First Guest: Sarah Lane-Hawn
Guest: Sarah Lane-Hawn
September 23, 2026 · 45:41
Sarah Lane-Hawn, the show's first guest, explains how she turned HubSpot UNBOUND session transcripts into a shareable skill file for her AI assistant, then rebuilt its landing page from her couch as the post took off. The sealed Top 3 got one line in the close.
Moments from this episode
10 short cuts from this conversation.
Key takeaways
Sarah Lane-Hawn skipped most UNBOUND sessions to talk to people, then turned the session transcripts she could download into a skill file her AI assistant can reference all year, and shared it because "why should someone else have to do that if I already did it?" (09:13).
She shipped it before it was finished. When the post took off she added a download she could count, her contact details and a link to her site, from her couch at nine at night with her AI assistant (13:12-13:47). By her own count, half the people who visited the page over the next two days downloaded the file once tracking was in place; she estimates she missed the first five or six hundred impressions before it was (14:09-14:30).
"the imperfect being better than like not doing anything" was her verdict on the whole exercise (15:59). A host named the same idea just-in-time value, as against just-in-case value: waiting for a finished campaign before sharing anything at all (14:55).
Structure first. Sarah said AI clicked for her once she saw it as a folder hierarchy, a habit from her first job as a civilian working for the Navy, and that people new to AI jump in without building any structure (21:09-22:34).
The guest's view of the hosts: "y'all tend to talk like up here about AI" (23:38). She said it helps when the conversation comes back to the basics, so the rest of the audience has something to take away.
Sarah still types to think, and said voice-only works once your setup knows what you mean, which hers does not yet: "your AI is not my AI, like at all" (39:20). Nico Lafakis, by contrast, said he has moved from typing to working by voice, and how much of his computing he now does without touching the machine (17:41-18:07).
The episode's open question (31:01): will learning to tell AI what we mean make us better at telling each other? A host said it already has changed how he talks with people (41:55).
The sealed Top 3 went unread. A host named its three stories in one breath in the close (43:41-43:55) and said it is getting hard to find interesting stories; neither take written for the board aired. More guests is the stated direction: "definitely going to be a new format" (43:33).
Resources from this episode
The guest
Sarah Lane-Hawn
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