The “AI wrapper” debate, AI-powered lead gen, auto-clips, resumes, and more with Sunny Madra | E1792

0:00All right, everybody. Welcome to Monday. I am back in Tahoe just for a little summer jaunt to see the lake, take the girls out for a little rope course, maybe get on the lake, get on the lake, get on the lake, I'm back in Tahoe. work front this year but that's good it's sort of it's a it's an important setup summer i think for a big big fall and set up 2012 oh i was calling it no i started the summer stress-free summer oh no and then i got halfway in and now it's the setup summer i i i tried to have stress-free summer it didn't work yeah um but i am doing we had three years of that 2020 2021 2022 22 those were not stress-free those were gag no but but yeah they weren't depressing and like licking your wounds and trying to fix everything in your portfolio yeah i've been meeting with a lot of lps and that has been uh very instructive because now venture capital is kind of back to basics back to square one like back to you know just find a great company invest in it burn a low amount of money, get product market fit, be super focused, be super lean.

1:27It's a different world. It's the J-Cal sweet spot. It's the J-Cal sweet spot. Yeah. It's kind of like exactly where I like to get, you know, Carmelo Anthony would like to get that little 12 footer going back you up. Try to do that little floater. I kind of like, I got my spot on the floor and, uh, you know, they're feeding me the ball constantly. This Week in Startups is brought to you by in brokers startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance today at a broker.com slash twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist lemon.io need to speed up your product development without draining your budget Hire vetted engineers from Europe at Lemon.io.

2:20Go to Lemon.io slash twist to get 15 % off for the first four weeks. And Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. Now you can add the pod cover to any mattress. Go to EightSleep.com slash twist to check out the pod cover and get$150 off at checkout. And the thing that's most interesting is I'm getting a lot of great AI companies. And they could be dismissed as AI wrapper companies or chat GPT wrapper companies or, you know, pick your language model, wrapper companies. Yeah. But what I'm finding is they're finding all kinds of pockets of where to add value in the wrapper. So, you know, there's a website or an app, a wrapper around an iPhone or a wrapper around AWS.

3:13I guess you could diminish it to that way. But I'm curious your thought on this debate in Silicon Valley, and if you can explain it from your own words, the AI wrapper debate. Well, look, I'm going to lean into a company that you are famously known for angel investing in Uber. Oh, yeah, I was in that one, I think. Yeah. And one could argue back then, someone would say the location API on an iPhone through iOS. Well, you're just building a wrapper around that. Yes. Right? But that was a very important API. That API has led us to have Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, a whole bunch of services with location kind of being at the core of it.

3:59But then they had to build a whole bunch of infrastructure beyond just the location API. But without it, you probably couldn't get off the ground. I view AI as the same thing. AI today is an API. It's a very powerful one. But if you're going to build a business, you need to build a lot of infrastructure, a lot of scaffolding around what's happening. And I think the companies that are focusing on that are going to get there. Now, obviously, Apple benefited tremendously off of building the platform and off of building a place for developers to build off of. But many companies, and probably in aggregate, the value of those companies exceeds Apple's or it's at least maybe close to it.

4:40um and so i think when you know people go to that argument say oh everything is just a wrapper well we we can boil that down to almost you know all technologies that that have scaled off of a good platform that got off the ground yeah i think it's very well said and you know we had in our discussions here you brought me a company called uh venturous ai yes remember on episode 1774 well I interviewed the Fanu Emanuel. I like the product so much. I offered him a 25K investment live on the air. And now Ventress just accepted the$100 ,000 offer from the launch accelerator. Oh, right. So it's our first full circle demo as an investment.

5:22So I'll make sure that you get a little tasty poo. Figure out how to do a little carry share on that for you. No, I'll just write a check. Or you can write a check. I'll just write a check. I'm good with that. That was the perfect example of a wrapper company, right? and you could dismiss these but i can tell you like the level of detail they went into in doing a swat analysis the pastel analysis yeah all this stuff um they're they're getting traction amongst uh and for folks who don't know it's a very simple concept i'll share it with you right now or you explain the concept while i pull up my screen yeah the concept is you know if you have an idea what it does is it takes your idea and it breaks down the the basic types of analysis that you would do for any idea uh you know everything from swat which is strengths weaknesses opportunities threats to pestle and you know it gives you uh like here's a framework right here exactly and it can formulate a business plan for you an mvp unique selling points um and go to market motions this is you know look for for a long time so what you'd pay a consulting firm to do for you Yes.

6:29Or you'd go get an MBA and you'd understand this through some type of business school. And for many people, I think what this does is help them understand because a lot of people have ideas. And, you know, you and I have both seen that throughout our careers. But what people struggle with is how do you take the idea and then start to test its viability and which framework should I use for testing it? Now, some people will just go and build something and see that it works or fails in the market. but this allows you to do some higher level analysis before you get into the build phase and maybe you know before you spend your money your energy on building something and this is uh as we've discussed with generative ai you may not want to make a health care decision on it right now or a finance decision obviously they can hallucinate but when you think about just ideation coming up with ideas fancy word for coming up with ideas and developing them brainstorming, another word for that, chewing the fat, jam session.

7:28This is just giving you so many jumping off points. So when you start doing these analyses, and the one I'm showing on the screen here, if you're watching, is for the venture capital school I'm thinking about starting. I want to start a program to train people to be associates at venture firms and have them work at our venture firm as part of it. It really does do a great job of giving you some ideas you know some of them are obvious leverage social media to share success stories of alumni and showcase the expertise of faculty members that's actually very succinctly said if you were going to start a school those would be two blocking and tackling things that you might forget and yeah oh wow you know we should move that up the list obviously testimonials and you know uh the dossiers of our faculty members would be critical so the other thing is when you look at this uh when i make investments in early stage companies everybody asks me like how do you make your decisions and one of them is uh product velocity you can see here they have updated their you know whole site since we talked to them a month ago or something so they definitely are adding things like path to an mvp and unique selling point i don't think we're part of the analysis and here they're upselling you hey you got to pay for this right so back to the wrapper companies i think there's so many ways to add value to you know some verticalized app whether it's travel, whether it's business analysis, sales, you can add so much.

8:49Imagine taking each of these ideas and using it as a jumping off point and just having group discussions inside of this app, right? Like just being able to store the, you know, people using these as jumping off points, right? Or moving them from a bullet point to a base camp, like a punch list, you know, a project management platform, right? You can go from ideation to project management. Pretty interesting idea, right? And I, you know, I've used it a few times now and a lot of people similar to you, Jake, how like reach out and have an idea or something like that. And I literally will just take what they sent me, put it inside the tool and send it back to them.

9:25And now you're a genius advisor. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'll be very transparent. I say, look, like these are the things you need to think about. Right. Then. Yeah. And then, you know, I'd create, I think it's, I really think it's an incredible tool. I'm, I am excited. We demoed them. I'm excited that they join the accelerator and, you know, writing a little check. That'll be nice. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So the voice is your hearing. Jason Calacanis, Agile Investor, Sonny Madra, co-founder of Definitive Intelligence. They provide AI enhanced data analytics of public and private data, including autonomous data science agents.

9:59That means people going out on the internet and working on your behalf. Not people. So we like to do demos. Robots. Bots. Agents. Bots. Agents, yeah. Pick whatever term you like. Listen, I work with super early stage companies at launch. like literally year zero. They haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the Series A, people have thousands of dollars in MRR, and maybe they've only raised a couple of hundred thousand before that Series A, and they don't have their insurance set up. And in fact, we recently had a great startup that didn't have D &O, and we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings, they were making massive decisions, there were legal issues, and they didn't have the basic D &O insurance that protects directors and officers.

10:40So we send them right to a broker. And broker is business insurance built specifically for startups, a single application will help your startup get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Think about that four quotes, four lines, 15 minutes. And they're going to connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. We use it at launch. It's easy peasy lemon squeezy. It's easy breezy. What more do I need to tell you? I use it. I love it a lot of our startups use it they love it try and broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10 off their startup package in broker.com slash twist that's e-m-b-r-o-k-e-r.com slash twist and use the code twist for 10 off okay let's get back to this amazing episode so let's get into our demos we always like to talk about demos and we're you and i are on the chat thread and we're constantly sharing things we find on the internet people talking about stuff generative ai it's obviously moving quickly here so what do you got for us this week okay so this is a build off of something that we've been continuing on a theme on which is from transcription to click or to to uh subtitles and you know what after last week i found this tool which is called clap and what it does is you give it a link to a youtube videos uh in in this case the free version is limited to under 30 minutes so i found this uh clip from your session with tim ferris oh cool uh and in this particular session you were talking about wealth and happiness yeah uh this might you know it's tim ferris i'm assuming the whole thing might have been a couple of hours because he doesn't do seven minute podcasts yeah and i haven't listened to it but now i've listened to this clip and so i gave it the clip and then what it does is it it's generated it's called clap.app k-l-a-p-a-p-p yeah okay and what it's done is it's generated nine tiktok style videos from that seven minute clip got it and those videos have all the standard um subtitling and all that but what i really like is it found a way to generate nine videos and it gave them all a virality score and so the first one here has a virality score of 85 out of 100 and it's it explains that uh this video has a high virality potential because it touches on a relatable topic of redefining success beyond financial wealth what a really interesting thing that it kind of pulled from that discussion right and then it it sees your enthusiasm and passion for life can resonate with viewers and it gives a reason of why this thinks this is 85 that's pretty scary i'm i mean good why is it scary video editor you know like an offshore a video editor why this is a good viral clip they they wouldn't be able to say right in all likelihood yeah when this goes back to our theme ai remember jcal we're talking about last week and said 18 months they'll be as good as humans and even better i mean this is the this is the crazy bet that you have made in 18 months should be we'll be sitting here in uh the new year basically january 2025 you're claiming sandeep that in january 1st 2025 like it's going to be as good as a human to do these kind of tests is a bold prediction but i i would have a hard time saying over under i might say over by a little bit yeah but it could be under by a little bit yeah yeah but we're not in orders of magnitude anymore we're just within like you know you're not saying 10 years away right so no no no it's not it's not the 20 year it used to always be when you made a prediction hey when will we have flying cars you say 20 years because nobody remembers you made the bet yeah right so you can do it under 10 you might know you can see it's done all that and then you know as you scroll through it shows different scores see this one is a 72 out of 100 this is a 72 this is a 70 and you can go 68 and so this i'm just looking at number six out of them and says yeah well why is this a 68 well this is moderate potential for virality and it's the topic about finding fulfillment and doing what you love is relatable and can resonate with a wide audience etc and so and it explains however the lack of visual elements and the length of video may limit its reach compared to and it's kind of looking at like just the real nuances of what so they've trained it that the clip is too long and it's not visually exciting enough yeah because it would be cool if i could say add collateral and make it more well you know it's funny that's exactly what nick and i were talking about when we were just doing like our dry run here we're like that's the next phase where you're like okay we'll make it better for me take this from a 68 and make this into a 100 you know that's a standard collateral thing like what we did we did a video one time on our tiktok where i was talking about the movie the founder and uh it got a little bit of traffic but then i say can you remake that and put clips from the movie in it yeah and then that one was the one that went viral yeah so so look you know this is just an evolution and you know i'm only make another prediction in less than three months we'll find one that does what you know both of you guys are saying which is now it's taking a seven minute thing turning it into 10 clips and scoring them i think in less than three months we'll have one of these that'll not only take the clips but it'll it'll give it the boost of what's needed um through an understanding of you know either doing like you know adding amazing like in transitions and things like that in yeah well i mean and if you fed it which i'm i'm guessing well what do you think the founders did there do you think they said here are some heuristics we know these are great rules so you know look at each video under you know with and in the prompt or something yeah they're saying hey examine the video for these qualities visually appealing quotes whatever or do you think they said here are these are trended videos from tiktok you know infer what should come yeah you know in the next video because if it did it'd be like you should be a sorority girl dancing during rush week do yeah those are pretty popular right now unbelievable what I would say they don't have a block on TikTok why don't they have a block on TikTok can I just say no none of this just more food I need to just tell them please no more dancing sorority girls and it's like the group chats that get you because someone will send you something in a group chat and you open it and it's like in your algorithm oh right yes if somebody sends you something now you're tied to it forever yeah exactly so that's like tiktok bombing you could tiktok bomb somebody if i sent you like oh my god these five tiktoks are amazing and i send you five tiktoks yeah about like people who like to dress like evil clowns yeah and now i've like turned your tiktok into like evil clown talk yeah the tiktok bomb it's like there's it's um remember the rickrolls there's an equivalent of rickrolling yeah yeah the tiktok so what do you think they did here I think they just put in their heuristics, right?

17:34I think so. It's very similar to like, you know, Venturist, right? Where, look, there is some set of frameworks that people understand, right? In their case around business, in this case around what it takes to make a viral TikTok. I think in building a startup, it's, you know, built by two folks. I think it's like, look, they've started and I think they have their names at the bottom. We can give them a quick shout out here. So it's built by, you know, Theo and Victor here. Oh, hey, Theo. Hey, Victor. Yeah. Yeah. And so look, my guess is that they haven't done the deep training of like, here's a bunch of videos, figure out what happened, apply it.

18:05I think it's like, they have some known, you know, formats and things that they want it to talk about. Because in some of it's a little bit repetitive, you can see it say the same thing. But look, if you're going to build these things, this is where we started the conversation. A location API just gives you, you know, where a person is just some lat long, right? You've got to build a lot of infrastructure around to build a company and you don't build startup by building all the infrastructure you kind of crawl walk run so i would start in the same spot if i was them yeah and you can totally see that the people who are jumping in figuring how to do these verticals which you could be cynical and say oh if i had the right prompts and i had an unlimited amount of time i could be on chat gpt doing this myself right yeah but we all don't have unlimited time and we all don't uh you know sit there and obsess over it so yes you could theoretically build your own airbnb like make a message board software and then you know email all your friends and say does anybody have a place or know somebody i mean yes you could do all that work yeah or you could let airbnb maintain it right yeah build the network facts okay what's next here okay so next is an interesting one this is like one that is kind of near and dear in some ways but like and i think it it makes sort of the use of the technology easier here.

19:19What is the name of this? Oh, sorry. This one is called kick resume, kick resume. Okay. And like these resume builders have been around for a while. Like that's not a new concept, but like this one uses the power of AI in a couple of different ways. And so I kind of did like a, and it can pull your stuff in from LinkedIn. I didn't want to have it do that because I just didn't want it to scrape my LinkedIn, but it has the ability to do it. And what I can do here is i can say i'm going to add work experience so i've just got like you know for the folks listening i have a resume ui on the right hand side and i have uh on the left hand side where i can add so i'm going to add work experience you have like prompts over there like you had a work experience like a four yeah yeah exactly so i'm going to say i said working at twist and i'm going to say i'm a podcast host right yeah and you know what i'm going to do and say oh you know i don't know what to do because like resumes are tough and so i have this ai writer and i can basically say generate content and say well for what is i say podcast and generate and you can see here on the left it starts to write the content and on the right it starts to put it into the resume and fill it in for me and so right look and it does this for all the different sections like your skills and you know and other areas it's an incredible starting point because it says here like listen i collaborated with a team of producers editors and sound engineers to ensure seamless production and delivery of high quality podcast episodes maintaining a strict release schedule and meeting all project deadlines who knows where the you know chat gpt or whatever claude or whatever they're using here got that information but somebody apparently had put that on their resume and so it scraped it or you know and then put it into its language model guess the next word what's the most next likelyness next word after collaborated with you know for people who are having podcast producers and here you have it and it's a great way to start because you'd say you know we didn't have uh really sound engineers we just had editors so collaborating with and oh it wasn't really a team it was a producer and an editor so collaborate with you know a senior producer and editor and you just edit it from here but again brainstorming with you and suggesting things that you might not have thought of and giving you great perfect grammar and structure Sure.

21:32And look like this goes back to, yeah, can you do this in open AI? You can, but you're not going to get a full on framework, like the resume that's coming out of it. Right. And you may not know like the template you want to do it in around work experience and the tense and the voice. And this helps now beyond that, it does some interesting things. It has like this AI toolbox, which I'm just loading up here. So we'll give it a second. And what it'll do is it has a, um it'll score your resume for you yeah and it'll tell you hey you know you've got these repetitive verbs maybe you're doing it it's got like a built yeah yeah exactly results you're using like you know words that are overused yeah and look and you know it's got a checklist make sure you got your email address last name work experience it's telling me i didn't put my phone number and i don't have an education section uh it's giving me some benchmark scores in terms of like word count start date to end dates you know just a bunch of framework stuff which you know i thought was really cool it then has a a section that will help you prepare for a job interview okay so put in here you want to be a podcast producer podcast producer sure yeah i want a podcast host producer right can you tell us about your experience as ceo co-founder and how you contributed to the company's growth and success so that was based on your first title on your resume yeah yeah exactly what strategies did you implement to increase market share and establish the company as a key player in the industry how did you secure venture capital funding and utilize to it to expand operations and accelerate product development these are great questions and yeah this would be great if you think about this like a resume coach to run you through an equivalent here would be hundreds to low thousands of dollars like what does a resume coach slash writer charge 500 bucks a thousand bucks probably yeah i i never had to use one other than when i was in college when we used to do co-ops and then our you know department our co-op department help us with that stuff but um but you know look this is a real thing for folks like you know people still expect resumes and even if you're applying maybe even to be a fantastic a job at any level and look not a lot of people have access to these kind of tools and you know they may not know what to do and then this going back to what maybe we'll stick on that theme today a lot of people may not know what to do in chat gpt if you got access to it even for free and say how to how to have it help me with a resume this puts a framework around it yeah and and it makes it a lot more straightforward.

24:14Great. Awesome. Yeah. Really, and then you can download it, proofread it, and it's got this career coach section as well. All the basic stuff. Yeah. I mean, and when it gets more and more data, it's going to get better and better. So, you know, right now they don't have, you know, I think when they get 100 podcasting-related people to build their resume in there, now they'll have a training set for podcasters. I mean, of course, they're probably scraping a ton of, like, resumes they're finding on you know career sites or linkedin yeah yeah you know building up data but you know that's going to be one of the interesting big debates there was a company in israel that sued linkedin and won or linkedin sued them and the company won that was just scraping you know basic data off of linkedin's public profiles and they wound up winning so LinkedIn tried to stop them from taking that data.

25:07Now, of course, building a derivative product, I don't think you're going to win, but it was HiQ Labs that did that. You can look it up, HIQ Labs. Okay, listen, you got an idea for a tech startup. Great. You think you want to change the world. You think you got this. This is the one. Well, you've got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. You need product velocity. You need to go fast. How are you going to go fast? How are you going to control your burn rate if you got no engineers? Well, what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than a thousand on-demand developers?

25:38And those developers were all vetted, experienced, result-oriented, and passionate about startups and building great products. Well, what if they also charged competitive rates? Does this all sound too good to be true? I know it does. Well, then you need to head to Lemon.io because your dreams have come true right now. Startups, choose Lemon.io because they only offer hand-picked developers with three or more years of experience and ones that have strong portfolios. Only 1 % of candidates who apply to work at Lemon.io actually get accepted. And if anything goes wrong, Lemon will get you a replacement ASAP.

26:09A couple of great launch founders have worked with Lemon.io, people in our portfolio, and they have had great experiences. So I want you to learn more at Lemon.io slash twist. And when you go there, you're going to find your perfect developer or an entire tech team. And you're going to do that in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners get 15 % off the first four weeks. I want you to stop burning money. I want you to hire developers smarter and faster. Visit lemon.io slash twist and give it a shot. You know, Jacob, you have this like uncanny way. And this was like the demo coming up after the next one, but I'm going to jump forward.

26:43Okay. Because, you know, the topic you're talking about is like, and I know you've been talking about this a lot for the, you know, the team at launch and inside. So this is a new service called Browse AI. and what they do is they make it super easy for you to build a structured data extraction robot or a site monitoring robot um and uh this one i'll just play their video because it's a little bit what do those words mean in uh english sorry okay if extract structure data monitor if you want to scrape if you want to scrape something from a site and so if there was a website like espn and espn had a bunch of player profiles and you say you know what i just want to get their last five games points scored yeah there's no api to do that uh or i might not be a programmer yeah i could use this tool to structure take all the next players and give me how many points they scored and then tweet it out yeah this correct where every 15 minutes x out tweet out post to x.com okay you said tweet i'm gonna say tweet so we know what we're talking about yeah yeah tweet to x.com that you know how many points you know brunson or steph curry right you have steph curry point score every time he scores a point it tweets yeah you would be able to get the data through this and then put it in there got it so one one is like so they have two two types of robots one is like sort of like a one-time like you just want to pull a bunch of data okay and the second one is site monitoring changes right and so yep one is like imagine you're trying to monitor a competitor's pricing and you're like, oh, I want to make sure if they set their pricing lower, I set my pricing lower.

28:24And this first one is more like, hey, I've got a research job and I've got to scrape a thousand profiles and I need to put it into some kind of tool. And so what they do in this example, and I'll just, I'm going to just quickly scroll through it. I won't play it because it's a seven minute video. But the example that they do here is, and I'm assuming they must be Y Combinator funded. I didn't check, but they scraped the Y Combinator logged in site. So they even allow you to log into something and it scrapes the Y Combinator site. And the way it does it is, and this is like a fantastic use of AI, you basically install a plugin.

28:58And with that plugin, you kind of highlight the sections you want. You tell it what those sections mean on the page. So you can say like, this is the company name, this is the location, this is the description. And then basically it will, from that, create the scraper for you. And then ultimately that turns into like a list that exists on their site here, right? That has the location, the logo, the link and everything else. And so it does what, you know, you would typically ask a programmer to do if they're writing a crawler for you and does it sort of by using a browser plugin and your own like human knowledge around it and it automates it for you.

29:35And then it can dump it into, I think you'll see in here, they'll dump it into like a Google sheet, right? They'll export it to a Google sheet here. And then here you go. So this is that all that Y Combinator information from the logged insight of Y Combinator companies. And they've got all the different parameters here. So going, you know, I know you've been talking about this a lot, needing this for research or needing this for a lot of different purposes. Now you have the ability to do this, you know, pretty easily without any programming knowledge. And how is it doing the AI? The AI is to figure out what the different columns are in your spreadsheet eventually exactly like what they're doing and look like i you know we should maybe have them on or something to talk about in more detail but like my guess is that when you install the browser plugin and you tell it the sections you want that underneath the hood they're taking that and turning it into the you know grabbing those sections in code and saying hey the name lives here this lives here and then they're using that to then like code interpreter, write a script that says, Hey, I know that in these CSS elements in a, in these HTML elements, this is where the name is.

30:41So go and grab it from me by going to this URL. Got it. And then how does it know where to go for the next one, the next one, the next one, and like do the crawling part? That's the, that's the AI bit, right? That's like that when you show it two or three, it knows, okay, it figures out the pattern like H, you know, you've written some html back in the day right you'd see like h1 and then it'd be sitting in a table and you just see it over again that ai can kind of figure that out from from that repetitive nature of it so there'll be in a way it's an intelligent crawler so it's an ai crawler in addition to an ai data analysis tool it's probably doing it's probably analysis it's it's an extraction tool it's not doing any analysis and code interpreter yeah exactly once you have it yeah so just extracting yeah i think this is why you may have seen uh twitter like didn't allow people or facebook doesn't allow people who aren't logged in to see data and this is the reason these tools are getting so sophisticated yes and then you know if you're not so they're going to require you to be logged in so they can if you load too many pages in too short a period of time they can turn you off and then the concept of an open web with data on it is kind of going away which is some ways is sad because if you leave all the pages opening you don't stop people they can just fire up crawler after crawler with different ip addresses and then just you know over time have everything you and it's it's it's a tough balance because in this case like they'll allow you to log in so they're doing it as a browser plugin so they'll even allow you to log in and then let the browser run automated so they'll work around like sort of some of the the automated crawl issues now i think by running it through a browser it'll stop like like it's not feasible to crawl all the tweets that have ever happened you're not gonna load 10 000 pages exactly but if you load a thousand it probably won't care and if you do it every five seconds it won't care but if you do it too fast the website might have a trigger that says anybody loading over 10 pages yeah you know i don't know anybody loading over 100 pages a minute is a is a spider yeah so you know throttle them yeah and i think like the flip side to that because i know you like the flip side is yeah like sometimes you're doing some work and you want a list of folks right and it is something like look i pay for linkedin and linkedin's pretty expensive like you know hundreds of dollars a year thousands of dollars a year i want to get a list of 100 podcast producers why can't i do that and they're like well you can do it we just want to slow you down because you're a paying customer so that you load one page at a time and it would be better if i could say put if i if i could do searches of up to 100 people at a time and i could do this 100 times a year so up to 10 000 people as a paid user and i could export up to 10 000 records at a time that would be fantastic but instead people have to use tools like this and and the people who get the value are not the paying customers the people get the value are the people who are the most gray hat hackers who are able to do this kind of stuff whereas the people who actually have a valid business use they don't but yeah that would be like a cool tool if if your premium account let you you know give you gave you the results instead of in the kind of you know web page after web page results yeah if it gave you actually a more of a table you know yeah which crunch base does so yeah i mean that that's my idea basically premium is you get some structured data as opposed to unstructured data yeah unpaid if you're not paying you get the web page but everyone creates everyone wants walled gardens right and that's the problem versus like you know and if you're using it for business it's challenging but another great segue jay cal you're on fire today it's gonna be a good week for you yeah this is a new style of uh like zoom info tool uh so it's like lead research so i don't know if you guys use zoom info we have an investment in a company called lead iq there's zoom info yeah yeah so so this is like sort of an ai powered one and uh what it does is like you give it like a name of a company and you know like it was something one of our customers and and then like it'll just find like similar companies related to it right and so i find um it's like really great like it's it's sort of um and if you don't know what you're looking for you can ask the ai to help you and say oh like i you know find me companies in this particular industry and i'll give you kind of ideas and names and so the whole the whole look it's like an ai look-alike finder which I thought was like really neat.

35:03Cause I, I think zoom info is great and we use it, but like what we're seeing now is this enhancement in and around the search interface that exists. Right. And so this allows you to kind of leverage the power of AI for search. Um, and you know, related, but unrelated, like we even saw this and I think you had a back and forth with Elon on Twitter last week where someone is complaining about like search on X and he's like, yeah, we're going to make it better with AI. So we're just starting to see that happen in all industries where someone's like, let me make the AI, like, let me leverage the AI to make the search so much better on my product.

35:39And then that lets them get a chance to even just build a competitive product. Right. And so, uh, so if I go here and I write HR software and it'll, it'll basically come up with a list of companies that it believes, you know, are good for HR software. And, and, uh, you know, I'm off to the races for my, my lead gen work. Fantastic. Yeah. That is definitely, um what people are looking for and there's going to be you know and then there's also write the email for me to contact this person or research this person tell me more about you know the targets at this company so you can find people by sector you can find people by um yeah you can find people by a specific company all those different things and this is what people use things like g2 or you know other software captera different software rating websites and And they'll go to the software rating websites and say, hey, I've got a partnership with Zapier.

36:30Who's similar to Zapier? Oh, if this, then that, this other automation tool. Oh, I use Notion and Coda. What are other knowledge management, you know, business process tools? Boom, here are the other ones. And so, yeah, it's very, very powerful, I think, to help find leads and then to get you in touch with the right person. And this is going to just lead to many more people contacting us to sell us SaaS software, which, to be honest, I'm there for it. I love SaaS software. I have been able to, I would say conservatively, I've been able to get 25 % lift every year using SaaS software. And now with AI, I think it's going to get us like 40, 50 % lift every year.

37:09We just did an analysis inside our company, and I haven't really reviewed it yet, but I got it yesterday, where people talked about all the major tasks they do, and then how many times they have to do that a year, then how much time it takes to do each time, and then normalize that into minutes and hours. It's like, okay, sorting through the inbound companies takes us each week, whatever it is, 400 companies, five minutes per company to sort them. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot, but five times 400 minutes is 2 ,000 minutes, 2 ,000 minutes divided by 60. It starts to be like, okay, that's a full-time job just doing that at least.

37:49And could you use AI to do that? And the AI could sort it. hey, we have our own internal ways of sorting it. Is there a product in market or not? We already have some sort of sorting. But over time, we can look at the companies we've invested in that have been successful and then try to put it against this database. I think that's two years out, but I do think that that's why I'm building up this database of all these startups is to start getting that knowledge. Well, the other thing that's happening is in what you just talked about there when you force your team to take processes that are loosely documented and are maybe even heavily documented but put them into like a an ai framework um what you're doing is you're capturing and memorializing that and you're codifying it and for many companies a lot of times that knowledge get lost so i don't know like you know for you but if you have like a really great analyst and that analyst most of it's documented but there's a few steps that aren't i think there's a real power for companies to to move stuff into the ai world by documenting these processes yes yes yeah it's 100 correct if you're forced to document everything you're doing or teach somebody else how to do it through the documentation and this is the right first culture that did particularly well at amazon where people had to write like little six pagers they call them and there's a great book working backwards that explains the philosophy and there's tons of short articles about it on the internet but basically if you have to write something down you explain it to people they'll even write the press release for a product they haven't launched or they'll write the faq and they'll have an internal faq frequently asked questions and an external one for customers or partners and if you have to write those you have to brainstorm hey what are the questions people are going to ask me about this new product or service i'm making or if you're taking an internal process and doing an faq for it you know you just whatever the most common questions people have which could come from a meeting or it could come from brainstorming or ai you'll have documented it which means which then means you could make an ai process out of it eventually and i think you know that's starting to happen inside the enterprise right and that's you know one of the things that we've seen on the enterprise side of things is the big consulting firms are making huge investments because they, you know, they've had these eras, right?

40:11They had the client server era, they had the, you know, migration to Linux era, the cloud era. And now you're, they're having this AI one. And in this particular one, the unlock is incredible and it's huge for them. So yeah. All right. This has been amazing. Well done. Tons of great, great demos that got us all thinking about how ai will impact our startups and the enterprise sandeep madra definitive intelligence thank you so much you can follow him on twitter he's at are you sunny or sandeep sandeep sandeep at sandeep on twitter and uh in between these monday episodes he's talking about ai and you'll get a little preview of probably what he's going to talk about here if you follow him on twitter okay next up on the pod igor from tone base tone base is a a subscription-based service that we invested in that has grown phenomenally over the years.

41:07And people pay to learn how to play classical guitar, violin, et cetera. It's an incredible interview about getting true product market fit. Stick with us. If you want to get ahead in your career, then you got to be ready to fight every day. You got to grind it out day after day. This is obvious. You're listening to This Week in Startups. You're grinding right now. But if you're a workhorse, you need to get a good night's sleep, period, full stop. We all know that getting great sleep equals better performance the next day. Sleep is a secret weapon and your secret weapon to getting great sleep is eight sleep.

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42:46All right, welcome back to the program. Next up is Igor Lichman. He is the CEO and co-founder of ToneBase. they provide online music education from expert instructors. How do I know this company? Well, they came to our Accelerator's 10th class back in 2018. The Launch Accelerator is just seven companies. We introduced them to a couple of hundred investors and helped them with their pitch and how to think about scaling their business. And now they're doing millions in revenue. I won't say exactly how much, but they've got thousands and thousands of subscribers and they teach you four instruments currently classical guitar piano violin and now uh cello it's not cheap when compared to your netflix but it's not expensive when compared to uh hiring a music teacher so think uh 50 bucks a month 300 a year something to that effect so igor welcome to the program thanks jason excited to be here so when we met you were trying to figure out product market fit.

43:49You had some videos up on a website and online education was starting to become a thing. I am most interested in how you've been able to, I wouldn't say bootstrap the company, but you have been incredibly frugal or capital efficient, as we like to say internally. You've been incredibly capital efficient while getting product market fit. So the subscribers to Tonebase are very loyal. So maybe you could explain a little bit about what you've learned over the last five years in growing from, you know, tens of thousands to millions in revenue from dozens of subscribers to thousands. What have you learned about product market fit, and how to scale a company so capital efficiently?

44:34Yeah, I mean, obviously, there's so many many things you know we we will learn but i mean i think what it comes down to is to really narrowing down and focusing on that exact thing that you can prove that you solve for customers it's um there's always a discrepancy between the ideas that we have and the missions and the visions and the big kind of you know idea for the future but at the end of the end of the day we'll learn that like ultimately i mean you know it's nothing new here you've probably heard this you know and this is one of the things that you also recommend to your founders all the time focus on the customer, provide solutions to the problems, and do more of that over time.

45:13Yeah. And how do you or how have you been able to understand the customer needs? What are the tools and techniques that you've used and added to your toolkit over the years to really understand the users so then you can refine the products? Because sometimes users tell you they want something, you build it, and then nobody uses it. So it's almost like you ask them, like, hey, if you ask somebody what we should add to the product, they might tell you a bunch of things that they have no interest in using. So now your user is just guessing and throwing ideas at you like in a brainstorming session, as opposed to, hey, we've studied their behavior, and we talked to them, and we know they want X, Y, and Z, and then they actually use it.

45:56Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so in terms of like tools, I mean, obviously, everyone is using the same kind of like, if we're talking about data analytics, we're using all the the heaps of the world and kind of like in all that and just kind of like understand i mean we're like a video like the way we solve problems for our customers is through video content it's live and it's pre-recorded so this is kind of like the the canvas the vessel how we kind of like you know pack its value and then give it to the customer and i think it was through yeah just like over time just like recording a lot of stuff and uh releasing it and just tracking you know and then you see that some things get a lot of engagement, some things that don't get a lot of engagement.