Digital Nexus Ep 42: Annie Liao, From Community to Company: Building AI Products That Actually Ship

What does it take to turn AI hype into shipped products? Annie Liao (Build Club / Relevance AI) joins us to unpack agentic workflows, community-led product discovery, and the mindset founders need to go from idea to MVP and revenue, fast.

Annie shares the playbook behind The Builders Club AI and her work at Relevance AI, including how to validate problems, run lightweight experiments, and use agentic patterns without creating black-box chaos. If you build, design, or lead AI products in Australia, this one’s for you.

Links:
https://www.buildclub.ai/
https://www.buildclub.ai/waitlist

In this episode you’ll learn

How to go from “cool demo” to a product customers will pay for (and what to kill early)

Agent vs agentic workflows: clear definitions, when to use each, and common failure modes

Community-led discovery: using a builder community to source problems, testers, and early adopters

Rapid validation: lean experiments, success thresholds, and “stop/iterate/scale” criteria

Designing controllable AI: transparency, evaluation, and guardrails that teams actually use

Founder operating cadence: weekly rituals that compound learning without burning out

GTM for AI tools: positioning, ICP focus, and the signals that you’ve hit early product-channel fit

Hiring the first 3 roles for an AI product team (and what to outsource)

Metrics that matter: activation paths, retained use, and qualitative proof you’re solving a real job

Australia’s AI ecosystem: where builders are winning now and what’s next

About Annie Liao
Annie is a community builder and operator behind Build Club (The Builders Club AI) and serves as Chief of Staff at Relevance AI. She sits at the intersection of community, product, and execution—helping teams turn AI capabilities into customer value.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:28 What is Build Club? Hackathon energy & projects
04:34 Annie’s path: UTS scholarship → Westpac → internal startup
05:08 Falling in love with tech: coding, PM, CRM build
08:19 Nov 2022 shift: GPT boom and the “build anything” moment
12:01 Founding story: After-hours at Aura Ventures → “Aura’s Build Club”
14:03 Community vs monetisation: mission to democratise AI learning
17:00 Joining Relevance AI (while growing Build Club)
21:35 SF vs Australia: risk culture, density & talent
25:53 How Australia can catch up (culture & ecosystem)
29:31 Enterprise agents: handover pain & the education gap
36:24 Bounty marketplace: matching AI builders with demand
41:01 Roadmap: AI matching, pricing benchmarks & starter templates
51:40 Rapid-fire: the tools we actually use
53:18 Build Club for enterprise: AI upskilling (waitlist)
53:47 Wrap-up & where to find Annie

#AI #AgenticAI #ProductManagement #Startup #UX #SydneyTech #BuildClub #RelevanceAI

Support the show

Other Links
🎙️our podcast links here: https://digitalnexuspodcast.com/
👤Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/pcsinclair/
👤Mark on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmonfort/
👤 Mark on Twitter - https://twitter.com/captdefi

SHOWNOTE LINKS
🔗 SIKE - https://sike.ai/
🌐Digital Village - https://digitalvillage.network/
🌐NotCentralised - https://www.notcentralised.com/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalNexusPodcast
X (twitter): @DigitalNexus