"We Need to Be Expensive First!" — Why a $200/Month Price Tag Proves Real AI Market Demand | A Conversation with Zhenyu Guo: Founder/CEO of Sandwich Lab
July 13, 2025
This week's Crossroads guest is Zhenyu Guo, founder and CEO of Sandwich Lab. Their product Lexi is an AI agent designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses to run ad campaigns on Meta platforms.
In the interview, Guo explains in detail how Lexi helps clients deploy Meta ads through "shadow mode," and breaks down their thinking behind the $200/month pricing strategy as a way to validate genuine demand. He also shares the "dopamine moments" and "epiphany moments" from his entrepreneurial journey.
Guo emphasizes that Lexi represents only a small piece of Sandwich Lab's larger vision. He shares the company's ambitious goal: using AI to help businesses "grow revenue." Meta ad placement is just one path toward that objective — they plan to roll out an Email Marketing Agent, as well as agents serving finance, tax, legal, supply chain, and human resources functions. Sandwich Lab's core philosophy: any agent that can help a business grow revenue belongs in their roadmap.
Guest Bio: Zhenyu Guo, founder and CEO of Sandwich Lab. He earned his bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University and his PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC). During his doctoral studies, he joined a startup that successfully became a Tier 1 supplier to Tesla. As AI Director at Postmates, he led the development of autonomous delivery robots. He later joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy to head the Xiaomanlv autonomous driving project.
About Sandwich Lab: Sandwich Lab provides automated revenue growth solutions for SMBs worldwide using AI. The company has raised over $10 million from investors including Jinqiu, Mobvista, 5Y Capital, and Gobi-Alibaba Entrepreneur Fund.
🟢 Part 1 Rapid Fire
01:27 Rapid fire: Age, alma mater, MBTI, zodiac sign, career history
01:49 Company/product intro, funding status, revenue/profit, team size
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🟢 Part 2 All About Lexi
03:42 What results has Lexi achieved?
04:17 Who is Lexi's target user? — An unexpected choice
15:20 How did it go when Lexi used itself to run its own customer acquisition campaigns?
20:45 How does Lexi earn users' trust?
27:26 Every business in the world needs to advertise on social media
37:26 Are Lexi's campaign results outperforming humans?
42:06 "We have to be expensive first" — Why $200/month was the right price to validate real demand
48:27 How does Lexi compete with Meta?
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🟢 Part 3 Company Goals: Starting with Lexi, But Not Stopping There
31:43 New product launching next month: Email Marketing (surprised?!)
31:57 Why isn't Lexi expanding to Google and TikTok?
43:56 The company's overarching goal: we'll build anything that helps customers increase revenue
53:31 Startups struggle to do even one thing well — why are you fighting on multiple fronts?
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🟢 Part 4 Entrepreneurship, Life Goals, and Self-Actualization
58:01 What's it like being a founder CEO?
01:04:22 What would you have to achieve to feel satisfied with yourself?
01:12:27 What drives us to work?
01:18:13 Has your understanding of the world changed?
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