---
title: 'Sitting down with Austin Buell of Bend startup Topsail'
date: '2026-01-14T07:25:48-08:00'
type: post
word_count: 130
char_count: 857
tokens: 169
categories:
  - Portland
---

# Sitting down with Austin Buell of Bend startup Topsail

In this conversation, Austin Buell, cofounder of Topsail, breaks down how his team built legitimate, enterprise-grade SaaS — without a traditional engineering team. Instead of raising venture capital or hiring developers, Austin used OpenAI tools like ChatGPT to prototype, build, and iterate fast — collapsing the entire top of the sales funnel into a single button click.

- 00:00 Startup stories cold open
- 00:15 What does your startup do?
- 00:37 What inspired you to work on this problem?
- 01:12 \[BONUS\] How has AI enabled this product?
- 04:23 What’s one piece of advice you’d give to startup founders?
- 07:29 What’s one resource you can’t live without?
- 10:15 How can we be helpful?

For more, visit <https://topsail.app/ >

**Want to share your startup story…?** <https://sflo.me/prep>