Building the "Lovable of Marketing" with Patrick Haede, Co-Founder & CEO @ Superscale AI

27:14Patrick Haede:But that's something that we're probably going to work on next month. How does this all play out, do you think, when people will, you know, ads are going to proliferate, there's going to be more ads produced um and uh and people are gonna become desensitized to maybe talking heads ads they're going to start to recognize ai ads maybe even regulation comes in you know possibly how does this play forwards in your mind in regards to how you keep things creative and interesting in face of desensitization and navigating through ethical concerns yeah yeah so i mean um maybe to start with kind of the you know limiting limiting what can be created thankfully the foundational models already do quite a good job at that right so if someone wanted to create an ad that we don't want them to create from a content perspective that would already be like in majority of cases be limited by the foundational models themselves right they don't then they would not allow the content creation and we don't even have to you know put an additional barrier in i think in terms of the the amount of content the interesting thing is i got this question when we were doing fundraising quite a lot you know like okay imagine a world everyone uses super scale right and i was already like okay let's stop right there that's already a pretty good world right to start with like i mean if that's a problem we can think about that at that point but the interesting thing is what will happen is that obviously people are going to create more content they are going to launch this content and iterate it much faster than before.

28:53Patrick Haede:And content will start to fade out more quickly, right? Because some formats won't work anymore, and something is trending just a short amount of time. And interestingly enough, it's going to make these kind of tools like the one we're building even more relevant, because now you need to come up with new creative ideas. And you need to do that more quickly. Now, I think what's interesting, and this is something that drives me personally a lot is when we started working on Superscale, which is only the beginning of this year, I was just spending a lot of time looking over the shoulders of people doing performance marketing.

29:28And what I realized is that most of them didn't even have the time to do the job that they

29:34Patrick Haede:actually loved. What they actually would like to do is they would like to think about creative ideas of how to advertise their product. What they had to do is spend time in CapCut and all these manual tools to put together 30 ad variations of something and then upload them in the Facebook ad manager, which takes three hours. and so I think we are entering a world where ideally with these kind of tools you have time to actually be a creative marketeer and we will see even better ads like more creative ads more ads that are not an ad but actually entertaining because someone now has the time to think about that idea and then just put that idea into super scum say okay now make me 10 ads from this idea and I'm just going to try it out tomorrow.

30:21Patrick Haede:So that's what I would hope for kind of it does in the enablement of people that are working in this world today. It's always like massively accelerating idea to execution if you consider execution to be done fully by the AI rather than having to pull together a film crew, find a location, you know, all of these things. So it's a real hotbed of creativity potentially that you're building. Exactly. And it might be, I mean, what I see, which I find quite interesting you know I mean people ask me like are we building this company to make you know influencers you know go out of the job or whatever like I think ultimately this is one more tool ideally a very powerful one that you can use for creating content and running ads but it might be that you generate 100 speaking characters with Superscale you use them for your product you find the one that's performing best and you create 10 variations with Superscale you And then you use the same blueprint and you create 10 variations with a human, but only then you know that it's actually going to perform.

31:25Patrick Haede:You might still have human actors be part of your kind of ad ensemble. Now, people thought like a couple of weeks back that this would have to be the case. If you go to Superscale today and you look at the actors, and we, I mean, we are now deprecating them, but we used to have other actors also AI generated. like four or six weeks ago you would think like okay still looks a bit too polished you know not natural enough and people wouldn't believe me that i was saying like look you know there's people that are going to have you know lara and lara is going to work at this this company and she doesn't exist but she's all over facebook advertising for this product people wouldn't believe me because they're saying like okay it all looks ai it looks polished the thing is what i've learned over the last half a year is that every estimation that I had over the, about the progress of foundational models was wrong by, and sometimes an order of magnitude in terms of how quickly that would get better.

32:26Patrick Haede:Right. So you, you like everything that I ever thought would take a long time to get better and to get like to a level where you wouldn't see the difference anymore, real and real world and AI has come, you know, just so fast. So it's like today, I know that even the things that we are working on internally right now if they look a bit ai like a bit polished i know that in four weeks they're going to be like you know at a point where it's indistinguishable so it's like kind of our roadmap is planning for that future already right and and i think starting next week we are gonna you know i share a lot of updates on x or linkedin on like our product progress and i'm going to share like even some creatives that we've generated already and it's going to be like it's just absolutely nuts what's possible right and when you think about you know like the power that maybe a gym shark or nike or like the big brands they can produce creatives but you can now just take that creative extract the script you just take that person which is a you know runner and you create like a running shoe ad like nike like literally the same thing with like click of a button you know and now like if you're a small e-commerce brand you're bringing a new product to the market.

33:36Patrick Haede:You have that power. You can run 100 ads. Before, only Nike could do it because they had the budget. Now you can also, which is something that I find really beautiful. There's a lot of people, Shopify, Lovable, they're building businesses. We want to give them this app where they're thinking like, man, 100 bucks a month, I now have the marketing agency in my pocket, basically. And I can be as successful, ideally, with ads as the big companies, which I think would be pretty cool for us to see as kind of like a vision of the of the company yeah it's super cool and um i mean if it goes the way that you know what you could build with lovable six months ago versus what you can build with the 2.0 and the agent and everything 100 it's like it's just like wildly different so so whether you go beyond video will you do like newsletters and linkedin posts and like will you do you plan to not just expand how you can create video ads but also expand formats and become that full all-encompassing marketing product we have obviously a lot of requests right i mean if i would have to list all of the formats that people want to want to want to produce it's it's a lot the way that i think about this is that a lot of the the foundational work for example the agent that we are building which in our case is is i mean it's an agentic several agents i don't know how that's called to the agentic uh you know infrastructure setup i don't know what the name for that is i don't know if there even is a name at this point so young everything but that agentic setup that basically understands ads from a marketeer's perspective and builds new ads that's the foundation of what we're building now that that foundation will work better every day now and the better it works the more formats you can plug into it and it will be able to replicate these formats and create new formats.

35:31Patrick Haede:And ultimately, every ad is a collection of pixels on a canvas, right? And that canvas could be a 9 to 16 or a 16 to 9, or, you know, it could be landscape, could be static. For us, it's really, you know, I think we're not just a startup that builds a very simple wrapper around foundation models. We are spending actually, I think, more time than the average startup thinking about what is the underlying infrastructure that we have to develop that will then allow for us to just plug in new foundational models and it still works and that's a different kind of set so i think short term you know if i look at like the next three months is already a long time frame and in our regard it's going to be fully focused on you know tiktok instagram facebook like these ad creatives and ad formats once we see these formats you know they're really being run at scale, then obviously we can look into something like statics, which would be kind of adjacent still because there is even statics being run on Facebook.

36:32Patrick Haede:But it's all around. Our job is to take a URL and to understand your product and your brand and your company so deeply that we can create performing ad creative for you as quickly as possible, whatever the format is. And then we are able to scale it for you and we are able to replicate it for you. And that's our job and so then i think we just choose the next format that's most widely requested and you know people like there's already people kind of like in early beta where you see like five formats on the home page right now and there's already people that are testing new formats internally or with customers so this is kind of how we go about it thinking about the business model there are a lot of different options and routes you could take i suppose there's get people to pay SaaS fee, there's seat-based, there's usage-based, you know, paper ad kind of thing that you could select.

37:23But then it just crossed my mind the idea that if you're able to close the loop by being plugged in with performance metrics and even sales data, there could be an interesting route where you say, we won't charge you unless we deliver you, you know, net positive revenue, net revenue. you and you know you could start to say well we'll just take 10 percent of whatever sales we generate from you assuming they're profitable sales which you theoretically have the ability to determine so have you thought about any like business model innovation maybe not today but

37:57Patrick Haede:maybe in future i think in the future it can become very relevant to a business like ours the interesting insights and honestly i've been surprised myself about that is how quickly super scale creatives are amongst the best performing creatives that companies have. Like, honestly, I mean, we just launched a product publicly to be used by everyone, tried by everyone, like maybe six weeks ago. I would have never thought, you know, like, I mean, I knew about the power to create things, but I wouldn't think like, okay, someone creates 10 ads, and already one of them is their best performing ad. But when you think about it longer, it makes sense because now they had complete creative freedom, right?

38:41Patrick Haede:They were not limited in anything. So they were just thinking about what is the best possible ad that I could imagine for my business and they immediately had it. So because that's the case, right now we just have a pricing that we feel like is very, very fair, which means like whenever you export an ad, you have to pay for it, which is like, okay, you want to use this ad creative. And we are, we can already be quite confident that the ad creatives that we create have good potential for your product, then you just, you know, pay per export, which I think is like a very competitive set. But overall, we think the company like very long term, like, like, okay, what's the foundation we're setting today?

39:18Patrick Haede:And then where can we go with this? I think once we close the loop on like performance data being in the product, we can create like incredibly competitive pricing, because there is going to be a world where, like, we might be able to predict even performance of creatives and then obviously it gets really interesting right because you can i mean the interesting thing is like even subjectively when i look at when i speak with customers and i look at their account like i can already tell i mean i'm basically spending you know 10 hours a day seeing ads at this point so it's like i can already tell you know from just seeing a couple ads like okay this one is pretty interesting you should run this one we'll see and then sometimes you know i sometimes i'm wrong but it's like that there's a tendency where i can see like okay this works so this can be done programmatically right and you can see like okay how this So then you could think about, okay, we just run percentage on the ad spend.

40:08Patrick Haede:And then obviously this becomes like a very, very interesting business financially. Now, the interesting thing is from a business perspective, like this can work even with the setup that we have right now, right? I mean, the ROI is so high. Like if you have to compare, basically, am I going to spend$100 on Superscale to generate ads? Or am I going to pay an agency a service fee even for them to start creating ads? And it's going to cost me two and a half thousand euros or more. So that is so clear. So it's like more, we optimize that first path. And once we get to a great customer base and like, you know, large scale in that regard, then we can really, you know, start innovating on that front and just, you know, integrating more data.

40:50Patrick Haede:but customers are actively asking us about it you know like they're they want that's the thing i said about like the usage pattern on the internet right they're messaging us saying like hey can i give you our ads account and can you look at the existing ads and can you do like can you just be or everything for us please you know that's kind of like how they want things to work because they go to judge dbt and just put in everything and they get their work done you know like that's that's how the word now works so that's where our product will obviously develop into and it's incredible I mean, incredible to see that kind of pull from users.

41:20And Patrick, I'd love to hear more about traction and where you're at with sort of customer usage, any revenue figures you're able to share in sort of the next six months for you guys.

41:32Patrick Haede:Yeah, not yet, I would say. We're a bit early and we have to be a bit secretive in some ways. It's important for me. I think the one thing that I want to share is the performance, which is quite interesting, right? that we are seeing these kind of performance levels for the meta ads right now. I think it would be surprising how many, there's thousands of chat messages being sent on Superscale. I mean, the level is much higher than we would think. Like, okay, the usage in terms of, okay, how many people are chatting with this platform trying to generate ads? Obviously, we are also in a bit of competitive market, right?

42:08Patrick Haede:And people are looking at the product and we see on a regular basis, some people trying out the product that i know will not they are not a consumer product they are actually in the in a similar space playing in a similar space as us and then it comes interestingly to the question of kind of what's the mode right how do you build a product in a world like this where everyone has like 10 agents and and trying to copy the competitor and we try to you know build a brand and build build somewhat of a of a unique user experience and and invest a lot of time in this kind of agentic level research where it's like okay this is what's going to differentiate us, you know, in the long term, like yesterday or next, someone tagged me and said, look, you know, there's some some founder made some crazy claims about their ad generation products.

42:51Patrick Haede:There is also a product in the US, I won't name the name, but they have made a quicker name for themselves with some crazy marketing. But ultimately, what happens is people realize quite quickly, like, okay, which product really works, and which is more only talking about it. and we have been a bit more on the quiet side so far because we realized quite quickly it's just not that easy you know you can very quickly build in an app that you just put in and you plug in chat gbt and it generates you in static ad and you can say oh my god i have the ad maker it's not working like that you know like when you really want to get to performing creative you're going to have like a certain grind that you need to go through like the agentic side like really making network is really really really hard so it's more for me like every day i generate ads with super scale and i look at okay like where are we and i speak with our customers and i talk about you know is this performing for you like you know just tell me honestly the more we see of that which is already kind of like the strongest signal for me then we are going to be also a bit louder like we we will also be a company that is happily sharing you know how revenue is growing but for me it's more and i now like i want to focus on this really has to work like you can easily enter the market and saying like oh my god we have the craziest at pro at at maker ever you have a hard paywall make people pay 100 bucks everyone will do it and your strike graph is going to go like this we have seen people in our market to do exactly that and investors were calling me and saying like oh my god 4 million ar yeah and 80 percent sure because the product didn't work so for me it's like we're going to be like a louder company when we actually know that now is the time and until then we are happy to be a bit more you know secretive and people can figure out themselves what works what doesn't so that we have some head start cool makes sense and we've we've had Stefan and Peter from Creandum on the podcast previously and they're good friends of the show and they led your pre-seed round.

44:52Five million dollars, is that right? And so maybe you could tell us how that all came about and how did you select Creandum as well?

45:02Patrick Haede:Yeah, yeah. It was a crazy time in the beginning of this year. Our second son was four weeks old. I started the fundraise, I think, on a Tuesday in a week, in one of the weeks. And we closed the round on the following Monday. It was absolutely crazy. Ultimately, we decided for Corandom because they have an incredible team. I'm just going to be really honest here. They have an incredible team. When you visit one of the offices, you can feel the culture that they have. And for me, culture, even inside our company, is incredibly important. They have actually built a VC that has a team culture that as a founder, you can feel.

45:44Patrick Haede:where it's really about like everyone is gonna is is full on about how are we gonna build a company like Crandom our company that is gonna deliver the best results for our founders obviously it was very interesting with them chatting about the product you know having been investors in lovable like we had some really really intense conversations also over the course of these days but it was very quickly like I realized you know especially Fred and Philip from the team like that work very closely with us they had gone so deep on the product you know they could tell me things that you know just I mean you would really have to be like an user for a couple hours to know these kind of things and so I realized like look you know in the beginning if you're in that stage the only thing that really matters is your product and you go to market and basically every week you have a problem in either one of these areas right you need either better product you need better go to market and that it just, you know, every week kind of like iterates.

46:40Patrick Haede:So I was thinking like, we need investors that want to understand this product incredibly deeply and want to work with you with us on the product. They also need to understand that figuring out this product will take time. It's not going to be like, we didn't, we very specifically didn't want to be the hype company, like the hype company without the product, basically what I'm saying. So these were the factors that I was considering. And so then we made the decision to partner with them. And it's been amazing. I spent time at the office in Stockholm and they obviously have an amazing network of people that we can talk to.

47:14Patrick Haede:And they've been very helpful in us figuring out the product. And maybe one interesting anecdote I want to share is we had dinner and then Fred from the team, he challenged me on the quality of the ads. He was like, I'm going to be very honest with you. you know if you don't like it as a founder I understand but I'm not going to hold back on my feedback of whether I think the quality is good because I think we can win this market if we have the best ads and he was literally telling me like back then you know a couple of test formats like that's not that's not good enough yet and I was like look this is what I what I would need as a founder you know I don't want I want someone that's very honest with me thinking about how this can be successful and this company will only be successful if it delivers great amazing ads so you have to be honest about quality right and you and and i would want to be challenged in that way so that was unique and so i was thinking you know that's a great part and obviously felix a longtime friend of mine he's been with random for a long time so you could tell me a lot about the company but you know it's just it's it's been great working with them that's that's really uh that's that's the summary just as a follow-on to the creative thing i i heard I think it was posted on social media.

48:25So this isn't like industry gossip or anything. But did they get Anton from Lovable to chat with you? Was that right?

48:32Patrick Haede:Yeah, we chatted. And there's also some more announcements that we'll share, but not yet. Okay, cool. I mean, it's very cool that you can take your Lovable link and chuck it into SuperScale, isn't it? It's happening surprisingly often every day, which is really cool to see. I mean, the Lovable team is obviously doing it basically a part of rebuilding the internet. Because we see so many Lovable links, you know, signing up for Superscale. Like, literally every day, it's just crazy to see, right? It's just like the amount of applications that they're building on a daily basis is just absolutely crazy.

49:09Yeah.

49:09Patrick Haede:So. It's incredible. I'm a user of Lovable and now Superscale. So, it's great. I mean, we could go on for hours, Patrick, because we, you know, I think we've shown through our questions that we think your product is really exciting. We can see a part of your vision. And I think you've done a great job in kind of explaining how you are thinking very long term and just really scratching the surface on what this business could be. So it's very, very exciting. And yeah, I'm sure we would have loved to go on, you know, 20 times over on our recording time. But we are coming to the end. So I'm just going to ask our two kind of standard questions, just get to know you a bit better, because obviously we focused a lot on the business.

49:56The first is, I guess, not related to you, but might give us a little insight into how you think about things and think of the world. It's a future unicorn prediction. So if there's a company out there that you've kind of spotted that's maybe early that you think could be massive, who would that be?

50:12Patrick Haede:yeah so i um i think you know a very interesting company i saw recently is called polar they're developing a new payments platform polar.sh what struck me about it simply i just read the website right and and obviously there is a giant like stripe you know that they're going up against or at least they're playing in a similar field but i found like they had a very unique point of view on on how the world inside the internet is evolving like what kind of requirements people have on the platform around payments and I always find it interesting when a company is basically building in a space where everyone would kind of say like I mean this that space is kind of taken right I mean there is giant companies playing in that space but you see like a small company really you know having a unique perspective and a great product as well and I pay a lot of attention to that also with with you know investments that i'm making so i would name them as an interesting company that i would want to be following yeah awesome am i right in thinking that irish is an irish company i'm not sure actually i just saw the the i just found the website i found i'm pretty sure we because oh no actually no oh it's stockholm as well oh that's interesting there was another there was another payments company i think that was in ireland that is not doing the same thing maybe but they were trying to build payments for agents so if an agent needs to pay for something oh yes task interesting that was really interesting but i had i actually it was a different company to polar but polar looks really cool as well so that's a great one i love that because they have a small team still so it's early so it's a proper future unicorn shower which which we love we can then i can revisit in a couple years we can revisit in a couple of years exactly or six months as the now it is exactly exactly 100 % 100 % and then our final question Patrick is our dinner party guest game so if you were to have dinner with any three people who would they be that's obviously a very interesting question I actually don't have I'm not I don't fully remember the name I think I only remember his first name.

52:26Patrick Haede:I think his first name is Ashok. And he's the head of the Tesla autopilot team, the Tesla FSD team. So I think that would be a very interesting conversational partner for dinner. I think I'd love to just spend one night, you know, being able to ask Sam Altman a couple questions. You know, it's really as I mean, that might be a standard answer. But the reality is, there is not that many people in the world that now have, you know, that deep of an insight into the future, I think, than he has. And I've been very fascinated by Ray Dalio, as I think that will be my third person. Just his predictions about where the world's going in terms of like the world order and economics have been really fascinating to me.

53:12Patrick Haede:So I think that would be my round of people that I would love to ask questions. You know, I think especially when you think about real world AI, and you know, the FSD as a product and Tesla, but also the Optimus robot and how they are really thinking about the timeline internally. It's like I'm always fascinated by technological developments that most people don't see coming at all. Like most people in Europe, especially even in the US, I guess, that you would talk to about like self-driving cars, they would still think that it's kind of, you know, it's just out there, right? It's just like a few years ahead, where it's already happening.

53:50Patrick Haede:And based on a tech stack, that's just really interesting. So it's like, I think I would want to be talking with people that are probably closest to where technology really is today, that know where it already is, even before it kind of enters the world. So that would be my round table that if I could put it together. Awesome. You can tell you're a pretty locked in founder based on those answers, because I'm sure you would be really interested in getting their view on your business and just like making sure that you're planning for that future. yeah well that's awesome so thank you very much patrick so yeah um thanks again for coming on it's great to to be able to speak to you we we really just think that you're onto something massive and it's super exciting so it's great to speak to you so early in the journey really but clearly you know there's a great product there and as hector said earlier anyone listening who's thinking about launching a product or has a product or creates ads at the moment should definitely go and try out Superscale.

54:50But thanks so much for taking us through it and telling us more about the business.

54:53Patrick Haede:Yeah, awesome. Thank you very much for having me on and great to meet you and looking forward to staying in touch. That's it for this week. Thanks very much for listening. To stay up to date with the latest episodes, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We also have a newsletter called Reading Unicorns, which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox. Please tell your friends about it and engage with us on social media and we'll see you on the next episode.