Ep. 613 - Moburst COO Lior Eldan - Put the Data Where the Work Happens

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0:48With AI, you can do much more in terms of empower the team to do much more so that each person can manage more tasks, manage more clients, but also spend his time on the stuff where is more interesting. And to be honest, the human is better at, which is, you know, the creative part, the strategizing part, and leave lots of the nitty gritty to the automations and machines. And then the other piece is rethinking things. We've started to build our own products and starting to kind of sell clients into services and products and kind of diversifying our revenue, not only services, but also being more of SaaS or products or non-service revenue as well.

1:34So that's the two ways we're kind of trying to think about it.

1:41Welcome to the Second in Command podcast, produced by the COO Alliance and brought to you by its founder, Cameron Herold. In the Second in Command podcast, we talk to top COOs who share the insights, strategies, and tactics that made them the chiefs behind the chief. And now, here's your co-host, experience-driven growth strategist, former chief strategy officer, and author of No One Needs Another Company Mug, Lindsay Smith. Today, our guest is Lior Eldon, the co-founder and COO at MoBurst. Lior is the co-founder and COO of MoBurst, a global digital full-service mobile-first marketing agency. With deep expertise in organic and paid marketing, Lior has been instrumental in driving innovative strategies that have propelled numerous startups and Fortune 500 companies to success.

2:33Under his leadership, MoBurst has worked with top brands like Google, Samsung, Uber, Reddit, and Pfizer, helping them to achieve significant growth. His passion for leveraging data-driven insights and creative solutions has established him as a thought leader in the digital marketing industry. I am pleased to welcome Lior to today's conversation. Happy to be here. Thanks, Lindsay. I would really love it if we could just start off with you sharing with our audience a little bit about you and about MoBurst. Of course. So my name is Eyal Dan. I'm one of the founders of MoBurst. We started off MoBurst almost 13 years ago, originally as a mobile shop.

3:21and through the years we acquired a bunch of smaller agencies as we scaled the company and we've done five acquisitions to date and today we're a full-service digital agency leaning in heavily into tech and AI. We're kind of trying to transform into being an AI native agency, 150 people globally, serving some of the most amazing companies and brands in the world across a wide range of services from media, creative, PR, Amazon marketing, podcasting, etc. So that's a brief about me and the company. And you today are serving as Mopar COO. Correct. And one of the things about being a COO is that there's so many things that that title encompasses.

4:15What does a day in your life as COO look like? That's a good question because I feel it changes and scales with the company, right? So I think I'm involved in multiple facets of the organization, depending on the company's needs. I kind of own a lot or work closely with the teams on processes, on hiring, on kind of the kind of more financial metrics with regards to operations. So profitability, what's the forecasting look like on the one side? And then on the other side, I'm very much involved in the data side of things. So how can we create a data infrastructure to serve our teams? How can we break silos as we have a remote team across different geographies?

5:24and how can we get the different units and the company as a whole working together more efficiently and to better serve our clients. So you're serving both data and people, which comes with its own set of challenges because you treat data one way and you treat people a different way. How do you balance the two of those things? So I think increasingly, especially with AI today, A, the data is more and more the infrastructure that any successful AI implementation stands on. And I think what I've learned is that having the data is not enough. It's really about giving the people the data at the right place at the right time.

6:17So if most of our company works on Slack, So increasingly, we're kind of moving to send alerts on Slack of stuff that might be off with the data, have the kind of data agents. So if you want to speak with AI, so to have it within Slack, within the channel, we have different agents which you can speak with, ask about clients' numbers, campaigns. so I think the more it's in where the actual work is being done the better because one of the I think the challenges of generally any company and especially remote teams is so many systems people scattering data is scattered across a bunch of and I think this even becomes even more important as you're acquiring companies and they have their own systems and their own processes.

7:17So getting everyone kind of to speak the same language, so to speak, and look at the same data in the same environment, I think is crucial. How widespread is your team? You mentioned a few times now that they're in different geographies. What are we talking? So we have quite spread. We have our team spread across Israel, which is originally where our company was founded. And then we just acquired the company out of Bulgaria. So we have about 30 people there. We have folks in Europe, different teams that we grew across. So Italy and UK and South Africa. And then we have probably another 50-ish people in the US.

8:07And also we've started hiring a bit in South America as well. So it can be in the same time zone. And now that I'm thinking about it, we just made our first hire based out of Canada. So lots of different states. You're dealing with a lot of different geographical locations of your team members. So you really are operating in this virtual network where you're not together. Is that accurate? Yeah, we have a physical office in Israel where we meet once or twice a week. But that's just the people in Israel. That's not the people coming in. we have an office in bulgaria but the rest of world we're pretty much uh remote yes so most conversations are are zoom uh and and yeah i think it takes it takes a lot to navigate across time zones across cultures uh to make to make it uh you know work and that's why um i think that the idea of kind of having the right structure.

9:09Structure is both a system, but also how much do we meet as a company? How much does each team meet? How much does each department meet? What's the structure? How do we run the different processes? So we're giving a lot of kind of thought as we scale the company into what's right for the type of company we are today, what do we need to change? How do we break up silos? We have like once a month where the team gets together and splits into breakout rooms and just kind of knows one another and gets to meet different people from different parts of the company. We have like a water cooler talks channel on Slack where people can just randomly talk about anything on their mind.

9:55So trying to think about But how can we take that office idea and try and restructure it in the virtual world? It sounds like you've taken the office and digitized it, giving people all those different channels. And I think the breakout feature is such an underutilized feature, at least from my experience. It didn't really come into play until COVID times when they figured that they had to have ways for smaller groups to interact. And yet it's a feature that I don't think is utilized enough. So I love to hear that your team utilizes that. And then mainly you said you're using Slack for your data.

10:33So we're using Slack as, you know, the place where most of the conversations happen. And I'd say kind of it's probably around Slack. And we use Asana in terms of project management. And then we have what we call our command center, which houses all of our clients' data with respect to the different services we're doing. And what I said earlier about how having the data where the people are is crucial because we have this command center and there are amazing dashboards there. And you can interact with the data and ask questions and get answers. But we saw that no matter how much we invest in beautifying it, etc., people don't really use it unless it's, you know, there where they work.

11:23So if they get an alert, they'll go in and check in the data and maybe look. But the fact that you can have today, you know, agents and bots where you can interact with within like Slack channels and it has the context of who is the client, who are the people that are speaking, what do they know, what are they asking about and how it relates to the different data points, even like what service does it apply to makes it so much more powerful because then, you know, teams can can essentially interact with the data. together. So that's on the data point. On the breakout rooms point, so yeah, that's what I mentioned earlier, where we're really thinking on how to maintain this company vibe and environment, even as we grow remotely.

12:18So we have every week, we have a company meeting, and every week we do something different once a month. We have an all hands where we update everyone what's going on with the company what's the latest uh try to be as transparent transparent as we can with the numbers what we're working on lots of ai talking in in the last two years uh but that's kind of one and then we have the breakout rooms where we usually split into different uh groups and have some sort of uh sometimes it's like more more like a speed dating environment where you meet someone for a few more minutes and then move to the next.

12:53Sometimes it's a group, a small group where we have some fun games. We have a session where one of the teams updates on what they're up to. And then we once a month have like sort of fun activity, I don't know, magician show or whatever contest. Oh, that's fun. So we have kind of this nice system where the all hands is mandatory, all the rest is not. But we find that the majority of the teams comes to all of them because I think people want that sense of belonging into something bigger and also meeting folks from different teams for other parts of the world. I think that it makes for an interesting environment.

13:35Absolutely. Absolutely. You mentioned just a moment ago about being as transparent as you can with numbers. That can be challenging when you're in an organization sharing numbers and figuring out financially what's appropriate and what's not appropriate. How do you balance that? That's a good question. I think so. One of the things we the feedback that we got through the years is, again, employees want to feel what's going on. How is the company doing? And when we were, you know, smaller and younger, we used to keep that with the tight group of management, etc. But as we grew, we kind of realized that it's for the benefit of everyone to know what's going well, what's not going well.

14:20I think it fosters an open environment that people know that you can talk about the good stuff and the bad stuff. And in terms of what we're not, I know that there is this, not so new anymore, but there's this wave of radically transparent companies which talk about everything. So we don't talk about everything, but we talk about revenue numbers. We talk about forecasts. We talk about sales and those kinds of metrics, which, you know, we feel comfortable sharing with a wider organization. And, yeah, I think it gives the team a sense of belonging and also understanding what's going on. And, you know, if we tell them, hey, here's the pipeline, we have a strong pipeline, they understand that, OK, we might have some busy months ahead.

15:10If we tell them the opposite, we understand that it might be a few more quieter times. So, yeah, I think it helps kind of to for folks to to know where they're at and where they're going. I think that's it's a great way to be cautiously sharing information that people can utilize. Right. And that can help them to forecast and plan for their own individual departments. and their own pipelines. I love the pipeline discussion so that people really understand. And maybe that gives people the opportunity, you can agree or disagree with me, to, if it's a slower pipeline, to help generate new business.

15:49Yeah, that's a great point. So not all teams and all team members can really affect the pipeline, but 100%. I think one of the phenomena is that we found with acquiring other agencies is that you bring on another founder to join you for the ride. And these founders operate as founders. So they bring business, they manage, they sell. So we have within, I think one of the things that have really helped to scale is that we have these units, which are pretty much autonomous in the sense that they're run by their original founder, which also sells and manages, but now they're also supported and can cross-sell to other services and get clients from cross-selling to other services, etc.

16:44So yeah, that's a good point. How many acquisitions have you completed? So we've done to date five acquisitions. initially we started off in Israel where we had a good network and in the last probably two and a half three years we have today a full-time corp dev which all he does is looks for good companies to acquire and we were really I think aggressive in how we treat it we aspire to do two, three acquisitions a year have systems in place to thinking about operations, et cetera, to how to run the acquisitions, how to run the integration to make sure that this acquisition is successful. How do we onboard them to our systems?

17:40How do we kind of make sure that the teams are aligned, aligned pricing, aligned cross-site opportunities? So yeah, I think there's also a lot we can talk about when thinking about operations and acquisitions. Let's dive into that a little bit, because I think that one of the most challenging pieces, once you identify and do all of the, you know, the backend things to make the acquisition happen, but once they're acquired, that integration and that operational onboarding is really challenging because the company you've acquired, you acquired because they were doing things that were working well, and now you're bringing them into your environment saying, and now I want you to do these things.

18:22What does that look like? How do you set those processes up and how do you assure that that's successful for both? Yeah. So first, I think the part of due diligence on our end is to make sure that we think that there's a mutual DNA and that how we operate, how we think about is close enough so that that type of integration would work. And we have been in our positions were we almost got there, but we felt it's just not clicking. So I think that's the crucial part to make sure you acquire the right companies. The other part, and this is true for, I think, almost every, each one of our acquisitions is to have the founder join the ride, which I think is very important because then you get that founder mentality.

19:15the team usually is kind of there because they... And then I think the other part is being, on the one hand, get them on board our systems and get them to enjoy now the bigger boat they're in, but not rush to do any dramatic changes in terms of how they're working. And we found that kind of natural evolvements happen over time, whether that's how they're structured or how they operate. I think this is something that is when it happens organically, and it usually happens once a team is with us for some time. It's just easier because then it's kind of a natural involvement, and we're trying to figure out the best ways to help and kind of facilitate that in terms of how can we get them to know the different teams, how can we train them more on different services, understand who they need to speak with, which is becoming an issue as the company scales.

20:33So for instance, we just created, we found that a big part of something that was impending kind of AI in the organization is that people didn't really know what tools did we have, who they need to reach out, what do they need to access. So we created the kind of an AI academy, which A, trains, the level sets everyone on, okay, this is what we know and want you to know about depending on which team you are. And then this is the teams we have at large at Mobius. If you're looking for some creative tool, if you're looking for some tool for, I don't know, for finance or for automating whatnot, then you can just search within the academy and even speak with the bot and get directed to the right place or the right person to speak with.

21:22So also thinking about how can we get people just to understand where to go to and what tools they have at their disposal. That's really helpful. I mean, at a much smaller scale, my kids are starting a new school this year. And I feel like I have seven different apps and things I have to access for all different things. And if they were in a central place where I could just ask the question and it would, in the back end, give me the information, that would be so helpful. So I can see how that really benefits your teams by creating less, you know, less for them to think about it. They already are overloaded with all of the things that they're doing.

21:58the last thing you need to think about is now and what app and where is that app housed and what is it that i need to i love that there's that that academy for them that's yeah and i think it's it's also you know if in the past you needed to like lots of resources to create such a repository it's it i think it's really relatively simple nowadays to create a repository that updates itself and we even kind of started to create a leaderboard and post that on slack uh every every week to kind of you know gamify a bit okay you know we want we encourage the team to use uh ai and kind of be more proficient uh so i think it's it's once you you go about this uh and and start creating these internal tools it really has a life of its own and i think it's uh so empowering the the type of things you can do today with AI.

22:56Because the truth of the matter is that people don't even need that many apps because they can just integrate it with Cloud or their LLM of choice and just interact with it through the LLM. Lier, can you share with us how you are doing this AI transformation you keep talking about within your organization? Sure. So to be honest, it was quite a journey in figuring out the best way We started off by doing hackathons, so taking the different teams, putting them in a room, saying, hey, guys, you have the day to figure out. And that got the ball rolling, but it wasn't very efficient and got people moving in the chairs of, okay, what am I supposed to do?

23:47Especially people that are used to working in a services company, they're not used to building products. So we did a few of those. It kind of got, I think, the people to deal with AI. And then we took some of the MVPs that were built there and essentially created products out of them. That was the origination of our first product. And we kind of took the best builders from the organization and created a centralized AI team, which does AI full-time.

24:24and that's how we operate today. So we also brought another team to support the products and our AI team mostly works on skills and automations for the different teams, each one with kind of the unique use cases. And we're obviously monitoring the impact that it's having in terms of how much time it takes to do things, but also the capabilities which we also spoke about. What kind of outputs can we give? What kind of services can we bring? So yeah, that's where we are today. And I don't know if I mentioned this, we're also starting to offer our clients to help them with their own journey in AI transformation and building automations for them and kind of walking them through what we learned from our journey in terms of the structure and how to think about it in a large organization.

25:27I love that concept of doing it yourself and now that you have it under your belt, helping others to do the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the only way. It can be real. Otherwise, you need to know your stuff. You need to know what you're talking about. And we see that there's this, I think, marketing or marketeers were very early in the sense that lots of the services we deal with were and are disrupted by AI. But there are lots of businesses which AI hasn't really touched as of yet. And they have this FOMO. They know it's coming, but they don't really know what to do. So we're hoping to help bridge that gap.

26:15Do you have a preferred AI within the company? So we, to be honest, we kind of use them all. We also find that for A, it ebbs and flows. Like a few months ago, Gemini was amazing. Now we're kind of, and to be a very beginning, ChatGPT. We're pretty heavy on cloud. I think that's probably our main, and I can see the usage growing. month by month. And I think it's also, at least from B2B, from the type of stuff that we're working on, it's the best in terms of the integrations they have in place and how fast you can be up and running. So Claude is probably our first ones, but we have them all just because we also need to be on our toes as this industry is changing all the time.

27:15What are some of the things that your team utilizes AI for?

27:22Pretty much everything nowadays, to be honest. Is it more data or is it creation or imagery? What types of things? So every team has their use cases. So if you're thinking about the, you know, we produce ads and creative for our clients. And so increasingly you can do much more with AI, A, to scale what's working, so create more variations, B, to create video productions with much lower budgets because you can create whatever you can imagine essentially. On the data side, so we essentially created our own data system with AI which houses all the data points and dashboards and agents. On the content side, it obviously helps us with the research, helps us with the editing.

28:20So it's really on almost every use case imaginable, we're really leaning heavily into becoming an AI-first company, AI-first agency. So we're trying to rethink really every type of process we have in the company. When you say AI first agency, what does that mean to you? So I think that with AI, you can do much more in terms of empower the team to do much more so that each person can manage more tasks, manage more clients, but also spend his time on the stuff where is more interesting. And to be honest, a human is better at, which is, you know, the creative part, the strategizing part and leave lots of the nitty gritty to the automations and machines.

29:27So that's how we're, so that's one piece. And then the other piece is rethinking things. We've started to build our own products and starting to kind of sell clients into services and products and kind of diversifying our revenue, not only services, but also being more of a SaaS or product or non-service revenue as well. So that's the two ways we're kind of trying to think about it. When you go back to your acquisitions, are you acquiring companies that do the same thing as you? Or are you acquiring companies that are adjacent to what you're doing to expand? Yeah. So all our acquisitions to date were expansion.

30:15So we identified areas which we did not have in terms of services. So we acquired a PR firm a few years ago because we got questions from our clients. if we do PR and we did not have that service. So we knew that it's something that once we have under our belt, we can bring in more business. And similarly, we just acquired the Amazon agency and video production agency. So we kind of identified things we think are strategic or we just see are in demand from clients or prospective clients. And that's what we're looking to add on. It's really interesting because you had one of two routes you could have gone down.

31:00One, you could have built the departments that you were missing from scratch, or two, you could have acquired them. What made you choose path two? So to be honest, there are services which we built entirely from scratch. So we kind of took both routes, so to speak. There are places like influencer marketing, which we did not do up until probably three, four years ago, and built that practice from scratch. I think the advantage of doing that through an acquisition is that you get a team on board, you get clients on board, you kind of get a head start. and where we find a good team and a good founder, it's usually an easy decision because when there's a lot of cross-sell opportunities, we can offer these services to our clients.

31:53We can offer the rest of our 27, 28 services to their clients. And also from just a pure financial evaluation perspective, then a bigger agency usually commands a higher multiple. So there's also a bitter story, I think, for the founders that come in and kind of can do a small exit initially, but also join a bigger kind of and more aspirational journey with us towards building. So that we kind of structure the deal in a sense that part cash, part future profits and equity in the business. So they're with us for the long run. How do you find it is managing, we'll say in quotes, all these different founders?

32:47That's where I think the DNA and the initial due diligence comes into play. And that's why it's very important for us that the founder sticks with us to the ride. There are lots of founders that look to sell their company and be off. And we are looking for those who want to stick along. A, because I think in the service business, it's super crucial. The relationship is everything and we want the folks around to make sure that their clients are happy. And also because we're looking, again, for folks that are coming with us for the long run and want to build something bigger and join kind of a bigger boat.

33:33And how do we do it? I think A, give them a level of autonomy into running their business how they see fit. So they can make a lot of calls in their unit, you know, as long as it's within their P &L. And, you know, so we kind of trust them with continuing to steer their ship, whatever they think. And obviously we make sure that there is that shared DNA into thinking about how can we do better. So if it's serving, so because we have a pretty, because most of our clients are US-based, so lots of agencies we acquire, that's kind of where they're linked into sending into US clients. We have the infrastructure, we have the team.

34:23And so it's kind of helping them through that transformation, scaling, marketing, whatever it may be. But they usually come and join us because there is something that they're looking to get from this acquisition as well. You mentioned that most of your clients are in the U.S. What is the differentiator that sets Moburst apart from other companies in your space? Yes, that's a good question. I think that what our offering is very holistic, not just because we have lots of services, but also because of how we look at marketing. So even when we were doing just mobile, most agencies come and take the user acquisition budget and just start running media.

35:14And what we would do if we would see that we're running campaigns and we see that the users are coming in, but they're not converting because the registration page is not compelling enough or the onboarding and whatnot, we would actually say, hey, let's pause the campaign and let's do some work on the product. Similarly, the app page. So we really tried to take a full funnel approach and see how we can optimize every step of the journey and not just, you know, you took us for campaigns or you took us for organic or you took us for PR, but try to look at, okay, we're now the business owner alongside you.

35:57What is your business? What do you want to achieve here and help you get there? So I think that's one thing. And then I think nowadays, and again, this is what we're getting from the market. I think the fact that we are undergoing this AI transformation and have all these tools and capabilities that just allow us to deliver our clients better results and team members to do the better work. I think we're also trying to make that into a more and more compelling reason to choose us. I read a post on LinkedIn yesterday. I forget the specific numbers, but it was talking about how until a company does X in revenue, they shouldn't even consider doing paid campaigns.

36:54What's your thought on that?

36:59I think it really depends on context. I can tell you, like, specifically in the app space, which, again, is where we're originally from, I can tell you that a lot of app developers come with the idea of if we build it, they will come, and then they launch to the App Store and Google Play, and no one comes because you can't really get by, you know, in today's ecosystem where there's millions and millions of apps, Why should they download you? And even organic doesn't really come because it's dependent on the volume of downloads. So if you're an app developer, you definitely need some element of paid.

37:38Otherwise, it would be very hard. You might have a one-hit wonder, but the chances are really, really low. But for others, you know, I've seen businesses that thrive on influencers only. So I think it's really context awareness. Amazon, for instance, you can succeed even without paid in certain niches. So yeah, I don't agree with the sticker claim. I think it's really depending on the context and specific niche of the client. When you meet with your clients, do you do an analysis to say, these are the services that we think that you would do well with? Or does the client come to you saying, this is what I want?

38:20Yeah, I know that 100 % we do. And many times clients come to us for asking for something. And then we understand this is the symptom. So you want influencer marketing because you feel you don't have strong enough brand presence. presence. But now that we analyze, we actually understand that we need to be talking about how you guys are coming up on AI, your AEO, people aren't really finding you or the LMS aren't recommending you. And so let's work on that rather than doing something that won't really move the needle in terms of your brand perception. So yeah, 100 % we're obviously trying to cater to the client's needs, but also trying to understand what the business pain is and what is our thoughts on the best way to achieve it.

39:11Years ago, people focused all their time and energy on SEO, and now they also have to worry about the AEO. So how do you advise clients on the best ways to do that? Yeah, so AEO is something we're very passionate about. We, it's something we've been dabbling with for the last probably year and a half. And one of the things we realized is as opposed to SEO, which we also do, which is a lot about your website content and how and the technical stuff about links and stuff like that. So when asking the LLMs, they don't just look on your SEO. They also look on your PR and where you mentioned, which third party mentions there are about you.

40:02And they also look on your videos and on your podcasts and on all these different bits and pieces, which we do. And one of the kind of revelation that we have is, hey, we have quite a compelling offering because we actually help our clients with owning all of the digital footprint. And now there's this new thing of AEO, which is essentially a representation of that. So we take a very holistic and comprehensive approach towards AEO. It's not just the AEO and technical aspect, but it's also where are you mentioned in terms of how's your PR looking? And we might do some work around that. What's the discussions around you across social, across LinkedIn, across Reddit?

40:49What's your presence on YouTube? Is there videos on you? So podcasts. So really take a holistic approach to to make sure that we we treat all of the different touch points so that when the LLM scans the Internet, it finds our brand and knows to recommend it in its competitive space. So this is a topic that's really interesting to me. When you're thinking about AEO and utilizing these AI products to find vendors or to find products or to find whatever, do they have to ask a specific question that would pull up your client or how does that benefit your client? Yeah. So, no, they don't have to ask a specific question.

41:42And I think the way to think about it also changes because if in the SEO world it was all about keywords and people were searching for keywords, people can ask questions and prompts in a million different variations.

42:00And LLMs would also answer in different variations depending on who's asking and depending what the LLM because you'll ask the same question, and ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity and whatever, Grok, you'd get different responses. But we actually built a system that monitors the LLMs every day and asked them a series of questions that we feel are interesting and we do a lot of research to understand what kinds of questions might customers be asking. and then monitor, you know, and does this brand appear? And if so, what percentage of the time? If he only appears, you know, once from the dozen times we asked, and probably it's not a great, his AO is not in a great place and we need to do some work.

42:53And it's not only if you're appearing, but if you're thinking about questions like what mobile agencies are best to work with if I'm an app developer. So it's not only if Mobirst appears, it's what is our ranking? Are we ranking number one, two, or are we number five or ten? So ranking also plays. And I think that's the phenomenon that we're seeing is that A, B2B buyers and customers in general are increasingly asking or starting their consumer journey in the LLMs. and then they get the recommendation from the LLM and then they just go and type in the brand on Google and go directly to the website.

43:42So how do we make sure that they're mentioned in the first place and how can we kind of tie the knot and make sure that we understand that they did that journey and that the conversion that we see as direct or as Google search which actually comes from, thanks to our work on AEO. Those are all kinds of things that we're thinking about and looking at, but it's a very interesting space. And I think that we're seeing even Google now suggest, you know, AI overviews when you type in on Google. And I just read today that they're starting, they're testing Google defaulting to AI mode. So that's when you search something, you won't just get the AI overview.

44:29You'll kind of be within the chat experience from the get-go. So this is definitely where the future is at. And I think the brands that invest there now might get the head start because most brands are thinking about this, but not really actioning about it yet. You know, it's really interesting because I'm planning a party for my daughter and she had her theme. And normally I would go into Google and I would just, you know, look for images and try and recreate things. But I utilized Chachi PT. And I said to Chachi PT, this is the theme of the party. What are the elements? Here's her inspo pictures.

45:09And it gave me specific products. I did just that. I took the product. I went to Google and I purchased the product. So I really didn't think about how they got there until this conversation. So, but in thinking back, there definitely are brands that are spending because there were certain brands that came up that said, well, you know what, this brand has eight of the 10 things that you might need, right? And this brand has four of the 10 things. So you should utilize this brand because you're going to pay less shipping because you have to order one time versus multiple times. So that really is fascinating.

45:40and we talked a little bit about how different AIs have different outputs. I took something, I asked the same question to both ChatGPT and Claude and for my business and I got two different answers. And so I took ChatGPT's answer and I put it into Claude and I said, well, you said this, but ChatGPT said this. And it analyzed it in a really interesting way that said, yes, they brought up one good point here, but in this particular instance, here's three gaps that they didn't consider. And so it was really fun to have the conversation with both to be able to identify, you know, what might be best for that particular use case.

46:20Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. And we found that each one skews towards different data points, different sites, you know, Claude is more business users in mind. So it's more business versus Chatipati, which is a bit more B2C. So it's very interesting to also understand, okay, where do they look? Reddit used to be very important and dominant on Chatipati. They kind of dialed it down. So it's important, but not as important it was a few months ago. So these things are very dynamic. And I think that's why we look at AEO as something that you need. You need a robust strategy and not just, you know, be on Reddit or do PR or one thing, because it also changes and every LLM takes from someone else.

47:11So if you want to be strong across the board, you need to take the holistic approach. Absolutely. So, Ler, thinking back, how did you end up in this space to begin with?

47:26So I actually know Gilad, my co-founder from the army, but it's not the class. Israel kind of has a classic story of tech founders meeting in a TED this year. We were actually both HR offices, so not so much tech. But known him since. I was very passionate about the internet and internet marketing very early on. got into Google, then SEO.

47:54And I knew I did some work around online reputation management and how thinking SEO from the perspective of now I need to own a name of a company or name of a person. And after I did that, mobile was kind of booming and I knew I wanted to get into mobile. I reconnected with Gilad, which just started off as a one-man consultancy on mobile, and we kind of hooked together and made a company out of it. So that's kind of how we got about it. We didn't, you know, plan. I didn't know back then that we'd be a full-service digital agency and deal with so many services, but I think, and this maybe also relates to the idea of operations, that once you have a good system in place, You can apply that to different contexts.

48:54So I think once we kind of found a good way to run an agency, serve our clients, applying that to additional business units and getting them into our model seems to work well. One of the most interesting things inside an organization is the relationship between the CEO and the COO. What does that look like for you? Um, so we, we've been, you know, friends and with good connection even, uh, before that. Uh, and we founded the company together. So I think, uh, um, we kind of, I think each one of us has, uh, their own swimming lanes, uh, and autonomy within that. So there are certain things which we know we need to make decisions together.

49:43There's a lot of things that each one has. So my co-founder runs sales and marketing. So he makes the calls there. If there's a big expense, then he usually runs through me. I run operations and work with the delivery team on how the sausage gets made. So each one has his... And also, I think how we think about... So I'm very systematic, operation thinking. he's a lot more about growth and pushing forward. And I think that dynamic of, okay, running fast, but making sure that we have systems in place to support the growth, that has worked well for us. Yeah, your job is to pull back just a little bit.

50:32Don't stop them, but pull them back a little bit to say, did we think this through? Exactly. That's great. What's next for Moobus? so I we're already you know in growing we almost double the company in the last year so we're and we have very aggressive growth targets for the next few years so I think continued growth, continued acquisition we launched our AEO offering as as a different brand, which we called Answerburst, just a few weeks ago. We started offering, helping some of our clients with their own AI transformation. So that's also a very exciting angle of actually building AI products, AI workflows for our clients within their environment.

51:35So there are many different kind of bets we're making both internally with AI and externally. Yeah, so I think the next few years are all about growth and continuing that route of transformation we're at. If any of our listeners want to explore working with you and your teams, what's the best way for them to get in contact with you? So they can go to our website, Moburst, M-O-B-U-R-S-T dot com. they can send out an email hello at MoBurst I'm pretty reachable on LinkedIn we're out there or they can just ask their favorite LLM top mobile marketing agency where we're probably number one or two. Oh great they can test the strategy before they engage.

52:25Lear thank you so much for taking the time I really enjoyed being with you today Likewise it was good fun. Absolutely thank you very much for listening to another episode of The Second in Command you've been listening to second in command brought to you by COO Alliance founder Cameron Harold if you enjoyed this episode please be sure to like share and subscribe to us on Apple podcasts Spotify and our other podcast streaming platforms for more best practices from industry leading COOs visit COOalliance.com

53:05Thank you.