Hello, everybody. Hello, everyone. Good to see you. Thanks for joining.
This is the Refine Labs Expert series that I host every single month. We bring on a thought leader or potentially someone who's doing great work at Refine Labs to talk about a specific topic that we think would be really valuable to everyone. Today, we're very excited to have Kyle Coleman joined, who's currently the CMO of CopyAI, who was formerly the CMO of Clary. I think that he came up in Clary through the Sales Orb, which I think is a really interesting experience and something that we might be able to learn from in the Q&A.
I think really highly of Kyle. I was able to work with him when he was at Clary at Refine Labs. We did a lot of awesome work together. I love just the work that Clary has done overall, really excited for CopyAI and what they can do for the industry.
Kyle, really excited one for you to be here, two for us to get to hang out and three for you to share all the things that you've learned and all your experience with everyone in the group. Very kind, Chris. Can we switch over to my friends? Looking forward to diving in?
Awesome. Let's get right into it on the promise topic. So marketing and competitive categories, you've worked at Looker, you've worked at Clary, you've worked at CopyAI, all spaces where very hot, some mature, some earlier stage in the category development, but all hyper-competitive. To start at a high level, just what do you think the main challenges are of operating in a competitive category?
You can even flip that and think about it as opportunities and advantages as well. Yeah. So the opportunity and the... So let's start with Looker.
For those of you who don't know, Looker is a business intelligence platform that was acquired by Google in 2019 for two and a half billion dollars. I started there as the sixth employee in a super saturated market. Business intelligence has been around for as long as spreadsheets have, and there were really well established players in this space. I'm sure you've heard of Tableau and Clickview and MicroStrategy and all the rest.
And so where this little six person startup trying to break through the noise, the advantage of being in a competitive market is that there's no question from the market that there's a business need for your solution. So that's like the glass half of all. Now the glass half empty is that there's a major question about your solution being your right one. And so you've got to do whatever you can to change the way that people think.
And we're going to the I. Chris, you and I, and we've spoken about this before, we're going to hammer this point over and over and over again. The goal here is changing the way people think way easier than done, long-term strategy, but you can't operate well in a competitive market without taking that stance and really having a point of view and really having a differentiated way of thinking about what is the future that we're trying to drag people toward? How do we think about the market differently than other players in the space?
How do we think about the competitors, not as competitors, but as predecessors to what we are doing now in our next-gen approach? And that is the mindset that served us pretty well. Looker, I can certainly talk about more detail there. Served us very well at Clary.
And now hopefully your fingers crossed in this generative AI space with CopyAI. Same sort of mindset is what we're doing now. So I'll pause there and we can dig into one or all three of those for us to tell me. Yeah, I mean, just because the AI market is so hot and so relevant right now, and there's a lot of, you got Nvidia and some other ones really at the top.
But when you look at more specialized B2B, CopyAI Jasper was probably the leading brander at least first to market in the past. So hyper-competitive. Why don't we go there and talk through how you're thinking about that? Yeah, so I've been at CopyAI for five or so months now.
So it's still relatively new and learning the space as we all are. But when I joined the posture of the company was very technical, very proud of the technology that we had and really emphasizing the technical details of the platform, which is a very common thing for startups to do and almost always the wrong thing for startups to do. Because the market doesn't really care about how fancy your product architecture is and the secret sauce that's going into how the sausages made. They just care that the sausage gets made and they want to understand why and how it tastes better.
And so what I focused on or what I inherited, I should say, and you can go to the way back machine and you can look at CopyAI a year ago, six months ago, and then compare it to today. What I inherited was high level top line messaging that was about our workflow automation platform. And the blank faces of everybody on the screen is exactly the reception that we were getting in the market. Like, what the hell does that mean?
Workflow automation platform, not only what does it mean, but also it could be what and is what so many other players say, whether they're in the genetic space or not. Slack says this. Salesforce generally says this. And you can go across it.
Like, Clary says this. Gong says this. Everybody is talking about workflow automation. And so I was like, yeah, I understand my conversation with the executive team.
I understand the pride that we take in the product and I don't want to be dismissive of that pride. There's a lot to be proud of. We've evolved from a copywriting app to a more general purpose AI platform. But we have to change the way that we're selling to, because we are not selling to right now a CIO CTO who will care about workflow automation writ large.
Right now we are selling to marketing and sales leaders who have specific use cases, specific problems they are trying to solve. And we need to show them that we a understand this universe, be understand the problems and see how a different approach to solve those problems, a different opinion on how to do that. So again, changing their thinking. And I'm very intentionally using the word different and not better because that's a really, really important distinction.
It's a different approach to solving problems. It's not a better approach to solving problems, better invites comparisons and comparison is the enemy of effective sales meetings. So we want to make sure that we're having this differentiation conversation always, always in the way that we position our top line and the way that we position our product and every of the features and benefits therein. And we'll talk about more details, but that's the headline.
Yeah, and I know we're going to get into tactics. So everyone stay tuned for that. But like, kind of what I'm hearing right now is like, if you don't have this different message, right, AKA your strategy, then maybe the tactics aren't going to work so well. How do you think about that?
100% right, Chris. And I you drew an inverted pyramid, I would actually draw it bottoms up, which is like this positioning that you're building is the foundation. And you can't build a skyscraper on a shaky foundation. As marketers as we sometimes do is we can build an ivory tower on a shaky foundation and we can broadcast from that ivory tower and think that we know everything, but it's not comprehensive enough to actually be what the entire go to market needs to be successful.
And so this positioning that you're building should be a durable, wide foundation that you can build on to change hearts and minds and to sell your product solution or service. And our mutual friend, Chris Lockett, who was the author of a book called Play Bigger and he's a category pirate, extraordinary. He often says marketing that doesn't sell is just arts and crafts. And so when you're thinking about positioning, when you're thinking about messaging, it has to be through the lens of how well does this actually sell?
How well does this actually land? So you can go through all when you're again, we'll talk about tactics, you can go through all the tactics that we're about to unpack. But if you don't actually go and battle test and field test this stuff and make sure it's actually resonating with customers with prospects, then you're going to immediately lose credibility with the sales team. And you're probably going to end up pivoting from that messaging sooner than later in all the hard work that you've put in is going to be for not.
So we'll talk about the tactics, but always know that we want to be battle testing. We want to be field testing. We don't necessarily want to be marketing by committee because that's almost always a recipe for disaster. But we do need to receive the inputs from the constituents that we care about so that we have the credibility and the confidence to take our new messaging and our new position in the market.
Huge insight. Product marketers should be testing their messaging in real life, proving that it works to sell deals before you roll it out to your sales team. It doesn't happen too often, but it's critically important. It's amazing how infrequently it happens, Chris.
And the example, and again, we'll talk about exactly what we've done here at CopyAI if you're interested. But the example I give is we rolled out all this new messaging. And it was the process to do this, we can unpack in a minute, but the focus group testing, how to speak, we use winter, I don't know if you all are familiar with winter, but it's a super powerful, rapid feedback platform. And I put in our version of our new home page into winter and tested it.
And the response that I got was not all sunshine and rainbows. People saying, oh, yeah, this makes sense. Oh, yeah, I like this or this. But what I did get was everybody said, I wanted to read more.
I kept reading. And I was like, that is what I care about. I don't care if you agree with everything I'm saying. In fact, I'm doing my job well, you shouldn't agree with everything I'm saying.
I need to be a little provocative. I need to be a little non obvious. But what I care about is that you scroll past the H one, the hero, you read the body text, you scroll into the next section of it. And so we got a lot of really good feedback that said, this is interesting enough to keep a reading.
And I was like, that's the checkbox I'm looking for. I'm not looking for the granular, oh, changed, automate to streamline like, con. I'm looking for the interesting type messaging positioning that's going to change the way people think and getting that type of feedback from your focus groups from your customers and prospects is really, really important. I got a question.
I'm going to kind of break it into two because I think this is highly dependent on stage. So let's think about in the copy AI space first and let's go to a different scenario like Clary. But how do you balance the idea? Like we're thinking about building this like really solid foundation and balance the idea between like perfection and speed.
Yeah. My first 30 days here was a warp speed listening tour. And speed, it was critical for I felt was critical for me because of how fast the generative AI space is moving. And so my listening to her was with internal employees.
I spoke with almost every small company, so 40 people. I spoke with a ton of internal employees. I spoke with as many customers as I could. I spoke with our board members and I asked them three questions, three questions that typically were 20 or 30 minute conversations.
Number one, what problem do we solve? Sounds super obvious, right? But you go and ask 50 people, I got 48 different answers. What problem do we solve?
Number two, who do we solve that problem for? Basics, basics. Number three, what is the impact of solving that problem? What problem do we solve for who?
What's the impact? Just those three listening to our type. And of course, there's double clicks and there's all the rest. It's 30 minute conversation with all these people.
But you get a really comprehensive understanding of how your company thinks about itself. And then from the board, you get a better understanding of how the market thinks about you and then say from customers. And so now I have this crazy spreadsheet of all of these inputs. And I was just like a mad scientist, like, you know, in the whiteboard, the core board, the red yarn, like connecting all the things together and just staring at it for, I don't even know, like walk out four hours in a day and just think about all of the inputs that I just got and try and find the connective threads, try and find the interesting provocative different ways of positioning our product.
That's not a workflow automation platform. What is what problem are we really solving aside from leveraging generative AI in our sales process? How do we reframe that in a way that's more interesting? What is the higher level problem that exists here that matters to executives at the companies that we sell to?
Maybe less to the individual marketers or salespeople. But how do we make this an executive level corner office conversation? So those are the inputs that I got. It was about a 30 day listening to our exercise.
And it took me probably a week or so to distill that into something useful. So I started on January 2nd here. And then I had a off site with our executive team on February 7th where I presented like, here's our category vision. Here's where we're at.
Here's where I think our positioning should be and here's why. And so was that. That was the speed up which we moved here. Way harder to do at a larger company where the ship is a larger ship and it just takes more to change one degree, let alone 180.
I don't have as much experience as an enterprise company, but I've seen this down at a 600, 700 person company. And it was maybe closer with three or four months exercise versus a six to eight week exercise. Yeah. And I think that it matters in all cases.
But as the company gets larger, the tolerance for iteration goes down. Before you go and roll it out to your 150 person sales team, you better have it right. Because then you're going to go and it's been money to train those people, then they're going to have to learn it. Then if you go and try to make changes and updates and all instead of saying seven customers to this, now we're going to say 20 and all those micro changes, great tons of overhead and complexity organizational change.
I think at smaller companies, there's more tolerance to be iterative. How do you think about that? I think that's right, Chris. It's just easier to be more agile.
The fear or the risk at a small company is that it's so easy to change that a lot of the executive team pivots and they tend, they want to do this and they 20, they want to do this and they 40, they want to do that. And you're like, my God, to be frank, like that had been sort of the experience for internal employees at CopyAI. As CopyAI was trying to find itself, there was a lot of pivoting because there wasn't somebody at the helm of the positioning saying, here's what we're going to do and here's what we're going to stick to for some time and here's why. And here's all of the downstream sales assets and WebCyclateral and Field Marketing and all the rest that's going to help substantiate this high level point of view that we have.
So you have to find the right balance and make sure that you are committing to the research and strategy that you've created, the positioning that you've created, and know that you can be relatively quick at a smaller company to make a change. But there's also a lot of appetite for constant change that you have to swag away. Yeah, and I think that pre-product market fit versus when you're hitting traction and going are two very different experiences where if you're joining a company, you better know which side of the coin you're on because there are some people that are not comfortable with pivots that join a person company that's going to pivot every month. And vice versa, there are people that love to pivot that work at a 5,000 person company where there's never a pivot or almost never.
So I think that's a key insight for people when you join a company to know what you're signing up for because early stage companies, there will be a lot of change. You got to figure out what works for customers. You have to try stuff. It's not going to work.
You got to try something new. It's not going to work. It works a little bit better. And you got to work toward that.
I think there are certain people that are built for that iterative process. I'm very built for that. I love rapidly iterating and figuring out, does that work for customers? How do we make it better and go and go and go and go?
And the reframe that I think is really important for marketers is a lot of marketing teams think of themselves as a service organization. We're going to fulfill the needs of the sales team or the CEO has this perspective and we're going to go launch that perspective and that's going to be our marketing message for the quarter. Marketing is a leadership function. It has to be a leadership function.
You have to be the ones doing this research that we just talked about the listening toward, the understanding, the distillation, the synthesis and then creating the provocative, interesting, point of view. And you have to stick to your guns. This is the way we're going to go and market and sell this product. And there has to be a direct through line between how you're marketing, how you're selling, how you're implementing, how you're supporting.
And marketing should be hitting all of those stages of the customer life. And if you're not, then you're not leading the company. And that's a challenge that a lot of marketers are unable or unwilling or haven't had the opportunity to step up to. And it's one that I think that you have to really have the impact that you could potentially have inside your company.
Okay, so let's move to the next segment. Let's pretend for the sake that you have a differentiated message that works with the market and you have a product that delivers value to customers. What's eliminating those variables to the equations or everything else that comes down becomes a lot more clear. Where do you go from there?
How do you evaluate different opportunities in terms of go-to-market strategies or marketing executions or things like that, especially when you have limited resources, not huge budgets, competing with very large companies that are going to could outspend you in anything. So spending more money is not the solution. So how do you think about evaluating opportunities, especially against the tried and true or what the traditional best practices would be in B2B versus emerging opportunities that are less accepted widely? Yeah, I just spend 90% of your VC money on SEM.
Of course, Chris, like, what do you think? Now, the answer is if you have this foundation and you've created effective positioning and you've created interesting and effective messaging, part of that positioning and messaging is new language. And again, this is stolen just shamelessly from Play Bigger and the category pirates. They call it languaging.
They created a new word to talk about how to use language. Anyway, creating new language helps you own that language. And so if you look at a huge part of the copy AI positioning relaunch, we're evangelizing this problem that has never existed. It's never been called this important.
It's a problem that is familiar, but it's never been coined. And the problem that we're evangelizing is called go-to-market bloat, GTM bloat. And what is GTM bloat? It's the accumulation of all the investments that you've made across your go-to-market engine that are underperforming and delivering underwhelming results.
That is go-to-market bloat. And people hear that and they're like, huh? I get it. And that phrase, Chris, you've talked about this concept for years, but you've never called it that until this year.
And so we're starting to see now more players in the space, more of gender data companies in general, are starting to use this word go-to-market bloat or this phrase that we launched three months ago in March. And the nice thing about it is we own all the SEO because we have all the thought leadership. When you, if and when you search for go-to-market bloat, you see copy AI, everything. What is go-to-market bloat, what are its root causes?
How do you solve it? How does a go-to-market AI platform solve, go-to-market bloat for sales teams, for marketing teams, for operations teams, for finance, like all of that stuff exists in the new secretes podcast about it because he writes super well for everything. And so if you can create new but familiar language, try and find that right balance, then you can own that language in the hearts and minds of your customers as well as from the search standpoint, which is super, super powerful and I'll say free, but it's not obviously it's not free. It takes internal resources and a lot of thinking to actually go and do this and create all the thought leadership and all the SEO posts and whatever that need to be created.
But it's a hell of a lot less than spending a million dollars a month on keywords that already exist like there's no way I'm going to outrank Tableau for a business intelligence keyword as a company looker with two million dollars in the back. No way, but we can go own cloud BI because no one's thought about cloud business intelligence before. And so you can be different in the way that you think about the keywords that you care about the messaging that you're taking to market and all the rest. And then you have to make sure as I mentioned that for a back-to-up copy AI now that go-to-market bloat concept has to be peppered across everything that we do, everything that we do.
Home page, events, sales pitch decks, over-view decks, keynotes, all the rest like the market needs to hear this over and over and over and over again. And internally, there's a lot of internal marketing that happens as well because I need to go to my company all hands and I need to convince them that this is an effective way to sell and our CEO needs to go convince them that this is an effective way to sell. And so there's a lot of internal marketing that's part of the two. But when you get this right, what's really cool is I start a sales call with this concept.
Hey, your team is overwhelmed or throttle by go-to-market bloat, explain it, talk about the solution. By the end of that sales call, the prospect of the customer is talking to me about go-to-market bloat using the language back to me. I'm like, okay, we're on to something here. This is working.
And so when customers when prospect started adopting your language, when competitors, other players thought leaders started adopting your language, then you know that you're really onto something. As long as you've done the work, the elbow birdies to actually own the SEO and on the search results. So let's talk a little bit deeper about the current marketing strategy that you have in place, right? You can't do everything SEO, clearly a big one.
What other things are you all using that you find to be highly effective today? Yeah, it's going to be straight out of the refined lab playbook here, Chris. So it's not going to be terribly surprising to your audience, but we're very targeted with how we spend our paid dollars. It's almost all LinkedIn, more billboard-esque type ads on LinkedIn that are very targeted to certain accounts that we care about.
And then it's all organic SEO owning all that podcast, owning metal channel, social, we're all over social, all of our executives are. And of course, they're evangelizing this problem go-to-market bloat. So that's our main strategy. We spend, I don't know, a couple of thousand bucks a month on paid ads.
And all the rest is word of mouth, it's social, it's organic, it's the highest intent type of stuff that we can create. I just feel like to just sort of drive home the point for me and trying to communicate to people, it doesn't matter what the big companies do that became successful 10 years ago that are not the people to follow today. The people to follow today are the smaller companies that are growing really quickly and clearly doing something different. And to distill it, the number one thing that matters in your marketing strategy beyond languaging, positioning, strategy, product, the things that matter at the business level, if you get those things right, the number one thing that drives growth is your ability to create organic social media content.
That is the number one thing. Most of us, it's linked in, but then you have YouTube, you have YouTube shorts, you have a podcast, other organic distribution forms that then from there you create organic content, you have the ability to then boost that or drive paid around that to the people that matter. And using that as the number one thing, a company of any size, but especially companies that are on the small run that are competing with people that they're not going to out spend. Really well said, Chris, and I'll talk my book here for a second and say we use CopyAI internally for a lot of this.
If you want to go use some of their genii tool, maybe good. But we think about things in terms of the demand creation flywheel that we're able to create, where we have this really effective thought leadership. That then allows us to create this really great social webinars, podcasts, all the stuff that drives traffic back to our site. We have very little click to direct response site advertising.
We're trying to direct people back to our website to learn more. When you hit our website 100% of the time, you will be hit with a opt-in monster banner at the bottom that says register for this upcoming event, and you have the persisting call to action in the top for a demo request. Those events and those demo requests create transcripts from events like we're doing right now that are thought leadership oriented or use case oriented. We take those transcripts, we feed them into our platform to create more content that feeds the flywheel.
It's always spinning. It's very content oriented. Yeah, let's go further into this because this is something I'm experimenting with as well and see a ton of promise here. But the thing that most companies I think will miss in trying to implement this flywheel is that you need to have the differentiated thoughts first.
You need to be able to create the transcripts first. This is not like what's getting a marketing manager to buy CopyAI and just spit out a bunch of stuff. You actually need all this stuff up front, which typically would require executive level and expert oriented thinking and time that a lot of companies aren't willing to commit in this new era. It's required from my perspective.
So talking through how you think about CopyAI and any recommendations you would give to the audience specifically for people that are working with executives that might not be on this train yet. The only way to prove whether or not it can work at your company is to try it. And so you need to do whatever you can to scratch and call a beggin plead to get your executives in meetings with you. Now the disconnect that a lot of folks have is like, hey, I want my CEO to post about this.
So I'm going to send my CEO this headline topic and ask him or her to write a post. Never going to happen. Never going to happen. But what you can do is you can send your CEO a list of topics that you know are interested in provocative that they have a perspective on.
Send them the headline topic in three bullet points and say, hey, I want to interview for 10 minutes about this, about these topics. And then interview them and like put the time on their calendar, put your neck on the line to a certain extent, put the time on their calendar, and that creates the transcript. Do this every week for all of the executives that you want, active on social, and from that one 10 minute transcript, you can easily create three LinkedIn posts per week easily. And so you just need to put in the thought as to what are the topics you want them discussing.
And what is the provocative angle or twist or counterintuitive insight that they have about this? And then let's tease it out of them in an interview format that completely or almost completely removes the burden on them 10 minutes other time instead of an hour of their time writing from whole cloth. And then you get all of their thoughts, you get face time with executives, and then you just need to figure out how to take that transcript and turn it into content. You can do it by hand as a lot of social media or content or marketing folks do, or you can outsource that first draft to AI and train the AI to speak and sound like your executive team.
And that's again what we do internally with copy AI either way works. But the front end stuff is what the strategy you can't outsource the strategy like Chris said, you have to have a perspective of what you want your executives talking about. And then you need to be the forcing function to pin them down and get them in those weekly meetings. In the other additional sort of tips, hot takes, learnings around this flywheel, even to narrow it in further specifically how it relates to SEO and how SEO might be changing in the future.
Some people will tell you that SEO is going to die and I think those people are completely dead wrong. The search generative experience SGE, I think Google calls it now where their position zero is the most important position. That's all true. That's all happening.
And of course, that's a trend we can't ignore. However, what's changing about the way that people search? One, people are searching for or you need to optimize for much longer tail keywords. So instead of optimizing for generative AI, optimize for how do I use generative AI for outbound prospecting.
That's your key phrase now is a much longer tail keyword because that's what people are looking for now and so optimizing for that is important because people are using text to search way more than they ever have. And so the search queries are much more natural language sentences, questions that people would ask the same way that you interact with Alexa. You don't say Alexa cookie recipe. You say, how do I bake chocolate chip cookies?
And so that's the same exact kind of thing that's happening with Google now. And so you can optimize your SEO presence for those long tail keywords. And again, this is exactly what we do every month myself in my head of content strategy is an Nathan. He's an absolute rock star.
We sit down and we say our theme for the month is this use case inside our product. What are the long tail keywords that we want to optimize for itself? Then we feed those keywords into our SEO brief and blog creation workloads and we have the 50 blocks that we're going to publish. And so that's the way that we think about it.
And so when people now are, by the way, our theme for the month is content creation. And so we have a lot of content that is being published on our site about content creation. And then when people come to copy AI, they will go and hopefully they'll click through to the blog post. And then there, as I mentioned, always, always 100% of the time, there's a webinar event about the topic that's thematically linked to what our SEO focus is for them.
And that keeps the flywheel spinning. And so then again, from this event that we do, we're going to have another transcript that's going to create thought leadership that's going to create social posts that's going to create a newsletter that's going to create a whole down the line. It's all kind of... I got to say, there are companies out there with hundreds of marketers on their teams that struggle to get eight blog posts out a month.
And maybe they don't even do a webinar every month. And maybe they'll be lucky to send one off email. Talk me through your team size and how outside of AI or even with AI, how you're able to get so much done with such a small team. I think that in the future, team sizes are going down part of the effect from go to market blow and just need to reduce team sizes to get into the appropriate ROI.
But I think there are other benefits of having smaller teams with that. Yeah, I totally agree. I clarity had about a 40 person team at marketing team at CopyAI. We have myself and three.
So we have a team of four. We are 10 times more productive than we were from an output standpoint at Clary because we're leveraging new tech. It's as simple as that. It's not to say anything like the team at Clary was super sharp.
They're awesome great people, but they were not optimizing for the new way of doing things as we are at CopyAI. And so the titles of all of our people, all three are they have strategy in their titles very intentionally. I don't have a head of content marketing. I have a head of content strategy.
I don't have a head of life cycle marketing. I have a head of life cycle strategy. Why? Because they are responsible for creating the strategy that you cannot outsource and then codifying their strategy in CopyAI workflows, in generative AI workflows.
So how Nathan might have content strategy. He's been doing SEO for God knows how many years. He was a SEO writer and animal source sometime. So he's got all of the subject matter expertise you get ever hoped for.
So now he gets to define step by step in our product, what does good SEO look like? What are the hallmarks of good SEO? How do I search Google? How do I think about people also asked?
How do I do all of these things that create a really useful piece of SEO content? And then he gets to codify that in our product so that all he has to do is input the keywords. And he gets his content that he's written in 60 seconds. And we go on and on and on down the line.
Like every single use case that you could every single process you could potentially run, we do at outsourced as much as we can to AI. Now we're not saying you can fully automate this. Hopefully you're hearing me say the opposite. Can't outsource the human strategy.
You need the people that know what good looks like. But you're outsourcing the stuff you outsource anyway. But you probably send that content brief to an agency and say, write this. And then 60 days later, you get the first draft, you're like, well, this kind of sucks, but we have to use it because we paid for it.
Now it's like just outsourced that to AI. Get the first draft in a minute and then spend the 15 minutes it takes to do the fit and finish and polish and then publish it. And you're ready to rock and roll. And the time you get back is not just to do more.
Like if you do 10 SEO blog posts a day, you're going to get killed by Google. So what do you do with the time back? You do the multi channel stuff, bring a podcast to life, do the YouTube shorts, do the social media stuff, you get to extend your strategies into other channels because you have outsourced everything that you need to outsource to a really useful agent, which is AI that's really cost effective pennies on the dollar versus what it costs to engage with freelancers and writers and editors and agencies and all the rest. Love that with that.
I think it's perfect timing to get into questions. I think we got about 15 minutes for questions. I'm sure people have been queuing up in the chats with Stephanie. Why don't you take us through?
If people want to come on live, we'd love to be able to have it be a back and forth discussion. So if you feel good about that, come on and ask your question live, Kyle and I will help you. Yeah, for sure. We've got a bunch of questions.
So we're going to start pulling people live now. I'm going to call Reese. He's got a couple questions. Yeah.
Hey, guys, long time listening for St. Collar. I just had a question about I'm at a startup level on a one man team. And so a lot of my questions of perspective comes from that position.
And so you mentioned marketing by committee. And so that's something that is of interest to me is how do you push back on the tendency in a smaller organization where everybody wants to be part of the marketing message. And essentially marketing by committee. There's a great David O' Gamble.
And it's not safe, but there's very few companies that have ever been wildly successful by playing it super safe. Like look at Salesforce, we're not safe. Like they're crazy, absolutely insane. And it was the same sort of thing where they went this down this whole path in the early 2000s of the no software type things like what does that mean?
Oh, I get it. No on premise software. Okay. And of course I was led by the office of CEO.
So we had a little more cloud, but you basically need to just expose what you're doing, what your process is, why you're doing it, and the power of differentiated thinking, the power of positioning and category design, and earn the right to go do it. And it's not going to work for every company, some CEOs, especially more technologists type CEOs. We'll never get it. They will say the best product always wins.
And you'll get to say, have you ever actually seen Salesforce product? It kind of like totally sucks. There are CRMs that are a billion times better than it. And nevertheless, Salesforce wins.
Why? A lot of it is messaging, a lot of it is marketing, a lot of this category, category domination. It's not going to work every time. And I'm sorry.
And I know it sounds kind of clear, just to say like show up with confidence, but you need to just make sure that you're peeling back the curtain as to what your process is and why it's important and try and get them on the same page. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. And I had a second question you mentioned more tactically about doing a lot of organic SEO.
And that's basically a key part of our strategy as well. But our leadership team is very much about like you got to build backlinks. Let's build backlinks. And I'm like, okay, one man, like, how does one build backlinks as one person like other than outsourcing?
I don't want to go to like a backlinking farm and feel like I'm just selling myself, you know, because I know it's an organic process. Like, how do you do that properly without? Yeah, my question. I apologize to Chris and everybody else on this call for just like the shameless promotion of the copy AI platform.
We've built a workflow that reads your site map, reads all the URLs, understands the content of all those URLs, and applies the appropriate backlinks to all of the existing content. If you want to refresh content on your site or all the new content as you publish it. So again, any process that you want to codify can be codified using gender today, I for the most part, and acting as certainly one of them, that's a huge time saver. And also hugely expensive, if you were to outsource it to an agency, the answer to every question is use our platform by myself.
Thank you very much for your time. Of course. All right, we've got Aneska coming on next. All right.
Hi from Vienna. Kyle, my question was about those three questions that you ask, like, what is the problem that we are solving? What was the second? Who do we solve it for and the third impact of the problem?
So how long should we the time container for the impact that we are trying to illustrate? How far would you go? Like, is it for three months timeframe or three six, 12 months timeframe? So you don't go too far in the future and hence, you know, stop being relevant or, you know, we worry about this tomorrow.
So what would you comment on that? It's a really good question. And I think the way that I try and think about things is we're not talking necessarily about ROI. We're not talking necessarily about that type of impact because that is really hard to quantify and also doesn't really always pass a sniff test with respect to like how it's received in the market.
And so as an example, the problem that you're solving, if you can't and make sense for your company, which most companies it does, it needs to be a sea level problem. The sea level people are the ones that own the budget. They're the ones that are going to make ultimately the go or no go decision no matter how much the buyer, the champion loves your solution, if there's no budget for it and get out. And so you want to start that conversation early with the sea level.
And so as I was going on my listening to her and I was listening to, you know, hey, we're a gender-to-vey high solution for sales and marketing teams, we help them create more content. And so I say, so what? You create more content, so that what? So that we can generate more demand, so that we generate more revenue, so that we have higher intent leads filling the funnel.
So like, you can get the layers down, down, down, down, down. And then my job, and that was, of course, one of 50 conversations. And my job was then to take all of those like double, triple, quadruple, click answers to that question and up level it to the sea suite. So what do we do?
We fundamentally change the way that your company financial profile is right now. Your customer acquisition cost is skyrocketing. Your lifetime value is plummeting because your churn is out of control. Your company valuation is down.
We can solve all of that by flipping the script with generative AI. Here's how. That's the problem that we solve. And you better believe that companies care about fixing CAC, fixing LTV, and fixing valuation.
And so if you can have that through line to executive level metrics, executive level conversations, especially if they're revenue oriented, the day of the end of today's environment in particular, you can have really firm ground to stand on to have the conversation. So again, like, do people know or out of the gate totally believe that we can do this for their company? Maybe not. But they keep reading and keep listening.
They're not turning off the video and zoning out of the sales pitch. They're leaning in and trying to find out more. And so then we get to tell the story of these use cases that we're talking about all through the lens of solving go-to-market blow, which is the genesis of your high CAC, of your battle TV, of your poor valuation. And if we can solve this problem of go-to-market blow, we flip a script and you have attractive financials, you get private investment, you get public investment, you're on your merry way.
That's what executives care about. So you can find the right way to create that through line, all the way to an executive level problem. You're doing something very right. Good stuff.
All right. And then let's go ahead and bring on Asa. Kyle, Chris, thanks for signing this. It's been very helpful so far.
So far, you kind of touched on and focused on, I feel like, more than a product approach. I work at a service professional service company to develop software. And the software element space is very commoditized and very saturated. And there's not necessarily anything that is inherently safe to differentiate about the work that we do necessarily, right?
So how do you approach differentiating yourself in that way when there isn't anything that is particularly different about what it is that you're doing or the service you're providing? I reject the premise. You've got to take for the differentiation. I mean, there's got to be something about the way you work or the outputs you create or the value you deliver, the customer engagements or something, something that's different and not commoditized.
And it's up to you to scan the business, to speak with the stakeholders, to speak with the customers. Why? Why do the customers you have, Juicy? If it is so commoditized, if they have all these other choices, what were the things that got them across the line?
And you'll start to find commonalities, you'll start to find patterns, and then you can start to change the top line messaging as you learn more about it. So, I don't know. I don't mean to be totally dismissive. So I apologize if that was a bit harsh, but I really genuinely believe that if you spend the right time or the right amount of time thinking about these things, and that's one of the biggest problems with us as in marketing orgs is there's so much to do that we don't give ourselves enough time to think.
So I literally mean like block four hours on your calendar and just stare at a whiteboard and just like force yourself to come up with something that's differentiated after you're listening to her. And I promise you, I promise you, you'll find something and it doesn't need to be a world-changing insight. If it's different enough, you'll stand out and then you can just keep beating that drum over and over and over again. I think services and in commoditized spaces can also just win on awareness.
The market is very large. People are going to be looking for a software development firm. Most people can't even name one software development firm. So just being the one software development firm that people know about could be a route to more business.
Having a differentiated point of view and strategy definitely accelerates both of those processes. But you could also just, if you dig and you really can't find anything that just being the most known can also be a secondary strategy there. So our last question is actually from Maria about commodity products. Come on, Maria, we'll wrap it up with that.
Hi everyone. Thanks. And you kind of answered part of it with the commodity because my question was, how do you build positioning for a brand that has several products and focusing on the problem when you have a commodity product or a set of commodity products? For example, my company, we have several products in the UCAS phase and it's really, really hard to differentiate because we have big competitors out there and we're not a startup either.
So we have a 40-year company, lots of acquisitions. We're still trying to understand and trying to reposition the company. I've joined four months ago. We started with one positioning now.
We're pivoting into another but still like it's really, really hard to differentiate. Does that make sense? It does. Yeah, it's tricky.
I guess the question is, what is the suite of products promise? What is the confluence of those products? So if you can extract yourself above any single product line that you have and think more about maybe more of a platform orientation, if these products are hopefully going to come together at some point, what is the promise of that coming together? And if you can challenge yourself to think about that at that slightly higher level, you maybe will start to think a little bit differently about what the value props are.
And again, back to the core questions, what problems are we solving for which audiences and what's the impact? And you can think about the full product suite as opposed to any individual one. An example of that is we copy, I have a chat, just like chat GPT. We don't say a single word about it anywhere.
It doesn't matter. It's commoditized. So we abstract away from that. And then maybe middle funnel, bottom of funnel people as well.
Hey, do you have a chat function as well? Or do I need to keep my chat GPT lessons? We're like, yeah, we have that too. And so the platform orientation that we have, the more holistic orientation that we have is the way that we kind of abstracted away from the feature by feature type stuff or the product by product type stuff towards something that is a bit more holistic and again, a bit more differente as a result way easier said than done, way easier said than done.
But that's, I think that's what I would try and recommend. Thank you. When you look at other commoditized spaces as well, think laundry detergent sneakers like when you look at those as well, you have the Nike's, you have the tides, but then you have a bunch of players that sit in this middle market that do have a pretty good business around that that have either chosen to just be a second or third player in a large category or have chosen to niche down around an audience and be more specific to that audience. And so I think in the UCAS market, like a shorter term place to get more focused on who you help and create a more specific solution around a target audience, customer service centers that have more than 500 reps or there's a million different ways that you could look at it.
Neeching down is also a potential option that breeds differentiation. Thank you. I appreciate that. Awesome.
We got a run that was action packed. I learned a ton about AI. We're a ton about what I'm actually going to go in there and log in and see what copy I can do for us because that sounds pretty cool. Appreciate all of you being here.
I hope you all learned some stuff. We're gonna be back here again next month in July for our future expert session. Kyle, I just want to thank you for joining us and sharing all your expertise. Thank you so much.
It's great to hang out. This is the third podcast we've done in now a couple of months. We got to keep it going. Pleasure is all mine.
Thanks for having me. Thanks again, everybody. Really appreciate it. If there's anything I can do for you, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Hope you have a great rest of your week and a good weekend. See you.
Bye.