Hulken co-founder and president Alex Schinasi shares how a software company mindset and AI integration help her run a business on track for about $70M this year, with only nine employees.
So, you have nine employees. We just onboarded our ninth employee last week. So this is really exciting for us. We just keep the internal team really small because it allows us to stay nimble, to have direct lines of communication with our, you know, most senior leadership and just allows us to move really fast, which again is something that I probably took from software, right? Where you used to launching something on a Monday, iterate on a Tuesday, relaunch on the Friday. And I do take some of that mindset into consumer and I think that's what also makes me want to keep the team small so we can maintain this mindset of speed.
Yeah, I love that cuz I I hope the days are over of companies with a lot of fat, a lot of employees, and it's a vanity metric, frankly. Um, and now with AI too. I mean there's so much that, you know, can be done more efficiently. Are you all using AI in any way around the company?
Yeah, so we actually a few months ago back in January hired a company that call Northstone. I'm on the board of it. It's super exciting. They revamped the entire infrastructure of Hukin to make it AI first. So what that means is that we have an AI brain that has all of our information from supply chain, to product development, to marketing and launches, and everyone on the team can tap into the brain for any sort of information. So, does it replace a human? No, but doesn't make everyone on the team more efficient? Yes, absolutely. We now each of us has their own chief of staff uh with AI that allows them to stay on top of deadlines, send them reminders of things they might have forgotten about. So I would say we're definitely AI powered and that's the foundation of what I call the minimum viable company, which allows us to operate more efficiently at this scale.
The idea of having your own chief of staff through AI. Again, I think every business owner and entrepreneur should really think about that. I had been thinking about it for the founder, but you've built it for every employee. Can you can you break that down a little bit more for me?
Yeah, so we each of us has a chief of staff or an AI assistant, however you want to call it. and that's an agent that will send daily summaries, daily briefs about different things that happen in the business overnight. So you get insight into numbers, how the business is doing, but you also get insight into conversations you had yesterday or like follow-ups that you need to make sure you don't forget. So it's just an additional brain in a way for you to stay on top of tasks and make sure that nothing falls through the crack and that our agents also speak to each other. So if there's a question mark about something, you know, they'll talk to each other and figure it out, but it allows us again to be more efficient and make sure that nothing falls through the crack. I think it's especially relevant for remote teams which you know, half of the team is remote, half of the team is in New York City. So it just allows everyone to be on the same page.
