What a night!

First, of course, I need to thank everyone who attended. You all rock!

And I am excited to announce that 1st-place in the Startup Pitch Competition went to Abrial AI. If you didn’t make it to this event. You missed out.

But don’t worry, we are doing these every quarter now. So you will get your chance to attend at some point.

Lois, the founder of Abrial AI, is now the proud owner of a brand-new nano-sized Pac-Man machine. All of the companies that pitched had great teams and innovative technology. We went with Abrial because they are chasing a huge market. And they have a clear and easy-to-understand GTM strategy to help them achieve it.

Registration is live for our next event on Tuesday, May 12. We will select another 5 startups to pitch, and we plan to have 10 additional companies demo.

Co-founders: Karan Grover, Harsh Patel
Location: Seattle, Washington
Stage: Seed
Website: Kanu AI
Social: LinkedIn

Kanu is an AI Cloud Engineer who turns product intent into production-ready software in your AWS account. It owns build, deployment, and validation, not just code generation. The goal is simple: ship faster with less infrastructure overhead.

Kanu installs as a single-tenant service in your AWS account. Three AI agents capture intent, apply infrastructure and app changes, and validate systems. It reads logs, retries failures, and iterates until deployment succeeds.

AI coding tools speed up code but not delivery. Kanu automates the path from pull request to production, where most delays happen. For enterprise teams, that compression of delivery cycles is a real advantage.

GTC vibes is the soundtrack for the show floor and the late-night debrief. Dark electronic pressure, cyberpunk adrenaline, and big room beats, built for founders, demos, and the feeling that everything is accelerating.

Put this on when you want your brain in compile mode.

At the first-ever Vibe Your SaaS startup pitch competition, one founder rose to the top. That founder was Louis Schmitlin, who is building Abrial AI. An AI company focused on helping airlines optimize ancillary revenue. Instead of chasing the biggest carriers, Louis is going after second-tier low-cost airlines, a massive segment with faster sales cycles and strong ROI potential.

After the event, I sat down with Louis to talk about why aviation is such an interesting market, why now is the right time to build in this category, and what most founders get wrong about selling into complex industries.

The airline industry is a trillion-dollar market with a surprising amount of revenue still left on the table. A large portion of airline profits comes from ancillary revenue streams like seat upgrades, baggage, and other add-ons. Small improvements in how those are priced or offered can generate massive ROI. That combination of scale and measurable impact makes aviation a very attractive market for optimization software.

Most startups try to sell to the biggest airlines first. That is usually a mistake. Large carriers have long procurement cycles and complex vendor ecosystems.

The real opportunity is in second-tier and low-cost airlines. They move faster, are more pragmatic about ROI, and are often more open to working with startups. That segment is large enough to build a real business while being much easier to penetrate early.

The timing is unusually good because airlines have already tried to build many of these capabilities internally.

Those projects often failed, but they left behind something valuable. Airlines now have modern data lakes and infrastructure that are much easier to integrate with than legacy systems. Combine that with advances in machine learning over the past five years, and it is finally practical for startups to build solutions that were once too expensive or technically difficult.

I initially assumed airlines would be extremely difficult customers to convince. In reality, they can be very rational buyers when the ROI is clear.

They operate on thin margins, so if you show them a credible way to increase revenue or efficiency, they are willing to listen. The key lesson was that deep domain knowledge matters a lot. When you can speak their language and understand their constraints, conversations move much faster.

How much trust matters in the process.

One of the most effective moments in a sales conversation came when I pushed back on a potential client’s approach and explained why it would not work. That kind of pushback only works if it is grounded in real industry expertise, but when it is, it builds credibility very quickly.

Enterprise sales always take longer than you expect. Even when there is strong interest and a clear ROI, building trust and achieving internal alignment take time. Our first paying pilot took around seven months after setting up the company. That experience reinforces the importance of patience and persistence.

Trust combined with deep domain expertise. AI capabilities will eventually become more commoditized. What does not commoditize easily is the credibility that comes from understanding the operational realities of an industry like aviation. When customers trust you as both a technical and industry partner, the relationship becomes much stickier.

The size of the market and the economics of optimization.

Even focusing only on mid-to-large low-cost airlines represents roughly a $300 billion revenue base. If you can improve ancillary revenue performance even slightly across that segment, the impact is enormous.

Our model captures a percentage of the revenue uplift we generate. That creates a very large potential outcome even within a relatively focused niche.

Surface-level uses of AI.

A lot of companies are adding AI features like chatbots or simple automation layers. Those can be useful, but they rarely change the underlying economics of a business.

The real value comes from deeply integrating AI into operational systems. That kind of work is much harder, but it is where the meaningful gains actually come from.

Spend time understanding the operational realities of your customers.

Technology alone is rarely enough. The founders who win in complex industries are the ones who combine technical capability with deep insight into how the industry actually works. That is what builds trust and ultimately drives adoption.

And one more thing, if you’re a founder, it’s all about grit. Just keep going. Don’t let anything hold you back.

🎙️ 037 Gregory and Paul Show - Moltbook, Macro Hard, Tinder IRL, and the SaaS Shakeout

This week’s episode starts in a San Francisco hotel room and quickly goes full internet fever dream. Gregory recaps his founder and investor event. Meta buys Moltbook, the social network for AI agents. Perplexity turns the Mac Mini into a local-first AI box. Elon rolls out “Macro Hard,” a Tesla and xAI vision that sounds part supercomputer, part sci-fi fever pitch. Tinder heads back into real life. Atlassian gets hit with layoffs. New unicorns keep showing up anyway. And Cloudflare keeps inching toward becoming a toll booth for the agent internet.

I'm Gregory Kennedy, founder of Vibe Your SaaS. After 20 years in Silicon Valley, devising new ways to get people to click on things, I now help early-stage SaaS companies scale their businesses through strategic GTM consulting.

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