Cordillia Tan is better known to many Singaporeans as "Tyre Jie Jie". with no driving licence and almost no automotive knowledge, she stepped into her family's tyre shop when it was roughly S$400,000 in debt, and helped turn Pitstop into a multimillion-dollar digital automotive business. after five years in the workshop she is building PetaniAI, a home for the AI-curious in Southeast Asia.

in this conversation you'll hear:

- eight months of TikToks that went nowhere before one video changed the trajectory, and what she thinks the scarce advantages are now that AI makes building cheap: attention, trust and distribution

- going beyond SEO into AEO: letting the model audit the site, surface the content gaps her whole industry was missing, then feeding it a fact nobody else in the world publishes so the answer has to cite her

- the day she couldn't make a S$20,000 rent payment with S$2,000 in the bank, asked ChatGPT for legal ways to raise it overnight

- the internal tools she built with Claude Code: an inventory system, a used tyre pricing tool, and a quote log to handle prices that kept moving

- the builds that didn't last, and what made the difference between the ones that stuck and the ones nobody used

- why WhatsApp stayed the interface for her team, instead of forcing them onto something new

our guest: Cordillia Tan, Co-Founder of PetaniAI (https://petaniai.com/)

hosted by Eric Tan and Yaohong Ch'ng

produced by PetaniAI

glossary, in plain english:

- vibe coding: building software by describing what you want to an AI coding tool, testing what it produces and improving it through conversation.
- machine vision: software that reads and understands images. Cordi used it to identify tyre details from a photograph.
- AEO: writing so that AI assistants quote you when someone asks them a question, rather than writing to rank on a search results page.
- moat: an advantage that makes a company difficult to copy or compete with.
- distribution: the ability to consistently reach the right audience and get a product, idea or piece of content in front of them.
- AI slop: generic, low-effort AI-generated content that sounds polished but offers little original insight or value.

connect with us

- want to suggest a guest or a topic? tell us: https://forms.gle/DSyLzPAoR6x2M4Np9
- Eric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erictisme/
- Yaohong: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaohongchng/
- Superuser HQ (Yaohong's company): https://superuserhq.com/
- Substack: https://substack.com/@coderiff?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page
- WhatsApp community: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Dmp5eEEsAZhJTB6LjcIG3c?mode=gi_t
- email: code.riffs.ai@gmail.com
- PetaniAI: https://petaniai.com/ and https://www.linkedin.com/company/petaniai/

Code Riff - a podcast hosted by Eric Tan and Yaohong Ch'ng. we interview leading minds and practitioners in AI so you can flourish and have fun with ai.