How This Creator Turned 400K Followers Into an AI Startup | Ghita El Haitmy building Eli

0:00Ghita El Haitmy:This creator built a tech company that tells companies what tools to cut, keep or replace. Introducing Rita. She's been a software engineer her whole career and a few years ago started building a computer vision startup. She needed users so she started making content online under the brand TechBible to bring them in. But the content took a life on its own. TechBible grew way beyond the original startup who kept asking her the same question. What tools should I use for my business? The problem was Rita could not answer. Every company runs on a different tech stack, and without knowing what was already in it, no recommendations made sense.

0:32Ghita El Haitmy:So she built one that did, alias the AI platform that solves exactly that. One of her customers got 25 % of their software spent in a single week. And on today's episode of the Hotstar Podcast, Rita tells the full story. Rita, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me, Scott. How are you? I'm great, thank you. You have been creating content about technologies, new trends, new tools, already for a couple years online. But I'm curious, what got you interested in technology in the first place? Yeah, that's a great question. I love the way technology makes people close to knowledge, close to each other, who create things that we could have never created before.

1:12The fact that we're having this while you're in another part of the world and I'm here in California is one of the reasons why I love technology. It just allows to more possibilities and makes the world a bit more expansive. I'm a software engineer by trade. So I love creating things, not with my hands. I can't for the life of me set up anything with like IKEA or hardware. But if it's in relation to code, I love it because it's clear systems. It's clear thinking. It's predictable as well. So I know that if I put in this amount of logic, I will get out of it. Not that we can do this with AI anymore.

1:46No one really understands how it works, including the people who made it. But yeah, that's how I got into it.

1:52Ghita El Haitmy:Yeah, I think it's especially interesting being obviously in SF where technologies are always on the forefront of innovation. I lived there in 2020, right before COVID. And like I saw for the first time self-driving cars. I was sitting in a park and there was like this robot that was delivering pizza to people. I saw for the first time like drone delivery. So I assume we're now six years farther that you have seen also a lot of like interesting technologies now being built every single day. It's really impressive. I mean, my default mode of transportation these days is Waymo and I can work while it's driving itself.

2:27I feel safe in it. Something that I would have been able to say about five years ago. I also visited the testing center of Zipline. They're doing drone. They're the biggest drone delivery company in the world. And like how fast has their technology evolved lately that they can deliver full packages, food. And they have so many contracts as well with retailers and how it's deployed now in the world. It's genuinely exciting.

2:51Ghita El Haitmy:Yeah. So a couple of years ago, you started to create content online about technologies under the kind of brand of the tech bible. So when did you start creating content and what inspired you to start creating content in the first place? So Tech Bubble started during COVID as every one of us had the side projects going on then. It was about the rise of TikTok just started. We were all just blocked in and I was at the same time building another startup before in computer vision. And we were building this really interesting computer vision technology that we needed to train. AI was not there yet, so we still needed people to go around with their phones so we can label data and capture different scenes so we can better train our model.

3:30And what was like, hey, what's the fastest way to get a massive amount of users to this app? And it was by creating content about it. And then people's comments and engagements were like, how did you build that? What did you use for this? That sounds really interesting. Can you show me how? And then it became this more of an educational technology platform where I would build stuff that I'm super excited about, but also describe my process, do the tool recommendations through that platform. And then that's how I picked up. But initially, I did start because I needed users.

4:01Ghita El Haitmy:Hey, quick one before we get back to the episode. If you love conversations like this one, you would love The Fame Game, our weekly newsletter in which we break down how celebrities and creators build billion dollar brands. Sign up for free via the link in the description. And now back to the episode. Yeah, it's so interesting because actually normally I talk to celebrity and creative founders who have been creating content for many years and they eventually then build an audience to leverage that to build their own companies. Now actually your story is like you had a company and you were thinking, let me build the distribution.

4:31Ghita El Haitmy:And then you were like, hey, there's actually a broader topic that I can talk about, which is technology. So I think that evolution also is very interesting. Is that something that you kind of relate to? I do relate to it. And I actually then fell in love with the content creation process because as someone who just likes to keep learning things and stay on top of things, it's been one of the best hacks in my life to make sure that I'm updated on the latest, that I can also verbalize and share the latest news in a way that now I have like, for example, this agent that does research on the latest news.

5:03And then I can read it. It's summarized in the way that I like, that I speak and that I understand. And then I can then communicate it. And then that's how I learn. So I basically just became like a life hack to continuously learn.

5:17Ghita El Haitmy:Yeah. How has technology helped you to become a better creator? You already told me about like agents that you have set up to provide you with the latest news. But are there any other tools or technologies that you're using that are maybe not so well known that are really uplifting your content creation? Yeah, and you can see my entire tech stack on my platform. But one of the tools that I love is Descripts. I'm sure you've heard about it before. So it allows you to edit directly just from erasing part of the text that it transcribes. It also has audio improvement tools, editing. It does highlights by itself.

5:52I like Riverside. I've actually used it multiple times before. I have cuts, Higgs field for the AI elements. I also just love like VO3, all of the open AI as well, image generation and video generation tools. My stack actually for content creation is pretty lean. I have those three tools that I mentioned that I use regularly for podcasts and meetings or events that I need to be recording. Descripts to do all the editing and transcribing of all of that. And then cut cut for short form video content cutting. I do have a video editor still on the team. If you require anything with motion graphics, all of the tech is pretty late on that.

6:29There isn't a tool out there that I tried that was genuinely impressive in making and deciding which visual to add at which point. So that's, I think, part of the software market that still is going to evolve rapidly. And hopefully whoever gets to make one really good tool in that is going to win because there's a big need in the market for a motion graphics tool.

6:51Ghita El Haitmy:Yeah, very interesting. you have been able to leverage your own platform to launch a new company. So what is Ali and what is also the founding story behind it? Yeah, so when I was making content, a lot of the repeating theme that kept happening in the comments and just my DMs. But can you tell me what to use for this task? Can you tell me what to use for that task? And I'm like, okay, I have no context on who you are, what you do, what industry do you work at? What's currently in your tech stack? how would I be able to make a good recommendation for you by just what I have in my environment? Sometimes some tools just have good marketing.

7:27That's why you know about them. But actually, are they compatible with you? Probably not. You do need to do a bit more research on that. So initially, it started as a discovery platform that I still kept as Tech Bible in terms of branding before. And for that, we built this huge knowledge graph of the entire software market, the features mapped over tasks of job roles. So I can see, for example, for this category of for marketing tasks, this is what exists in the markets. These are the tools that do it well at what percentage. And for the pricing that they have, this is what the ROI or presented ROI of what that tool brings to that individual or that company that uses it.

8:05So that's how I started. It was a big rabbit hole of me going into building agents to track the change logs of these software tools, whether they're releasing. Can we add that to that? Because now I think you would have noticed this in the market. Everyone is going vertical. Like if they have one problem that they fix really well, they will go for the next one right next to it. And then it keeps expanding to occupy more into what the task of that individual is using it for. And we built this really awesome discovery engine that still now lives in LA, by the way, that tells you that if you ask it, hey, what's the best SOC 2 compliant tools for a stage startup, it would give you the top recommendations based on that and does the analysis for you.

8:45Ghita El Haitmy:And then I kept digging more into the problem. Is it that you don't know what to use or is that you don't really understand your current tech stack? Which is really crucial because now tech is part of the business infrastructure. If you're like a solo founder or a mid-market team or an enterprise team, a lot of how you operate lives within the tech. It controls the processes, how people behave, what actions do they do on a day-to-day basis, where they go and click on their laptops. That's all technology that you don't have visibility on. So how can I make sure to give you that visibility? And that's where Ellie started.

9:20We auto detect all of the tools currently in your tech stack based on multiple integrations, either native or just from going through all of the invoices in your inbox. And also the trial emails, the notifications that you get from all of these tools. I do believe that email is the best source of truth for everything. We also connect with expense management platforms or like budgeting platforms to see where exactly do you spend that. And from there, we build this context for you as a company to what toolings exist. We categorize them by department, manage identity. You can manage budgets. You can invite and add to the onboarding, offboarding process to these tools directly from the platform.

10:00I'm sure you had to do this before, Scott. if someone joins you to work with you and you have to give them access to 20 tools. So you'll spend an hour going through every link, adding them. And also just sometimes you would get a notification on your phone and say, hi, I didn't even know we were still paying for that. That's one of the main comments I kept getting from founders. Like, why did it renew for another year? I honestly forgot that we even pay for that. We don't use it anymore. So we decided that Ali could be more of the context platform platform that understands that entire layer of your tech stack, helps you manage your spend, optimize it so that you can better optimize your business operations.

10:38Ghita El Haitmy:Very interesting. And do you have any data on type of like the cost savings that companies actually have once they actually start to use Ali? So one of our biggest prize case studies that we had last week was one of the companies slashing 25 % of their current spend right now, just from old records, systems of records software. So stuff that was just used to like a dashboard generation platform or like a docs generation platform where right now they had like a cloud enterprise subscription so they could do these artifacts much easier on these platforms by just connecting MCPs to different data integration platforms.

11:14And actually most companies choose to reinvest that money to further invest in AI. So people are not necessarily focused right now on reducing the spend. It's more reallocation because now so much of the market is new. There's so many new tools coming out that have way better functionalities and ease of use. Like with one button now, I can analyze the entire data set of a company than having to go to Lucerne, like try to make that dashboard. And same, if I used to use, and I don't want to mention names because I still love them. Well, I still love the brands. The products have evolved. So if I used to spend so much time on WordPress, on Webflow, trying to set up a page, now I know I can do it directly from a prompt.

11:57And those tools have not evolved in including these functionalities into their platforms. Of course, I'm going to move and reallocate to something that makes my life easier and is more updated to the times.

12:08Ghita El Haitmy:And like, obviously, we live in a time where hundreds of new tools get launched every single day. So how does Eliasa stay updated on all these tools and kind of know, hey, this one is actually now, now it's the right time to actually recommend this because there's enough data on like its solutions and is it actually working and positive feedback and that type of stuff. Yeah. So Scott, I don't know if you know, but I'm a sole founder. And that means that I build a lot of mini agents to do stuff for me. One of the first ones I've ever built was an auto scraping agent. So it runs, I think we process around 3000 URLs a day where it just goes and finds all of the information, the latest data on their changelog.

12:52If they got a new certification on some security certification, we'll identify that and it will move up in points as in that category too. So it would be recommended more. So we have a really nice scoring system of what makes a tool good. Again, my background is in digital transformation and for six years I did this for corporates. So companies that are 30 ,000 plus employees and I had huge budgets in the millions of euros to prove to a CEO that, hey, I think this is the best tool to adopt for this team and I can prove ROI on it in six months. This is how we're going to integrate it within the company.

13:27So I developed quite an advanced framework on how to analyze and make sure that the tool fits. And I basically just took what I learned in my career and applied it to this. And these are updated regularly. the scoring system changes over time. Last week, Figma was doing great. And then Cloud Design came down and now it's fifth on the list. It's an ever evolving and fluid map, which I love because that means that I think it fits with how I see the world as well. And I do understand like change is the only thing that's constant in this world. And keeping track of this market is data that's so niche to us and something that's so proprietary to our product that you can't really get much of this insights outside unless you're like of course a VC firm or a PE firm that invests in these companies then it's in your best interest to track this so that you know where best to allocate your

14:16Ghita El Haitmy:funds yeah and are the recommendations also kind of based on I don't want to call it geography but kind of on like how native they are with specific tools because I assume that if you work with a very large corporation their like employees might be a little bit older so they're not very common and known to like AI tools or whatever. First, it's like if you work with a startup that has a bunch of 25-year-olds, they know everything about tools. So is that also something that kind of like is taken into consideration whenever like new tools are being recommended to specific companies, how digitally native they are, for example?

14:51So first, the geography part is something that we just added into the platform like about six months ago. For example, we onboarded a Danish company and they had a Danish accounting system So all of the recommendations that came and the integrations that came fit with that. And that's part of the context graph that we build for the workspaces. And from the onboarding, we detected that it's a health tech company. So they might not be as AI native or savvy because that was not their focus and not their industry. So in the recommendations, that's taken into consideration. Again, everything starts from your context as a company or as an individual.

15:31and then every recommendation is tailored towards that.

15:33Ghita El Haitmy:Very interesting. You've officially built your own audience of a few hundred thousand people who are following you to actually get recommendations on tech and that type of stuff. How have you also been able to leverage that to launch and scale your own company? I think marketing in general is a skill that every founder should focus on. I think the main task for a CEO is to be able to generate leads into a company. Otherwise, I don't know what's the point. I've learned throughout the content creation process based on what worked for other companies. So I've worked with Adobe, Google Workspace, OpenAAP, I worked with so many software tools.

16:06It trained me to what works well within the markets for what category, so that when I do now ads for our platform or promote it, it's in a way that's very in line with what people are used to seeing and what converts best. So I feel like this entire year has trained me to, and all of these collaborations that I've did, have trained me to just be a better founder at go-to-market and at scale. Because usually when a startup is in the early days, one of the tasks that the founder has to do is to do a product market fit. And when you don't have distribution, you go talk to people, you try to convince people one-on-one, right?

16:46But when you have a personal brand, the skill is that you can be one to 10 ,000 in one video. And then you still have to do, of course, the follow-ups one-to-one, but it's much less convincing because they know who you are as an individual. They've followed your life. They can see you pop up in their face regularly every time they open Instagram to be entertained. So the conversation flows to a more personal level, to more like, how can I help you with whatever products that I make? It's really not about the products. It's about how can I be of value either through my content or through anything that I create and help that person achieve what they want to achieve in their life.

17:25So that's how I see it. I hope that answers the question.

17:28Ghita El Haitmy:Oh, I understand. And like within that community, have you kind of also built like a smaller community, even like more deeper fans of your brand, like the super fans that you are always stepping into for like feedback whenever you launch a new feature or whatsoever that you reach out to the 100 or the 500 people that you actually have engaged regarding Ali versus the 100 ,000 people that are just following you? I think of all the community that I have around me right now, I've built a strong system of other founders. So since my content is very educational and technical, it's other builders who choose to follow.

18:07At different stages, we have people who are just sausages, just starting a side hustle to people who are running unicorn companies. So it's a big, there's a variety there. And because of that, I kind of bring in the founders to be as close to me as possible, either to WhatsApp or in-person events. So I actually started running a lot of dinners and events in multiple cities. I'm always SF, New York, London. And I get to meet and build those relationships in a deeper level. And now it's evolved more than just being a follower. It's more like a friendship. It's a community. It's a support system that when I reach out and I need to test a new feature, it's easy to reach out to like 10, 20 people who are already at the scale up stage that can help me talk about it or actually test it or adopt it internally.

18:56So I think it evolved more from the traditional, let me just put them in a community and a subscription, which most creators go for. For me, it was more about how can I deepen that relationship? So it's friendship. It's people that wouldn't have access to normally outside of this. So how can I deepen that as a one-to-one relationship? It's also just my style. I'm great with one-to-ones and in-person stuff rather than just chatting. Honestly, I don't even chat or type anymore. I have also another tool that I just talk to my computer the entire time.

19:28Ghita El Haitmy:What I think is interesting is in addition to having a community of builders, you also have a community of other creators that are following you or people that have a large following. And you already mentioned that somewhere in the conversation that you have actually your own tech stack online. So if people want to understand what type of tools you have, they can actually find your whole stack. And you are starting to work with these other creators where they're sharing their tech stack as well. So would you maybe expand on that and how that's helping you with your go-to-market strategy? Asi, that's been one of the best go-to-market strategies that ever worked for me.

19:58Our website gets about a million impressions a month right now, just because every time you type the name of someone and slash what they use or stack or just their name, they will pop up with their tech stack on Tech Bible because it's a public profile. It's also one of the features that has gotten a lot of interest is initially, before even Ellie was that evolved, founder could use it to have visibility on their tech stack, but just click share and they can send the link to all of their employees. So they have a full ledger of everything that they're using. Since that's been public, I made sure to go talk to people who are building awesome stuff that I can ask them what tool they're using.

20:37And people trust people. They trust the recommendation that you give them. They trust if another similar person like them is using it way more. And that's been a great distribution channel for me. Yeah, in terms of search and also gaining trust, because they see all of these other great builders are on the platform, have their tech stack directly on there.

20:56Ghita El Haitmy:Yeah, and how are these creators kind of incentivizing to share their tech stack? Because I assume if a large creator shares that they are using Riverside, it also really benefits Riverside, obviously. So is there kind of like a third party here that's financing the bills for them or whatsoever or not at all? It was the business model for the first six months of the business. And it was great. I loved doing referrals and affiliate marketing. We did a lot of tracking to see who came from WorkClick. It's a passive type of revenue that comes in straight from there. But I think Sat and thought about where the industry is going, where the internet is moving towards.