Numbers and Narratives
Numbers and Narratives bridges the gap between the marketing/customer experience and data - come listen to marketing and CX experts talk about how to use data to better engage with your customers and provide a great experience.
Numbers and Narratives
Founder-Led Marketing: Leveraging AI Without Losing Authenticity - with Lauren Vriens
In this episode of Numbers and Narratives, hosts Ibby Syed and Sean Collins engage in a thought-provoking discussion with Lauren Vriens, a startup advisor, former general manager at Revel and VP of Growth Strategy at Accenture, about the changing landscape of go-to-market strategies for startups in the AI era.
The conversation kicks off with Lauren sharing her extensive background in AI product development and Fortune 500 strategy, setting the stage for a deep dive into the challenges and opportunities facing modern startups. The episode explores critical topics such as the importance of niching down, differentiating from competitors, and leveraging founder-led marketing in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Lauren offers valuable insights on why traditional advertising methods are losing effectiveness and how startups can utilize innovative tactics like user-generated content, creative PR, and AI-driven marketing to gain traction.
The discussion also touches on fascinating subjects like the potential of AI agents in marketing, the future of internet anonymity, and the delicate balance between human intuition and AI-driven decision-making in startup growth. Listeners will gain practical advice on crafting shareable product features, building engaged communities, and aligning marketing strategies with founder strengths. Lauren shares her experiences with various AI tools like lovable.dev and Jennifer, offering listeners a glimpse into the cutting-edge technologies shaping the future of marketing.
Tune in to gain actionable insights and stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving world of startup marketing.
All right, lauren. In the length of a tweet or a tweet thread, what did we talk about today?
Speaker 2:If you're a startup founder and you're building something, the first things you should be thinking about is how you're going to go to market in this day and age and how that might be different than what you've done before.
Speaker 3:I'm Ibi Syed, I'm Sean Collins and this is Numbers and Narratives. Lauren, thanks so much for coming on the pod today. Before we get started officially, do you want to give us a brief intro as to your background? What you're doing now we know you from.
Speaker 2:LinkedIn, but would love to hear your own story in your own words. Yeah, and Sean and I also worked for a hot minute at Revel together, so that's how we originally met. But yes, I was the general manager of Revel and employee number 10 and helped scale the business to about 50 million in revenue in a year and a half, which was pretty wild at the time. And after that I started doing Fortune 500 strategy at Accenture, but mainly helping them build in-house startup incubators so how do they create an entirely new product that doesn't cannibalize their existing revenue and actually bring it to market? And then, as part of that role, I started building AI products within Accenture.
Speaker 2:And that's when I got super deep and super excited about Gen AI like literally trying to convince strangers on the street to like try ChatGPT, and also got an opportunity to like build it with engineers 12 engineers across the world who had maybe built chatbots before, but they'd never built something like this. So we were all learning Langchain and how to string together different LLMs. That was super fun and cool. And then now I do startup advising so particularly startups that have an AI component. But what's that intersection of go-to-market and product strategy and how do you create those wheels, those flywheel effect of growth, without spending the GDP of a small nation on ads because those aren't working so well. So, yeah, that's what I'm obsessing about these days is go-to-market for startups and how it's changing in the AI era.
Speaker 3:That's sick. I feel like we both Sean and I, as people who are doing go-to-market for startups, stand to learn quite a bit. The first thing that kind of comes to mind is I feel like and maybe this is not what you're thinking about, but I feel like AI has kind of changed go-to-market for startups Like things that historically worked. Ie like cold outbound is like one example. Like everyone just assumes that every email that you get cold is now written by a bot, and so what was like what little juice was left from cold outbound is like kind of dead, because, rather than hey, like your email that you're sending to somebody has to be like relevant. At this point they're like not even looking at their email anymore. Like if there's an email from somebody that they don't recognize, they're just like not clicking on it.
Speaker 2:Yes, though I did get a cold email a couple days ago that I replied to because I was like this is one of the best cold emails I've ever gotten and the subject line was just something like you're so smart and intelligent and I was like, wait, who thinks I'm so smart and intelligent?
Speaker 2:And so I clicked on it and it was a guy that's actually built a business around helping people who are searching for jobs use cold outreach to promote themselves and find jobs that fit with their interests. But the reason his cold email and I'm pretty sure it was a stock email, but the reason it works so well is because it was so different. It had a corny joke in there. It didn't have a link to a website, it was pretty casual, and I think if you're going to use cold outreach, you have to break the mold. It can't be like I saw your recent post on LinkedIn about blah, blah, blah or whatever. You have to be completely different than what an AI generated thing would create, which requires some creative prompting, but it's doable. And so I still think there's room there for particularly high ticket items or where you can find your buyer on LinkedIn to use cold outreach AI generated cold outreach, but you have to be really conscious of how you execute it.
Speaker 1:Well, I can tell you. So I've been trying not to use AI for the actual writing because, to Ibby's point, like I wanted to like make it personal and you know we're trying to find early customers, I can post the copy to every email that has gotten zero replies, but most of them get absolutely no replies and I try and be like hey, I got recognized. Even as I'm rereading it before I hit send, I'm like this sounds like AI wrote it. Because I'm trying, I explicitly call it like hey, this isn't AI, this is me, really me, and I'm like that's what an AI would say.
Speaker 3:This is stupid. There's no AI. This is the real me. This is really me guys.
Speaker 2:You got to throw in some typos, some slang and some like incomplete sentences. No, seriously. I heard someone refer to it the other day as like oh, I hand wrote this. And they didn't mean by like hand, they meant like without AI, and I was like that's going to be the new term.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, that's crazy.
Speaker 3:So wait, what have you been? You said you've been thinking about things from like a startup go-to-market perspective. I'm kind of curious, like what's been on your mind lately?
Speaker 1:When you think of so you're saying this like what phase of a startup or like how early on are you thinking about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, so, particularly, I'd say, the clients that I work with already have some revenue, they have some customers, but they might be customers that are very different from one another and they might not have nailed their positioning exactly and they don't really know like which thread to pull on to scale. And so I think, particularly with AI products, what they struggle with a lot, and just kind of the world that we're in today, it's like your product could probably do everything and for anyone, but that makes it really hard to position it in the market. And so, and there's so much, I think this is so funny.
Speaker 2:I was talking to a founder the other day who actually had like a really clear target audience. He was like it was recruiting for industrial, like hourly workers. So it's like very clear, right, like you know exactly you have to go after them, what they could use. And I was like how do I convince founders who don't want to narrow in their niche to do that? And he was like, well, it's just makes your life so much easier, like if you have a clear audience and a clear prospect. But I can see why that's a huge resistance. A lot of what I do is work with founders to try and narrow in like what could be that real target so that you can replicate it. Your materials make sense, your use cases make sense. Your like value prop on your website makes sense to an audience.
Speaker 1:That makes sense Because, yeah, I mean, maybe now we're actually just talking about this earlier this week, right Like the tool can solve so many problems for so many people. And I think the biggest limitation we have with AI is that the scenarios that we think of are only the ones that other people have kind of already told us. So the reason everyone thinks about writing blogs or LinkedIn posts and crap like that with AI is because that's what's like easily dangled in front of us and doesn't take too much creative brainpower to get to, and there's so many other use cases where AI can level you up. It's kind of tough to help people unlock that creative side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so then I think you're right. So there's a lot of competition, and so one way to grow, still in a world that's very competitive, is to have a very particular audience. So if your tool is specifically for I don't know life coaches looking to build on LinkedIn, then it's like you know how to make your product especially relevant for them and also it's a lot easier to, I think, capture SEO or use case material and things like that.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting.
Speaker 3:If you're trying to market to three different types of customers and you have to write three different types of emails to three different types of personas, each of the same company, you have to set up three different websites, or one website that tries to boil the ocean, so it doesn't do that well. Three different types of blogs it's just really easy. It's a lot easier even if you are a company that can be something for everyone to start somewhere and go from there. Clay is a great example of this, by the way, like clay for a really long time was just a generalist product, and then one of their like customers started using it for sales stuff and they were like, oh my God, we didn't even realize it was the problem. And then they just became really sales focused and that was when their hockey sticky graph thing started to happen.
Speaker 2:You know it's Ray, founder of me, hockey sticky graph thing. Yeah, well, and part of Clay's go to market which I think probably happened a little bit organically, but then they jumped on it was that these third parties, like people who have like built offerings around AI automation for sales, were promoting that they knew how to use Clay and could help you set up Clay, and so, instead of them spending effort to make Clay more user-friendly, they didn't really care. They're like well, there's this whole market forming around people who are helping clients use Clay and we'll just let them do all this user-generated content for us. And so that's how they got so much play on LinkedIn is because other people were talking about their product instead of them.
Speaker 1:That's wild. That's crazy. It's almost like an app store, but for brands, right Like creating an ecosystem where other companies and founders will want to start up and so they'll talk about you all the time and specialize in you. That's wild.
Speaker 2:And I think, like user generated content used to be just the domain of, like skincare products and chocolate brands and whatever, and it's becoming more relevant in software, which I think is really interesting. So it's like if you have a product that in any way you can build a feature on it where it's shareable and people might be like interested in sharing it so it makes them look good or it makes them look cool or it makes them money or whatever, it's a really good feature to include. So an example would be gammaapp, where you can create your own PowerPoints with AI, and it's like they made that super shareable so anyone who goes there can just see your PowerPoint and they don't have to log in and do whatever. Or examples like Opus Clip, where they have watermarks on their videos that you create and so or even you know the biggest one, which is now the name is escaping me, but like Google's Google's platform, you could create your own podcast with AI.
Speaker 1:Notebook LM.
Speaker 2:Yeah, notebook LM. So, like people were just so fascinated by the weird stuff they could create that they were sharing it. Google didn't have to advertise it at all.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting one, because there was like when Notebook LM came out, everyone lost their mind about it and I feel like I had everyone send me something in the next 48 hours and then I haven't heard anyone talk about Notebook LM in months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, One of their lead founders or founders, I don't know if they call her that but she left, but she's actually building. She got like a bunch of funding to go build an AI product. I don't know, maybe that's part of the backstory there.
Speaker 3:Suno is another example of this is like all of the songs Eleven Labs and Suno come to mind, where they're just creative products, which is super, super interesting.
Speaker 1:Okay, so companies that have some sort of product, have some sort of revenue, but are struggling to niche down, and that's like when you come in to start helping them like what, what? How do those conversations start and what are the first steps for you to help them go to market?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, so typically I have a series of questions that I ask and they get down to why are people being drawn to your product now? How are they finding you? How are you finding them? I think the tricky part for a lot of founders is they get so deep into their feature set and what their technology can do that they have a hard time stepping back from their own lingo, and so that's something that I help them with.
Speaker 2:So I'm, like I've worked with a lot of executives and consulting and what is common language and what is niche language that maybe someone might not understand or it might not be immediately clear what your product is or what it does. There was, like, for an example, like now, ai agents is a widely understood term, maybe, but like a year ago, like people were like I don't know what that is, and maybe even today, honestly, they're still like I don't know what that is. So should you really have AI agent on your website or should you have something else that explains, like, the value that someone might be able to create with an AI agent? Or is that just like a buzz term that you're using to get VC attention? Like, don't build your website for VCs? Like, build it for, like the people who actually use or buy your product. So it's really about messing around with that positioning.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm thinking about all the sort of like Sienna, ai style, like automated chatbot companies where they'll like replace your customer service representative. Like a CX person has a much lower probability of knowing what an AI agent is. But if you just say, like we will, we're a better chatbot. Like we're a chatbot that like will resolve like 70% of your tickets, that makes a lot more sense to somebody in that position, whereas, like, if you're trying to sell that to a VC, it's like less of a sexy like, ah, yes, like visiony, visiony product. So, yeah, it makes that makes sense.
Speaker 1:I mean, that just doesn't sound like fun marketing, right, like we're, like, you know, pretty, we're a pretty chill chat bot, you know we do good stuff that doesn't sound like it's going to convert anything, yeah Well, and you also have to think about your buyer, right?
Speaker 2:Because you could have like a tagline there that's like save yourself 10 hours a week, but then who are you targeting? Then You're targeting the actual user of the product, but they might not be the buyer. Save 10x of your headcount would be like okay. Now you're talking about the business person who probably has budget to buy this product. So you also have to think about the words you use and what those people's motivations might be and how they would need to sell it in their organization, Because typically, you know, enterprise buying decisions are not made by one person. They have to convince somebody that they got to do it. So how do you make it a super simple sell for them that it makes sense when they have a million options to choose from?
Speaker 1:That is interesting because, yeah, it's like not only is the buyer not necessarily the user, but also the discoverer. Might not. Maybe the user is the discoverer but not the buying authority, right? And so does the copy need to go to the person who's going to try and pitch this to their boss and like, hey, I can save 10 hours thinking about what I can do. Or does it go to the head of operations who's thinking about dollars and cents, and so it is, yeah, the headcount line. That's really interesting.
Speaker 2:What I think is interesting is that there's this trend happening where B2C products are actually being pulled into enterprise. So if you think about Chad GPT as an example, it was a B2C product when it first hit of hit mainstream and then people were using it so much in enterprise. Enterprise was like wait, wait, we need to like control this and we need to have user-based access and whatever. And so there, I don't think this was necessarily deliberate, but it's been replicated by other companies where it was like you start with users who are just using a free version or whatever, and then you add on enterprise level things like SSO or security or whatever, and then that's your premium product. But it gets alerted to the enterprise by you know, maybe your engineers are using an open source version on GitHub or something like that.
Speaker 1:I mean, I guess, like that goes to the idea of like don't, don't overbuild anything.
Speaker 3:Canva's the Canva's, the other company.
Speaker 1:I guess, yeah, when you're kind of talking to these companies. Lauren, have you found that there's an easier entryway to growth, whether that's going for SMB, B2C, trying to build straight for the enterprise? Have you found any of those paths to consistently work better, or is it purely product by product?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's no universal answer yet. I mean, I'm looking for the universal theory, but I think what? There is a really interesting book that's coming up. I saw a podcast on it. It's called like Just Evil Enough and it was talking about how you might want to deploy kind of marketing tactics that are completely unique or different, because that's the only way to get attention.
Speaker 2:And so the example they gave I think it was Hinge, was it? No, it was Bumble, who put signs up at universities that were like we don't allow Facebook, we don't allow like please don't use Facebook, please don't use Bumble. And then everyone was like wait, what's Bumble? And so like they knew about Facebook. And so it's an example of them being completely creative in how they thought of like breaking out of the molds. And there's some companies are doing like dystopian PR even, which is really interesting, like kind of scaring people about their AI products, and that gets picked up in the press quite a bit because you know, journalists love that kind of stuff. And so there is no universal answer, because if you're like a data analysis, ai product, like dystopian PR, you what could you pursue that is different than your competitors to get attention on your product Because there's so much noise out there and I don't even really think that ads are very effective anymore, and so it's like what else can you do?
Speaker 1:Okay. So truth one is we want to niche down. Truth two is we want to figure out how we're different from competitors and do something that is not just when you say you think ads aren't working anymore. Is that specifically, you're talking about Facebook ads and stuff like that, or where are you seeing a trend of diminishing returns?
Speaker 2:I don't have good stats on this and I should but it's essentially like the trend towards information overload is just accelerating. So we are bombarded with information. We're losing trust in the information that we see because there's so much weird Russian bot activity going on. And I think people don't want to hear from brands so much anymore. They want to hear from other trusted sources like influencers or creators too, and so that whole combination of things makes, if you create an ad for your company, it's like are people really clicking on it? And again, I'm not talking about necessarily physical products or more consumer-based products, but more like software or AI products as well. So it's just kind of a trend that I'm seeing that it's hard to get the ROI from ads.
Speaker 2:Keywords are, depending on what you're targeting, but they're getting more and more expensive. We know from Google searches kind of getting eaten by LLM search and LLM queries and things like that. So every founder that I talk to it's like that's not the first option. The first option is start with some sort of founder-led marketing. I love the idea of playing around with AI agent personalities as well on social. So you create some sort of persona that is a cute little AI agent and they can post things that are maybe a little bit more spicy, a little bit more edgy and generate kind of interest or conversations that way and then take it from there and see what, like your big splash would be. But I think primarily that needs to be some sort of community that you're tapping into or third parties that might talk about your product or your product features itself are shareable and leveraging it that way.
Speaker 3:Do you think that? Are there any companies that you feel like are doing that? That little AI agent to post spicier takes than you can as a founder is an interesting one. Do you know anyone who's?
Speaker 2:doing that? Well, Bordy does it. So Bordy is an AI networking platform and they have a personality called Mr Bordy or something like that. That like just comments on people's posts and it's like very, I think, self-deprecating that it is an AI and I think that's kind of funny and resonates with people. But the ones that are like this is new, right, this is a new space. There are some big brands that are partnering with, like AI influencers, like even Coach did that with an AI influencer out of Japan. But the ones where it's like really making a splash are these meme coin AI agents on Twitter. So they're posting the most ridiculous, insane stuff. They have whole backstories of personalities and lifetimes and goals that they have and they're mostly shilling for meme coins or their own spotify like album that they're dropping or whatever. But those are really taking off and I expect that trend to continue.
Speaker 3:Man we're just slowly, slowly moving towards a world where people's only friends are going to be ai bots, huh I have a question about this actually, uh sort of sean and I were discussing this the other day which is do we think that anonymity on the internet at some point dies? Because one conversation that we were having was that it's the same thing. People want to hear less from brands. People want the trust factor in a world where a lot of the things that you see on the internet maybe are just a Russian bot. Do we think that at some point Because I do think that the two things are kind of correlated like soulless corporations talking about their product is very different from like, oh like.
Speaker 3:I really like this TikTok influencer I assume that they're a friend and like it's actually kind of illogical. Right looks at TikTok for restaurant reviews a lot more than look at Google Maps ratings for restaurant reviews, which to me doesn't make any sense. But I understand why I like. The idea of trust from like a source matters a lot. So do we think that at some point, like the internet as we know it today, the sort of anonymous part of it, it doesn't necessarily go away, but it becomes like basically useless because we can't know what we trust versus not trust? Like Reddit's a great example of this. Like do we like? Does Reddit become fundamentally unusable because you don't know what kind of like who you're interacting with on there?
Speaker 2:Oh well, that's a whole nother can of worms. I think. I don't know. I think what's weird is that there's probably enough content of the three of us right now on the internet for someone to like duplicate us already.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And create AI videos pretending to be us. So that gets really, really strange. But also like, but you could also leverage it yourself to magnify your content. So like. There's a couple of pretty big like AI influencers, I would say, and they're humans. They're humans that talk about AI, but they're generating their videos with their own AI avatar, Like Rowan Cohen is one of them, who has like really big AI newsletter, and I learned recently and you can't tell, like I tried, I like freeze framed the video and I like zoomed in on his hands, and it's only because I did that that I could tell that there was like maybe six fingers in there at one point. But I was like, oh, that is AI, but it was so hard to tell.
Speaker 2:And so does anonymity die. I think if you're trying to sell something like, yeah, you probably need to put your face out there and your anonymity is not promised anymore, Because I think people are a little bit afraid that, like, for AI products to work, it needs a lot of data, and we are afraid of that data being used for nefarious purposes, and so, and we I mean like I think this is kind of like a maybe it's me, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how you guys think Some people are like well, I don't care, Like my internet, the information about me is all over the internet already. But I think there's some underlying fear and so people want to know, like, who is that person that's built this product?
Speaker 1:What always terrifies me, like whenever I actually start cause, like I'm with that, someone's going to make like a string of deep fake videos of me saying whatever, doing whatever, right, but like this goes back to the argument of, like people that want to do nefarious stuff are going to kind of just do it no matter what, and so it's like, so should I just ignore all of AI stuff and, you know, not put my likeness on the Internet so that I can prevent or try and prevent some bad actors from doing stuff and I'll get none of the positive value out of leaning in? Or should I just say, like, screw it and yeah, just train in notebook LM to crank out podcasts and videos and write books and do everything for me?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I think all three of us have our faces on the internet enough, so I think we know where we've fallen on that spectrum. We're just like the benefits outweigh the negatives.
Speaker 3:And we'll only know in like 10 years from now. I've done this before. One time. I was gone for Valentine's Day and my fiance is like a big Taylor Swift fan and I know you're not supposed to do this, but I did use just like some content to like fake create an AI message from Taylor Swift being like hey, happy. Your boyfriend says happy like Valentine's Day, and like it fooled her. She was like what the heck, how did you do this? And I was like it's fake, dude, and she goes, but it sounds just like her. I'm like yeah, it's still fake.
Speaker 1:But not in here. Not in here.
Speaker 3:Not in here, it's not fake. Yeah, like I let her believe it for like five seconds. One other thing that I'm curious about and again I'm leading us on some tangents here but one other thing that I'm curious about is how much time do you spend pontificating with founders on once? Because one great thing about AI is you can actually run a lot of tests very quickly because you can just set up an agent to do a repetitive task over and over and over again. So are you employing interesting uses of AI to help founders to like test out go-to-market strategies, scale go-to-market strategies? Like I keep thinking back to like I can't remember who it was that said that like we're coming close to the fact that a billion dollar company can be run by like one guy and a bunch of AI agents Sam Altman, yeah, but I'm kind of curious as to like what kind of work y'all have done around that.
Speaker 2:I wrote a piece a while back on AI sales development reps and companies that were doing that, like YC founded companies or funded companies, and they were the CEOs. The founders I talked to were actually complaining that a lot of clicks on this the most and which value like massive scale of A-B testing, essentially for value proposition. I think that's one strategy is the right positioning, who's the right audience, what's the right pricing, the value proposition, et cetera. That requires a level of intuition and differentiation. That requires a human touch.
Speaker 2:So like AI is derivative, right. Like it's based on all the stuff that came before and so you run the risk of it glossing over the outlying information that's actually critical to making a decision. So like I've even fed it before all these transcripts of user research interviews I've done for a company and I was like wait, it missed what I thought were the most important parts in its summary because it excluded the like surprising facts, because those are counter to the like what's the most common narrative? And so I tend to recommend that companies actually don't use AI until they've hit the thing that's catching fire and then they use AI to magnify that, but until you've found your product market fit, it's a little tricky to use the AI to find what will give you product market fit, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that. We'll see. We'll see how things to be proven wrong on that.
Speaker 1:Like we'll see. We'll see how things go. I mean, that sounds right though. Right Like they. I feel like the prevailing wisdom before AI came out was until you have like serious product market fit, don't be hiring a sales team. You should be talking to all your customers, right Like leaning into the unscalable and trying to build that intuition around your customer, and so I don't see why that would really change with the integration of AI. Right Like if the whole point is that you should be learning from exposure. Trying to figure out shortcuts removes that whole learning process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I completely agree with that.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we want to pick a niche. We don't want to test that with AI. We want to build that with intuition. We want to figure out how to do something different that is not purely ads related. What else are the working pieces of nuggets for your universal theorem on startup GTM?
Speaker 2:We've covered this a little bit, but I would just add this like looking at your feature set and understanding where things could be shareable. So, like an example for an AI agent, if it's being used to manage your inbox or something like that, then it'd be pretty simple to have a little feature in there where it's like this was sent by my AI agent. Get your own AI agent here, you know, and like little things like that that are important to think about of how do you increase your distribution using your own feature set. If you're building some sort of collaboration, like if you're building some sort of knowledge management tool, how do you make that collaborative so that people are like inviting other people thinking through your product itself for the lens of like, what could we do differently here to, uh, have the product lend itself to increasing distribution?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's like, uh, that goes back to like Sean Ellis's like old. You know all the old growth hacking silliness that people were very obsessed with in the mid mid two thousands and early 2010s, right, like Dropbox did a bunch of great stuff with that and and I think gmail had that sent from from gmail footer and all their emails and and the watermarks you talked about on videos. So, yeah, how can you get have your product, be a walking billboard for your product and have it invite users in? I actually saw an interesting one. We're trying to bootstrap, uh, my company, and so I am pinching every single penny I can, and so right now I have 15 different tools where I'm doing a free trial to try and find email addresses and LinkedIn's and stuff like that. And one of them had an interesting one where it was like get unlimited. It's like I think you get like a hundred searches on the free plan, but if you invite three other people you'd get unlimited searches, and I was like damn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like gross hacking stuff is still relevant and it's so what I've been working on is this like there's so many options, right? So then it's like, as a founder, how do you pick what's right for you? And so so that's something I've been. I've been trying to like, distill. So like if you had to ask yourself a series of questions like is your product novel and cutting edge, then it's like, okay, this might actually get traction on Product Hunter Reddit, but if it's something that is just not as sexy sounding, then maybe it won't get a lot of traction there.
Speaker 2:So maybe pursue a different avenue. Is it something that's addressing core human needs? How do I make more money? How do I get a job? How do I improve my mental health? Like, maybe you should lean into a community where people could be helping each other and just trying to like, match, like products with tactic and trying to distill that into something that makes it easier. Because sometimes it's like well, I've got a million things to do as a founder, and which one do I pick to grow my business? Yeah, I like got a million things to do as a founder, and which one do I pick to grow my business?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that a lot. I think that, to your point earlier too, about it being so much of it is founder personality driven. Now I think that the tactics should mirror that too. It's not just the marketing needs to come from the founder, but it needs to logically fit for your market, your customer, but also you as a team, right. So Ibi and I talked about this months ago. They have a bunch of brilliant engineers and data people on their team. Why would you try and win through faking a person when it's not yours? Or just build great? You're great at building things fast that solve problems. Do that and have that be your acquisition play. We knew we weren't going to be able to outspend other financial services companies, and so we leaned into things we thought we could do, and that was organic content and UGC content and social.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think you're nailing it on the head, which is like I think we sometimes we have a hard time recognizing or acknowledging what we're really good at, because it's easy for us, and so it's like we underestimate the value of the knowledge we already have and so your content doesn't necessarily have to be like this is my product and this is what my product does, like it can be this infotainment right. So like how are you sharing what you're uniquely good at? And like helping other people learn about it through that and just kind of building an audience without the hard sell, because if people resonate with your content, like they'll dig it up themselves and they'll look into it because they're curious. And so if it's like building, if it's like a bunch of engineers are really good at building things fast, it's like how you build content around that like just what would be naturally easy to do because you're already doing it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love that. That's all very, very good. I think we're running up on time. So I have one final question, which is Claude, or ChatGPT. I'm sorry you don't have to actually answer that one.
Speaker 2:No, the answer is both, and they're not the only AIs that I use either. I have a couple others, and they all have different purposes.
Speaker 3:Oh, I was gonna say do you mind sharing? I'm pretty curious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I also want to know how much you're spending per month on AI.
Speaker 3:I also use both, but I don't use that many other ones, so I'm curious about what other ones you'd recommend.
Speaker 2:So I've started using lovabledev to spin up like a quick mock-up of something. For example, I was just working with a client on the positioning for their landing page and so we had a bunch of texts and taglines. We're thinking and I was like, let me just throw this in and design it in lovable in 15 minutes and then it's a lot easier to be like do we like this or not? And so for others who don't know, lovableai is like, or dev is a AI coding platform so you can use natural language to code something and it looks way better than you could do with Claude or ChatGPT. Like their front end is just really good, back end a little still very buggy, but that's okay for just like demo purposes.
Speaker 2:And then I also there's a product called Geniverse. That's still kind of in beta but we'll be coming out of beta later this month. That has more sophisticated memory management and you can also segment the parts of your life so you don't have kind of memory bleed, which is a challenge with ChatGPT. So if you're like me and you have lots of clients, you don't really want that information and you also use it to analyze your dreams. You don't really want that information cross-pollinating. So Geniverse is cool for that.
Speaker 2:And then I also like I had my own product called Giant, which was trained to be more entrepreneurial minded. So instead of using necessarily ChatGPT for a question, I would ask Giant instead, because it just got the right like orientation. It's not trying to boil the ocean and like go straight to the point. It's like well, you only have time for three things, so like here's the three things you could do, whereas ChatGPT you always be like straight to the point. It's like well, you only have time for three things, so like here's the three things you could do, whereas Chad should be always be like.
Speaker 1:Here's the 25 things you could do. I forgot about John. Are you still using that internally when you do consulting stuff?
Speaker 2:I am, yeah, yeah, I am using it. It needs a whole like refresh, needs to be rebuilt and like completely different, but I still use it.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then who do you have for the Bills-Broncos game this weekend?
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't watch the Bills anymore.
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 1:Heartbroken.
Speaker 2:They're dead to me. Wait why? That's a long story. I don't even watch football anymore. I'm over it.
Speaker 1:That's probably smart, but yeah, yeah you really do.
Speaker 3:You broke his heart twice in this.
Speaker 1:Twice.
Speaker 3:One being like hey, newsletters suck.
Speaker 1:And the second one is what do we even have to talk about anymore?
Speaker 2:Oh, hey, newsletters don't suck, they're just hard. But if you can make them work, they pay off for sure.
Speaker 3:People don't know how to read anymore.
Speaker 2:That's true. Can you do a verbal newsletter? Is that the next thing?
Speaker 1:Is that not just a podcast?
Speaker 2:Is that not?
Speaker 3:just a podcast.
Speaker 2:No, it's different.
Speaker 3:And I think on think that we're going to end. It's different. It would have the headings and structure. Lauren, thank you so, so much for coming on, Really appreciate it. Before we jump off, do you have anything that you want to pub? Any marketing, anything that you want to pub for our listeners? I know we've got you said giant. I don't know if there's anything else you're working on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean people should follow me on LinkedIn. I'm still trying to grow my empire over there. I just hit 10,000 followers, which is pretty exciting. But yeah, follow along with my videos and posts.
Speaker 1:We'll post the link in the show notes here.
Speaker 3:Great. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun. Yes, it was, and everyone go follow Lauren on LinkedIn.