Very few growth moats will survive AI - Sandy Diao [Descript]

22:26Sandy Diao:And, you know, I was just totally panicking. It's like we spent all this time, you know, optimizing all these different aspects of our pricing and packaging and our free-to-paid motion, and then all of a sudden, you know, this exposure group is like really, really suffering. What do we do now? I think a lot of that, you know, early insight data really pointed us in this direction of saying this is going to work, but I think the lived reality is that when you actually run the experiment, users behave very, very differently. When I kind of reflect on that experience, our biggest learning here is that different types of users have different expectations about the value of these different pricing models.

23:00Sandy Diao:What we found when we segmented the data is that businesses or more of that B2B customer had value from that reverse trial because they could essentially kind of leisurely go back to it and test it out over time. And they didn't really have this like day-to-day DAU, WAU distinct need for it. So it felt more aligned with their value model. But for a lot of the consumer prosumer creator type users using the platform, it didn't make sense to them, right? Because they just didn't have the two week bandwidth or timeline in their minds for making a decision around a video editing tool. They're like, I need to cut a TikTok short right now.

23:39Sandy Diao:I need to cut a YouTube video right now. It's like, okay, I'll get this thing done and then I'll disappear and I'll never come back. It doesn't, it didn't really help reinforce the idea of the value of the product. So, you know, we ultimately ended up reverting back to our original pricing model. But that's an example of how that early data really pointed us in the wrong direction. Interesting. Yeah. And for me, you know, like I've seen it multiple times that whenever you want to optimize for a certain metrics, you might also like compromise a whole other set, you know, of metrics. So if you want to optimize, let's say for customer expansion, you're going to reach out more to existing customer trying to oversell something and some might actually like not like it and churn so your churn might increase but your expansion so you have always like side effects so i'm curious to know like from your perspective whenever you have like a marketing budget or a gross budget what do you how exactly do you split it between these are the experiments where i want to measure like a clear outcome versus, you know, like this are, let's say, strong belief we have and kind of like moonshot project where we know it's going to go in the right direction.

24:54We know we're going to not be able to measure exactly, you know, like the impact it has on the growth, but we believe that it's aligned with our brand, who we are, and we have a high conviction that it's beneficial for the company.

25:08Sandy Diao:Yeah, great question. Generally, for the growth teams I've there are two types of budgets. One is the time budget and the second is the financial budget. For the time budget, almost all the time, we want to over-index or shift most of our time resources on big bets or big swings, right? We basically want to find the power distribution channels that will drive the majority of our growth. And if we don't take enough of those swings to find what those channels are, we're really going to suffer because we're going to be micro-testing, micro-optimizing, you know, focusing on a local minimum rather than the ultimate global maximum.

25:44Sandy Diao:And then there's the financial budgets. I think for the financial budgets, we want to be indexing most of our financial investments in primarily the things that we know are giving us somewhat measurable unit economics. So channels like paid ads, for example, influencer marketing, sometimes SEO, if you have sort of this like content cost behind content creation, although, So, of course, that's changing a lot with AI these days. But I think, you know, we generally think about our budgeting in that way. And then for more of the time investments, we want directional outcomes, right? We want essentially it to show some results that this is working at a scale or a magnitude that we care about and that's going to drive a ton of users for us.

26:24Sandy Diao:And then we can get a little bit more detailed and nuanced about how much incrementality or the precise attribution method to use to properly attribute growth there. But for more of the financial budgeting, we probably want to be pretty precise about that from day one because the input or the growth lever there is going to be budget. So that's just going to be able to scale in the manner that we're able to prove out there's LTV to CAC and that there's actual ROI and return on ad spend. So that's how I've traditionally thought about it. And I think you talked about like the big swings at Descripts.

27:04I think you did something that generated a lot of the revenue. Can you please share a bit the growth loop that you put in place there?

27:16Sandy Diao:Yeah, Descript is, again, an audio video editing product. A lot of the users there are going to be content creators, whether that's an individual content creator or a business content creator. And if you really think about the product without referencing any data, if you really try to have intuition about it, you'll figure out that the product itself is really meant for users who have their own built-in audiences. So this idea is essentially that every user that you acquire, that content they produce is meant to be seen by many, many other people, which means that in theory, there's this opportunity or this network effect, a user-to-user network effect, where one user can always equal N equals, you know, more than one user.

27:58Sandy Diao:So in order to make that true, we need to figure out how do you tap into the distribution that your users already have. And so one of the pieces of intuition I had here was we can essentially figure out how to get content creators to sell Descript on our behalf. But how do we do that without me reaching out to every individual content creator, setting up some kind of content or partnership agreement there? And so one of the experiments I ran, even despite not having a lot of firm data around this being a growth lever for us, was setting up an affiliate program. And the affiliate program was very simple.

28:32Sandy Diao:We used a third-party tool. We didn't build anything special or in-house. And we essentially used this tool where people could sign up for a tracking link. That tracking link would measure the conversion of a Stripe event, meaning that somebody paid, and they would get a percentage or a kickback on the paid subscriptions that they drove to our business. And we would just send this out to new users who signed up in our onboarding emails, you know, not even that openly, but in the footer would say, here's the affiliate program. You can go to our website, there'd be affiliate program. And when we first launched, we obviously made an announcement email, which allowed for us to get our first base of affiliates.

29:09Sandy Diao:And we launched it and we said, let's just keep the cost minimal, the bill minimal and see what happens. And it turns out a lot of people were interested. We opened the program to everyone at the time. So anyone and everyone could become an affiliate. it. We learned a lot of lessons along the way. Some affiliates are really bad. They do things like bid on your brand terms through Google ads, which is terrible. And we eventually banned that, of course. But then there were also really great affiliates. As soon as we launched it, we saw organic content just pop, right? If you went on YouTube, you saw a lot of tutorial content, you saw a lot of videos.

29:42Sandy Diao:We thought this is great. When you actually looked at the results and the data, you saw that they actually did refer paying customers because they're so, creators understand the product. Their job of content creation, when we talk about the product, it comes across very authentically. And so by putting the link to the product there, even the creators themselves don't feel like they're running too much of an ad per se because they're running these workflow videos. So that ultimately netted us in realizing that content creators themselves, whether through affiliates or even eventually paid placements through influencer marketing, was going to be a massive channel for us.

30:15Sandy Diao:And that eventually drove upwards to a third of the business for quite a number of years. And that's something that would not have come about if we were to have diligently looked at our dashboards, our traffic sources, and try to be overly analytical about what was going to work. It just really came from this understanding of who our users were and this intuition about the space itself. That's really cool. And to your point with the referral system, actually, when I first launched the referral system, same using like one of the most famous platform out there um i actually like uh i went on a vacation and i typed like the the name of our company online and then i saw an ads and i wasn't doing actually like any google ads at the time so i was like how come so i reached out to someone in marketing and i was like when did we start like doing ads i thought we were not doing this thing like no we're not and then I looked at it and I could see like the you know the in the url the ref code of the affiliate and when I went back you know to the affiliate program I had seen that in the last six months whenever my head of marketing was reporting to me that the referral program was working really well that it was basically linked to our growth etc I was super excited and realized that one partner was making the most of his money by just like buying our name on AdWords and uh and just yeah so in the end we we stopped it but again I think when when it's done uh in the right way you can definitely get like uh some amazing results and I think you wrote on your uh on your blog that is actually so it's a really cool blog uh like about finding your niche in uh in AI like how how what's what's different versus what happened in the past and And how would you frame it, you know, like for people trying to find a niche with this new technology?

32:17Sandy Diao:Yeah. And are you referring more to finding your niche as in the right type of product or feature to build or more so how to use AI in your existing workflows? I think like whenever you want to find a niche, you know, for your product and the new features that you want to develop. Yeah, I think a lot of the startups I've advised in the last few years, especially when they're building AI native products from scratch, one of their biggest challenges is trying to figure out if they go very, very narrow and horizontal and go after a very, very specific persona. and that tends to be the easiest in terms of shaking up the product roadmap or they go very horizontal so they try to build something that has you know unlimited use cases right and they're like you know sky's the limit with ai tools and features and we just want users to be able to be creative and do whatever they want it's always you know this this very tricky balance because on one hand if you build something that's very narrow you firstly get called a wrapper and then secondarily becomes very hard to remain competitive especially as you know more of the general purpose models can essentially tackle many of and probably all the tasks that exist out there today.

33:23Sandy Diao:And then on the other hand, if you build the really, really broad product, the challenge is you're not going to be better for the most part than foundational models. And you have to essentially figure out how to win that market. So it's this very hard question to answer. I will say this about, you know, sort of figuring all of that out. I think that what I've learned is it feels that TAM is virtually infinite here. I don't mean that in the sense that the number of people on the planet is skyrocketing or growing. In fact, there's a little bit of reversion on that number. But instead, I mean more so that people have two distinct behaviors that I think are worth tapping into.

34:04Sandy Diao:One of them is that switching costs are relatively low from tool to tool, meaning that if you are building better experience, the better design experience, the brand that people trust more, you can still win in the grand scheme of things. And then I think the second thing to note is when you're trying to sell the product itself, people are willing to use more than one tool for the problems that they're solving. So it's this idea that even though you see maybe a foundation model doing something really well, you can actually still get a mark there if you can solve it better for them in like one corner of the universe or one specific area.

34:44Sandy Diao:Like one example is one of the companies that I advise or work with is called TeachShare. They help teachers or educators of any traditional or untraditional kind create educational curriculum. And generating this content, sure, you could do it with GPT, you could do it with Claude, you could do it with any foundational model. But what they add on top of it is this design experience, where all the variables that you need to think about, like what is the grade level? What is the level comprehension? What is the format? Is it, you know, more image based? Is it tracing based? Is it text based? Is it more comprehension based?

35:20Sandy Diao:All these factors are basically like packaged neatly for you so that as the educator, you don't need to think about all these different factors. And then it makes it also easy for you to be able to keep up to date and edit and come back to your repository of the content that you're creating. So I think, you know, regardless of what it is that you're building, I think that some of the factors of building for a market still remain true, meaning that you want to go for product market fit, meaning that you want to make sure your product is serving a market, look for the classic signals there of, are these users retaining?

35:54Sandy Diao:And then, you know, ultimately try to figure out a distribution channel that fits that as well. So can I sustainably, for example, with teacher grow in the teacher and educator segments? And do I have channels that show me that that is working? So, you know, kind of in my view there, I think that TAM is very large. People are willing to use multiple tools. And just because the foundation model is building for this use case doesn't mean that you cannot tackle that yourself as well. And to build upon your point, I think like for the company you mentioned, I think what's interesting also is like not only they have like the package design and they simplified a lot the experience for the end user so there is a lot of additional value but i assume that in the way they build their products because they leverage all these new models when the models get better the product experience also get better which means that they are not like you know fighting existing models that just can leverage the improvements to bring even more value to their end users.

36:57Sandy Diao:Exactly. As the models get better, you're right, the product experience gets better. So you're not having this existential threat of, I get out-competed because the foundational models themselves outperform my product itself. In fact, my product has the actual data points as well of teachers and educators creating content. And therefore, the way that my evals are set up, I'm actually going to have a net better product and output than even a foundational model with far less context on a specific use case. Definitely. No, that's really interesting. And you mentioned like to look at the retention and also that people, you know, like have lower and lower switching costs now that with AI, you know, you, a lot of people feel that they can build everything they want and in a very quick way, even though it's, it's more complex than this, actually, but eventually it might get there over time.

37:47Like what do you think about AI and retention and what are the things that you would focus on to make sure that your retention doesn't go to zero with the switching costs, you know?

38:00Sandy Diao:Yeah, it's honestly so hard. I think a lot of the retention strategies will remain the same in that you still need to figure out how a user continuously gets value with your product over time. And some of these are going to be figuring out like what is ultimately the strategy around how the longevity of your product. Referencing the maybe the, you know, the educator tool for a second here. One common behavior that people are going to have is figuring out how they can like repeatedly come back to make refinements and edits to their products. How they can store their products and view their products and share their products.

38:33Sandy Diao:So we have to, you know, use it all as some of the same retention strategies that we would pre-AI as well, which is how do you build a product experience with longevity that people can constantly come back and reference and continue to use. On the other hand, one of the biggest drivers of retention, the input to retention, which is new user activation or activation itself, has wildly changed, right? Right. AI has kind of trained us to expect value really, really quickly and really, really fast and very, very generously. And part of that is the fact that we've been spoiled by these big companies who have this seemingly infinite budget to burn around giving away AI credits and tokens so that people can get a taste of what good looks like.

39:19Sandy Diao:And so in order for smaller companies or newer players to keep up with that, they need to figure out how do I let somebody peek at the value? How do I let somebody see what's behind the curtains without burning myself out, without costing me a fortune in order to run this business? And I think that's really hard. But I think there are some design patterns that we can utilize to make that happen. You know, for example, one of the experiences that you get when you use any Vibe coding tool is they allow you to start typing your prompt right away. They say, what is it that you want to build? And then they let you hit like generate.

39:54Sandy Diao:But for the most part, most of these tools don't actually run the generation. They bring you to a signup wall and they try to add all of these little steps that help the user be more serious about their intention to use the product. And I think that's one of the things that we need to look out for in growth, which is we want to give away value. We want to show people what's possible, but we also need to make sure that these are real serious users, not someone who's just going to be casually browsing, burning us of, you know, our cash and our capital here in order to run these models. And of course, that will become more and more negligible over time because the cost of running these models gets cheaper and cheaper over time.

40:31Sandy Diao:But I think, you know, for now, one of growth's responsibilities is to figure out what are those distinct points? How do we continue to identify intent early on, but still match the expectations of this ever-changing consumer whose expectations are now being seriously molded by their experiences with free and fast AI? Yeah, I agree. And how would like one full stack growth person leverage AI in the day to day? Like what's what's the typical what are the typical workflows that you personally leverage whenever you advise companies or? Yeah. Yeah, I would say the following. The first one is that maybe unexpectedly, a lot of growth and marketing teams aren't necessarily adopting AI as much as you think they would.

41:23Sandy Diao:And I think one of the reasons here is that especially in the role of growth, a lot of the even the channels and levers we just covered are very cross-functional. They're product-led, they're marketing-led, they're sales-led, they're community-led, etc. And one of the challenges with AI right now is getting all of that context and data to a single place in a way that makes sense, in a way that breaks past the walled gardens. Not every one of these tools has an API that you can use to nicely and neatly connect all of these data points together. So there's still this role of the orchestrator, if you will, who has to look across these channels, use their intuition about the business, look at the data from various sources, or at least figure out how to, generally speaking, automate reading some of these reports and then figure out how it all coalesces.

42:11Sandy Diao:I think the manually building the stack, building the data sources still lives on. And for good, very, very good reason. Some of the areas where agents and AI automations are starting to play more of a factor are things like automated ads reporting, automated ads optimizing, stuff that is very, I think, process oriented. you can really write out the guidelines and say, here are things that I have to do. Even things like influencer marketing outreach, where maybe your guidelines for identifying who an influencer is, you can now write into a natural language prompt and you can build, say, a Claude skill around it so that it runs every single week, every single morning, however frequently your outbound influencer marketing campaigns work.

42:59Sandy Diao:So I do think that Every team, for the most part that I've seen, have a relatively unique stack based on who's responsible, whether they're more of like that general growth manager or maybe more of a performance specialist who's focused on one channel or the other. I think the opportunity here is having more of a unified growth system that has the context across all of these different systems here. But I think right now what I'm seeing and probably the way I recommend growth teams to think about it now is really thinking of ourselves as individuals who are responsible for growth to be general orchestrators.

43:34Sandy Diao:Figure out what is worth automating, but figure out the manual stuff first, because if you don't have the manual stuff down, there's no point in scaling it. And that agent's only going to be as good as the underlying assumptions and logic behind why we did this thing in the first place. and when you join like a company to to advise them like what's your typical process like what are the steps you go through to kind of analyze what's working what's not working and what can be done better great question the first step that i take when i meet a company is i just kind of want to hear from them what their growth challenges are and the second thing that i do is i pair that with an audit of what actually is happening in the business and the realization that we typically have at the end of that process is that our assumptions on what's working or what our problems are, are typically not actually what's happening in the business itself.

44:26Sandy Diao:So that tends to be the early on process. And then we have to align on what are the growth problems that we meaningfully want to solve. From there, it's figuring out, you know, what are the quick wins or the fast things that we can do to show some initial lift and impact so that we can have confidence to continue to double down or continue to invest in other things. That tends to be my roadmap. And then from there, we build something a little bit more long term. That's like, OK, here are good foundational things that we should probably invest in and do, but we don't have to do right away. So an example is some quick win type of things that we tend to do early on.

45:00Sandy Diao:I mentioned this concept earlier, but what I've seen in most probably 100 percent of early stage startups I worked with is their power law outcomes to user acquisition. Firstly, every business wants to solve user acquisition, even if they have tons of users, they're like, oh, I'm afraid it'll dry up at some point and it's not sustainable. and it's not scalable, et cetera. So everyone has that problem. But what I've seen for every business life I've worked with or ever touched is that power law outcomes drive the results, meaning that one or two channels drive the majority of users. Again here, meaning that we need to figure out what those best fit channels are.

45:32Sandy Diao:And one of the inclinations that a lot of teams I work with tend to have is they want to test more and more channels. So they're all saying, what do you think about influencer? What do you think about paid ads? What do you think about Reddit? What do you think about, you know, all these like different referral programs and everything else. And my response to that usually is, I don't think you should be testing all these all at once. We should find out which channels have the best fit for your product. So for example, if you have a product that's very socially shareable, very visual, let's start with social channels first, because you're going to have a better fit there.

46:01Sandy Diao:Or if you have a product that has a lot of existing demand, a lot of people understand, maybe consumer product, let's focus on paid first or SEO. So it really kind of depends on the setup of the product itself. And then, And, you know, we launch an experiment or two and that gets us really strong results. Either it works like crazy well and we're like, wow, we should hire a paid specialist or we should hire an agency. Or it goes, oh, wow, I thought for the longest time that this was going to work and it and it didn't work. Let's move on to the next thing. But that's typically how the roadmap looks.

46:30Sandy Diao:And it's also the same approach that I take when I'm full time, you know, full time in-house in a team. And my mandate is also to, you know, to grow the team. And what do you think, when you look at a growth moat for a company, what do you think have changed before AI versus now? What kind of moats do you feel will remain stronger and the one that will actually not be as strong as they used to be? It's a really interesting question. I think about this one a lot. what is going to be a moat with growth? Well, here's how I view it. I think that firstly, when people ask what your moat is, it's this unique competitive advantage that's supposed to sustain for the long term.

47:17Sandy Diao:But I think by definition in the world of AI, there is going to be very few growth moats that remain the same. In fact, I think that growth moats are always constantly going to be changing depending on the size, the scale of the company, and just the distribution channels themselves are changing. So by definition, you cannot have a persistent growth mode that is going to take you from, you know, C to series A and series A to C and C plus, right? It's just, it's not going to work that way anymore. And one of the reasons that's true is because again, the distribution channels are changing and things are just working a lot faster.

47:50Sandy Diao:Also, the nature of these distribution channels like GEO or generative engine optimization products are now being served on a platter to users, right? Users are asking, what is this exact product that I need for my specific profile with all this context about like what this model understands about me that model will just say like here's the thing you should use right there's no more comparison there's no more reading these lists of like check boxes that says like this solution is better than the other there's a little bit of that and you know sort of referencing it but you know for the most part products are being brought closer to the point of conversion with AI as one of these distribution channels and same with video content right algorithms are getting better and better at surfacing content that is unique and custom to you.

48:33Sandy Diao:And so you don't need to do that much more research the same way that you would have been in sort of this pre-AI world. And so in order to succeed here, the growth mode itself is like, one, being adaptable and making sure that you're constantly checking on and making sure that you're aware of and changing how your distribution works. But two, I would say that this other concept that I referenced earlier as well, finding what your natural distribution advantage is is even more important. So we need to figure out essentially for the product that we have, what are some of the unique channels that we're going to have a leg up in?

49:07Sandy Diao:You know how when investors talk about their conversations with founders or the companies they invest in, they say, I'm looking for a founder with unfair advantages. They're basically saying, I'm looking for a founder who's going to be better at doing this than other people. I think growth works the same way. You need to find your unfair growth advantages, which is to say, I don't want to play the fair game of running ads like everybody else. I don't want to play the fair game of being competitive with everyone else. You want to say, I want to play the unfair game of the channel in which I have a leg up.

49:35Sandy Diao:So like the Descript example that we talked about, Descript is a product that is going to be socially shareable because its users create content. So let's lean into channels like affiliates and influencers and paid social advertising, right? And on the other hand, if you're a B2B product, You want to figure out what are some of the channels that you have there. A lot of business products are collaboration oriented. How do we really make the product collaborative? How do we really make invites a part of the product experience? So, you know, you really want to lean into start out with that. And even more so in the era of AI, lean into those early on and as hard as possible.

50:11Sandy Diao:And then, of course, adapt that strategy as time progresses, because the mode itself, the distribution channels themselves are constantly evolving. I love it. And at some point you talked a bit about B2C versus B2B. And there is actually a third, I would say, category, which are like prosumers. Can you maybe elaborate on this? Yeah, I think that prosumers are actually one of the most overlooked markets or segments to go after. I think there's this inclination to try to bucket companies or for companies to bucket themselves to say like, I'm a consumer product or I'm a B2B product. But actually, a lot of the businesses, especially the successful businesses and especially SaaS products of the world, are everything, right?

51:02Sandy Diao:Right. Prosumers are really interesting because especially for startups, prosumers can be pretty sizable in scale, meaning that you can reach some. A prosumer, by the way, I would define as someone who has some kind of like productivity need for using your product and it might be tied to financial outcomes. So like a content creator, maybe an indie developer, someone who has more than just like a simple hobby, but wants to do something productive with it. So that prosumer is great to go after because they have really, really high usage. They have propensity and willingness to pay, and they can essentially help you build into this eventual motion to go after some kind of more productive use case around B2B or enterprise.

51:43Sandy Diao:And B2Prosumer, I think, is actually a lot of businesses out there and a lot of reason why even LLMs have been successful in monetizing as well. You know, that casual GPT user who's using GPT or Gemini for search and just basic question and answer is probably not going to pay. But a user who's doing a little bit more with it, like trying to do more deep research or automate some of their workflows or even use it for a bit of their work as well, is most likely going to swipe their credit card and become a paying customer. And so I think B2Prosumer is actually a great early segment to go after and figuring out what is that consumer-like use case that I can go after but has more of that productivity, business propensity.

52:26Sandy Diao:One of the other benefits of B2Prosumer is that it's a really great fit for being talked about. So word of mouth tends to be a really great fit for prosumer products because, again, tied to things that you do, really easy to explain. You can have tutorial content. You have a lot of creators talk about it on social channels. And arguably one of the fastest and growing channels out there is social short form video content. So yeah, B2Prosumer is a great segment to go after. And I think is actually a combination of consumer businesses who are kind of evolving, going a little bit more upmarket, as well as enterprise B2B products who want to have bigger land grab, reach more customers, but maybe don't necessarily know how to do that yet.

53:10Yeah, I agree. And I also feel from a branding perspective, you can do a lot of very interesting things, you know, when it comes to prosumers, because you can have the brand of a pure consumer product that's targeted at people who are generating revenue, as you said, or might generate revenue or add productivity to what they use. and at the same time, you know, like generate revenue and scale that you would not usually get with B2C because people are less inclined to purchase like software than when they run a business.

53:47Sandy Diao:Yeah, exactly. Like a great example is one of the companies I work with is Adobe. And, you know, a lot of their early business was essentially consumers, right? It was, you know, individuals who are using Adobe tools for design. But over time, they used that to evolve into this sort of prosumer lane where you had productive individuals who were, you know, maybe their full-time job or their job itself was being a content freelancer. They worked in an agency. They worked in a small, medium-sized business. And then that kind of gave them the ability to enter enterprises and teams and more of that B2B segment.

54:22Sandy Diao:So, yeah, exactly what you said. That's cool. And I know we're almost running out of time. So I'm curious, like, what's the project that excites you the most at the moment? Project that excites me the most? Well, I would say one of the things I'm doing for myself right now is I'm really trying to figure out how to build up that stack of AI agents that can help orchestrate a lot of the work that we do across growth teams. And so one of the things I've really been playing around with is figuring out how we can create skills that are tuned for the nuances of some of these cross-functional growth campaigns.

55:00Sandy Diao:One of my favorite skills in Cloud Code, which is my growth operating system, is the skills creator, right? So if you don't necessarily have a perfect vision of how exactly you want the skill to be laid out because you don't know what the output is going to be or you don't know exactly what's going to work or not work, then Skills Creator is a great way to get started. Like any of these workflows that I'm creating, maybe let's say I want to build a skill around generating programmatic SEO content or landing pages. That Skills Creator will essentially, I give it a general sense of what I want to do.

55:33Sandy Diao:It will ask me questions on what I want to accomplish. and it has this sort of built-in evals process where I can go in and grade you know the outputs of what was generated and that allows me to do this trace analysis and say well here are different parts where I would like have done the research differently or where I would have like written the content differently and I think it's just a fantastic way for someone who's not you know fluent in coding or not fluent in terminal to get access to to skills and agents And so that's one of the personal projects that I'm working on. And I am working with a number of the teams that I advise to deploy some of these agents and see whether or not they actually generate the results that we are going to find to be high quality and high value.

56:17Super cool. And would you share anything on your blog or LinkedIn at some points?

56:24Sandy Diao:Yeah, that's a good thought. I am interested in writing up a tutorial for this. once I can get, you know, a really solid case study in place. Yes, I would absolutely be interested. Awesome. I mean, Tenzi, that was really, really cool. You shared a lot of valuable insights. Where can people like follow you or reach out to you if they need advice? Yeah, I love jamming on growth ideas. Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. I also write about this a lot on Substack, sandydiao.substack.com. So you can find me in either place. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Sandy, and have a fantastic day. Thank you. You too.