3: Eric Vardon, the CEO & Cofounder of Morphio, using artificial intelligence (AI) for marketing insights & security

[00:00] Welcome to First Customers, a hyper-tribal podcast. I'm your host, Paris Vega. Let's get started. All right, Eric, why don't you start off by telling us what Morphio is? Absolutely. So Morphio, it's an interesting story. Think of Morphio as sort of your antivirus for marketing software or marketing data, otherwise used as marketing security. But our algorithm, after you aggregate a bunch of your marketing data, is going to notify you when something out of the ordinary happens. So think of tracking issues, credit card failures, you know, those kinds of things, even when tracking goes down or we let campaigns go too long or we forget to turn them off. Those are the kind of things that generally impede marketers and throw us off our day. [01:00] So Morphio helps to save you time, a little peace of mind, as well as allow you to get to your goals faster, which makes all of our bosses and clients and customers that much more happy. Right. So before Morphio, what were you doing before you got involved with this project? Sure. Yeah, I've been a longtime marketing nerd. Went to school to build websites. So for the last 20-ish years, I've been all around marketing, technology, creative projects, work for agencies myself, mainly an entrepreneur, and spent most of my time making clients happy and producing marketing tactics and campaigns for them. And built an agency business over the last probably 10 years. Always kind of been on the agency side. [01:51] You know, when we were scaling our business, ran into a few issues in terms of bringing on new clients and being able to keep up with the data and managing the team, the expectations, keeping people happy. And so I spent most of my time worrying about that. And it's kind of where Morphio was born. Okay. So did you come up with the idea for Morphio? Or did you join an existing team? Talk about how you got involved with the project or how it started. Sure. Yeah, no, it's all from my partner and I, John. Good friends and longtime fellow nerd. [02:24] We actually were launching a website one late night and getting ready to launch a campaign the next day. And went through kind of a long conversation in terms of after 15 years of really following the same process. Kind of asked ourselves, you know, there's got to be a better way to do this. And, you know, why are we as individuals making subjective choices in terms of the creative, the copy, you know, the code set, the framework, all those kinds of things. And so we kind of had a long conversation of where we thought the industry was going to go. So we actually looked around for affordable software for, you know, a small agency that we were running. And, you know, even from an SME perspective or SMB perspective, looking at affordable software that could add a lot of value that we could, you know, that we could put a budget against. [03:15] And it was really difficult. So we really kind of carved our way out and said, we're going to build something that fits that need. And so we did some research and started to get into machine learning and AI back in 2015 when it was still fairly, fairly new and at its infancy, especially in the marketing and the technology space. And that was really kind of how we got into it and built the team around it. Absolutely. So did you start off building it as an internal tool or was it from the beginning you were like, we're going to build this software and launch it as a service? Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately as a serial entrepreneur, you know, you're always thinking of, you know, what this might mean. But first solving a problem, you know, as you mentioned with our internal team. [03:58] And it was, you know, people just managing and analyzing data for far too long. The complexities of the different digital marketing tactics that we were managing, you know, spends increasing as well as other tactics and opportunities to, you know, space out your client's budget. And, you know, it just became a little bit overwhelming. And as you grow any kind of business, it became more difficult. Time became really hard to find for our most expensive, hard to find and hard to keep people. And, you know, ultimately we built it to solve a few of those major problems, knowing that we could really help our humans, help our people be more satisfied within their job. [04:39] That ultimately together we could meet our clients' objectives more quickly and, you know, have more freedom to do the things that we do best as people, which is to creatively think and have time with our clients and bosses or team members. And really think about problems and, you know, solve strategies and those kinds of things. And then from there naturally. You can never go wrong by saving people time. That's always a winning strategy it seems like. Yeah. I mean right now it's an issue no matter what business you're in and whether it's a personal life or at work. Like you said, it's hard to find. It's precious. And so it's a commodity that, you know, you don't have more of and you can't buy more of. [05:21] And I think everybody identifies with it. Okay. So take us from you and your partner deciding this needs to happen. We need to build this. How long did it take from the initial idea to initial launch? How long did it take to build? Yeah, absolutely. I mean we spent some time early on trying to solve, you know, landing page issues. We tried to solve and build our own framework to create websites more quickly and use machine learning at that point to try to make better decisions on how and who was, you know, browsing our clients' and customers' websites. And all trying to, you know, monitor the business and see where things were going. [06:02] But probably in the last year, you know, 18 months, it really kind of settled itself into going out to the community and trying to understand the other issues that, you know, that marketers were having. And it kind of became apparent, you know, quite quickly over the last, you know, few months that we kind of had to hone that into kind of where the product is today. But really, yeah, it's been about, you know, 18 months since we've been in the platform. And I have a small and mighty team that continues to work on it to this day. But from a time frame perspective, it's, you know, almost a two-year journey from kind of start to where we are now. Yeah. Cool. So when it came time to launch, talk about that launch moment. Like what specific tactics did you use? Yeah. [06:49] Like some of the, was it advertising? You know, speak about that. Sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, it's a whole new world out there in terms of, you know, releasing a SaaS product into a world of very advanced, very technical, very smart individuals. And I think there's a bit of a pathway to that. So spent a lot of time doing some research. And, you know, we needed to get it out before it was perfect, but at least to develop a bit of a community around it. And so, you know, about May of last year, we launched a public data, if you will, and kind of released it in its infancy and just brought as many people on as we could. And so we launched on product time. We got our marketing going. [07:30] We had our website, of course, and all of our collateral across major channels, consistent, looking great and all those kinds of things. But ultimately then just tried to do a lot of, you know, individual reach out to either friends and family and other networks and just really tried to grab some volume as much as we could of people we knew, people we didn't, people with experience and people without it. It really didn't matter. The more, the better, and really just kind of let it out to the public and gauged our feedback that way. So, you know, content early on as well as today became a big piece of it. And that was one challenge for a small business, finding time, building a product as well as trying to write and think about what people care. So, yeah. Right. So you mentioned Product Hunt specifically. [08:15] Was that the main site that you launched on? Was that just one of many? I'd say that was one of many. I mean, LinkedIn now becoming the social media for all things business connections, you know, was a big focus. And so a lot of direct outreach with the community personally that I had made on my business profile over the last 10, 15 years, more specifically on LinkedIn in the last five, I'd say, was fantastic. People willing to, in a cross product hunt as well, willing to give feedback, willing to be a part of the launch, you know, people willing to understand that it may not be perfect, but to help shape and give feedback where need be without any kind of monetary return. I was pleasantly surprised at how open the community was to support anything new. [09:03] Just given the sheer amount of products that must launch in a given day across the globe, you know, we were welcome with open arms. And Product Hunt definitely was a huge piece of that for sure. In the first 24 hours, what did that look like when you released the product or did you do like some beta releases first? And like how many people signed up right away? Yeah, I mean, I guess within the first day there was probably a few hundred, which, you know, we didn't set any goals or expectations. And for us going from zero to even two or five would have been a success. So, you know, bringing on new individuals, some that we could speak to and some that we could not was a huge change. And it starts to make you think about the entire process of somebody brand new. And, you know, you spend a ton of time thinking and planning and executing. [09:57] But until you, you know, gain some feedback and hear anything from anyone, you know, you really aren't sure what's going to go down. So I think our best plan was to not set too many high level goals and expectations. I mean, ultimately, we were in the firm belief and still are that a smaller audience of right and like-minded individuals that can learn from us and we can learn from them was our goal. So it was, you know, albeit nerve wracking to let your baby go out on a date for the first time or whatever the analogy was. But it was a ton of fun and we learned a lot. So that's a huge launch. Over a hundred customers, you said? You said a couple hundred? Yeah, I mean, in terms of, you know, sessions and page views and inbound questions and phone calls and all sorts of things. [10:50] I mean, we got to remember that all things AI and machine learning about, you know, even a year ago is still very, very new and in the marketing space, not heavily, heavily influenced. And so we had a lot of people thinking we were doing one thing and the other. So, you know, intent and customers aside, it was just a bombardment of people curious as to what we were doing and why and, you know, what our team was like and the challenges we faced. And so it was actually, it wasn't as much, you know, even about the transaction or monetary side. It was more around the community trying to really understand what AI meant to them. And it's a big piece of what we talk about today is really getting into people's AI strategy and just having conversations of what that looks like. And I love having that conversation. [11:38] You never know what kind of conversation you'll get into as well. Right. But so these were like paying customers that signed up for the service right away. Well, yeah. I mean, the traffic you just. Yeah, it was the way we the way we handled it actually was to onboard without any with any payment. So we opened up the Krono to any user that was interested in going through the beta, the platform. We did not charge them. We did definitely. Yeah, we definitely, you know, curated as much as we could and managed that. [12:14] But anybody that wanted to that was interested, we let them have access to the platform for free in exchange for feedback. So, yeah, it was there was no barrier. All right. That's a specific strategy there. Yeah. So was that a like a set time? You're like, all right, we're going to open this up for a set amount of time, the free beta and then kind of iterate through maybe feedback bugs or whatever. Yeah. Like what kind of set time? Yeah. [12:42] So we put three months. We put three months against that, knowing we would get, you know, all most of May, June and a little bit of July or most of July. You know, most of us do go on vacation. July and August are a difficult time from a business perspective. Right. So we figured we'd use that gap in between from our from our release and our funding. And, of course, side by side and concurrently, we're dealing with raising money. And that ultimately was the major piece that was going to justify what we did next. So but we took three months and we you know, we had this this this this public beta and and offered as much as we could and really spent that three months having a lot of conversations with people that were interested, thought they would be a right fit, were a right fit. Some that weren't a right fit. [13:26] And, you know, you always go into that hoping for the best. And some conversations are fantastic and some are, you know, got to cut short and move on to the next one. So, you know, from from there, it was just, you know, what are you going to do next? But we knew we would spend at least a few months doing that and a couple of months to kind of internally debrief and figure out what our next challenge would be in through the kind of holiday season, if you will. So that's a wild time where you're you're trying to raise money at the same time of kind of proving the value of the product by getting at least interested, you know, signups and proving that there's a there's a some traction in the market for it. So after that three month period, what kind of conversion did you see to actual like paid subscriptions? [14:11] Yeah, I think it was it was kind of what you'd expect from, you know, when you give a product away. Our goal was not a monetary one. And, you know, we could talk about our strategy was it was really to understand what people cared about. We definitely knew that we needed to figure out the price point variable of what people would be willing to pay for literally a brand new tool in a new industry, something that they weren't comfortable about. We also wanted to figure out if the integrations and the type of technology that we built around the aggregation of our data was relative to the audience we were serving. So those were really the two major factors. [14:52] From there, we needed to to to simply get to know our audience, understand their workflow, how currently they were building reports, for example, or managing their risk from a marketing perspective, which, you know, started to become quite an interesting piece of messaging, which I'll touch on. But and, you know, this this was what really John sort of preached on me is like these are going to be the hardest people to talk to because you're not trying to sell them something. You're actually trying to extract as much information related to where we're going to go with this product. And I love sales and love talking to people. It just became a bit of a different agenda. But, you know, that that time curated more, you know, decent conversion, if you will. [15:30] But it was more around how it actually shaped the product, you know, over the course of the next few months while we raised money, because our conversation and pitch to investors actually became very different. Interesting. So after the three month period, it changed kind of a product roadmap in a way. Absolutely. Absolutely. OK. So once you switched over to the paid subscription, what's the what's your growth rate look like? Yeah, well, I mean, at that point in time, so in through July and August became more of the internal. OK, what did what did we hear and who is the audience we spoke to? And I think the realization for the most part was back to the notion of you get what you you you get what you pay for. [16:15] I guess I'll use that analogy, but we know we needed to then actually find, you know, some net new customers that were not friends or family or people that we directly outreached to that or had a conversation with and tried to, you know, give away the product and kind of convince them. So we set it on, you know, we set it on a path in in mid-September, late September, I guess, after everybody had come back to school and are back to the grind of work and closing in on the last quarter. And hopefully we could catch a few budgets. So in terms of then, you know, planning in through after July and August became really the internal time of what we had to change and tweak to go out and and really convince, you know, convince the people to to to to continue to join the business and the community. [17:03] But from a more of a paid customer acquisition perspective. So but we had one major question unanswered, which was, you know, what is the price point that are net new customers or or prospects would be willing to pay for a new product and new environment? And it's something that is very different than, again, speaking to friends and family or people that you've invited to tour or test the product or give them some feedback. Right. So that became our next two month, three month plan, again, depending on how financing came in. So really through the mid of September and through October, November, as we're trying to to pitch and close and financing, we set out on on on a goal to understand this price point and what people cared about. [17:47] So so I think through that that phase, it became we turned off the ability to get the freemium model with our web platform. We changed over to book a demo and really controlled the sales cycle. We wanted to first allow. Site or anything. You didn't put pricing on like website publicly. You just said book a demo or contact us to get pricing. We still had pricing on there solely to set expectations. But then we the call to action. We didn't allow people to register for the platform itself or try to self on board. That part we switched over to a book a demo. [18:28] So we knew the volume would go down. I've seen a ton of research just on that, like the pricing page and all those strategies. That's a whole conversation. Yeah. And I think we're, you know, as as we'll get into, we're just, you know, continuing. It'll never it'll never stop. It'll never finish. It'll always be an interesting process as the business evolved. But that was the one thing that we didn't have enough clarity on. So we said we're going to go out and we're going to find a founder, a group of of 100 individuals that are interested in not only building a community, but want to and see value in the product. [19:02] And so we we didn't know what that cadence was. So the probably the first month we had maybe 10 or 15 demos a week. We spent an hour with each individual, both with the tour and then our onboarding. We met with their team. We did follow ups. We really, really went to against a low touch model. First of all, to understand their workflow from net new customers, but to get a sense of what are they currently using? What are they paying for? You know, what are they interested in? But what are the other issues or problems that we currently haven't identified yet? [19:32] And we really found one major thing that actually we kind of put all that on hold after about a three week or four week period and said, we just found something that is very, very, very unique about our product in talking to these people. And we found something that really we think could could change the trajectory of the business. Ironically or coincidentally, it was two weeks after that that we were able to find a solo investor for our seed round, close that finance within about a month time after that, and actually moved our focus to closing the finance, getting the money in the bank, and then pivoting in terms of how we change our execution based on the fact that we had financing all within basically a two month period. So, you know, you can't forecast everything, but it was an interesting course of a couple months. [20:20] You said you came across something after talking to the users. Can you mind sharing what that was? You said that kind of changed. Yeah, absolutely. So when we started out and even at the core of the product, really Morphe allows customers and marketers to be able to scale and automate through AI. I mean, ultimately, that was our value proposition before. It's why we started this product and this business. And that resonated with the rest of our customers and prospects that we were speaking to. But there was one clear thing that we identified through conversation was a risk mitigation factor. So ultimately, our algorithm, what it does is through standard deviation, it aggregates all your major data, all things Google, all things Facebook, you know, LinkedIn, and now Microsoft as well. [21:08] And so when you think about those products and all the data, all the campaigns, all the clients that you may or websites or geography or all the things that go on, our algorithm is going to look for the consistency of that data. And when something falls outside of normally. Now, is this specifically organic paid campaigns? It's both. Or is it like organic activity based on the paid? It's organic and it's paid. So again, depending on the type of agency or type of brand or type of marketer, they're going to be either SEO heavy or paid heavy, or they're going to be focused on social versus, you know, pay-per-click, et cetera. It really doesn't matter. But the one thing every each or each one of those individuals or marketers had to deal with was when something happens out of the ordinary, how do they act on it? [21:49] The faster they act on it, the more they're going to either make their boss or their clients happy. They're going to be able to react and optimize and change. They're going to meet goals and objectives more quickly. But they didn't look at it as necessarily a growth or an optimization tool. They saw it as a risk mitigation tool. And so this notion of marketing security or what they came up with, and I heard through some conversation of, you guys are like the antivirus for my marketing software. You make me feel good. I can sleep better at night. I know I have something that's keeping an eye on me in the background, was a huge value proposition that, you know, we didn't quite think of before. And it became this light bulb of, well, there isn't really a marketing security sector. [22:33] There really isn't a notion of this idea that something can handle that analysis paralysis for me so that I can more think more freely. And ultimately, that was the trigger that said, okay, we've got something here. Let's see if we have some legs to it. And we started to then test that against, you know, customers as well as prospects on how they resonated with that type of risk mitigation. And, yeah, so, you know, it became clear that this notion of marketing security and an idea that machine or an algorithm could help manage the mundane process of monitoring data for irregularities, if you will, or anomalies, you know, was something that they thought, wow, I don't have to put my most expensive, my most important people on the analysis. [23:22] I can actually free them up to think about strategy or sales or pitches or, you know, solving client problems or, you know, all those amazing things that we all want to do. And so that became a light bulb for us for sure. So give an example of what type of thing that might become an alert. Because I, like, I handle a lot of, like, marketing campaigns. And, like, just by visiting your website and reading through the features there, I was, like, 50% sold just from going to the website. I was like, oh, man, if this is, you know, doing what it says it can do, then, yeah, it's obviously going to save a lot of time. But just give a really, like, specific example of one thing that might be an alert. Sure. [24:03] Yeah, I mean, so on a growth marketing alert, there are things like, so in Morphio, you set your business KPIs, your cost per acquisition targets, or cost per lead targets, both paid or organic or, you know, an average value of an order. Whatever those KPIs are, you set them within Morphio. And then, again, if you're trending and the data is trending against or away from that KPI, Morphio is going to flag that to you. So when you first think about it, and that's really where the platform began, it was to make sure that you meet your objectives or always stay on target for your objectives. And now you have a machine or machine learning to help with that. So it's like a percentage of, like, hey, if it goes within this amount away from our target, is it that granular? Do you have some built in? [24:49] Yeah, so think of there's basically three levels, level one, level two, level three. Level three are extreme changes. Let's say you're used to seeing 100 conversions on an average day in whatever geographic location. All of a sudden, you're seeing zero or one or two. There's a huge variance in that data. That's probably going to be a level three. You're going to want to know why. You're going to want to be able to flag against that as soon as possible so that you can go in and fix it. Morphio is not meant to take you away from the analytics tools that you love. It's meant to be there to ensure that those types of variances don't happen. [25:23] Now, the other things generally are credit cards expire, tracking goes down, you know, 404s or whatever the more transactional parts that happen to us as marketers all the time. Even little things like you let a campaign go longer or you forget to turn it off or turn it on. Sometimes you don't know and you need that reminder because if you're not looking at it, you probably might miss it. Yep. All right. So what tactics would you say have caused the biggest spikes in the paid signups now that you guys have been out there? It sounds like for the most part, you guys have been doing really manual personal things. Have you been advertising or any other tricks you've been testing out? Absolutely. [26:10] So the interesting part is that you're always trying to line up to, you know, both the funding that you have, especially at a startup where, you know, you have to experiment, but you have to be careful not to overindulge with tactics that you believe are flashy or invest too much in something long term that you may or may not know is going to have the return. So concurrently, as we finalized our seed fund, as we've gone and really focused on the next evolution of this campaign of, you know, our marketing security software, et cetera, that will roll out in the new year and building the tactics for that, we've tested on LinkedIn in terms of paid ads, sponsored as well as, you know, boosting posts and those kinds of things, organic posting. You know, a lot of it is through a B2B approach and SaaS model like ours. [26:57] LinkedIn is a big piece to that for sure. SEO and organic in terms of how we're managing our content, our page speed, probably first and foremost. You know, we're trying to take the approach of content, agency partnerships, you know, brand and marketing partnerships, sponsorship, leadership. You know, we're looking at where we are as a new area and a new space, especially with AI and marketing where people are still not sure they can trust it yet. And we have to become that thought leader. We can't go out and spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars against a very expensive competitive pay-per-click campaign. It's just not going to benefit us right now. So we're still in that testing environment phase. [27:39] But I would say first and foremost, what has worked is content and ensuring people find us, backlinking and a whole bunch of other great strategies. And going forward, it's going to be more direct in terms of our messaging and investing now with funding a little bit more into those, you know, those areas that hopefully will provide a return. And then we'll continue to invest in those as we see success. So would you say your blog is kind of the hub of your content strategy? Yeah, I would say it's a big piece of it. I mean, we live across all channels, you know, but with Medium, with myself, you know, kind of leading the charge as a CEO on LinkedIn as well as blog, that thought leadership, you know, gets to reside on me. [28:21] But we have a huge content team and engine behind it to make sure that not only do we have content that is meaningful and makes sense and it's passionate and things we care about, it's related to our business. It's SEO rich. It's relative to our audience. We hope it's going to add value. And it needs to look beautiful and it needs to catch eyes. And so, you know, we put all that in the same boat in terms of we're going to do all this very well and we're going to do it often. And so whether it's those types of, you know, hardcore objectives of direct conversions, we still believe in the power of even podcasting, you know, video and telling a story. We're very visual. We're very much storytellers. And that's something we're really excited to roll out for the new year. [29:08] So the design of your site, and it seems like everything related to Morphio is really polished. And is that from being able to get, you know, funding early on and like get a legit team in place and all that, I mean, or does your kind of founding team have some design background? Well, I mean, I'm a designer by trade, but wanted to go to school to build websites. But back in the day, that didn't really have, you know, I'll date myself, but mid-90s, there really wasn't a lot of places you could go to school to learn this stuff, right? So I wanted to be in advertising and marketing, but ultimately wanted to build websites and was fortunate enough to meet an amazing individual, Vince, who we had many different paths and working together and have been lucky enough to work together for the last many years. [29:57] And so we put time and effort into the product vision, both from a UI and a creative perspective from day one. And so it's always been great and beautiful, but we wanted to make a very, very complex tool seem friendly, but also make and empower our users to feel really good about how they would interact with the site. And that's a fine line. So Vince is still with us today. He's the man that leads the charge in all things UI and creative. He's upstairs with the team right now, late on a Wednesday or Tuesday or whatever it is, cranking away and working hard. And it is a value proposition for us to be or try to be better than anyone else, both when it comes to the connection of our content, the connection of the visual and the UI. So it's always been a focus from day one and will continue to be for sure. [30:48] So there doesn't look like to be any actual UI shots on the site. Is that part of wanting to kind of guide that whole process through the demo? Or is that what these little kind of little rectangles I'm seeing? Are those little kind of like screenshots from the actual software? There's a few. There's a few. And I think that we've controlled how often and how much we will display the UI and where we're at. Both of that became a strategy and a bit of a locket and control this, I guess, in one respect. And often because we're still changing, we're still tweaking. But that focus will definitely update in the new year as we release kind of more around the UI itself. [31:34] And we'll expose the kimono, if you will, to exactly what the tool looks like, what it does. And we'll use video as a big piece of our tactical suite. But if you book a demo, you get kind of shown the whole deal of the current state of things. Okay. Absolutely. Yeah. We definitely go through a full tour slash demo, if you will. And we love it when we can onboard prospects, let them see their own data. It's always easier when you can. But I know we're happy to walk people through it and have a fantastic conversation of what they're trying to figure out. [32:06] Well, I'm slowly getting sold more and more. We'd love to have you. We'd love to have you. So, all right. So the content, publishing, constantly putting it out there, that's the main strategy for boosting growth. Yeah. Yep. For sure. I mean, outside of that, I think what we've done is we're working with a fairly large global agency, PR agency, to help us navigate and cut through the noise of both funding and growth and tech. And it's a big world out there. [32:42] There's a lot of dollars and a lot of eyeballs. And so we're heavily employing a strategy against PR and technology and content to, again, allow us to focus on credibility and play the game, if you will. Yep. And you mentioned, like, brand sponsorships. Is that like lining yourself with influencers or doing, like, some co-sponsored things with other brands? Yeah. I mean, it's still to be determined. But we're looking for, you know, we're looking for environments where we can connect with our customers and prospects in a way to have, you know, meaningful conversations. And part of that is to always live within the life of our customers, their workflow, their teams, the problems they're facing. And there's no better way to do that than through, you know, a true conversation. [33:28] So, you know, we can see ourselves, whether it's speaking engagements, whether it's attending conferences, whether it's, you know, hosting our own. We definitely are including and have an amazing Slack community of early adopters that, you know, we post ideas and offer, you know, ways to communicate, you know, field issues and problems, whatever the case may be. We include them in webinars like we will be doing in the new year in terms of our product roadmap. You know, we want to live within our customers, but as well as the network in the world of marketing. So we don't quite have all that figured out, but we definitely want to connect in a way that hopefully is meaningful to our prospects for sure. [34:08] So it sounds like you guys have been extremely thoughtful about every step of the process, which is amazing to see laid out that the plan that you guys have executed looks incredible. Is there anything that you would have done differently looking back now where you guys are? Anything about the initial launch or getting those first customers that you would have done differently? I know that you've changed the product itself in a way, but other than that, you know, is there anything about the launch strategy that you've done differently? Yeah, I mean, I think you can't see it now, but there's a lot of gray hair on my side. And so, you know, being in business before, I believe we've learned a lot of what not to do or at least what to try to mitigate. [34:51] And so the one thing that always comes back to me when I'm asked that question is we probably would have launched earlier. We probably would have been maybe less sexy as we are with our UI and some of the things that, you know, maybe we could have changed. But I also firmly believe that the market may not quite have been ready even two years ago for, you know, this type of idea and software. And even now it's the social skeptics out there. There's still do I really need to employ automation? Does this really make sense for me? What is my strategy? So, you know, it's part of the personality. I probably wouldn't change anything. But if there was one I had to answer, I would probably say I would I would love to get it out earlier and get more of that community feedback. [35:33] But maybe that was a reason why we didn't. So, yeah, because it seems like you have to do a little bit of client education throughout the sign up process to explain exactly. What the product is. Yeah, I agree. So it makes sense that you wouldn't necessarily be doing a bunch of Google search ads because if it's a newer type of product, people aren't going to be searching for it anyway. That's right. And that's that's right. Some indirect targeting, maybe. Yeah. And that's our next challenge is to to create enough volume of content and trust in the community that people will be willing to to give it a try. [36:07] And then creating an onboarding that is low touch, but provides enough value and content where they feel confident, confident and comfortable with onboarding themselves within the tool. Because, like I said, it's when it's your data, you can see what our product and our tool can do for your own data. It's much easier to translate than going through a demo with, let's say, someone else's or, you know, our sample data or even more FEO data. So that's our next challenge, absolutely, is to try to to remove that barrier. But I do believe the market, you know, is helping soft the mistrust, if you will, of AI and machine learning. Yeah. And it sounds like you've created almost some of your own hashtags or new buzzwords with some of this marketing insurance kind of angle, that marketing security. [36:50] That's stuff that I've never I haven't heard tossed around. Yeah, it's still a little new and we hope to own it. But we also believe that there's an opportunity for ultimately we're marketers. We're nerds. We love these platforms and tools. And I just want to sleep better at night knowing that the, you know, the least amount of mistakes I can't still technology, we're still people, we're going to think differently and we're going to make mistakes. And if I can mitigate that and free my mind up to to really be as creative and as strategic as humanly possible, well, that's why I'm in this business. And I hope that we can empower others to feel, you know, just as confident. That's awesome. I'm going to try something new here. [37:29] Do you mind if I ask you a few rapid fire questions? They can basically be yes or no. Absolutely. Okay. So I'm just going to go down a list of different platforms and you can just say yes or no, whether or not you guys are using them or you view that as part of your growth strategy or customer acquisition strategy. All right. Twitter? Yes, sir. Facebook? Absolutely. [37:51] Instagram? Yep. YouTube? 100%. LinkedIn? You already answered that one. What about Pinterest? No Pinterest yet. Okay. Reddit? [38:02] Reddit. We have. I was thinking Quora, but no, it's Reddit. Amazing impression cost for Reddit. So yes. Okay. I need to add. Don't let my partner hear that because we don't normally talk about impressions. I don't like impressions. We love conversions, but we're experimenting. [38:23] Yeah. I've talked to some people who've had a lot of great luck with Reddit. Great community. Yeah. So you said Quora. What about Snapchat? No Snapchat. TikTok? Nope. Product Hunt, you already said yes. [38:38] And you do have a blog. What about any niche forums other than Quora? Um, like I think medium, albeit not a forum itself, but an unbelievable community of artists and writers and communicators. So I'm going to put that in the same boat. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That's kind of similar. Okay. And as far as paid advertising, you said you guys are kind of about to experiment, but like Facebook ads. [39:14] It'll mainly be, uh, LinkedIn in order. Um, the next one, G2. So we're going heavy, heavy, heavy in G2 and some other unbelievable, uh, platforms insights, but, um, using that what's G2. So G2 crowd using, uh, reviews and a review based, uh, strategy to help our credibility with our amazing community. Yeah. G2 appear to be a review site. That's it. So generally, uh, a lot of us nerds that when we're looking for software, we'll, you know, it's a G2, it's a Capterra, even, you know, even like a trust pilot, et cetera. But those are the go-to where we're looking to find solutions. Yeah. [39:54] So we're going to live there. All right. Now switching to some older school tech. What about cold calling? Absolutely. Okay. Snail mail, postcards, letters, et cetera. Yes. One hundred percent. You might see a little tiny Morphio robot in your inbox soon. [40:14] Um, flyers? No. Okay. And you mentioned some sponsorship stuff. Uh, email marketing. Email. Probably more from a sequence sequencing follow-up perspective, but not cold emails. No. Okay. And retargeting. [40:34] Absolutely. Okay. So even though you're not heavy into big, like search ad campaigns necessarily, retargeting is already happening. That's right. We definitely, definitely. And a little tool called visitor queue. V is just as it sounds, but queue is Q-U-E-U-E. Check it out. Okay. I'm surprised about, uh, how many people still don't do some level of retargeting. [41:02] Agreed. Especially with such a tight audience that, that we have. You spend a lot of time and a lot of money bringing them to the, to your site and it's a researched type of, uh, of purchase. You know, they're not going to generally activate right away. So got to keep in, uh, in their minds as long as you can. And I think marketers. Especially, I mean. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, especially like if you could, you know, you're tracking who goes to the checkout or the book, a demo page or whatever that, you know, right next to the final action is, it seems like it's a no brainer to just, Hey, remind them that they visited there every once in a while. [41:36] Well, I always felt that as marketers, like other industries, you go to a restaurant and if you were a waiter, you're going to treat waiters in the same way that you want to be treated. And so as marketers, it's, I kind of respect it when, you know, they don't annoy me with the remarketing, but they try to help with the value add, remind me that I'm busy, but I still might like their products. So think about it as customer service. It's not supposed to be annoying. Hopefully that'll help. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them, I think a lot of the guys that I get retargeted by, I think they need to add like a 24 hour delay. Yeah. [42:07] Like if I just left your site and I go to Facebook and I see your ad like immediately, it's like, well, my window is probably closed for the moment. Yeah, that's right. Give me some time to breathe. Yeah. Okay. Well, this has been awesome. Yeah. I really appreciate the time. Yeah. Is there any advice you would give people real quick to close it out who are trying to start their own thing, trying to get their first customers for their project? [42:35] Yeah. I mean, I continue to say, look to the community. I've, as the gray hair on the, on, on the podcast here, I, you know, I've had to relearn what it means to work hard and outreach. And, you know, the days of cold calling and email are still definitely applicable, but there's a new world of automation and Chrome extensions and integrations that will create a workforce to work for you through automation and machine learning or tools. And, and I think it's just, it's unbelievable what we have access to now, as well as the content to help us answer any question that we would have. So there definitely isn't anything you can't learn or educate yourself, uh, through the content that's accessible today, wherever you search. So I think, uh, as startups go, you don't have to spend money. [43:22] Your best foot forward is definitely going to be figured out on your own, um, understand your costs and then build the team from there. Awesome. Thanks Eric. Yeah. Thanks for having me Paris. Appreciate it.