328. How to get attention for your startup in the AI era w/ Anita Moorthy | Rocksalt.ai

0:00My name is Anita Moorthy. I am the co-founder and CMO of a company called Rock Salt AI.

0:05Amardeep Parmar:So you came on here a couple of years ago, and back then you were in stealth, so we couldn't really talk too much about what you were doing. So what does Rock Salt do? What are you doing? Yeah, I mean, first of all, so happy to be back and talking to you again. And yes, that time we were still in stealth. So Rock Salt is in a very interesting space, and it's helping entrepreneurs, B2B CEOs and founders, get in front of their customers online. So the problem statement that we're solving is, you know, nowadays, it's so noisy. Everybody's creating tons of content. Everywhere you go, it's really noisy.

0:44And I keep hearing from founders and CEOs, how do I get in front of my customers, my buyers? And then the fact is that AI has completely changed the buyer journey. So let me first talk about the buyer journey. If you think about the most popular way of getting traffic to your website without paying for it was what HubSpot invented, inbound or content marketing. Write great content, optimize it for Google, put it on Google search, and lo and behold, you will get traffic. that whole playbook is becoming less and less effective for a number of reasons. The first being that a lot of people are not even going to Google to search anymore.

1:29And that trend is only increasing. Second, you can now create content at the speed of light for like zero money and in a few seconds. So there's an explosion of content everywhere. And so that's making that whole playbook not work. And so that's the statement that that's the problem statement we decided to go and solve. Like, well, what is the new buyer journey? What are people doing? And hence, how can founders and CEOs get in front of their buyers? And when we talked to a lot of buyers, they told us, well, you know, we don't really go to websites anymore. Like where if we are not in market, you're scrolling feeds.

2:11I'm reading LinkedIn. I'm looking at newsletters. I'm listening to podcasts. That's what I'm doing when I'm not in market. And when I am actively looking for a solution, then I'm researching on AI. That's what I'm doing. So that's really the new buyer journey. You have the not in market group who are basically scrolling feeds. And then you have the buyers in market who are researching using AI. So if that is the buyer journey and you believe it, then as a founder and CEO, what do I do? A lot of people are right now focused on how do I get found in AI? How do I get found in AI like I used to get found in Google?

2:53But remember, that's 5 % of the market that's actively looking for your solution. What about the other 95 %? That 95 % is really where Rock Salt is focused on. How do you get to be in the relevant industry conversations that are happening on platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit so that you can build awareness and brand even before your buyer is in market for your solution? And I don't know if you know this very popular statistics, at least in the B2B case, you know, there was a research done by a company called Sixth Sense, and it showed that when a buyer is looking to shortlist the vendors that they're going to research using AI or whatever, they know 4.5 out of 5 vendors on day one.

3:48so that's why that first pre-research 95 % out of the market is so important because if people know you and you build some trust and credibility then when they are in market they're going to be like I'm going to look them up they may not select them but you've already made the huge short list which is the biggest sort of you know hurdle so that's really the space I know it's a very long-winded answer but hopefully it helps you and like with where you are today right

4:19Amardeep Parmar:so let's say somebody is coming in they want to find a buyer how does the model work is like a subscription model is it like an ai model how does that work yeah so it's a very simple uh model it's a sas subscription model and we have made it so that we've built it in a way that it specifically works for the busy founder and ceo and that's a big difference like there are a lot of tools out there, especially social media related, that are really for like social media marketers and marketing managers who know the system and who spend all their life or for influencers, like people who get their business on LinkedIn, right?

4:57There are loads of tools to help with that. But if you're a busy founder or a busy CEO that doesn't have time but needs to be on places like LinkedIn and Reddit, what do you do? It's not easy to be creating content, setting up time, Even if you have ChatGPT, it still takes a lot of time. So our solution, which is a SaaS solution, sort of has three different components that really help a CEO or founder maximize their impact on LinkedIn and Reddit in 10 minutes a day. That's the promise, 10 minutes a day. So the first thing we do is we surface relevant conversations for the company and for you based on your interests and what the company does.

5:42So you're just given your company name, you're given your LinkedIn URL, and the system says, okay, based on everything I know about you and your company, these are the kinds of conversations that are happening on LinkedIn and the people that you should be engaging with. So that's the first part is find relevant conversations. The second thing is creating content. Now, that's really important, obviously. You want to be consistent in creating content, but you don't want to take up all your time. So we have a way where you can use SMS or WhatsApp. Whenever an idea strikes, you come out of a customer meeting, you come out of a conference, or you're just going for a jog in the morning and you're like, wow, I really want to write down that.

6:26Usually you put it in some reminder app and then you'd forget about what it is that you were going to write on. Here, you just text it to Rock Salt. Rock Salt asks you three very deep and insightful questions and I'll explain how that is. And then you give the answer. You can voice it or you can text it. And by the time you finish your jog or by the time you get to your desk, you have an 80 % draft, either ready for your marketing team to polish and publish or for you to further like upload an image or whatever. But basically, I have lots of our customers say, I was in the airport, I was waiting for my Uber, and I was able to create to post in three minutes.

7:04So that's the second part. And the third part is analytics. It's like, blows my mind on why LinkedIn, for example, which has so much activity, gives you very high level, like here's the total impressions and the total engagement, right? You might have seen it, but they're not necessarily the people that you care about. A lot of people are like your friends and your family and your mom. And, you know, because you said like, congratulations to your friend, now your friend sees your post, and they are now in this. They're not the people who are relevant to your business. So what we do is we filter all the people that react to you, DM you, engage with you, and we filter them for the audience that you said you're trying to get in front of.

7:49So let's say you're trying to get in front of CFOs, then we'll only show you the CFOs that are interacting with you in any form, whether it's commenting or DM or following, and show those to you, which then you can say, okay, these people have shown some interest. How do I nurture them, et cetera, et cetera. You can use Sales Navigator or whatever tools you have to further nurture them. But it's always stronger for you. When someone says, I want to connect with you, Amar, it's so much more stronger than if you are going out and saying, you know, connect with me. They've never heard of you. And you're like, connect with me, which a lot of tools do, but But the conversion is becoming less and less because there's just so much noise.

8:29I mean, I get, I don't know about you, but I get messages all the time where someone likes my post. And then the next minute I have a message from them saying, you know, do you want to see my product?

8:41Amardeep Parmar:Do you want to see my demo? And I'm like, I don't even know who you are. I don't know what you do. I'm not in market for you. Why are you telling me this? So that's kind of, you know, what we're doing. So obviously before as well, you had the strategic thing of staying in stealth. and when you're trying to get those first customers right and like trying to convince you said oh your customers are doing this in three minutes a day how did you get those first people on board to like prove to them that this works yeah it's worth their time as you said like it's a very busy icp yeah no it's so that is one of the challenges is because we're doing it for this very busy icp um you know you have to find people so initially we just went out to like all ceos and they all love it they're like oh my god this is great they have good intentions but it just they don't stick and so we had a lot of churn and we were like oh my god so now but then we had a few people that continued using it and so I interviewed them to really understand like what is it about them that's making it stick yeah and I realized that the people that are sticking are people that are convinced and they have either seen some success or you know or they just believe that they have to be there, either for credibility or because their competitors are doing it or because they've seen some success.

9:53You know, they have done it and they've got some DMs or whatever. So for these people, you don't need to convince them that, hey, do this, do this consistently and good things will happen. They're already convinced what they're looking for is a more efficient system. So that is, so once I understood that, then I narrowed our sort of ICP and who we were going after. And actually, I don't know, there's this coach that I spoke to. His name is Rob Snyder. And our VCs connected me to him. And he was brilliant. He said, Anita, the problem you have is your value, like the good thing is your value proposition resonates with so many people.

10:35But the bad problem is, you don't know who is your right, your early adopter ICP, you know. And so you need to really, like your very first few minutes should be, you need to understand who has this pull where they just want to take it out of your hand. They want to snatch it. Not, oh, it's interesting. Okay, yeah, sure, I'll give it a try. But they want to snatch it out of your hand. So I think that was a really good sort of eye-opening moment. And it allowed us to say, okay, these are the kinds of behaviors we should be seeing in a CEO or founder for them to be a good fit. So that's the first thing.

11:14And then the second thing we did was before we were trying to sell everything, we were like, here's the texting piece and the conversation and the analytics, da-da-da-da-da. It was too much. And so even though we were closing sales within one or two calls, but it was still too much for people to get value out of the product. And so what we've now done is we've completely changed our go-to-market motion and made it more PLG-led. So we looked at our product and we realized that the part that's unique and easy to understand is the one which we say, find the conversations that gets you in front of your buyer and engage there.

11:59It just is really simple. And so and it also very differentiated because a lot of other tools were all about, you know, here's this AI tool that's going to write like you. It's going to interview you and all these kind of like lots of like content creation tools. But no one was doing the other thing. and also it was simpler to understand. So we've just made it so that anyone can go to our website and put in their company URL. And within a few minutes, they will start to see all the conversations. And if they like the conversations that it's finding for them, they can sign up for a free email digest.

12:33So at the very least, every day they'll get an email that'll say, here are the relevant conversations in your industry. And then they can, if they want to engage further, they want commenting help and all the rest of the stuff that we do, great, like sign up. But there's always this free product that you can very easily sign up to and test. So that was a huge change that we made from when we started like a year ago to just a few weeks ago when we've done this PLG. So good learning, but yeah, that's where we are.

13:05Amardeep Parmar:How's it all going so far in terms of traction? Is it now building up? How's that all going in terms of? Yes, we have like a little less than 100 paying customers. And it's going well. Like I said, we've just changed the motion right now. So we now have to go and get a lot more traffic because we're going to try and convert more in the PLG way. So we're in the process of changing my go-to-market and marketing. But yeah, it's going really well. like people really, if we get the right ICP, it's like a no-brainer. They just love it. And especially even on the Reddit side, you know, Reddit is a huge influence for AI, right?

13:48Everybody knows it. It's one of the top three-sided domains. And most people, and especially the marketing people for companies, they're afraid of Reddit. Their biggest fear is getting banned, getting thrown out, you know, and they know that Reddit hates marketers. So we've created a product there that really helps your subject matter experts engage in the right conversations, and we guide them so that they will not get thrown out. So we don't do any of the black hat stuff. We're like, okay, you know, Amar, what's your maturity? What's your karma? How do we build you up so that you can engage?

14:24Where should you be? Like Reddit is huge. There's like thousands of communities for your business, what are the ones that are ranking in Google? Meaning those are the ones that are potentially showing up in LLM. Look, we're very upfront. We're not saying that if you use our Reddit product, you're going to show up in LLMs because anybody making those claims, even the people who are building the LLMs don't know how it works fully. So we don't promise that, but we say, look, we can take Google as a proxy. So for your business, if you say, here's a topic my buyers I know are querying on and then put it in Google and if you limit it to reddit.com what are the subreddits that come so this is the kind of things that we do in the background and we just again you just go in and say here's my company here's what I care about and look at your competitors do this thing in the background of Google and say Amr for you these are the five subreddits 10 subreddits that have the kinds of questions your buyers are asking so depending on where you are.

15:24Let's build your standing in those subreddits and let's start having you engage in these relevant threads. And if you can do that, you're going to show up in the LLM rankings. So that's what we have. We're both LinkedIn and Reddit, but it's all towards building your visibility where your buyers and AI are searching.

15:46Amardeep Parmar:Hello, hello. I hope you've enjoyed the show so far. I'm Amadeek Parma, co-founder of BayHQ and the host of this show. For those of you who don't know, BayHQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events, 200 people have been for our impact programs, and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the programs and come to the events go to vahyhq.com forward slash join we also just released our first ever book called startups for outsiders which you can get on amazon now and the link is in the bio hope to see you soon at event hope you enjoy the rest of the episode i think with reddit is the case of that they said like a lot of people know that it's the right place to post but it is a lot of people i guess lurk rather than post they don't feel comfortable doing it.

16:40Amardeep Parmar:Is there anything else like that where you feel like when you're talking to maybe CEOs or founders and trying to get them on board, there's bits which they didn't fully understand or misconceptions people have? Because as you know, on LinkedIn right now, there's so much misinformation about everything. And is there any ideas you think are stuck in some founders' minds that need to adjust a bit? Oh my God, it's like you and I prepped before this. So we actually did a research. So because of what our product does, we have a ton of conversations that we're privy to. We have like 300 ,000 influencers that we track and we track all their posts.

17:13So we have like thousands and thousands of posts. So we did an analysis where we looked at 39 or 38 influencers in the B2B marketing space. The reason we did that is because we wanted people that frequently post and we wanted to, like, I know the content really well. And what we did is we tried to look at their posts to analyze what is it that works on LinkedIn, especially because the algorithms have changed. Right. Again, there's so much random advice. Do this, do that. Don't do this, do that. Like it's just so random. So we did this analysis and we have these seven findings that we found and some of them are really interesting.

17:55So, for example, one thing that you'll always hear is post often. If you want to be on LinkedIn, you should be posting four times a week, three times a week. That's the regular advice. Actually, what we found is that there is almost no correlation between average engagement and the number of times you post. Of course, you will get more impressions and more engagement if you're posting four times versus two times. But in terms of average engagement, there isn't a difference. And what that means is it's great news for founders and CEOs. We tell our founders and CEOs, post when you have something interesting, original, insightful to say, don't post for the sake of posting.

18:33There isn't any data that. So another one is you look at the people that do really well on LinkedIn, they have a mix of posts. They don't just post about the company all the time. And they don't just, you know, but then they also don't post about, you know, my child going to kindergarten one day and then another day about some startup and another day about some charity that they're working on. They're not all over the place either. There's a method to the madness. And basically, we see that they have there's three buckets or three types of content you should be posting to be interesting on LinkedIn and for people to follow you.

19:09So the first is what we call top of funnel, which is a general awareness which appeals to people beyond your ICP or your target audience. So this is about you and like, you know, for example, if I look at myself, I am a founder over 50 and I've started a company with my brother, which is unique to me. So when I want to talk about something, you know, that is general awareness, which you want to do because then you reach people that don't typically see a post. I talk about those two themes because they're unique to me. So you want to find themes that you are passionate about and that you can speak to that's unique to you.

19:48So, like, for example, I follow this guy and he I don't even know him. I've never met him, but he always posts about his community in Philadelphia and the kinds of things he does in his community. A lot of like charity work and stuff because he's really passionate about it. So that's on that. Then you have middle of the funnel and that's really your industry. So in my case, it's B2B marketing. In your case, whatever that is. And you want to talk about things that are appealing to your industry, your target audience, beyond your company. So it's not specific to Bay or, you know, it's just the industry, like what's happening in British entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship in, you know, in UK and Britain.

20:32So that's the middle. And that usually is like the bulk. It's like 50%. The top is about 30, 50. And then 20 % only should be about your company. and that's sort of the mix that we found when we did this analysis there's a whole bunch of other things but those are two findings on the linkedin side that um that we found so my little

20:53Amardeep Parmar:hack is that whenever my engagement is dipping a bit then i do a bhangra video i love and that's like my kind of one like whenever i do one it's usually because okay i want my views to go up again and it's like you said it's the top of funnel bit of where people don't necessarily even know what i do at phq but they see that and assume an event they're like oh you're the dancing guy yeah and it works and then they then find out more about me and it's i think sometimes the top of final stuff too it makes you likable yeah and it makes people more receptive to other types of content exactly no one wants to follow someone that talks about the same thing over and over again i mean we all have such low attention spans and like it's just too hard so it's so much easier to follow someone who's just interesting you know they post interesting relevant stuff but they also just like somebody that you like, you know, even if you've never met them.

21:39So yeah, that's definitely the key. And so these are all the things that we also work with our founders and CEOs, so they understand that. And I think it's really important because whether you like it or not, that is the best free organic medium you have. You know, if you figure out how to get in front of the audience. So for example, I didn't speak about this specifically, but how do you get in front of your audience. It's not just posting content. What you need to do is you need to say, okay, let's say I'm trying to reach LPs. You might be trying to reach LPs. Well, what kind of people and topics do LPs care about?

22:19And there are people on LinkedIn that they are already reading, right? So you want to be following those niche influencers and engaging with them and putting really thoughtful comments that stand out. Because now you are getting exposure to their audience, which is your audience. So that is the, you know, the first part where I talked about find relevant conversations. That's the secret is find people that have the trust of your target audience and are kind of niche influencers or subject matter experts and start engaging with them And if they like you, if they like Amr, they're like, oh, I like Amr.

23:02And then you post a content. Because you've been engaging and they've been replying back to you, LinkedIn is more likely to show your content to them. And then they engage back and they say, wow, this is great. Now your content gets exposure to all their 10 ,000 to 10 ,000 content. So that's the secret that this all sort of, you know. And again, founders and CEOs don't have time to figure all this out. So we make it really easy so that you just have to share your insights and get going.

23:31Amardeep Parmar:It's one of the things I always tell people is like, if you're trying to get on the radar of somebody who's like really busy, if you're commenting on their posts every day, they're going to remember you. Yeah. Because think about, on average, I put a meeting like a thousand people a week or like interact a thousand people. I don't remember most people. Yeah. But if they're commenting on my posts every day and it's not AI as well or it's not like, it's not obviously like something which is like, this is no way of them writing it. Yeah. then I'm like, oh, okay, you're the person I see on my post every day.

23:57Amardeep Parmar:You keep seeing their little face come up in the little circle, right? And you're going to remember them. And it's such an easy thing for people to do, right? They can be chasing you and keep emailing people over and over again. But if you keep commenting on their posts, they're going to notice sooner or later, right? Exactly. I think, you know, no one is saying don't do Outbound. All founders and CEOs, including us, that's the tactical and sort of short-term thing that everybody wants to do they want to do facebook ads or some some sort of ads and they want to do emails let's get a list you know here's our icp let's get a list let's enrich it using whatever clay apollo and then let's email them um or you know reach out through sales navigator all of that will convert better if people know you and they've seen you it's just like anything else you know you keep seeing whatever some billboard with some ad and that name just sticks and then if you get a direct mail from that company maybe you're more likely to open it than if it's the first time you've ever seen them so yeah you also mentioned as well how one part that's unique to your story right is that being over 50 and starting coming with your brother how has that experience been it's been i mean i think it's been great because my brother and I have a very strong relationship.

25:15We complement each other really well and we enjoy working with each other. I mean, don't get me wrong, we have lots of argument and I feel like sometimes nowadays we don't even talk about personal stuff anymore because we're just talking about work. So that is definitely some downside, but I think we have the two things that make, and this can be spouses, brother, sister, whatever, but we have the two things. We have complementary skill sets and we respect each other we have a good communication style so it works but you know the other day I actually wrote a post about I would rather work with my sibling than my spouse because with a sibling like as much as we may have had a fight we both go to different houses and we have a night to cool off imagine if you it's your spouse you still have to go home and you know pretend like everything is okay and put food and and then like you know your kids are there and you can't be annoyed so i think it's much harder if it's a spouse than if it is brother and sister but yeah it's it's been going well and then have you grown up the team as well we've grown it a little bit so we are three co-founders and actually we've just added one full-time engineer ada she's our founding engineer she's brilliant and then we have like um contractors in mainly in south america because most of the team is in san francisco um except me but and And then we have some here as well in Europe, but contractors have been the other thing.

26:37And I think that's a, I mean, I think you've heard this, there's definitely more five people, billion dollar companies that are going to be created because you can do so much with AI that it's not as necessary, especially if you're still in that, not in the Uber scaling mode. So we haven't added that many people yet. So yeah.