Why Most Businesses Will Fail Without AI Marketing | Ep. 204 with Raza Sheikh Founder & CEO of Identable

0:00Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have Raza. You are doing something very interesting that I believe is going to impact the entire world. and any entrepreneur, any business owner, they need to understand this. Doesn't matter if you have a brick and mortar, doesn't matter if you have an online business, e-commerce, you're a coach, you're an author, whatever it is, everyone needs to understand the impacts of AI, marketing. And that's why today we're gonna get deep into some of these topics today that at the end of this, people are gonna understand just how important this is.

0:38But you are the founder of Identable. I love this tagline, one platform, zero fragmentation for organic marketing. But Identable is dedicated to unifying and simplifying organic marketing for organizations of all sizes. So let's just kick it off, Raza, with what was the spark that made you say, I need to create this company and I need to do it right now? Well, you see, Daniel, the inspiration of Identable came from something that I witnessed on a day-to-day life before, wherein the chaos of organic marketing team facing or juggling around with patches of AI tools, free utilities, and legacy platforms that really work together, right?

1:23I saw the talented team spending more time wrestling with the technologies than actually marketing itself. The frustration drove me to create Identable, a single reliable platform that cuts through the noises and fragmentations. Basically, our mission here is to give organization back the time so that they can focus on the strategy rather than creating the content, scheduling the content, hiring technical SEO team to optimize their website, and so on and so forth. So the tool is basically a unified platform that packages all together for organic marketing part of it. So, Raza, if you were to think back just through your own success, other people that you know, would you say that a founder who can solve a problem for themselves first and then bring that to market is a great route for somebody versus coming up with something that maybe they don't even have any experience in?

2:25So that's a very good point, actually, because even the idea of Identable, the frustration itself is a firsthand experience of my own with my previous venture. Because I'm coming from a data background, a technologist and so on and so forth. I know how to build the code. But one thing that I was really missing out was shifting the code into the market and making it present to the target audience. I happened to join at one particular point of time, you know, alumni as VC of Antler VC back in Singapore. And that's where I actually learned the other side of the coin, which is the business side of the coin, the marketing and sales and so on and so forth.

3:11Having interacted with 52 founders, I realized that it is not that me alone who's struggling with this problem, but most of the tech entrepreneurs basically have these issues of making their product visible to the audience. So I used to hire this content writer separately who used to do this content, writing the content. And then basically we had this SEO expert who used to optimize our website so that the building block of the website is solid and the on-page and technical issues has been fixed, which used to take ages for him to do that. and then Google start ranking the page and the content comes in keyword optimization, LSI keywords, identification and so on and so forth.

4:00A lot of things that actually used to happen which used to take a time, right? And more importantly, what I realized is the social media aspect wherein I used to hire, I remember one of the Australian-based agencies that we hired for, They used to create a lot of content for us on the social media, which was great. But one aspect that was missing throughout this whole process was the prospects who used to interact with the content, they were not being captured. and I did not know for whatsoever reason that who interacted with my content and who got to resonate with the pain points that we are talking about and so on and so forth so that my sales team can go and approach them as a hot lead and so on and so forth.

4:52These are the problems wherein we have bought in and centralized into Identable. So Identable basically is, as I said, zero fragmentation. That means the building block, what I call it as flywheel effect completely. The building block is basically optimizing your website, making it ready for Google to rank. And then basically is the content creation where we basically entirely for six months or one year, we schedule your content, whether it's social media or a blog post or whatever it is with the right keywords. And we have seen the witness that our customer basically get ranked within three days of the content getting post for the blog post from the identical and capturing those or leads who have been interacting with the content centralizing into RCR.

5:43So complete flywheel effect that we are trying to bring into the whole aspect. Hope that makes sense. Yeah, no, there's a lot of talk about SEO changes and when it comes to not just Google rank, but how AI is now ranking because, you know, Google has their AI search and people are searching. I don't know what the number is, but I think it's like 20, 25 percent of people are searching now in ChatGBT in places. So, you know, the Google rank is changing and digital marketing is changing. How do you see AI playing into this if, you know, people are not staying up to speed with AI versus those who are?

6:23If you're not catching up with AI, then you're missing something for sure. But there is always an aspect where you have to really realize that AI is not everything. You have to have AI to feed into something that AI can personalize the content to you specifically, to your pain problems, to your target persona's pain problems, so that they can resonate to what problem you're talking about, right? Along with your solution. So in our platform, we personalize this entire content. And one other thing that you really bought out is, in my humble opinion, the SEO is not dead. SEO is still there, but generative search optimization, GSO, what we call it as, right, is coming up.

7:24It's coming up. But it is a semantic layer on top of the SEO itself, right? And what is the difference between that? SEO is more backlink backed up, backlink powered. But generative search optimization is more structural process. How you are structuring your content, how basically what keywords and what basically the information you're posting. You're structuring the entire content basically. And that is the combination that we bring in to make sure that we are not even catering the SEO, but also the generative search and optimization aspect. I'm glad you bring that up and you clarify. I like that.

8:08Traditional SEO is backlink driven. And I agree, it's not dead. I feel like every year, being in the digital marketing space for many years myself, every year they say SEO is dead or this is dead or meta ads are dead or this. But it just changed and transformed. But I like this generative search and its heavy importance on the content. So it's even more important to have a platform like Identable and be able to create this consistent, good quality content. So what are you seeing in terms of, so if I'm a business owner and I start using this software, how does this transform the team that I have?

8:50Do you think that people might downsize their team because now team members can do more? Will people increase their team because now they're getting more output? How do you see this playing out? Good point. so I've been last two weeks before I was reading through that Meta actually has automated the entire level one engineers completely so I'm not saying that the team size have to be reduced but what I'm basically saying is AI is to give you the space to do that valuable thing when you have AI to do your labor work so you can play smart. You can basically do things much better with AI and much faster because the whole idea of this current era that we are living in or AI era, what you can call it as, it's all about speed.

9:48It's all about speed. If you can't match up your computer's speed, then you're losing the game. As simple as that. And in my humble opinion, AI helps you in coming to the pace of your computers. or be you know going beyond it so we were interviewing son recently um who i guess you would call him a futurist and he was saying how iq is going to be the least important the least important thing in the future just because we have so many tools that are going to be probably smarter than most of us and that there's other eq and other things that are going to be important for this is just humans in general like regardless of of the digital marketing aspect but how do you feel about that in terms of uh you know just our species just humans in general in the future you know do you think iq is going to be less important more important how do you think ai is going to be transforming how we think i tend to agree with that unfortunately or whatever it is because we cannot match the iq of ai whatsoever so it's better that we agree it up right at the moment later than later but one thing that we can make the differences um you know like other day itself i was reading one article where it is it was saying that uh there's nothing as smart work because if you're not working hard you're not getting smarter right so uh that is something that ai does not do it right it could ai cannot work harder to get smarter you have to work harder as a human to make AI smarter.

11:25So how you are using AI is going to make the change in the shift of the game. What exactly are you doing with AI? I like that. That is good. I really like that. How do you see, and this is just AI in general here, what excites you the most about AI in the future? And then what scares you the most? Okay. Okay. Metaverse scares me the most, to be honest. Because being a father of three, I see most of my kids' time being spent on the screens. Right. And that's preparing them to be ready for the metaverse. Something like that. But see, ethical use, this is very important, right? ethical use of anything, right?

12:23Definitely would make things adaptable and easygoing as well. But too much is too bad for anything, whether in your day-to-day life or whether it's with AI, whether it's with data, anything, too much is always too bad. Too much ice cream is never good. We were talking about, you know, sweet tooth, right? I, you know, I got to stop, I got to stop eating ice cream, basically, because it's not good for my health. But, so this has been very informative and I appreciate that. I could understand how important it is, you know, it's going to be because like you said in the beginning, we have so many AI tools now.

13:02There's so many, so many things to do. It's very confusing. And really, we just want it into one single place. And I think it's a lot easier for our teams. So, you know, one last thing on what are you seeing in terms of the clients that are using this? You know, what are they telling you about how this is transforming their business? So one of the customer that yesterday I was having a chat with and being a small, tiny team, right? they basically see the value of Identable being added wherein they were basically able to do the posting just for the text long form and short form post and through Identable they are basically able to generate their explanatory videos with a prompt and with a blog post that they have earlier been written from and that made things very easy for them to convey the message to their target audience seamlessly.

14:02One other thing that they, you know, like pointed out to me, because in Identable, when we say that we capture the leads from the content interaction, we also allow email discovery as well. But in our roadmap, we do have this capability of, you know, email cadence and so on and so forth, which is what they basically have to use a third-party tool to do the email cadence and all those things. So that's a very good point that you have raised that when is this roadmap or when is this particular company coming into, which is a delightful ask for me because that shows and that proves that the customers are adapting our platform and they are appreciating and asking for something which we already have in the roadmap.

14:53When you realize you need to hire, it's usually already too late. I've been there wasting weeks, waiting for decent candidates. If I had used Indeed, I could have hired way faster. So when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed, sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45 % more applications than non-sponsored jobs.

15:28One thing I love about Indeed, it makes hiring fast because it puts you right in front of the right people without wasting time. Plus, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts. You only pay for results. And while I've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash founders story. Just go to indeed.com slash founders story right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.

16:06Indeed.com slash founders story. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Well, Raza, this is super exciting. I can't wait. You know, it seems like possibilities are endless. And now that you have the foundation built, you have an amazing software that I just started using, and it's really transformed our business in terms of being able to, one person now, at least from my experience, one person could do multiple things. Before, they had to master SEO content creation. They had to master social media. They had to master these things. Writing an article took four hours. now though one person can master like three different things and if you are a marketing agency and you're helping clients you know you can have more clients per person and making it you know doing as good or a better job than before which is you know good for anyone's business but I could totally understand that in the future this will only get better and better but if you want to get in touch with you they want to find out more information how can they do so so you can basically reach out to our support team and I'm going to leave the link for my personal calendar as well if there is any need for anyone to connect or you wanted to reach out to me.

17:29I'll be happy. I'll be happy to connect. I'll be happy to listen to what is to be said and yeah, we are here to do whatever is needed to be done to make SMEs successful in the marketing aspect. Well, Raz, this has been great. Thank you for joining us today on Founder's Story. And I hope everybody checks out Identable. Thanks. And thanks for the conversation. I had a lot of fun as well. I appreciate that. It was the same for me as well. Thank you very much.