From Music Producer to Marketing CEO: Domain Expertise

10:47Andres Figueira:So our team is above 15 right now. A couple of those are part-time, but mostly are full-time. I don't like to rely on contractors whenever, unless entirely, you know, mandatory because we're overloaded. But I like to have an internal team that understands how we do things and that we're, you know, of the same culture. And that seems to work.

11:15Peter Malick:Do you offer the services of business development to companies all over the world? Or do you have a certain demographic or industry that you like to work with, be it the music industry or be it something else? Or would you be able to shed some more light about how inbound AV works? Sure.

11:30Andres Figueira:So all of our clients so far have been North America, Canada, and the United States. And it's not that I don't want to expand around the world, but if you go to, say, Europe, you're dealing with some fairly serious time zone issues, especially being in Los Angeles. And so I just haven't really sought it out because of that. And as far as within the country, our clientele had been all over the place. I just said goodbye to our client number one after nine years, a couple months ago, and he's a solopreneur. He publishes recording software, you know, basic like plugins for digital recording that emulate different pieces of studio gear that every studio used to have.

12:20Andres Figueira:And so he was my last and only solopreneur, but we've worked all over the map. We've worked with a car wash company here in the Western United States that was emailing to, I think at the time, 2 million size database. And they have like 170 locations. So we've worked with some pretty large companies and also some medium, small companies too. Okay.

12:51Peter Malick:And do the companies that work with you guys, do they need to tailor or do they need to meet certain requirements in order to be able to have their business development done with the accelerated velocity that InboundAV mentions? Or can you work with anybody at whichever point they stand in their process of creating the company?

13:11Andres Figueira:Well, it depends. I mean, if you're like a scrappy startup, you probably can't afford us. Although if you're a scrappy startup that looks to me like you could be a really successful company, then yeah, I want to have the conversation and I want to make concessions and I want to be part of that, honestly. So it just depends. I mean, I think the main part of it for me is that this is an ecosystem. It's, you know, you might be building a website, but the website doesn't operate in its own universe. You know, there's like social media that's going to impact the website and the website's going to impact social media.

13:52Andres Figueira:There's a CRM, a database and marketing that's done through email and so forth. And each one of them touches the other. So I prefer to work with a company that recognizes that.

14:03Peter Malick:Okay.

14:04Andres Figueira:And it often happens. You know, somebody says, well, I need you to put up these, you know, to redesign this part of a website. And I start to look, and doing what they want to do, yeah, it'll make the website better, but it's really not going to change the trajectory of the company. So I want to try to get across, you know, like, look, your goal is, if I have this right, is to sell more stuff or make more money or whatever it is, you know, or, you know, serve more people in a nonprofit environment. And in order to do that, you need more than just this little piece that you've identified. It's definitely something you need, but it's not everything.

14:46Peter Malick:Peter, do you help them with their marketing strategy in general, or is this something that Inbound AV prioritizes automation and having their processes occur more behind the scenes and letting the workers focus on something else?

15:00Andres Figueira:So, I mean, that's a loaded question, especially because of where we are with like AI capabilities and AI development. And the thing I alluded to earlier was that last Sunday, so it was a week ago yesterday, you're familiar with Claude?

15:22Peter Malick:Yes, of course. Of course, of course.

15:24Andres Figueira:Yeah. So Claude, you know, as you know, is sort of viewed in the AI community as the choice for developers for actually coding and developing apps. And on the 11th, I guess I'm dating the podcast, but anyway, so it's eight days ago, they launched what's called Claude Cowork. Have you read about that?

15:51Peter Malick:I believe so. I did read that Claude put out some new specs and functionalities for their LLM that kind of changed the game, but I haven't gone right into what it is, so I will learn from what you explained to us, Peter.

16:04Andres Figueira:Yeah, yeah. So the deal is, you know, the Cloud Code was this amazing platform, and developers were developing a lot of stuff very, very quickly. And there's just a lot to it where, you know, it'll QA itself, it'll find bugs, it'll fix them, sometimes without you asking. But that coding had to be done from a development environment. So, for instance, I'm a Mac user. On Mac, there's a terminal, which, you know, there's a development environment. And so you can run Cloud Code through terminal. But CodeWork opened it up where you don't have to be involved in anything coding at all. If you're going to put in a prompt for what you want to do, Cloud Code's going to ask you.

16:54Andres Figueira:I'm sorry, co-work, will ask you questions about it, and then it'll go off and do it. And it's really incredible. The claim from Claude is that Claude co-work was built by Claude in 10 days.

17:14Peter Malick:Okay. So the AI built the co-work module in 10 days after it was prompted to create a solution for that.

17:22Andres Figueira:Yeah, I think there's a little bit more than that, you know, but yeah, but but nevertheless, it's just it's incredible if it's even, you know, even 3 % true. It's incredible.

17:33Peter Malick:That totally changes the name because like, for example, coding, which has been such a niche and specialized skill is now becoming something that is more available to the general user of an AI LLM because I might not be an expert coder, but at least I can go into the lovable app and create a website now that I did not know how to do before or things in that style. So that really is a game changer. So cool. And Peter, would you be able to also shed some light on how you guys are leveraging AI? Maybe not specific solutions, but like how does it work for you?

18:06Andres Figueira:I'm actually doing a presentation at NAMM tomorrow, and it's something I've done for about 10 years now. And one of the things I'm going to talk about is building a website, you know, using an app, you know, an AI app that will generate it for you. And I've been playing around with that myself for a bit. Our graphics department's been playing around with it. and I attempted on Saturday to create a website using Google AI Studio. I'd never used Google AI Studio for that particular thing before, and I was actually my teenage daughter. I dropped her at a dance class. I was sitting across the street at a pizza parlor.

18:51Andres Figueira:I ordered a slice of pizza. They had Wi-Fi. They had an outdoor table, and in, I think, under 20 minutes, I created a pretty decent website. And the stunning thing about that is the last time I did that, which was, I mean, only a few weeks before, the app would say like, okay, we'll get back to you when it's done. And then, you know, it's not that long, but it's a half an hour, it's an hour, whatever. And it comes back. Well, on Saturday, it took like three minutes.

19:25Peter Malick:Wow.

19:26Andres Figueira:And it's crazy. So right now we're like in the middle of like an 8.1 earthquake as far as tech goes, right? Yes. And it's incredible. And so I actually was having a conversation with the head of our design and development team, and she's mainly a designer, a very talented designer. I was showing her the website this morning and just talking about, well, we've got to really recognize that the div part of a simple website is not going to be something that we're going to be needed for. Okay. But luckily, we have a very talented designer who is not going to be replaced by AI anytime soon, and that's for sure.

20:19Andres Figueira:And so consequently, how do we make that transition? I think everybody's facing that. There's a transition of like, well, we're not going to be able to sell the widgets we've been selling before, but how do we stay relevant? And basically to stay relevant is that we all have to become thought leaders. and so the companies who might have come to us who found hey they built a pretty good website or they built a great website whatever that those people are going to be more moved by we have the plan and what we put together and AI is going to execute it is going to be a game changer for you because we bring the creative to it that will make the difference.

21:14Peter Malick:And Peter, how many, if this is something, a detail that you can give us, how many customers are you working with through inbound AV right now?

21:22Andres Figueira:So I don't actually have a good answer for that. We have, most of the projects we do are fairly substantial projects. And we have about 20 of those going on. But then we have customers from nine years back who need something done. And so I don't know if I count them as a real active customer or not, but that's kind of the way it works. And you were asking what we do with AI, and I'm not going to directly answer your question, but I have another mini tale that I think you'll find interesting.

22:03Peter Malick:I love that. Okay.

22:04Andres Figueira:And so we have this guy who's just a really talented developer. He's been doing it for a long time. He's brilliant as far as finding solutions of stuff that can't be done, right? And he'll find a way to do it. And so we started, in our focus on AI, we started to pay attention to this micro-SaaS trend that's happening right now, where basically a programmer will find a particular thing, very narrow product, a piece of software that does one thing that nobody else seems to be doing. and they'll code it. They'll code it with the help of AI. They'll build a website with AI. They basically, possibly within days or certainly weeks, they can have a launch website that's bringing them revenue.

23:05Andres Figueira:And so we became interested in that. Like the successful micro SaaS might bring in$50 ,000 a month or maybe$100 ,000 a month. So it's not like you're starting Facebook or anything. But, you know, I mean, I could live pretty comfortably on 100 ,000 a month.

23:28Peter Malick:I would not complain either. It's totally possible.

23:33Andres Figueira:So anyway, we started to think about that. We had an idea for abandoned cart video generated entirely by AI. and so Joshua, our developer, he's been building on AWS, Amazon Web Services, for well over a decade. And so he started to build this product and about, I don't know, a month later, I got an email from Amazon and they said like, hey, you know, we recognize this Gen AI product that you're building on AWS and we're nominating you for funding. and so the smoke has cleared and so about two weeks ago we got a substantial amount of funding

24:23Peter Malick:from amazon uh it's not yeah it's crazy and so i think you know i think the takeaway here is

24:32Andres Figueira:that there are incredible opportunities for people out there it's like we were just building a small product and we started to realize well you know what this isn't a small product this is this is a big piece of software. And lo and behold, evidently Amazon recognized that too.

24:49Peter Malick:In no way was there an outreach from you guys to get Amazon to notice you, but Amazon just did. And they reached out to you to mention that they would like to provide further funding to have the product expand and become even better. Yeah.

25:02Andres Figueira:I mean, their entire agenda is that if the product's successful, they'll be billing us for gobs of money of us building the product on AWS. you know, for the usage of, yeah. So that's their entire agenda. They're not looking for a part of the company. They're just looking to sell more of their services.

25:22Peter Malick:That is so cool. And it's so inspiring to just feel that if you're able to pinpoint one of those friction parts in processes or in day-to-day life with software, with anything else that you feel you can make better, anybody who's listening here should feel in the right security and motivation to go try and solve that because more often than not, what you're mentioning could happen, Peter. And that is so cool that it happened to you guys. So congratulations on that as well.

25:49Andres Figueira:Yeah, thank you. It's a strategic point. If you're thinking of building something like this, why not build it on AWS? Because they're out there looking for products that they think could become successful.

26:04Peter Malick:Now that we're at the beginning of 2026 and it's mid-January already, well, I'm already past the half of the month. um what is the number one priority for you as CEO and founder of inbound AV and how you want to take

26:18Andres Figueira:the company in the next 12 months like for 2026 yeah no it's all about AI and I think it has to be and so as a company you know just I was mentioning the conversation I had with our our developer and phone call coming in there get a dump there it is um and it's the same thing it's like how does inbound EV stay relevant, stay ahead of the curve, automate our clients' processes more and more, but also automate our own company to where we recognize stuff that we can be making money on in 2027, 2030, 2032, and recognize the stuff that we probably won't be making money on, maybe even in the next six months and keep ahead of it and do strategic planning to make sure that we stay relevant.

27:19Peter Malick:Anybody who's hearing us, any company, or anybody who's interested in the services that Inbound AV offers, how could they go about contacting you guys? What would be the best method? And how could they reach out to see if it's a proper fit?

27:31Andres Figueira:Okay, I'm pretty easy to find. And I'm on LinkedIn. and it's LinkedIn slash IN slash Peter Malik. And Twitter at Silver Tone, which is more from my guitar playing days handle. And then, you know, our website. It's very easy. There's a couple of pages to book a meeting with me. Inbound AV, as in audio video, although it's morphed into accelerated velocity. over the course of nine years. So yeah, inboundav.com.

28:10Peter Malick:Amazing. So anybody who is interesting, you heard it here first, you can look up Peter Malik via LinkedIn, also inboundav.com, where you can also just go through a few pages and set up a call with the CEO. And that way, see if your company is a proper match to what Inbound AV is offering. And with that said, Peter, thank you so much for hopping on the show, for giving us a bit of your time and all of your insights and your stories of how Inbound AV came to be.

28:36Andres Figueira:Absolutely, Andres. Pleasure. Pleasure was mine. Great conversation.

28:41Peter Malick:No, no. Likewise. Likewise. And to anybody who is still here with us, thank you so much for staying on, for listening to the show, and for always coming back to learn about the different personalities that we talk to and the different industries that we are seeing as well. And with that said, I'll see you next time.

29:03Thank you.