?29:19 Coming back to Crazy Egg after 20 years32:16 What’s exciting — and what keeps Hiten up at night34:47 Finding the “obvious future” of your business (Castos breakdown)38:22 Why “grow my podcast” is the new job to be done40:50 What Hiten’s excited about in AI right now49:17 Wrap-up: pick who you serve

LinksNoats: https://noats.aiHiten on X: https://x.com/hnshahHiten’s weekly Friday calls: https://www.hiten.com/Castos: https://castos.com