Linq's $20 Million Bet on AI in Messaging

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1:05When you're hiring, we at ZipRecruiter know you can feel frustrated, forlorn even, like your efforts are futile. And you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. F***! Fortunately, ZipRecruiter figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash zip. With ZipRecruiter, you can forget your frustrations because we find the right people for your roles fast, which is our absolute favorite F word. In fact, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

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2:27And of course, Facebook Messenger. And what's interesting to me is that there's been a bunch of lawsuits. Like basically, Meta didn't want to allow any other AI chatbots to be inside of their platforms and services because they're like, you know, this is ours. There's been a bunch of lawsuits from different countries. I believe India in particular and maybe some others that have forced Meta to allow other AI assistants inside of their chatbots. So this is something that I think we're going to start seeing more of in the future. And it's kind of like Meta's moat. Maybe that's slipping. Link, I think, wants to be one of these players.

2:57We're going to get into what Link is doing, why they raised$20 million, what they're doing. Before we get into all of that, though, Jamie, would you want to tell everyone about the AI Hustle school community? Absolutely. Yeah. If you've ever wanted to learn how to grow your business with AI or even make money on the side, you want to check out our school community called AI Hustle. We'll link it below, but it's really a great place to be. Each week, we release bonus content specifically geared towards how you can actually make money with AI. So this week, we recorded a really interesting episode.

3:27Jaden did a complete web redesign of his app, AI Box, he's been working on for over a year now, and how Lovable was able to help him redesign it. So we go through things like that. We're talking about, we're doing actually a really big vibe coding course right now, releasing a lot of content over there. So if that's interesting to you, you should definitely check it out. Each week, we, so it's right now it's$19 a month, and you can lock that price in if you join today. So we have over 300 members and we'd love to have you be a part of it. But let's talk about Link here. They raised$20 million, which is a significant amount of money.

4:04And I always like talking about kind of the history of some of these companies. They started as launching a digital business card business. That was their original business model. But they last year kind of helped businesses in a new way, which is upgrading their text messaging, like text marketing services to instead of just be an SMS text to iMessage. So it showed up in blue as an iMessage instead of the green, which for some reason matters a lot. But I mean, it really does when you're talking about follow up and marketing and authenticity, like a feeling of an authentic person you're chatting with.

4:45I find that because I have an iPhone, if it's blue, it seems like more real or something and less spammy. But Jane, what do you think about it? Okay. I think this is a cool company. By the way, it's out of Birmingham, Alabama, which is awesome to hear any company not out of just Silicon Valley, right? Or San Francisco. So that's cool. Okay. What I like about what this company is doing is I do think that there is a ton of untapped potential for so many different industries and markets with messaging. Specifically, what they're doing is helping you inside of iMessage, like text, you're basically having a text message chat with an AI model.

5:21They're helping companies to do that. So you can text the company. And then you're texting back and forth with an AI model. It's a lot like what we're seeing with customer service, right? There's customer service bubbles that when you go to a website, you can talk with them. And like I use a lot of I used to kind of hate it. And I actually have had some pretty funny experiences with some. but I do have like a lot of AI ones where I will ask it like if I go to your website and ask your AI model for a refund and the AI agent gives me a refund I don't care what you do fantastic that's the greatest use case of all time or you know fixing a bug on a website I think is less likely because it's going to send it over to the development team but like sometimes it can genuinely help you with things if there's a double charge or a refund or whatever or an issue if it can solve it great now I think the next level on this is you have a lot of service-based businesses They're not software.

6:11And people aren't, you know, if like your plumber, if you need a plumber to help you with something, you're not going to be on his website. I'll, you know, always being able to chat with it. Sometimes you're like in the thick of, you know, you're under your sink and there's a burst pipe. You need to text someone. Sometimes you just want to text a person. You might be away from the internet and maybe the internet's down, right? And so I think there's a lot of use cases where just being able to text someone and it's an SMS is really useful. And it's funny the way that they came up with their company.

6:37was like i mean basically they were just trying to help you send blue bubble texts on i messenger and there's a whole bunch of stuff you could do there's a bunch of companies that have sneaky ways to do this right where it's like automated systems but they can send blue bubble texts and then they realized well this is actually a great thing for ai assistance for businesses so i think this is really cool you could just text the business directly text the business line and have an ai assistant which feels very much like a person like if you make it feel like a person to answer all the questions answer and everything it saves the business owner a ton of time.

7:06I know for my own local business, like I have a brick and mortar local business. It's a podcast studio in Arizona. I don't live there in Arizona. I have a studio manager that runs it. We get texts all the time for people trying to do scheduling or change scheduling and being able to plug something like an AI model in that's actually able to do something and give people information. I mean, a lot of the times you're getting the exact same questions about pricing and about schedule over and over again, if you can automate that. So whoever is in charge of it just has to kind of monitor and look over and it runs it all.

7:33I think that's an incredible use case, very useful for a business. And so I'm not surprised they're able to raise$20 million for this idea. Absolutely. I mean, yeah, especially when it comes to service-based businesses, usually people are calling about availability and price. And if you can automate a lot of that, you're going to save yourself a lot of time and money paying somebody to basically be a secretary for you. So that's one side of it. And then there's the marketing side as well, messaging discounts and things like that. So really, you know, companies like this, I feel like, honestly, $20 million, I mean, it is a lot of money, but there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of potential in this industry, specifically with marketing moving forward that, you know, there's just a lot of opportunity.

8:18So. Yeah, I think this is kind of cool. So they're plugging into a lot of different systems. They are working with a company called Poke. And now they're going to kind of stick with some of their original revenue thing, which is basically B2B clients. They've done a lot of pivots, which I think a lot of startups can relate to. But they had a quote where they said, we still love our sales customers and we love that use case. But our choices were, do we stay a spoke of this wheel or do we build the hub? Do we focus on being the infrastructure layer or on these different applications of programmatic messaging.

8:57So basically, they think that customers are suffering from app fatigue. And so with their technology, you don't need to use another app to interact with like, you don't need to download like, you know, some sort of AI assistant to chat with something or be on a specific website. It's just all through text messaging. They said, quote, poke.com along with others have provided or have proved that AI has gotten good enough. You don't need a traditional app anymore to do things. Really, you just need an interface that will let you talk to an intelligent enough AI, maybe connect to some of your systems and just tell them what to do and give it feedback.

9:30So I think at the end of the day, this is really cool what they're doing and what the kind of the target audience that they're they're targeting. It feels kind of like what Apple intelligence should be or Siri should be like Siri and Apple intelligence should just be like on iMessenger. There should just be like a Siri that I can text and it will tell me everything. I don't want like a custom, probably like specific another app on my phone. And so it's just, I don't know, it's always funny to me that these startups are like plugging into systems and able to get this pulled off sooner than Apple could have.

9:59And they're literally using all of Apple's technology to do it. Right. I know. Yeah. So it says it's customers, links, customers, AI agents now reach 134 ,000 monthly active users via the platform. And the company also facilitates more than 30 million messages per month. So to me, that tells me that these people are actually chatting back and forth with the agents several times each, not just asking one question. So it appears that these agents are actually doing a lot of work for the companies. And this results in zero churn for the company. That means they have not lost any customers, or at least they don't on average from a month to month basis.

10:38So that's pretty huge for financial implications as well. yeah and i will say so this is their series a that they raised this 20 million dollars it was led by tq ventures mucker capital was also in on this big vc and then a bunch of different angel investors all got in on this um one thing that like i guess is the the concern here is that like meta or the apple is going to do kind of what meta does meta went and banned any other kind of third-party messaging ai systems from integrating with their tools but then i think right now in like india there's a like a law that just um made that illegal so i think in india and i think we might see this other places so it'll be interesting to see if they're if they're ever banned by apple who seems very closed system or if that happens though it also seems like some countries are going to force apple to let them in anyways because that's kind of the precedent it's getting set for meta so it's an interesting space right they're building on top of apple but they don't know if that's going to be a competitor if they're going to get shut down it seems like everything's good right now so really interesting company uh interesting concept you don't need any more apps You can just talk with iMessenger and talk directly for businesses, plug into their systems.

11:45I love it. Guys, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If this was interesting, if you learned anything new, make sure to leave us a rating review on the show. It really helps Jamie and I out a ton to get this show shown to more people. Basically, if you leave a review, it pushes us up in the algorithm. More people see the show in the search results. And so, yeah, it helps us to find more amazing people like yourself. So if you haven't done it already on Spotify, it's the About tab, but on Apple, drop us some stars. Leave us a comment. We read them all. We really appreciate them.

12:15And we hope you guys all have an amazing rest of your day. Warning, the following ZipRecruiter radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F-words. When you're hiring, we at ZipRecruiter know you can feel frustrated, forlorn even, like your efforts are futile. And you can spend a fortune trying to find fabulous people, only to get flooded with candidates who are just fine. Fortunately, ZipRecruiter figured out how to fix all that. And right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com. With ZipRecruiter, you can forget your frustrations. Because we find the right people for your roles fast.

12:52Which is our absolute favorite F-word. In fact, 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Fantastic. So whether you need to hire 4, 40, or 400 people, get ready to meet first-rate talent. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash zip to try ZipRecruiter for free. Don't forget, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash zip. Finally, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash zip. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. with rss.com starting your own podcast is free and easy upload an episode and we distribute it to apple podcasts spotify amazon music and more track your listeners see where they're from and start earning from ads just like this if you've been thinking about starting a podcast this is your sign start your new podcast for free today at rss.com