Transcript:

It's so weird to see you in Halifax, hometown, you're visiting your wife's hometown. So I know it's great to be in Canada. You're my very first Canadian, I guess, interview. That's awesome. Done about 50 podcast interviews, obviously. Yeah, I mean, obviously a handful for Never Go To Market Alone. know, a lot we did with IDG Foundry, but never done one in Canada. So there you go.

Yeah, and with a founder himself too. So this is, this is cool. We're in a Volta, which you were telling me is a, kind of like an incubator work coworking space. I just met another founder in the kitchen and that's the best part about it. It's those chance serendipity that you get by being here because other founders are also working on their startup. You talk, you learn about what they do. Maybe there's a sense of collaboration. Maybe there's an introduction, maybe some learnings, but it's great. Yeah.

Yeah. So how, let me ask you this, cause I want to get into, know, this isn't your first time starting a company. Um, I do want to hear how it's going, but for someone who's done this successfully, you know, taken, taken a company to market, had a successful exit, like, you know what you're doing, but you still seem to place a lot of value on community in terms of doing it again. So like, what does community mean to you in terms of, you know, a founder perspective and go into market? Um, so I'll give you two.

perspectives when I think of community this time around. When I first started the company, I didn't actively think of community. I didn't even really understand the concept of community and the power of it. We were always part of Halifax. We based it out of here, but our customers are all global. There were some accelerators we were part of. Volta didn't even start when we started. So there was not a lot of startup community around.

But this time around, ⁓ when I'm starting this, ⁓ even before I started, I absolutely am convinced of the power of community. And what I mean by that is, well, the first thing that I've started doing was at Volta, we do these AI meetups where we basically get startup founders, government employees, corporate employees, researchers, students come in and just present what cool stuff that they're working. ⁓

Uh, on about AI, they literally demo, uh, we always sell out 150 people within 48 hours we sell out. Um, so what that community does is two things. One, helps foster the sense of community. Now, anyone who's working anything in Atlantic Canada about AI, they're like, Oh, how can I be present in that? showcase. So that's great for the city. There's a buzz people, people who are working in government. They're like, I want to know what's going on. Cool stuff's happening, not around the world, but in my town.

So that's a great ⁓ fostering of innovation, learning and everything. So that's one community angle. What that helps me selfishly is A, ⁓ I think there's a massive unfair advantage for me keeping the engineering team here. So I can leverage that community because I do this, I'm so active, I can hire and find incredible talent that show up at these AI events. There are students and when I tell them what I'm doing, they're like, cool, let me know there's a job opening.

So that helps me. Not only I help the community selfishly, I also get, that's a side effect. I get to meet so many cool founders and not founders, engineers who are working in AI. So that's one part of it. ⁓ There's a big need for those people. And I guess it's finding and recruiting is one of the startups right now. Right. 100, especially the first 10 employees are super key. So that's one thing that that's one angle of community.

Other angle of community that I'm thinking of is in my, and this could be a segue in my new startup, Gia, where we are basically building a platform to help professional service firms, boutique professional service firm run and grow their business. There's a component that we want to build is called community. Professional service firms ⁓ love being part of a community where they can share learnings, refer each other business. Maybe they can subcontract some work. ⁓

And there is something that we are actively thinking of is how can I build the community within JIA of hyper curated professional service firms, boutique professional service firms or consultants who are starting their business be part of our community. So that's how I think about community. Community is super important. ⁓ Especially if you're starting a business yourself, ⁓ it's a lonely place to be. So being a part of a community helps with that as well. There's that feeling. like, it's not.

you alone, like the person that you bumped into, Alex. I've had multiple chats with him where I was feeling low and he's like, man, today was a shitty day. I'm like, okay, tell me more about your day than I discuss. And it's a shared pain exchange, I guess it helps in a weird way. It's cathartic. It does. It does. mean, I'll be honest. Yesterday I was having a hard day.

It's funny because 10 minutes ago I was telling you we closed our first deal yesterday. So obviously ended on a good note, but I remember just earlier in the day, I just phoned up my business partner. like, dude, I am not feeling it today. just, you know, and I stopped, I did an hour long workout hoping that would help and just my mind was racing the entire time and just fixating on, you just my anxiety of just things not moving as quickly as I'd like or wish this would happen or this person would get back to me. And I had to talk to somebody, you know, and he...

You know, I knew he would talk me out of it and he did, you know, and by the end of the day we closed our first deal. obviously everything worked out. But you're right though, I think we do need that, that human connection to help keep us on track, help motivate us, help center us. ⁓ You know, you mentioned on the, on the first, first gig, so with Lead SIFT, you know, didn't really think about community. Did you find it throughout that process or did you, did you sell the company and wish you had, you learned and wish you had incorporated it? Like.

At what point in this journey did you realize like community is important? I need to lean into this. While doing it, I realized at some point because there were some other companies that tapped into different communities better than we did. And I saw them and they were not necessarily locally here. One of them tapped into community in New York because they were selling into media agencies and they absolutely killed it. ⁓ So I saw how that worked. then

what some of them did was then they started their own community. So I monitored them, like, okay, there's definitely, and I do not know if I called it community. I called it networking, but later on I realized that is he built a community of like-minded folks who want to stay connected together. ⁓ So that's when I realized that was important. Post-lead shift.

Because in my first startup or a lot of startups, when you're going to the zero to one stage, which you are going through in your face, that is the toughest phase, right? There's so much uncertainty. There's so much, ⁓ you have to put out fires every single day. It doesn't stop. So when you're going through that, then thinking of community, if you have not fundamentally thought of it, it feels like an afterthought and it feels like a luxury. It's like, I'm not closing deals. My revenue is not growing. Customers are churning.

I'm my top engineer left. You don't have the luxury of thinking of community at that point, if you did not fundamentally think about it. So after I saw Leadserv, I had more time. That's when I realized building a community around, even if it doesn't directly help you, ⁓ it helps the community, like the region or whatever. And then, you know, you can bring up other people up, expose them to new things.

bring other people who can help them, that actually, there will be second or third degree effect that eventually helps you. So that's why ⁓ I'm actually on the board of Volta now. And one of the things that I'm trying to do is there's a bunch of other startups, a lot of them are first time founders. ⁓ And I have some hard fought lessons learned is how can I share that with them? How can I bring people that are way more successful than I am, that are in different parts of the world?

bring them in here, talk to them. So I'm definitely trying to foster that community. think it's super important. I'm super bullish in Canada ⁓ and Atlantic Canada specifically. That's where I live. So I think that is something I really believe in. And now with my startup, one of the things that I hear from the consultants in this professional service rooms I talked to, they're like, look, I don't have a big team, a person of one. It gets lonely. So being part of a community helps me a lot. So you're thinking of how can we...

sort of foster and build that into the system. yeah. Working in tech, think a lot of people, especially in the States, familiar with Toronto, maybe Montreal, British Columbia, Vancouver, probably less so, Atlantic, Canada, and Nova Scotia. What are some of the challenges you think you and other startups are facing in this area that you're hoping community can help bring up and solve and support? There's multiple challenges. mean, obviously we are not

I think I saw it, Toronto's GDP is about 30 times of Nova Scotia's. So that goes to show, they also have 10 times or 20 times more people, but the opportunities are less here. The talent is really good. We have insane schools here, so there's a lot of good talent, but unfortunately a lot of people, move out. They go to Vancouver, they move to Toronto, they go to San Francisco, all over. So the challenges that they face is,

there are not a lot of direct business opportunities that they can sell to. There's not a lot of direct customers they can sell to. ⁓ There's not a lot of access to early stage capital, risk capital that they would have in Toronto or San Francisco or New York or Boston. ⁓ So that's a challenge. So those are geographical challenges you cannot just change overnight. You just cannot. The other challenges for a lot of startups is they don't have

clear idea what good looks like or what great looks like. A lot of the times they're think building, even though they're global and they're growing, they're like, okay, I'm great. I'm comparing with other startups in the region. I'm maybe in the top 1%. But if you have to build a big massively impactful business, you have to compete globally. And when you go globally, when you go outside, go, holy shit, there's different levels to it. So how does, what does good look like? think that that.

That's a challenge being making them aware of it. ⁓ so those are some of the challenges that we have. ⁓ Yeah. I want to ask you like in that last part, what is good look like, you know, kind of taking a step back from community, but just more like just being a ⁓ founder, being a leader in your field. I feel like that that can really demotivate you. Right. So like, I think I'm good. I go on LinkedIn. I see what others are doing, how great they are. And like, wow, I don't feel so good anymore. ⁓

You know, I think it's, could be motivational, something to achieve, but how do you keep it from just demotivating you? so I, cause I know I saw your LinkedIn post recently talking about that. And I think from my perspective, it's important to you to know what good looks like. How do you use that as a driver as opposed to just demotivating you? Right. And literally I posted about this. Jason Lemkin said that. And the question he goes, you know, why San Francisco works? Cause it makes me feel bad every single day as a founder. Like that's what he started at, but he was saying it in a positive manner. And I, and I.

And I see what he means. Um, and, there's both sides to it on one side. If you're a founder, you are off a different, a specific mindset, like you're cut out a little different. So you are super competitive. You do want to win. You're playing to win. Um, so that can be a good competitive barometer for you. Like, shit. I grew 10 % month on month, but average these companies are going 20 % month.

I need to strive for that. That's, that's what good, that's the level I want to play. Like any sports, you don't want to be competing in just in your regional league. You want to go to the nationals, international Olympics. So you have to know what, what's the best time in a hundred meter race. Okay. So that's what we are. We are all playing for the goal. Like that's as a startup. ⁓ so I think that's one factor, but there is this part of it where it can demotivate you. There is a lot of noise on internet where you go.

that company went to 50 million in revenue in 18 months. And they're like, how the hell did it can. So I think as a founder, you have to have that filter of filtering out the signal to noise is take that go. Okay. Okay. This is what good looks like. Great. So I understand. Can we learn about what did they do? What are the tactics? What are the methods? What did they, is there any insight I can glean and then shut it off, go back to the drawing board and say, okay.

These guys did it. Forget, even if there's someone did it and these are some of the things they did. Can we replicate? Can we do it on our own and execute on it and not think about it any, any more than that. But having a pulse on that, I think is super important. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's something I'm always looking at and I got to just check my ego and sometimes and just to your point, like, what can I learn from this to replicate? I'll tell you something. As someone mentioned this yesterday and she was telling me this example, ⁓ for a

I don't know if it was for a marathon or for some distance running for the longest period, people just stayed under a certain amount of time. They completed it for like 20, 30 years. There was no world record. was like, that was where people were playing until one person broke that record. Like shattered it since then. Everyone has started breaking it. just going on. So it's a mental thing too. ⁓ It's a mental thing. you go like even in your business, if you go, okay,

this is what good looks like, this is the best I can do. can only close three deals a week. But let's say another, you find out about another startup in a similar space, maybe it's just team of one or two and they're closing six deals. The first thought you go, so, okay, I know it can be done. They're the same size. They don't have extra pair of hands or an extra brain. They just figured out a way to do it. So let me push it. ⁓ So that's how it is. I think it can push you to achieving, know, stretching yourself and achieving greatness.

Now is the idea of community a Toucan thing or is it a Gia company thing? And if it's the latter, how do you distill this importance down to your team? Do you just lead by example? you institutionalize it? It's a team thing. ⁓ it has to be a team thing. As a founder, as a CEO, you should be always paying attention to all the best in class, best practice that happens. And then basically,

Sprinkle that information, give that context to the team consistently. Not overburden them, it's like, hey guys, this is what's going on in a motivational way. oh, you closed a deal, it's not a big deal because someone else closed 10 deals or you shipped this feature, someone pushed, because that's demotivating. it go, look guys, a team of another size. Like literally, last night I shared an article with my team. There's a guy out of Israel, it's called Base 44, solo founder.

He sold to Wix.com for $84 million. Cash plus equity. And he has been, forget his name, he's from Israel. He's been ⁓ building in public on LinkedIn. Basically his pain points, how he struggles, revenue, everything, super transparent. That's the style, right? And I thought that was motivational. I thought because I'm like, okay, and he's literally journaling it. That's what good looks like. That is great, I would say.

And I don't think everyone can replicate it, but it goes to show with the right kind of people, go, okay, this is possible. This is inspirational. yeah, that's how it is. So it's definitely not a me thing. It'd be my job to consistently look for these, the right ones and sprinkle it. But the whole team needs to feel, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's possible. I mean, that's why hiring the first 10 people in a startup is super key. It's not for everyone.

It is not for, because somebody might go, holy shit, this is not even possible. And that's absolutely okay. You're not for the startup world, for this high stress, high reward, high risk startup world. So yeah. So let me ask you this, because I know, you know, from my experience, community networking, it's highly personable, you know, it's relationship based, it's emotional. You run an AI company. So like how, how, how did these two come together from your perspective?

that the best of AI can offer versus, this is a personal thing, you know, to help grow and foster. Like, are the two connected in any way to support one another? Are you seeing AI play a role in networking and community, or is it just completely relationship-based and AI will never help it? Two ways, two things. ⁓ It's super meta, but you should build an AI community, meaning bring like-minded people who are working on AI stuff together.

That's a fantastic learning opportunity. You could be building cutting edge stuff, which doesn't involve any humans, but you're building something on a, let's say a pharma. I'm building something in retail. You're building in marketing. I'm building in consulting. Bring these people together. What are they building? That's a community so that you can learn from what's going on. That's what we have done at Volta. It's been a year and a half. We've been doing this, as I said, sell out events. Every time people look forward to it. So we have built a community of people, AI people, people that are building in AI.

and people that are interested in AI bringing them together. So that's one thing. ⁓ The other thing is AI will automate a lot of things. It is doing it, it's making you efficient and effective. But end of the day, it is still a human doing business with another human. At least for now. Like the deal is signed, like the deal you closed, you closed it with a person. What AI can do is,

When that person close that deal with you, if you go and say, there may be the reason is you have built a bunch of AI technologies or AI stack in your solution that makes it super compelling for him. So you can do it better than anyone else, but that, that component exists. Right. So you are building a community of partner marketers and AI can facilitate that part of initial seeding of the group, then discussions you're having the relationship you're doing. That's you.

AI can help you in a whole bunch of other ways. can help you, maybe one thing AI might be able to help you say, hey, Rick, there's a partner marketer that you have and work since the last eight years might want to reach out to them. And AI can surface that for you. Or AI can make your product that you're selling to these partner marketers 10 times better. ⁓ So that's how I look at AI. The human touch doesn't change. If anything, AI frees up time.

So I have more time to do this human networking, be part of the community and socialize. No, I mean, that's, that's key. mean, even with this podcast, mean, I love doing it. It's obviously two people talking and I utilize AI to do a lot of the back end stuff. you go. The show notes, the transcript, the 100 % thing, you know, cause I don't, man, I don't want to spend hours on that stuff. I want to spend more time talking to people like you a hundred percent. Yeah. And this is a core thesis I have. think it's knowledge workers, uh, like white color.

workers, there's two kinds of tasks we have to do. Tasks that we want to do, that we get joy out of. are strategic creative things. And then the tasks that we have to do. My bet is, it's already happening, AI is going to help take care of all the things that we have to do that we don't really want to do so that we can get more time doing things that we want to do. So you want to have this discussion more and AI will

help with the recording, post-processing, editing, distribution, all of this. You don't get any joy of chopping up videos. You would much rather say, who else can I talk to? So I think that's what AI will help with. So let me ask you this. If that's your bet on where this is going, what advice do you have for, especially marketers out there in the tech space that are navigating this thing that's changing every day with AI, what advice do you have for them on how to best navigate where this goes, whether that bet plays out or not? it's.

It's playing out. It's 100%. I don't think there is a doubt in my mind or people's mind that's going to play out where it is going to have a massive impact across all industries. So the way I think of from a marketer perspective, I think the first thing my advice would be just embrace it. Just embrace it. There's so much you can do with AI, even yourself now that you couldn't do before. Like for example,

and this is probably a contrived example. Let's say you're working with a marketer ⁓ and you want to come up with a new landing page or an asset, or maybe there is an, actually, let's go back to our Foundry days. So that's an ebook that you want to promote. ⁓ And maybe you looked at the ebook and you're like, maybe the cover page doesn't look good. Previously, as a marketer, you had to reach out to the design team, creative team, give them the brief, ask them to edit. They might be busy, so it might take you two, three days.

to have this new asset ready as you want it and start distributing. Now with AI, you probably can take a screenshot of the current image, give a very nice prompt, give it context about your branding colors. And in AI, like any of these foundational models or their specialized tools, that can give you a new cover page for the ebook. You don't have to talk to anyone. You don't have to bother anyone. Within 30 minutes to an hour, you have the ebook that you really wanted with the new cover page. Start distributing.

Right? That's a very specific example that you can do. So my advice would be look into all the new tools that are available. The no code tools. Really, you don't have to know how to code. You just need to know how to prompt well. ⁓ And that's another thing that I think everyone should learn is go deep on prompt engineering. And prompt engineering is not just typing something. Like if you see the depth of good prompt engineers,

It'll blow your mind. And the best part is it's literally English. It's not Python. It's not C++. It's English. No, I think you're so right. And you've posted some stuff that I've incorporated mine, my prompts, specifically one was around, and I've noticed this, especially I use chat GPT a lot. It's overly agreeable. you know, it's almost like whatever direction I take on the prompt, it's just going to go in that direction, even if it's wrong. Right, right, right. And you gave me this advice. You gave everyone the advice. It's like act like you're a

brutal advisor giving honest truth. And there was a more to it than that. But it's changed it. And even now I still have to like, yeah, remind it like, is this the brutal truth? Are you just agreeing with me? And then it'll change course sometimes. % 100%. So I think it's that's great advice. How do people how do people learn that? Is it just YouTube and Googling how to how to engineer prompts better? There's so many courses. ⁓ Yeah, YouTube is great. ⁓ There are

specialized courses being offered by Andrew NG's startup. I forget what it is with partnership with OpenAI and insane, all free, all free, probably spend eight hours over a week and trust me in any field, forget marketing, engineers or salespeople, anyone, you will be more efficient. I'll give you a very specific example, right? And this actually applies to marketers. So was listening to a webinar.

And in the webinar, they shared, they were showing an Excel calculator that they built to predict revenue. I'm like, that's a cool calculator. But they were not going to share the formula and everything. So while the recording was going on, I took a screenshot of that Excel, uploaded it chat. I was like, hey, what are the formulas that you have? That this, it gave me all the formulas. Then it goes, do you want me to create an Excel for you? I'm like, yes. Created the Excel.

I downloaded the Excel. Now what I can do is can take that Excel, I can go to lovable or bold or replet and say, hey, can you build a landing page where someone can come in and type in this formula and it spits out the revenue product probability ⁓ without writing any code? And I can set up that landing page as a lead magnet now. From a webinar I saw, think of all the possibilities you have as a marketer. As a marketer, previously if you had to do this,

You have work with your engineering team, have to work with your design team to build all of it. Now, literally with no code, you just built a lead magnet. So that's why I think...

If you think of that, because I would have gotten no joy in thinking of creating that Excel, but now someone did it. I'm like, okay, how can I apply it into my business? So much faster idea to execution, so much faster. And it's literally better prompting, figuring out what tools to use. ⁓ Yeah. Now it's funny because, you know, we think AI automation, but there's a lot of creative thinking that's going in there. Like what you just talked about, like you got to think creativity, know, think creativity.

creatively to how to do that, right? Like, you know, all right, take this, put it here, do that, create this. Like, so it's, mean, it's still enacting our creative part of our brains and how to do these things. And we love that. That's the part that we want to do. That's not the thing that we have to do. And I think AI, that's my overtly optimistic view is AI will unleash more creativity so that we can do new things creatively that that tickles our brain better.

Yeah. So I'm, I'm, I'm really excited about all of this. That's very cool. ⁓ so I want to ask a little bit about GIA. Sure. Right. How's it going? Good. Yeah. Tell me where's this all going? Do you want me to, tell you the LinkedIn facing answer or the real truth? This is what it's good. Good. We have, we have launched a beta, I would say two and a half months ago. So we have about 75 days where we have about thing close to 50 customers. Awesome. ⁓ so that's great.

We have learned a lot and the only way to, before we launched, we interviewed probably 300 consultants or target market customers, but the learning that you get from shipping a product, no matter how half-assed it is and getting that feedback versus what they say in a customer disk is very different. So we have learned a lot. ⁓ So what we are now doing is, what we have realized is there's a very strong ⁓

message market fit. So when I get on a call with our customers, they go, how do you think? Like, how did you know what was in my brain? this is exactly what I'm struggling with. So I get that. But then ⁓ there's a gap in the product that we have built where they go, this user experience or the customer experience is not living up to what I expected for it to do. And that is the truth. I sort ⁓ of, ⁓

expected that ⁓ because if you waited too long to make it perfect, the ship would have sailed. now what we're doing is we're getting a ton of feedback from these early customers, super generous with us, getting on calls, they're thinking, hey, this is not working. And then we're also getting implicit feedback. So we are seeing what their behavior is because we track their behavior. Based on that, we're now going, okay.

This is the ideal behavior. This is the outcome we are going, we want our customers to get, is how can we optimize for that? ⁓ So that's what we are working on. ⁓ I think the feedback cycle is so important. Are you automating and analyzing that feedback in any particular way, or is it just getting on calls and hearing things and just connecting dots with other calls you had? Both. There's a lot of automation. So we use Mixpanel. We use bunch of these things to see what behaviorism we have a dashboard. We're collecting that.

Second thing we are doing is in the customer calls, when they're saying something, like, I don't understand how this works. Or, can you do this? So we are recording all of this. And then we are analyzing that, OK, what are the common themes? How many people are saying like? Because a lot of the times customers will not, customers are not, I don't think, are not always necessarily great at telling you what features to build. But customers are great at telling you what they are trying to achieve and what their pain points are.

you as a product person need to understand going, I get it. This is the goal that you're trying to do and this is the struggle you have. I will build features to do that. So for example, like in your case, they will tell you, as I'm guessing you're selling into partner marketers, they're not gonna say, hey Rick, build this feature in partner research. They're gonna say, hey, my goal is to deliver these many higher quality leads to my sales team that convert at this rate.

My challenge is a lot of these leads don't convert or they're not qualified. Your job as a product person or the founder, product founder is going, I get it. These, this is your goal. These are the expectations. And this is where the struggle is. It's not getting the leads necessarily is qualifying them. Maybe the data is incomplete. How do I, which data sources, which data partners do I use to enrich it? so yeah, so there's a lot of automated data and a lot of this is you product person using your gut and judgment and prod. They call it product sense.

to really figure out, build that killer user experience. Yeah, I love it. I think the feedback is so important. And I think that's very applicable to a lot of marketers listening to. I think a good note to end on, kind of a little different than community, but can be community, is that you've spent a lot of time with marketers. It might not be what you're doing today, but back to Foundry, especially in the tech space. What advice do you kind of have for them out there in terms of this world of AI and data and audiences and leads? I mean, you've seen it all.

You know, any just last thoughts you might have for the marketing community? My thought is I think this is a fantastic time for you to experiment with AI to a generate better content faster. maybe better lead magnets by yourself and then use AI to then qualify the leads yourself, validate and rich. There's a bunch of AI tools that can help you do that.

and they're not expensive, always look out for it. ⁓ But at the end of the day, keep in mind, AI's primary job as a marketer, marketing leader, use it to assist you to do your job 10x better. Don't worry about, ⁓ they're gonna take my, they're not, AI is not, doesn't have taste. It's not the creative mind. Use it, I call it like the calculator, right? You don't need to be multiplying 782 by 324.

anymore. You don't do it because that's not the best use of your job. ⁓ So use AI like that. Yeah, I'm going back to the previous advice. Look up prompt engineering, look at tools like lovable, bold, replet. ⁓ These are all no code tools. In 24 hours, you can build a fully functional app. You don't need to build an app or landing page or something like that. Yeah, yeah, I love it. You know, it's especially in the partner marketing side, I've seen they're very, ⁓ they're just risk takers. They're more likely to try new things. I think that's great advice.

Yeah, cool. Well, to can thank you so much for coming on. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah. Also check you.