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Epi 7: The Communications Software Changing How Businesses Control Their Content – David Hart, CEO of ScreenCloud

infinityadmin December 23, 2020

Learn more about ScreenCloud at: https://screencloud.com/

Find David Hart on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhartxyz/

JC: Well, hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have with me here today, the co-founder and COO of ScreenCloud. And if you’re pulling it up on your computer, it’s screencloud.io. This is David Hart. David, thank you so much for coming on the show. Please introduce yourself to the audience and tell us a little bit about you and the company.

David: Thanks. Thanks for having me. So I’m David Hart. I’m one of the founders of ScreenCloud. And ScreenCloud is a software as a service business. We help companies, big and small, manage and create content on public screens using consumer devices. That was one of our USPs when we first started. So things like Amazon Fire TV Stick, or Chromecast or something like that, connects a normal screen and makes it a digital smart screen.

JC: That’s really cool. So I went on your website. I was watching your video on there, and what I found really interesting was it looked like if you had screens all over the world, you could manage them from your laptop basically. Is that correct? How does that work?

David: Exactly. So when we first started, we were talking to one company and they said that in order to update content on their screens in stores, they were having to courier DVDs out to the store managers and things like that. That was a long time ago, I guess. So effectively we’re like an operating system that works across different media players. So if your screen is smart and can connect to the internet, you can effectively run ScreenCloud and you can manage all the content, schedule it. You can say, “Well, this office has this content and this office has that content.” You can give people different permissions, you can publish content, and you can edit content, that kind of stuff. So really like a content management system.

JC: What clients are your biggest ones? I see in my head Reebok shoe stores and stuff or retail where they have things running on the screen. Are those the biggest clients you have, or is there other industries that I’m not even thinking about that have a use for this technology?

David: So retail is important, but actually, it’s not critically our most important factor. And I think that might be because they’re already pretty well catered for. So really digital signage came up in the audiovisual world. So they got into retail quite early. And when we came along relatively recently, we were like, “Hey, you don’t need these expensive proprietary bits of hardware. You can just use consumer hardware.” So what we found is we have got quite a lot of retail customers, but we’ve also got a lot of offices and critically deskless workers.

David: So if you’re working in manufacturing or health, education … And manufacturing could be literally in a warehouse or it could be chemical engineering, that sort of thing. So people that don’t necessarily sit in front of a desk all day, but still need to get that critical information across to them. That’s another big sector, but it’s-

JC: So like subway stations or government facilities or something like that where there’s a lot of information running constantly, maybe like train schedules? Do you see it seems like people are using it for more infrastructure practical purposes or do you see it more like marketing agencies running ads and being able to control those?

David: Strangely it’s not that many ads. So there are a few who do that, but it’s not so much used for that. We’ve got about 9,000 customers, and there’s a real variety of things. So on the retail side, it’s like digital menu billboards. If you go into like a fast food restaurant and they’ve got their menus up behind. So that’s all generated digitally. And the key thing is that it’s updated dynamically. So those prices, it’s not someone creating a JPEG and uploading it. Those prices are fed in through that ecosystem.

David: I think that’s probably where we’re slightly different from the traditional players. And the traditional players go, “Right. Here’s your hardware. Just make JPEGs and stick them up there, and they’ll look pretty.” What we’ve said is actually for lots of people, they don’t have someone sat there making videos and JPEGs, but what they do have is content that can be driven dynamically from their databases. So it could be pricing information, it could be sales data, anything really that people need to better do their jobs. So call centers might use them, for example, to show the volume of calls.

David: We’ve got a big internet company that’s constantly monitoring their traffic and the server loads that have those on their screens as well. So there’s a real mixture really of use cases, which is why we’ve got 80 plus different app integrations. So anything from your social media through to specific dash dashboards like Tableau or types of things that people are using day-to-day in their offices.

JC: So you told me one big pain point that your software solves, which is the old school way was literally having to courier DVDs or something. Is there anything else? I guess you said there is, but what else does this software really solve that wasn’t there before, other than having that manual upload situation?

David: There are lots of different types of use cases. So I guess the key thing to think about with digital signage is there is a passive communication module. It’s not like you actively go on … Let’s say you’re reading an email or you want to look at some sales data. You have to go on and log into something, look at your intranet or look at the dashboard. With screens, it’s much more of a passive experience. So what we’re finding is people are using it to connect either customers or each other with information that’s going on in the company.

David: It sounds a little bit obscured, but I’ll give you an example of a way which I suppose shows how companies can use screens to connect better with their end customers. So this is quite a simple example. So one of our customers manufactures houses on a conveyor belt. So they’ve got these teams of people and they’re working at each pool station, and they’re connecting houses together. And what they had before was screens just telling them that they’ve got 30 minutes left on their station and then it’s going to move on to the next thing. But what they realized was that they wanted to make people a little bit more connected with the customer.

David: So it’s, rather this abstract experience of, I’m just putting this screw on and using a wrench and doing it up, they were saying, “Well, we know who the customer is for each of these houses. We know where they live. And we probably know a little bit about them because selling a house is quite a sales intensive process. So they said, “Well, what if we use some quotes that we get from the sales team and the name and the location of the customer? And we can actually bring it to life. So rather than just working on a pool station, you’re seeing that you’re making this house for Mr. and Mrs. Brown and they live in Illinois and they’ve said that they’ve been saving up for 10 years, and this is their retirement home, and they’re going to live the rest of their day. Suddenly, that connection with the end-user is a lot more real. And it’s quite a small example, but it’s a way in which you use screens to bring things to life, using the data that companies already have. I think that’s where this is going. So typically or historically digital signage is really seen as just somewhere to put digital posters really. And now we’re seeing it much more as being, it’s real content that’s updated in real-time, dynamically. And it’s bringing to life and connecting things in a way that we couldn’t really do prior to this.

David: It’s not the same as having a mobile app or an email saying, “Hey, let’s have a look at your mobile app and see who you’re making this home for.” These people are working on factory lines. They’re not going to be firing up their mobile apps. It’s that kind of thing I think is where it’s going.

JC: You told me earlier in the pre-show that you started off as a consultancy. So how did you go from consultancy to a SaaS? That’s a pretty big leap. What was that turning point? What motivated you guys to make that shift and start ScreenCloud?

David: It’s a thing that a lot of people have asked us about, and effectively we were an agency, we were doing side projects. And we did a number of side projects. Some of them did okay. We sold a couple for a private equity company, and then we did a JV with someone else, and that got merged and bought and everything. So we’ve done okay, but we realized that they were all side projects. They would do, at their peak maybe … Well, apart from the one we did a JV on, which got quite large, but the side projects that we were doing, which were SaaS projects, and we did quite a lot of mobile apps and things like that. The most they ever got to was say maybe $30,000 a month in revenue.

David: So at the time we were going, “Well, if we just …” It’s only three of us, the founders. Obviously, we had staff, but we thought, what if we just keep doing that and just keep doing $30,000 a month things? It won’t take long before we can get rid of clients altogether, because anyone who works in a consultancy, clients, they’re hard work and you don’t get-

JC: Fire right now, all my agency for 10 years.

David: And it’s raining. And I remember coming back from Christmas. I’d been off. I came back and I realized that one of our apps had made more money over Christmas. I think it was the year that iPads came out. Everybody got an iPad for Christmas, and we had this amazing Christmas period. And I think our various apps generated more revenue than I paid myself for the whole year. I was like, “This is crazy.” We weren’t even at work and we were making this money. So we definitely got the bug.

David: We love the idea of having products, because the products that you produce, unlike when you’re working for clients and they always change what you do and go, “Oh, don’t do this,” and you’re like, “Oh.” And you just get paid for what you do, but with products, you get paid for the upside completely. And it’s all down to your efforts. So we made the decision for the three of us to do this. But I think the critical thing was we also made the really tough decision that if we were properly going to do this, it couldn’t be a side project, because we’d seen that all of our side projects had just stayed side projects.

David: Because actually launching a product takes a massive amount of energy and money and creativity and effort. And actually, if we were always going to have it as a side thing, the clients would always take price … The client was paying me $50,000 or a hundred thousand dollars for a project, then they’re screaming. You’re going to drop everything and sort it. So we made this decision and Mark and Luke, my two co-founders, went off to start the company full-time. And I was working on it part-time and I said, “Look, I’ll deal with everything else.”

David: So I basically sold the agency and extracted ourselves from our other commitments to the various … So I was doing a day a week for an ad tech company because we’d sold one of our apps to an ad tech company. I was doing a day a week on this JV we were doing. I was running the agency and I was trying to sell it without the founders. That was hard, and also trying to do some stuff on ScreenCloud. So it was really tricky. And then there was a moment where there was no going back. It was like, urgh. Meanwhile, ScreenCloud was growing like most SaaS companies do in the early days.

David: I think after about four months, it was doing say like $4,000 in revenue per month. And I was like, “Oh my God. We’re getting rid of this thing that pays for our mortgages and puts food on the table and putting all in this other thing that currently is only delivering $4,000 a month, and we had staff and everything.” So it was a pretty scary time, but god, I’m so glad we did it. It was the best thing we did, because-

JC: So how did you grow that? What kind of marketing or things did you guys do to grow the SaaS? Because we have a tech audience. I imagine some people listening have their own SaaS, whether it be in the startup phase or beyond. So what did you guys do marketing-wise, for example, or growth-wise, just in general to get it from $4,000 to where it’s at now?

David: So I guess the two things we did, one was an accident and one was deliberate. So the deliberate thing is that we invest in content right from the very, very start. So we were bootstrapping the business to start with, but then we raised some venture money. But what we did was made sure that we were working with someone that we knew pretty well who had worked with us before in our agency to write content for us. And we just said, “Right, just put out a load of content.” We were asking her to do four bits of content a week in two days, so she was just like a machine.

David: And we weren’t really writing about digital signage because we realized that a lot of the people who were buying digital signage or buying ScreenCloud hadn’t had it before. I probably should have mentioned this. This is the reason we built this in the first place, is because we wanted to show some stats on our wall, in the studio. And we said, “Oh, let’s go.” And the only way we could see that we could do it was to go with one of these expensive hardware manufacturers. There didn’t seem to be a software option, or at least not a software option where you didn’t have to invest in their proprietary hardware, either screens or the box that sat behind the screen.

David: So Luke, our CTO, hacked it and realized it was a little bit more complicated than he thought. So that’s why we thought of it as a product. So we really were just saying, look, let’s not write about digital signage because people aren’t really thinking about it in those terms. They’re thinking things like, I can stream things at home using my Chromecast. So why can’t I share my tweets on a screen in the office using a Chromecast? So we would just do loads of really long tail content, like how to show Twitter using an Amazon Fire TV Stick, or how to show Twitter on your screen. That kind of thing. How to connect to your Google Slides using a fire-

JC: That’s really smart, because you’re going to gobble up all that long tail keyword, traffic. Even though each one is maybe a ton of traffic in itself, you add it all up together and it becomes a good traffic. That’s pretty cool. How does this actually work? For example, to wrap my head around it, I sign up online, how do I add devices? How do I get it from the point where I’ve paid your company? I put my credit card in, and now how do I even do that? Do I have to download software to my smart TV? Is there a browser code? How does it get implemented on devices?

David: Exactly. So you get your fire TV stick. Let’s say, for example, you plug it into the back. You go to the app store on Amazon Fire-

JC: Is it just fire TV or is there other like Roku or Chromecast also?

David: Yeah. Chromecast. We’ve got loads of Intel devices as well. So they each have their own different ways of getting the app onto that. But let’s say the five TVs that you go on to the app store … And this is another way we got found, because none of the other incumbents were doing this. They were all doing this proprietary. So you bought the box, the software was already loaded on it. So if you went into Amazon Fire TV App Store and typed in digital signage, there was hardly anyone on there. So we were being found. That was the accidental way in which we grew. But you go on there, you download the app, ScreenCloud, download it to your TV stick and it comes up with the pairing code, which you will get from … So when you add a screen on the ScreenCloud in CMS, you press add screen and it’ll come up with a pairing code. You just type that parent code, and then that screen is then paired with that particular license on ScreenCloud.

David: And then that’s it. Basically, just start adding content. You can add apps, you can change the fonts, you can change the color palettes so it looks on brand. You can upload your own content. The whole thing was designed because we’re a UX web design agency, app development, we were coming at it completely from a software and UX perspective. Well, as I said, at the time … Lots of people have come in and done a similar thing now, but at the time, the incumbents were really selling the hardware and software as a bit of an afterthought. So the software was ugly. It didn’t work. It wasn’t very user intuitive.

David: So we just came in and just approached it from a completely different perspective. And we just found we were pushing on an open door. And then I think we did some research about two years in. So we’re five years old now. And I think 70% of our customers at that time had never had any digital signage before. So we were really opening up a new market. When we were going for funding in the early days, it was a real challenge because they were saying, “What’s the size of the software market for digital signage?” And you look at any of the Gartner or McKinsey reports, and it wasn’t that big.

David: It was because they were looking at the old world and how the old world might move, but actually now we’ve made it, it’s a lot more accessible. Anyone can do it. It’s 20 bucks per screen for a device. It’s nothing.

JC: That’s what I was going to ask. What price point is this? What’s the barrier to entry financially? Is it 20 bucks a month for every screen that you add to it basically?

David: Yeah. So one of the things that we realized two or so years in is that this was really an SMB product. And we were getting a lot of interest from enterprise, but then we were getting objections because we didn’t have SSO, or we didn’t have versus we didn’t have SOC 2. We didn’t have other security features around showing stuff that sat behind logins and all that stuff. So we rebuilt the product. This is another thing everyone said we were crazy to do, but we rebuilt the product. And so we’ve now got different tiers, so if you need all of those bells and whistles, the entry price point is 20 bucks per screen per month, but it does get more expensive if you want some of the other enterprise features.

JC: If you’re enterprise and you have that needs, you expect to pay more, but that’s a pretty great price point, honestly. And there’s no minimum, right? If I wanted to go on there and just put in one screen, I can just do one screen, right?

David: Yep.

JC: That’s fine. Well, here’s what I like about your software, especially with COVID right now and then everyone going remote, I see this having a bigger need right now, because you can have a situation where you’d have people … For example, you could even say, “Hey, if a person’s working remote, say, okay, well on your TV, I’m going to …” For employees or staff, possibly, even for remote workers buying a computer, you could say, “Well, we’re going to put the software on your TV so that you can see these things while you’re working, because we need you to see these live updates.” I could see that being a thing, right?

David: Yeah.

JC: I think this is a really interesting concept and just software you have here, because you’re looking at it from, the people bought it right now, and you were saying all these manufacturing places or things like that, and that’s all great. But I also see potential here for people who just work from home because they’re remote. Maybe salespeople. You could have a whole remote sales team, for example, working from their computers. And if you put this on their screens, they could see where the sales numbers are or territories or just live updates that you want them to have during their Workday. And then at the end of the day they just turn it off, they turn the channel. Simple enough.

JC: So I could see that being integrated as well, experimentally. And I think that’s just such a cool concept, which actually brings me to my next question, which is where do you see the future of this going? The title of the podcast is The Future of BizTech. So where do you see this going in five years, for example, with how things are changing? If you had to guess, where is it going?

David: Well, I think there’s two things. I think you’re actually spot on because the future of work is going to be a mixture of remote and going into the office. And we’ve started working with this thing, we’re calling it embeddable channels or virtual screens, but it’s effectively a virtual screen cap that you can look up on a browser, but it’s slightly different the way it’s laid out. But you can even look at it on a browser or you could embed it into your intranet or something like that. But the other thing that we’re doing is we’re thinking of it like Netflix for work.

David: So going back to this idea, let’s say in the morning, you’re working from home and you do catch-up like you would with Netflix. So you might just go into the ScreenCloud app and the normal screen is like a passive experience. Someone schedules it or it’s scheduled and it changes and you don’t interact with it. You just go, “Oh yeah, that’s cool.” Whereas with this, it’s much more of, “I’m going to look in here, and I’m looking at the marketing channel,” let’s say. So you’ve got different channels and I’m going to go, “Click. That’s interesting. I’m going to watch that. This is a little video they’ve done about a particular campaign. Brilliant.”

David: There’s a message from the CEO. I’m going to look at that, and “Oh, I’ve only got five more minutes, so I’m just going to quickly look at the sales numbers and then I’m going to go off and do my first meeting.” So I think probably an element like that. So we really see digital signage as I said, moving from this idea of digital posters to something that becomes much more rules-based. And that could be written rules that someone creates, or it could be learned rules through AI. So it’s like, if you think about at the moment in the workplace, we’re surrounded by loads of messaging, we’re all using Slack or Teams. We’re doing Zoom videos, Loom videos. It’s just constant.

David: So how do you make sense of that? How do you surface that content? And I think that could be done either by someone writing rules. So they say, “Well, look, these kinds of information we think is really important. We’re going to show that,” but it could also be some AI stuff. So let’s say, for example, you’re saying about sales figures. You’ve got a dashboard that’s showing – what happens if the system is working out what is normal and what isn’t normal? So it’s looking at your dashboard. And again, bearing in mind the screens there, it’s not in front of you. It’s something that’s kind of there. What if it notices something that’s out of the ordinary?

David: So it goes, “Normally you have churn of 1% a month or something. It’s jumped up to 10% this month. The system should be able to work out that this looks really, really unusual and surface that content perhaps more than some of the other content.

JC: You’re going to have an AI aspect to this. If you’re looking at a smart system that can actually not just serve the content you want but serve content that needs, that should be seen based on that machine learning of it.

David: I think that’s where I was going, because-

JC: And I like the browser idea, because that’s also really cool, because people usually have multiple screens anyways, especially working remote and you get a tab open, for example, that’s just your company tab browser in just Google Chrome. Because you have a plugin obviously or you just create a plugin on there and all of a sudden it’s like, if I want to serve this screen to all my staff, if they click on that tab, they can see what everyone needs to see at that moment. As a CEO who has remote workers … A lot of my people are here in Denver, because we had an office, but then with COVID, well, we don’t have an office anymore.

JC: So now we’re starting to hire people around the nation just because it’s a bigger talent pool. We can get the best of the best when you can work outside of your location. And so this software really interests me from that point of view, especially if you come out with that browser version, because I’m like, there are some things that I want everyone to be able to see pretty much ongoing or reference. And if I could create that … If you had a plugin where I could log into that and I could just serve it to all their screens, that’s super cool and very huge when it comes to communication. Even a training point as well.

David: We’ve got some of our customers who have created their own company TV, which is exactly that. And the nice thing as well is that you can have content scheduled and some of it can be dynamic. It can be pulled through social media stuff or it could be pulling through data, but then if you want to, you can take it over and you can do a live broadcast. So you can cast directly. You can literally just go, “Hey, everyone.” Press a button and then suddenly you’re there and you’re saying … And then when you stop, it goes back. So no, you don’t need to reset it or anything.

David: So we did our first all-hands the other day using this new technology. It’s using some of the technology from Twitch actually. So when you do a Zoom cast to all of your company, it’s fine if there’s a few of you, but we’re nearly a hundred people now, so it’s quite cumbersome. And if you are a thousand or 10,000 people, it just becomes really difficult. So with this, you just live cast and whoever has got the mic at the time speaks to the whole company. You just stop at the end.

JC: You know what this could be cool for, something that just came to mind … And you probably already thought about this, but something that I just wanted to talk about. So before COVID, we were registered for multiple conferences and obviously conferences got shut down and went away. They’re rescheduling for 2021, but what I’m starting to see is this uptick in these smaller virtual conference-style settings. But there’s a limitation to that when it’s based on attendance in that Zoom meeting style. There are only so many people we could put on this before it became too distracting. But what I think is interesting about your technology is I envision this situation where you could have a virtual conference, but because everything was streaming onto people’s screens, you really can now watch this person give their speech in that more live interactive way where sometimes these video conferences fall short.

JC: And I think that’s interesting, because there are certain things you’re not going to ever be able to replace a conference with. The whole point of conferences was that in-person interaction. But that being said, when you’re forced to adapt and overcome, it seems like your software could take a big role in conference companies to try to figure out a way to use that and get it onto people’s screens in their homes. Watching it on your TV is different than watching it on your screen at your computer. Because a lot of people have maybe 13 or 15-inch laptop screens, whereas TVs are 45 to 60, 70 inches big.

JC: And so having that more interaction in that sense and watching a keynote speaker from your TV versus your smaller laptop, that really changes the experience. And I feel like what you’re doing could help with that too.

David: That’d be quite nice, because you could have your Slide or whatever on your laptop, but the main stage is your main …

JC: Look at that. I’m giving you ideas.

David: No, no.

JC: You got a new industry to go after now. We’ll talk about it later. All right. A couple of personal questions for you. And I ask this about every guest. When you were a kid, what did you want to do when you grew up, and then how did it transition to what you’re doing now?

David: So I wanted to be either an artist or a rock-and-roll star, I think.

JC: Kind of the same.

David: I just thought, you know what, I’m going to be doing something creative. It will be fine. I don’t have to worry about anything else. I don’t know. How did it really translate? I almost went to college to do art and then I had a change of heart and went and did economics and politics and philosophy and started working in publishing. Worked for The Economist magazine and then got into some digital and then got into an agency. So I think though, the one thing that’s probably been constant is I always imagined that I would have my own business. I think that’s partly because I’ve never been very good at being told what to do. I think a lot of people who run their own business go, “Oh, no one would employ me.”

JC: I was like, “Oh yeah, speaking to the choir,” right?

David: Yeah. That’s probably the only thing that, I guess, links back is definitely a desire to do things my own way. And not because I wanted to rule the world or own lots of money or anything. I think it’s just for my own-

JC: That freedom to express, right?

David: Yeah. What I love as well is if things go well, you benefit. If things go badly, then you don’t. But if you work for a company, if things go well, you still get paid whether it goes well or bad. You might get a commission or whatever, but I love the fact that if you do a really, really good job and you work really hard and you try your best, in theory, you get some reward down the line.

JC: You can control your own destiny in a way, right? You’re either your best friend or your own worst enemy, but it’s all on you at least. That’s how I feel.

David: And I love the things where you’re constantly learning. We’ve got brilliant investors and we’ve learned so much from them. Starting my first business in 2004, you’d think I’ve seen everything, but there’s so much more that we have to learn about. And I just hired a new VP of sales in LA and a VP of marketing. And again, there’s so much stuff that they know that I don’t know. And I just love that. I love that constantly learning more about things to do with the businesses. I think-

JC: That’s awesome. So last personal question. Who is one of your mentors business-wise, or even maybe just personal growing up, and then what’s the best piece of advice that you’ve ever been given business-wise?

David: Oh, man.

JC: People know that I just spring this on you, because it’s not an easy question.

David: Well, at the moment, we’re thinking about a new category, because I’ve been talking about digital signage and we’re realizing that we’re going to move into a new category. So there’s a really good book, Play Bigger, and it’s all about creating a new category and the reason for doing that and why it’s such a good thing to do. And it’s so relevant for where we are right now, because I think ever since we started, we’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in the digital signage industry. We used to go to conferences and it’d just be full of men in gray suits, selling screens, and pixels, and bevel edges and cabling. And they were like, “You guys with your little software thing over there.”

David: So we’ve always felt like the outsider, but I think creating … All the things I was saying about how we think digital signage is going to go in the future, I think we want to define it and own some category. So that’s my influence at the moment. But I’m thinking a lot about this and these guys and what they’ve done. And people like the Drift characters, they created that category, conversational marketing, which they could have just written a book about chatbots, but instead, they talked about conversational marketing, and they created a category. And I think that’s really amazing. Oh man. Best piece of advice. I know I’ve got some, but I can’t-

JC: Listen, the book itself, like even just recommending the book, that’s good advice. I was over here writing down the title of the book here too because I want to read it now. So if there’s that one-liner you can think of, then that’s awesome. If not, even just the audience knowing about that book, it seems pretty inspirational to you.

David: I suppose it’s a specific piece of advice, but the whole thing around SaaS is there is a playbook. So quite often in businesses, we’re constantly trying to reinvent things. But one of the things I realized … And again, this is what our investor said to us. He’s like, “Okay, SaaS is quite a relatively new industry in the grand scheme of things compared to mechanical inched motor cars or something like that. SaaS is quite a recent thing, but there’s a lot that’s been written about it, and there’s a lot of data and stuff that you can follow and people behave in a largely predictable way.

David: So understanding that and taking confidence from that. When things first started with SaaS, as I was saying earlier, we were going four or five months and we were still only doing $4,000 in revenue, which when we started our agency, we were doing $40,000 within two or three months. And it took us 22 months to get to our first million dollars in revenue, and then another six months to double that. And that was the thing. It’s like if you look at the playbook, you understand what you’re doing and understand all the metrics you realize that you just gotta put faith in it. You go, “Okay, well, I can see that this stuff takes a long time to build, but then it starts a real rollercoaster.” And that gets super exciting.

David: So I guess my one piece of advice that was useful certainly from our investors is don’t forget that there are lots of people who’ve done this before who’ve done it really, really well, and you don’t have to reinvent it each time. You can obviously put your own spin on it, but seek out that wisdom and use it to your advantage.

JC: That’s great advice. Listen, the last thing here is how can people reach you or the website? If there’s anyone listening, who wants to reach out to you directly, what’s the best way for them to do that? And then also remind people about your web address and how, if they’re interested in your product, what they should do as well.

David: Well, actually we bought the dot-com, and so you can do screencloud.com or screencloud.io or screen.cloud. We’ve got all of those, but anything ScreenCloud, you’ll find us. And then if you want to talk to me, probably the best thing is to connect with me through Twitter, because it’s easy to remember. And if you just message me there, it’s @DavidHart, H-A-R-T, or look me up on LinkedIn, that kind of thing. I love talking about all of this stuff, especially the transition from agency to product company, because I’ve done a few talks on it and people come up to me afterward and go, “Oh my god, I’m exactly at the point where you were before you made the decision and we’re just wrestling with this ourselves.” So I know that it’s a rich vein that people are potentially interested in.

JC: No, absolutely. Well, listen, thank you so much for being on the show. You’ve given the audience a ton to think about. And I hope people go to screencloud.io or screencloud.com, check it out. I was there earlier, watched the video, looks amazing. I’m really looking forward to seeing those new things you were talking about, like the browser version. That would be really huge. So I wish you well in all that, and thanks again for being on the show.

David: Well, thank you.

infinityadminEpi 7: The Communications Software Changing How Businesses Control Their Content – David Hart, CEO of ScreenCloud
FutureofBizTech-Epi6-ReBrand.png

Epi 6: Write Better Content For Your Brand, Faster – Chris Willis, CMO of Acrolinx

infinityadmin December 16, 2020

Learn more about Acrolinx at: https://www.acrolinx.com/

Find Chris Willis on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cpwillis/

JC: Well, welcome everybody to another episode of The Future of BizTech. Today I have with me Chris Willis, he is the CMO of Acrolinx and they have headquarters in Massachusetts and Germany. Chris, thank you so much for coming on with us here. Tell us a little bit about yourself and give us that 30,000-foot view of Acrolinx and what you guys do.

Chris: Sure. Like you said, I’m Chris Willis. I’ve been with Acrolinx now for just about three years. I joined the company shortly after it was acquired by a private equity firm in Germany with the expectation of really starting to see growth and expansion. And first thing is to be able to explain what we do. So let’s do that. We are an AI-powered platform that essentially delivers content governance that enables the world’s biggest, most valuable brands to write better content faster by aligning all of their writers with the company’s strategic content guidelines at scale. So think clarity, consistency, and character across thousands of writers aligned to the business.

JC: Awesome. And you’re the CMO and in the pre-show you had told me a little bit about how you joined the company. Tell the audience here what brought you to Acrolinx and what your motivation is for being there and the changes you want to bring.

Chris: I mean, as somebody that’s had tons of organizations now for almost 20 years, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as what Acrolinx did. And I mean, I was running teams of people across the globe writing great, engaging technical content in many different forms of English. And the issue that we would run into is that editing that content post-development is very difficult because it’s not just changing grammar, it could potentially be changing contexts. The writers were very technical people. They’ve written down the things that are in their head and their writing styles obviously might not align with the organization and so we make changes. And those changes take time and effort that then goes back to the writers and gets changed again. And over and over and over again.

Chris: So it takes a long time to create a piece of content. When I met Andrew Bredenkamp, the Founder and Chief Scientist that developed Acrolinx in the early 2000s, it was fascinating what the company and the product actually do, because it solved a specific problem that I’ve had. So it wasn’t just coming to find a new job, it was that I was passionate and excited about seeing this product move forward and seeing the concept of understanding content quality, so the grammar and the spelling and the layout of a piece of content evolve into strategy alignment. So how do we want to create content?

Chris: We have in our offices, as content owners, we have that idea of how we want to create our content, the words, the clarity level, the education levels of our audiences, the tone of voice that we’ve created for our brand, the specific brand language, and how do we take all of that and build that into all of our writers from day one of the creation process so that every piece of content looks like content from my organization? And I think that part of why I like my job is because I really do like what we do.

JC: That’s good. Now, how long have you been with the company? You said you had joined here somewhat recently? How long ago was it?

Chris: I just rounded into my third year.

JC: Oh, okay. Good. All right. So you’ve been there awhile. How old is the company overall?

Chris: The company was originally founded in 2002. The go-to market really began in 2005 and that’s when we started collecting customers. Acrolinx has the position of having all 20 of the top 20 global technology companies, pretty much every major tech company you can think of is an Acrolinx customer and that has happened between that 2005 to now timeframe. In 2017, like I said, we rounded a corner and started an acceleration phase that brought me to the organization and that brought our new Head of Sales to the organization and new Customer Success Leader, who most recently, Volker Smid, who is our new CEO who joined us from a company called Searchmetrics also a German and US company.

JC: So why does this technology matter? The audience typically wants to know what makes this special. What is it about what you guys do that means something to the industry?

Chris: Well, at the top level, it’s the concept of alignment of brands. So we spent a lot of money creating brands for our companies and the brand of a major enterprise really is its most valuable asset. And the way that you maximize that asset is through singularity alignment. When you see brands start to deteriorate and value be lost at the brand level, it’s because of fragmentation, it’s because of bad brand management. So at that top level, let’s speak like one thing.

Chris: As we reach down into where this value really lives from an implementation, from an execution standpoint, it’s in first being found, driving volume. So content that is written with the right words in the right voice leveraging the right clarity levels is going to be found better. It’s more usable. Findability is critical. You can create the best piece of content in the world, but if nobody ever finds it, it didn’t do its job. So if we can create content that is relevant, is written correctly, is using all of the things that we built into our strategy, that’s going to be found at a greater level. So we’re going to drive more traffic.

Chris: The next thing is, if it’s clear and consistent and on-brand, it’s going to convert at a higher level. So we’re first going to see more traffic and then we’re going to see more conversions. And how do I know this? Well, let me explain. We are a small company. We are not our customers. Our customers are the biggest companies in the world, but in my little world, I build content that offsets my demand gen spend. So when I joined the company, the first thing we do, first thing anybody does when they join a new company from a marketing standpoint is, “Let’s start doing some content syndication. Let’s start generating some leads.” Right? Let’s turn on the engine.

Chris: But that money is expensive and it also generates leads that are questionable in value and we’re getting people that may have downloaded an ebook, do you have your BDR call somebody that downloaded an ebook and say, “Hey, saw you downloaded this. Want to buy something?” Chances are they don’t. So we want to draw in people that actually want engagement with us. And if you look at us in particular, we have a piece of content on our website around tone of voice. It’s a big positioning angle for us. It’s how we talk about a big part of what our product does, is aligning tone of voice and we are highly findable for that search term, a number one result. And because of that findability, we’re driving tens of thousands of visitors to our website a month on that search term. And when they get to our website, that content, which is written using our platform, to be clear, concise, on character has a high conversion rate.

JC: So essentially, I just want to make sure I understand, what you’re basically saying is that, listen, anyone can write content, but your software takes content and makes it high converting so that it ranks better and gets more traffic? So, content with your system equals more website visits and more traffic. Content on your own, not so much. Is that the general idea?

Chris: Yeah. So we use the word supercharge and we’re looking to supercharge the content that’s driving your business.

JC: So supercharge the traffic by correctly creating the content?

Chris: Using the right words, using the right language to be-

JC: Got it. Okay. So you mentioned that you guys were small, but your customers are big, what are some of the biggest brand names that the audience might recognize that you guys do this for? Because I mean, that might put into context how valuable it is.

Chris: Yeah. So, I mean, I think if you think about software, for instance, Microsoft, IBM, SAP. Think about healthcare, companies like Siemens and Philips and Pfizer. Engineering, KTM, Nestle, Kohler. Financial companies that I can’t mention that are huge banks in cities, for instance. And so our customers tend to be the brands that care the most about their branding to make sure that they’re creating content that is able to be first found and then convert. And whether that’s marketing content or support content or technical content and association with products, different product manuals, all of this is driving end business results. It’s either driving customer satisfaction, it’s driving customer conversion, it’s driving customer retention, it’s driving employee engagement. And so the more effective that content is, the more valuable it is.

JC: Is there any kind of industry-specific companies that benefit the most or more from this than others? For example, do tech companies benefit more from this? Or do consumer-based companies, like retail or food and beverage, do you any kind of common ground or any niche you guys have grown into when it comes to that?

Chris: It’s more at the departmental level. So we started in tech doc. We started in technical content, first in UI strings, so the words within the software to align software with company language and then into product manuals and then to support. Where there’s a high volume of content moving very quickly, so if you think about somebody like a VMware, agile software development process, the speed of their software delivery is very high, but content is still content.

Chris: The content companies need to be written, it needs to be edited, it needs to be reviewed, it needs to be released. So how do they take what they’ve done on the development side and move that into the content side? So we allow them to accelerate that process to a point where they’re delivering the product content at the same time they’re delivering the product? At the same pace at scale. And that for them is important. They’re also doing it with one employee versus four to seven copy editors, which is-

JC: So it not only helps convert and do better, let’s say, in SEO to help drive more traffic, but it sounds like it saves even costs on, like you’re saying, employees. You could do more with less. Is that what you’re saying?

Chris: Exactly. So you can take those people. If you look at a support team, for instance, you have all these people that are writing tickets and then you have all these people that are reviewing those tickets to make sure that they comply. Remove all that and now you’re moving more people into the creation process. We don’t ever expect that our customers are going to just cut employees because they don’t have editors. Those are highly trained content creators that have been moved into editing roles. And now you can be more effective and you can start doing things that you weren’t doing before.

Chris: So Laura Bellamy at VMware has spoken at our conference several times and one of the things she talks about is the ability to self-fund projects because they’re saving time, they’re saving money, and they’re freeing resources. For me and my use, we’re able to do more. There is a dollar saving in headcount cost that’s associated with my use of Acrolinx that clears my employees up to do more things across the organization than just copy edit. And so that means that my content leader has time to do things that we normally wouldn’t be able to do if we were taking up the time to release these pieces of content, we have blogs, we have eBooks, we have landing pages, we have website content and all of that needs to go through a review process and we’ve automated all of that.

JC: Automation, I mean, now you’ve got my ears perked and my tail wagging. I love automation. Here’s what I mean, everything about what you’re saying sounds amazing. I mean, I guess what’s the biggest barrier to entry for companies? I mean, why wouldn’t every company just be like, “Oh yeah, great. Let’s just buy this now?” I mean, what are people’s objections and how do you guys overcome those?

Chris: I mean, it’s less of an objection and more of a not understanding what the value of content is, the actual dollar value of content is to their organization because most enterprises don’t have a line item in their budget for content. So if I were going to say, “I can save you money on demand gen.” Okay. I know what that looks like. There is a line item that says, demand gen, and under it there’s a bunch of programs and things that happen. And okay, you can save me money there.

Chris: “I can save you money in content creation.” Cool. Show me where that lives. What money are you saving me? And that’s because for the most part, unless you’re outsourcing all of your content to agencies, content is something that happens as a by-product of employees being at work, your product marketers are creating content, your product management, people are creating content, your support people are creating content. And none of that is tracked as headcount. And so the first thing that we need to do as an organization, and part of what we’re doing in market education right now, is helping companies understand content as an asset in their business.

Chris: So if you think about a major enterprise support portal, for instance, it might have 10 million pages of content in it. And yet they would say, “I’m not sure how much we spend on content.” Okay. Well, if we can assess that each one of those pages, once it’s been researched, created, reviewed, indexed, it probably costs about $1000 per page to create. So if you’re spending $1000 per page, you have a multi-billion dollar asset.

Chris: Now, it’s not fair because the next question you would ask is, how much of that asset, how much of that content are you maintaining? And in a lot of cases, we’re hearing maintenance on that content is about 10% of the content. So, okay, maybe we’re at $1 billion dollar asset that you have. How do we now, moving forward, reduce the cost of adding to that? So eliminate the editorial process and reduce that cost $1,000 per page. And at the same time, allow you to increase the amount of content that you maintain through automation. So if you didn’t have to go through and manually maintain content, uplift things, check things to see if there’s still relevancy, if they’re on-brand. If you could automate that process, would you maintain more than 10% of that content? In most cases, the answer is yes.

Chris: So now, we’re saving you money on content creation, we’re expanding your pool, and if you’re only maintaining 10% of your content, do you have the other 90% locked off somewhere? No. No it’s available. Cool. Now let’s look at risk of that content, because what’s in there? You’re not maintaining it. So if regulations in your industry change, if the language in your organization changes, what risk is sitting in your content? And now do we want to go through all of that looking for specific key areas of risk that can be removed from your content? And that’s a big use case for financial services where there are parts of organizations that are almost entirely responsible for making sure that the risk in published content does not exist, how do we keep people from getting in trouble, from getting fined, from ending up in jail? And-

JC: Oh, well that’s a big value-add there, especially-

Chris: ..all of that content, look for those things. Same gameplay, so we save you money, we save you time, but also, you’re a medical equipment company and the manual associated with a piece of medical equipment allows a doctor to operate that equipment. Clarity and consistency in terminology, those things matter and you’re dealing with a life or death situation now. Somebody can’t use your product wrong or follows the directions and the directions are misaligned or unreadable or unclear-

JC: There’d be huge liabilities, obviously. Yeah.

Chris: Yep. And I mean, so small plug for our podcast, Content Insiders, there’s an episode that we hosted with Phillips and they talk about that. They talk about the life or death situation of the content they create. It’s really interesting stuff.

JC: That is interesting. Now, you said you work with big companies, do you work with small companies? Medium-sized companies as well? Or do you find that typically your main demographic are going to be those Fortune 1000 types of companies? Who could probably afford to hire you or even has enough content or liability where it’s relevant to hire you? What size of company are we talking?

Chris: It is. It’s about $1 billion now because you’re looking at that scale. All of the things that we do are really interesting for everybody, but that at scale is what makes the ROI work. If it’s a team of five content writers and one copy editor, can you get value? I say, you can. I do. But is it worth buying the product? I think you’d have a hard time getting an ROI when you have thousands of writers creating content, when you have even 10 people making millions of pages of content, it’s worth our product and that’s where this size of business, these global brands come in.

JC: So on a side note here, so I’m going to get away from the company for a second. I want to ask about you, Chris. Tell me, you’ve been in the industry a while, who was your biggest mentor and what was the best piece of advice that they ever gave you?

Chris: So I have two. My first mentor is a guy named Bob Mazzarella. Robert Mazzarella was the President of Fidelity Brokerage back in the 90s. He is highly successful businessman. And I think that the words that sunk in from him really went to how to lead people. For being somebody as successful as he was, not a micromanager, really looked to put the right people in the right place to get the most out of them, incent them correctly to be successful and let them do their jobs. And I think that’s part of who I am as a manager.

Chris: My most recent mentor, Rainer Gawlick, was the CMO at Sophos and Dassault and President at Perfecto when I was there. And really, it was about honing my strategic skills. I think marketers in general fall into patterns of being very tactical. It’s easy to all of a sudden jump in and solve problems yourself, put your hands on things and get very tactical with everything happening around you. But as you scale a business from 10 million to 100 million, that’s not helpful. And I think that was the biggest lesson. I have a sticker on my laptop in the other room that says, “I love strategy.” I do. Rainer stuck it there.

JC: What did you want to do when you were a kid? When you were like eight and you were like, “Oh, I’m going to be this?” What was your dream job first, just out of curiosity? Oh, a musician? Yeah?

Chris: I was going to be a rockstar.

JC: A rock star?

Chris: It wasn’t eight. It was from eight until I moved to Boston.

JC: Oh, okay. So you carried that through. I imagine you’re pretty damn good at that then, huh?

Chris: That’s what I wanted to do. I was a musician when I was younger. I moved to Boston in ’93. After coming up here for… I graduated from college in Pennsylvania, went back to Connecticut, and came up here for an open house at Fidelity in 1993 and got a job onsite. It was one of those huge cattle call things that they did for their call center for the 401k plan. And I got the offer, came up here, signed a lease.

Chris: I think I was leaving the lease signing when I got… I don’t remember how one contacted me, because there wasn’t cell phones yet, but I remember talking to Fidelity on a payphone in the Allston-Brighton area in Boston and finding out that they’d canceled my department because ’93 was the beginning of a recession and that cleared my calendar to really continue to work on songwriting and recording. But in the middle of the beginning of a recession, it didn’t come together and I ended up getting a job, like a grownup. So if that hadn’t happened, we would be talking from the stage right now probably, but we’re not.

Chris: The other interesting angle on this is that I am not a traditional business background person. I have a theater degree. So I went to school for directing. I directed theater. I’m not an actor. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I’m sure if you’ve been watching this for the last however many minutes, you’ve seen that. But what I learned through directing was that you can’t save the play, right? So I’m in the audience, my job is to have picked the right people, put them in the roles, given them a context, and the understanding of their priorities to be effective in their roles.

Chris: And if I’ve done all those things right, I can count on a good performance. If I haven’t, I can almost count on the opposite and that’s how I have to operate in business. One of the things that I’ve been very lucky with is being able to hire people that I think are just way above the level that I should be able to hire, because the word’s out on the street here in Massachusetts that I’m not going to get in your way. I’m going to let you be as effective as you can be and do the things that you’ve always wanted to do in your role, as long as you deliver.

Chris: And that’s really attractive to your best demand people, to your best content people, to your best product marketers, to be able to come and do what they want the way they want, without me standing over their shoulders saying, “Let me tell you all the ways I know how to do your job better than you.”

JC: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, I agree by the way with that too. I’m a very similar management style myself. I hire experts and I say, “Okay, well, you know how to do it. So get it done.” Right? I give people enough rope to either hang themselves with, or pull themselves over the wall, right? They can do whatever they want with that rope, but it works out pretty well.

JC: I have a couple more questions, one of them being, we talked in the pre-show again about COVID, obviously we’re in the middle of a pandemic and regardless of which side of the fence you fall on it opinion wise or politically isn’t really the question here, as much as, how does Acrolinx… What is it about your software that is either helping companies? I mean, is there a play here? Is there something that Acrolinx is doing that’s actually helping companies specifically during this time?

Chris: There is. And I mean, we’re very careful about how we talk about it. What we don’t want to do is be insensitive. We don’t want to… I get so much marketing with COVID in the subject line and I don’t feel great about it. I don’t think that using a global pandemic to market your product is as sensitive as you could be at this time. But at the same time, everybody’s working from home and as a manager, you can’t be everywhere. And that’s essentially what our product does is it helps everybody to be aligned. And that’s the thing that we’re all challenged with right now, is if you’re not used to working from home, which a lot of these big enterprises are not, how do we stay aligned? How do we speak as one thing? How do we create those efficiencies while creating the right content at the right time? And that’s what we do.

Chris: So I think that we have a very timely solution and at the same time, it comes back to, I hate the framework of, “In times like these,” but in times like these, words matter for a number of reasons. So first and most obviously, the way that you create content might be your only interface with your audience. So if you’re not getting your personality, your brand across through the content you’re creating, you’re missing an opportunity to build engagement.

Chris: Also though we, as businesses, are trying to communicate with empathy and care. And it’s not always easy when you’re writing things down to do that. And you’re hearing on a daily basis more and more organizations stepping up and saying that they’re blocking language-specific terminology from their ongoing communications because they find that it’s insensitive. That’s what our product does.

Chris: And so companies are using us and have come out recently in the press to talk about how they’re using us to eliminate problematic language from their content at scale. So not only what they’re writing going forward, but going back into it and things like, master and slave relationship in database development. That’s seen as inappropriate at this point, insensitive. How do we manage, not just moving forward, saying, “We don’t write like this?” But going back into all of our content and looking through and being able to find that problematic language.

JC: When you say that about the content and sensitivity, we had another guest on the show from a company where they have a software that does kind of what you do, but they do it in paid ad spend. As in, they’re able to make sure that a client’s ads don’t show up on websites that have content that is against their message, right?

JC: So for example, Nike doesn’t exactly want their shoes popping up on an ad on a page talking about the KKK, right? Or something like that. And so their software actually reads the site first, kind of like what you were talking about, and it gives it a score, a toxicity score and then your ads won’t run on those pages. Because like you said, again, whether you’re standing next to it or it’s on your T-shirt, either way, that message comes across as guilty by association, right? So, yeah.

Chris: I’ve been in that. I know that situation.

JC: Yeah. All right. Last question.

JC: What? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No. And so I find that what you guys do is very similar to what they do in just different parts of marketing. Yours is on the content side, theirs is on the display advertising side. So I thought that was interesting. I might actually introduce you two after this, if you’d like, because I just feel like there might be something there for you guys to be very aligned in your missions, which I think is cool.

JC: The last question I have here is, is there anything I didn’t ask you that you think would be of benefit to the audience to know? Ooh, I feel like I did my job good. If I stumped you on that one, that means I did great.

Chris: You didn’t ask me how my stock tank project came out.

JC: Oh, let’s hear that.

Chris: I got an eight-foot round stock tank in my backyard with a filter hooked up to it, because they can install swimming pools during the COVID, so-

JC: Oh Jesus. Well, how about-

Chris: I mean at the end of the day, it really comes down to the proof points behind all of this. And it’s a great concept, it’s a great platform, but the biggest companies in the world are getting real value. So they’re improving content quality and consistency by huge percentages that are resulting in much higher customer satisfaction. They’re reducing the cost per support ticket created over time and eliminating phone calls into support centers because that content that they’re creating is highly usable.

Chris: Simple things like a company that we work with has a goal to speak like a human. Every one of their employees has access to our platform and it allows them to essentially eliminate superfluous adjectives, use inclusive language, sound more like a person than a company. And that’s where engagement comes from, that’s where findability comes from, and that’s where conversion comes from, which is really important.

JC: It’s funny you mentioned that. So part of… You know me, as you know me, I own a marketing agency and we deal with tech companies and one of our email strategies specifically is we really do shy away from this high graphic, high sales looking templates and we’re very much a people, one-to-one style, mostly text, like if you were emailing your grandma kind of thing. Those kind of personal style relationships in marketing strategy in general, like you said, talking like a human, nobody connects with a logo, they connect with a person. And so, we take a lot of what you’re doing too. So I mean, we’re aligned there.

JC: So listen, thank you so much for being on the show. I do have a question here. If anyone who’s listening wants to get a hold of you, what’s the best way to learn about the company or to get ahold of you, Chris Willis, specifically? What kind of information do you want to share with everyone?

Chris: Easiest way is to go to www.acrolinx.com. Everything-

JC: How do you spell that? Just make sure.

Chris: A-C-R-O-L-I-N-X.

JC: Okay. I-N-X. Got it. Just making sure.

Chris: The easiest way to get to me is chris@acrolinx.com.

JC: Perfect. Well, listen, this is amazing. I love your software, not only because you hit my buzzword, automation, I like that. I like that it’s intelligent and that it has the ability to really humanize a company in that sense. And I really like where you can help update, like you were saying, you update your content and manage your content in case there are changing times. People talk about how like, “Oh, well people said those words 20 years ago because that’s just the way it was.” And that’s fine, if you have a 25-year-old company though, you might want to change some of that content, right? Because you’re in new times right now. Right? So I think it’s fantastic. I love it. And I want to thank you again for being on the show and I hope you have a good rest of your week, sir.

Chris: Fantastic. Thank you very much.

infinityadminEpi 6: Write Better Content For Your Brand, Faster – Chris Willis, CMO of Acrolinx
FutureofBizTech-Epi5-ReBrand.png

Epi 5: Vet Where Your Company Places Sponsored Content – Cedar Milazzo, Founder of Nobl

infinityadmin November 20, 2020

Learn more about Nobl at: https://www.wearenobl.com/

Find Cedar Milazzo on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cedarmilazzo/

JC: Well, hello everybody. And welcome to this day’s episode of the Future of BizTech. I have with me, the founder of Nobl, Cedar Milazzo of WeAreNobl.com. Cedar, thank you so much for coming on the show and tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about what your company does.

Cedar: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So I’m Cedar Milazzo, as you mentioned, the founder. So Nobl is what we call a brand responsibility company. We use artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify things online like misinformation and hate speech and, and other toxic kinds of content. And then we provide services to brands to allow them to avoid sponsoring that content. So there’s been many cases. In fact, you know, you hear about them in the news, you almost every day, where advertisers are accidentally running ads in front of an ISIS recruiting video, or, you know, in front of the Christ church manifesto, you know, things like that, things that are obviously not something that they really support.

Cedar: But they are sending money to the people who are actually publishing that sort of content. And so what we’re designing our software platform to do is essentially allow those advertisers to say, I want to be responsible with how I spend my money and I want to avoid misinformation. I want to avoid toxic content. And I want to make sure that my ad dollars are spent on legitimate content, on things that actually help our society instead of hurting it. So, you know, supporting the real legitimate news and, you know, things like that, as opposed to just random websites out there that just have things that are divisive or, or incorrect, or, you know, just hate-filled

JC: That’s incredible. You know, if I have an obvious question, but I am curious, you know, what motivated you to start this company? I mean, what was that? What was that day? I felt like every owner of a CEO of a company has that day where they’re like, just something clicks and they’re like, screw it. You know, I’m doing this, you know? This is the company I want to build. And here’s why, so what was your motivation to start Nobl?

Cedar: It’s actually a pretty interesting story, at least I think so. It was right after the 2016 elections and there had been a huge amount, as you probably know, as everybody knows of discussion in the news about, you know, what they were calling fake news and other types of misinformation. And right about this time my wife was actually working or volunteering at an animal rescue center. And my father in law lives up by Yosemite and he was down visiting and this was actually for Thanksgiving. He came down to visit and he was telling us these stories about how everyone in that area, where he lived was going out and killing possums. And the reason was because there was a bunch of information online that says that they were spreading rabies to everyone’s dogs. And so everybody was going out and getting rid of them as quickly as possible.

Cedar: Well, because my wife actually worked at an animal rescue center. She knew that she didn’t have to have rabies shots to handle the possums. And therefore it was very obvious to her that they actually don’t carry rabies and they can’t spread it to anybody else. And so it was an obvious bit of misinformation out there on the, on the internet. And they got into this huge discussion about it. And it ended up being well, you know, I saw it online. I know it must be right kind of thing. Right. And it, at that point, a kind of a light bulb went off in my head saying, you know, there’s two kinds of things happening right now. One is little types of misinformation. Like this, people are doing silly things because of information that they find online, where on the other extreme, you have all this misinformation in the political world that’s causing major problems, not just in, in how we vote and who we believe in where we’re thinking about our politics.

Cedar: But also right after that, there was an incident in India where people were sharing stories about strangers coming through small villages. And, and they were molesting children. And this is what the story went well in India, in the small villages, they started actually lynching, every stranger who came by because of this Instagram post. And so about 12 people actually were killed because of this type of misinformation. So it was a big problem from, from something silly, like possums all the way up to people dying, right. And everything in between. And at that point I was like, okay, there’s gotta be something I can do. I have a technology background I’ve been in software development for 30 plus years. I know there’s gotta be some way to cut back on this. And, and I decided at that point, something had to be done.

Cedar: I had the skills to actually do something around it. And so I quit my job and started on this full time. And haven’t really stopped since basically started writing up some machine learning models that help to identify some of the basic stuff right off the bat. And within a couple of weeks was able to put something together to have like an 85% accuracy rate, obviously not good enough for production, but it can show that you can actually do something about the issue. Right. And so over the past couple of years, we’ve just been kind of refining those and making things better. But the idea essentially was let’s identify this stuff out there. And at the very least we can tell people to be careful before they actually go off and believe it.

JC: Yeah, that’s incredible. You know, obviously it’s obvious the kind of application that would have, you know, with a, with a new election cycle coming up as well. What do you find? I mean, how, how ramped up is this now? Because I mean, it’s, you know, at the time of this recording anyway, you know we are in what are we in June, June of 2020? So we’re about, you know, five, five months out, or so until the next presidential election, you know, how do you see your, your software being used right now for gearing up for this kind of political climate coming up with all this information and misinformation coming out?

Cedar: Yeah, it’s an interesting time. That’s for sure. It’s not just the election, it’s also the coronavirus and even the black lives matter movements that are happening right now. There’s just so much going on and there’s so much misinformation out there, that it’s very hard to tell. What’s real. So in terms of where we’re at, like I said, we spent the last couple of years basically working on the technology we’ve got about six people or so on the technology side, just building things and making things better continuously about three months ago or so, right about the time COVID-19 hit. We actually started going out to customers and actually deploying it. So it’s very early stage still. But we’re seeing a great uptick in interest, you know, especially with actually the COVID-19 stuff. There’s so much health misinformation out there that, you know, people are, people are desperate, especially anybody who’s related to any companies that are related to the health market.

Cedar: We have one company who came in, we had a conversation with them on Monday, Tuesday, they were informed by their, by the press that they were supporting COVID-19 conspiracy theories. And then on Wednesday, they came back and signed a contract with us. Yeah, I imagine so, I mean, good, good timing. But, you know, because there’s so many problems out there, it’s, it’s a, it’s a solution really that’s that people are desperate for. And so we’re, we’re definitely seeing a huge amount of traction happening right now. And I think that we will be able to, to get out there in enough force and enough scale before the elections to actually be able to help people understand what’s real and to cut back more importantly on the amount of misinformation that’s actually being out there and it being spread around. And so I think the biggest thing that we’re looking for is the ability to cut the funding to these sites of misinformation.

Cedar: Right. If we can identify this thing and tell the advertisers, don’t place your ads here, then though the profit motivation essentially goes away for those sites. Right. And that’s, that’s not all of the problem of course, but it certainly is a big part of the problem is a lot of people out there who are just publishing whatever they want to say, just so they can make a little bit of money or a lot. So we’re trying to just cut that, that financial incentive out for them.

JC: So what is it, I mean, walk the audience through kind of, what is it like to implement this system? You know, I mean, I think some people might have a hard time wrapping their head around, like, okay, we get what your system does, but how does that integrate, you know, what’s it actually doing? Is it the AI reading the ads and, you know, I mean, like walk us through exactly maybe how it’s implemented and how that helps the clients.

Cedar: Yeah and it’s a really complex environment that we’re working in. Our stuff isn’t actually that complex, but the advertising market itself, especially when you look at programmatic advertising is extremely complex. There are a lot of different players, and there’s a lot of different ways that you can attack the problem, but the way we’re coming at it essentially is in programmatic advertising, they have what’s called real time bidding or auction, essentially an advertiser sets up a program that will essentially bid on every impression, every viewable ad that happens. Right? So if you pull up a web browser and there’s three ads in the site, he goes back to the backend server and says, I have three ads that are going to be displayed to JC Granger.

Cedar: And here’s his background information. He’s this many years old, he lives in this area, you know, whatever information they have on you that they’ve been collecting in violating your privacy about. So he sends all that information to the backend and the auction is then run and all the advertisers have the information and they can make a decision on whether to show the ad team or not. What we’re doing is we’re inserting another piece of information at that point, which is, this is the page that ad ad is actually on. And we’re reading that page, the content on the page, and we’re analyzing it and coming back with a score, essentially, a credibility or toxicity score, basically from zero to a hundred that says, if it’s a low score, it’s toxic. If it’s a high score, it’s high quality. So we simplify it down to that level.

Cedar: And then the advertiser basically makes a bid based not just on who you are and your background, but also on the content that you’re looking at. So decide if we want to be associated with that content.

JC: Yeah, that’s brilliant. I know that’s something that I think the real, especially now, you know, black lives matter crew and all this what not, and even the election with just how polarizing, you know politically it is you know, a lot of big brands, I think what would find this to be huge because they have the most to lose. If, you know, if a Nike ad shows up, you know, on some coronavirus is a hoax website, not a good look for Nike, you know what I mean? So, and, and you know, they, and they’re a public company, you know, they, take a half a percent a hit and that’s hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, like that that’s not small, you know, when it comes to market cap. So I, when I, when I was reading a, your website will say, that’s what I found the most fascinating. But so where do you think..

Cedar: It’s really interesting as well because consumers are becoming more and more involved in this, right? As a consumer, people are, people are saying, you know, what, if this company supports this type of content, I’m not going to buy that product. I’m not going to buy their products. Right. And that’s happening more and more, you know, I, I kind of credit it to a group called sleeping giants. They actually happen. They kind of came together right after the 2016 election as well. And sleeping giants is kind of an activist group. And they basically point at advertisers and say, Hey, your ads are running next to this. You know, this really bad content. And they send it out on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else and get people basically to, to put pressure on the advertisers to change. But the problem with that is they average Kaiser’s, didn’t have a tool to actually do anything about after the fact that they were spending the money.

Cedar: So they couldn’t really proactively keep their ads off. They just had to wait until they had an incident in a, in a boycott and all that before they could actually do anything about it. So we’re, we’re kind of attacking the problem from the other perspective. But the other interesting piece about that is, and the reason I wanted to bring up sleeping giants is that the founder of sleeping giants is a man named Matt Rivitz. He’s actually joined us, as an employee, as our chief marketing officer. And we’re kind of joining forces to kind of attack this problem, both from the front and the back ends and make sure that, you know, people who or the companies who are not being responsible and letting their ads flow through are still gonna be, you know, caught up in this public sentiment kind of thing. Whereas those people in those companies who are taking responsibility upfront and preventing their ads from going to that sort of content are going to be in a stronger position to never have to worry about that issue.

JC: That’s brilliant. That’s a hell of a, of a get, as I say for employment, then you got a great guy that came on there. Let me ask you a personal question here. You know, what did you want to do when you were, when you were a kid? Like, you know, what did you want to be when you grew up, so to speak,

Cedar: Oh, I have so many ambitions, you know everything from the usual astronauts to, to firefighter and all that sort of thing. But, you know, when I was in high school, I really did get enamored with computers. And I went into software engineering. I got my degree in computer science and stuck with that ever since. So that really is kind of what I was super interested in longterm and what I’ve, what I’ve made a career out of. So I actually did get to do my dream job.

JC: That’s awesome. And then who were your mentors kind of coming up? You know, what was the best advice that you ever got? You know, something..

Cedar: Oh, geez. There’s so many people out there. I think my, my probably most, most valuable mentor at this time is a man named rich Wycoff. He was a tech CEO for a long time here in the Silicon Valley area. And he’s just given me really great advice, especially when it comes to starting this business. You know, this is the first company that I’ve started. I’ve been in a lot of startups, but this is the first time I’ve actually been the founder and the CEO. And, you know, there’s so many pitfalls along the way when you’re starting a new company. And he was really able to guide, you know, my decision making and guide me to avoid a lot of those pitfalls.

Cedar: You know, there’s, I think probably the most beneficial, single piece of advice for this company at least was from, was actually from Rich and he basically told me to reach out to people like Matt Rivitz of sleeping giants and, and see what we could do to partnership, right. It’s really hard to do a tech startup, especially in the ad tech world without having some strong, strong partnerships. And so when I started reaching out to organizations, sleeping giants is one of them, credibility coalition, miss Infocon and places like that, that’s where things really started to take off. It was, it was one of those things where, you know, you can build something and build something and you have a solution, but if nobody knows about it, what’s the point, right? So if you were able to start finding people in that industry and, and really make those connections and get them to be supporters and champions and, you know, and partners made a huge difference for Nobl. Absolutely.

JC: Well, you know, I own a marketing agency. So when I see something like this, this makes my, my brain speed up and think, you know, is this a platform that we could use to help with our clients, for example, to make sure that they don’t end up on ads, you know for the marketing agencies out there that might be listening is your, is your system something that’ll be available if not already in more of a, kind of a sass, easy sign up monthly subscription style? Like, what is it like to actually even purchase your service here?

Cedar: It is a SAS model. Absolutely. So you can kinda actually we’re, we’re taking early early applications now basically for free trials, essentially to get people to come in and great year.

JC: Me, I definitely want to play with it. I’m a complete nerd when it comes to this stuff and this could, I could actually see this being something that we could actually really benefit from. So I want to check out.

Cedar: It’s interesting because you know, we have the service on the backend that allows people to kind of protect themselves. And when we present that to customers and to agencies and people like that are they’re interested, but they don’t quite a hundred percent get it, but we have also a dashboard and we show them the dashboard and they can actually see what their what’s really happening, how many dollars they’re spending on hate speech, how many dollars they’re spending on like an audit.

JC: Wow. Could you do an audit of their current campaign and just show them, wow, that’s gotta be impactful. Like seeing that for the first time, seeing that audit run, I mean, Holy crap, we got like 10% of our ads are on ISIS pages or something stupid like that.

Cedar: Exactly. That’s exactly what, what is actually getting our business at this point is actually demonstrate the product and show them that this is actually going to be beneficial and valuable to you. And so when you, when you sign up, you get access to this, this dashboard and it shows you not just all that sort of information, but also every single place that your ad is being run. So really nowhere else in the ad tech world, do you have the ability to get that sort of transparency? I mean, if you use Google advertising, for example, if you pay for, or get the very detailed log information, they might get you down to the domain level, but we have every single page in the context of that page. So you can really understand exactly where you’re at.

JC: And it’s learning all the time. It’s just going to keep getting better and better. That’s amazing.

Cedar: Yeah that’s the other piece of it, it’s always learning. Exactly

JC: So in the spirit of the title of this podcast, the Future of BizTech, tell the audience here, two things, one, why you think your Saas is the future of the industry that you’re helping out. So, which I know market inches are one of them and also just big brands in general. Right? Right. And then, but then also, if you can, if you, if you’re able to give us a preview of anything coming down the pipeline, that’d be fantastic too. So why, why would it be the future of the industry and then, and then what’s coming down the pipeline?

Cedar: Sure. So, I mean, I think, as I mentioned before, consumers are getting more and more aware and interested in the corporate behavior of the brands that they support, in the products they buy, right. They’re becoming more and more interested in where you spend your money. What are you doing? That’s good for the environment or good for the society in general, right. Whatever it happens to be. And so it’s going to become more and more important that brands become not just pay lip service to being responsible, but actually really proactively become responsible with how their advertising dollars are spent.

Cedar: And so just from a public perspective, I think that’s going to become more and more important to these brands. From a more insider view, there’s some big changes coming to the ad tech world right now. One of them is the death of third party cookies. And third party cookies are essentially how Google and these other big advertising companies track everything about you as you go around the web, right? So you might have a cookie on website A, and a cookie on website B, and they both sell that information about when you came to their website to Google. And now Google knows more about you and every advertising company is doing that, buying all this information well, that’s becoming illegal very soon. And once those cookies are no longer allowed, there’s going to be, it’s going to be very difficult to target you specifically based on all your, your past browsing habits.

Cedar: And so it’s going to be much more important that you understand the context of where your ad is being shown, because you don’t know who you’re showing it to necessarily. You have to at least know about the context that you’re being shown in.

JC: That actually has a lot of ramifications. You know, when you think about it that way, it could actually change the entirety of how advertisers target people in general targeting the context of what they’re looking at. Not necessarily, you know different pieces of information about that, you know, very more psychological. So that’s my background is psychology. So when I, I sort of think about this stuff, I think about the, the, the psychological side of it, more consumer psychology, for example..

Cedar: Right, so now you’re gonna have to look at, okay, what’s the psychology of a person who would read this type of content and, you know, decide in real time you have 10 milliseconds to decide whether you want to bid on that ad impression or not. So you have to very quickly make a decision of whether that impression is something that you want to bid on or not knowing that the toxicity, the credibility of that page makes it much easier to understand and to decide whether to actually target that page or not. So contextual targeting is going to be huge shifts in the ad tech space over the next couple of years. And we’re really at the forefront of that because we have we believe the very best contextual information about the content. Our algorithms are far beyond any other sort of what they call brand safety companies out there. And the way we’re interpreting the information, the way we’re training our models is so different that our contextual awareness is just light years beyond anybody else. We believe that we will be really kind of at the forefront of who takes control when you don’t have the information about the user anymore.

Cedar: And how are ads targeted and how are ads placed? So, you know, it’s a $200 billion a year market that basically is going to be turned on its head within a couple of years within a year, really. And we believe that we have the technology that will basically enable the next stage of this. So we think we’re sitting in a pretty good spot there.

JC: This is fascinating to me. Is there anything that I didn’t ask or we didn’t go over that you think would benefit the audience to know?

Cedar: I’m not sure how important it is to go into the technical side and describe how our, our models are built or anything, but it is something I think that would be interesting to talk about just because even from a layman’s perspective, just saying an AI looks at it and interprets it, isn’t really helpful. Right? And so essentially the, well, what we do is we have we have scientists on our team who are actually rhetorical scientists. These are language scientists. So they’re not computer scientists. These are people who understand the language and how it’s used for different purposes. And they have come up with these, these indicators of what is toxic and what is high quality, and there’s about 25 or so of them that they’ve identified so far. And we’re continually looking for more. And, and it’s everything from, you know, the clickbaiting is how closely does the title of the article match the actual content down to very esoteric things like the ratio of adverbs to verbs and nouns and, and all those sorts of things kind of play together. And we take all these 25 indicators out of every page and we run them through a, a machine learning model and that outputs the final school.

Cedar: So that machine learning model score and the, the indicators are actually trained based on what we call expert data. They’re not just scraped off the web, every single piece of data that we’re running into our training set is all hand reviewed by multiple people. So, and these are all experts in the field. So we get two or three reviews for every single piece of content that goes into our training step which is very different than some of the competition out there that is basically saying, “I want to script the New York times and I want to scrape natural news.com and everything from, from New York times as good. And everything from New York from natural news is bad”, but that’s not really true. I mean, there’s varying levels of goodness or badness from each of those sites, right? I mean, if you have a editorial on the New York times, it’s not the same level of credibility as a news story.

JC: I was going to say they got, they just got some heat for running an op ed, you know from, from a politician that a lot of people didn’t agree with it. Imagine if your ad ran on that, you might be thinking, Hey, I want my ad to run on New York times because it fits with my demographic, you know, in our, in our line of thinking. But that particular page would have been insanely problematic for a company to have their ad on that op ed page. So that’s why that’s brilliant. I think it’s great that you guys had the foresight to have rhetorical scientists, you know, language scientists rather, or not necessarily like, rather than, I’m sure you also have computers just did the algorithm stuff, but that you, that you employed people that specialize in language and have an actual human intuition factor that you’re importing into this AI. And I think that’s fantastic. Listen, I want to absolutely thank you for coming on here. How can people reach you if they’re interested in signing up or, you know, just people listening might be going, Holy crap, I need this. I mean, I’m one of them, right? So we’ll talk after this because I want to, I want to get signed up here and check this, but how would people reach you if they were interested in this?

Cedar: Well, the easiest thing is to go to our website. WeAreNobl.com. WeAreNobl.com. There’s a link there too, to send us an email or you can just email us at hello@WeAreNobl.com and that’s the easiest way to get in touch with us and we can go from there.

JC: Well, that’s awesome. Cedar, thanks again for coming on, you have a fascinating business. I’m so glad that this type of technology is coming out at a very much needed time. So thank you again for coming on the show.

Cedar: Absolutely. Thank you for this, man. This has been great.

infinityadminEpi 5: Vet Where Your Company Places Sponsored Content – Cedar Milazzo, Founder of Nobl
FutureofBizTech-Epi4-ReBrand.png

Epi 4: Using Cognitive AI to Drive High-Value Industry Growth – Leonard Lee, President of Beyond Limits Asia Pacific

infinityadmin November 20, 2020

Learn more about Beyond Limits, Asia Pacific at: http://www.beyond.ai

Find Leonard Lee on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-lee-9646473/

JC: Well, hello everybody. And thank you for listening to the future of BizTech. I am your host, JC Granger, and I’m here with Leonard Lee, president of Asia Pacific with cognitive AI. This company is solving the world’s most complex problems, and I absolutely had to have Leonard on the show here today, so he could tell you all about it. I think you’re going to really like it. Leonard, thank you so much for coming on. Maybe introduce yourself a little bit to the audience and tell us about yourself and what you do over at cognitive AI and then we’ll kind of jump from there.

Leonard: Thank you, JC for having me on the show. So a little bit about myself. I’ve been in the tech industry for probably close to 20 years. My background is in engineering avionics engineering, but I’ve since moved into it and digitization. So apparently I run the Asia Pacific business as a president for Asia Pacific for Beyond Limits. And prior to this I’ve had you know, experience 12 years with Microsoft in sales transformation and global expansion, and also a digital ventures with Airbus and the last couple of years in the startup world. So with beyond limits, I think I’m really excited to be part of the company and the pioneering, a leadership team, right to drive our global expansion. So, you know, what we do is a very unique branch of AI, which we call cognitive AI.

Leonard: And we combine conventional models that most people know about like the deep neural network, the learning models, the machine learning models. And then we add on top are symbolic AI IP blocks. And the net result is we are able to create a AI model that thinks like a human being. So if you’re in a refinery, they will act like your best operator. That’s been on the job for 20 years and we’re able to codify that expert knowledge into the cognitive AI model. So that’s kind of a quick summary of what we do.

JC: So that’s fascinating to me because, my background is in psychology. I mean, I’ve been doing marketing for 20 years,, but my degree was in psychology and I always found cognitive psych, for example, to be something that I always took a lot of interest in. There was this one course I took called Sensation and Perception very specifically. And it was learning about how, you know, the brain kind of codifies you know, the things that it hears touch, taste, smell, and then how it relates that to his thought process. So when you’re talking to me, you know, people, people listening, everyone’s heard of, of AI, you know, they understand the idea of maybe machine learning, for example, right. You know, the computer starts off like a baby, you know, takes in all the information and it works it from there. But when you say cognitive AI, I don’t think a lot of people really understand how that relates in the tech field. Like, you know, how is it that, you know, what’s the difference, I guess, is my point from what people traditionally understand is AI maybe machine learning versus the cognitive AI that your company specializes in.

Leonard: Yeah, sure. And the best way to explain it is through an example, right? So one of our core focus in terms of product and strategy is working with the oil and gas industry. In fact we have a great investor plus commercial partner British petroleum is one of our key investor and a big customer as well. And so what we’ve done with BP and we’re extending the same product to other oil and gas company is we’re able to combine a lot of their data analytics and ML models that they may have used or have worked with other startups or other AI companies. And basically we have now added some expert knowledge coming from the operator of the refinery that’s been there for the last 20 years. So in a lot of operational situations where you have a large complex you know, facility like a refinery, think of this as a super complicated factory, that is four stadiums, large in size and footprint.

Leonard: So how do you manage the scale of complexity and operation? And it’s, it’s tough to use just the numeric models that are out there, where you pump in a lot of data. And one of the key reasons why a lot of these models fail at a certain point is you just don’t have enough data or a complete set of data you need to build that specific model to then, recommend the decision or give you an output. So when there’s broken data, when there’s unstructured data, a lot of the current AI models fail because it just can’t function. It just needs lots and lots of data for it to work and to give you a recommendation. So because of that limitation we’ve branched out into a symbolic AI where we can build in the expert knowledge, like literally the veteran who’s been there for the last 20 years and he, or she knows exactly when I see this kind of conditions, I do this.

Leonard: And then, because the temperature is such today, or, you know, depending on other factors and, and senses that, that he or she can read from, you know, I would do a search to take a certain action, which may or may not be a sort of intuition, right. That I’ve been here for 20 years, I know how this refinery works. And so we’re able to codify that kind of expert knowledge, intuition, and experience into the AI model. And maybe just to share a little bit of heritage on the company – the technology itself was originally basically matured in the NASA Mars Rover program. So our CTO Mark James, was the head of AI for the Mars Rover program. And the reason I bring that up is because if you think about the first piece of the Rover, you know, going on Mars and trying to navigate around Mars while doing experiments that it was told to do. So at that point, you, you think about, there is no Google maps from us, right? No one’s been there. So it has to take limited data like temperature and tilt angle and the direction of sunlight, and yet has to make decisions based on very, very limited data. And so that’s how the whole cognitive AI came about is through that NASA and Caltech program with NASA for the past 20 years.

JC: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense, because I remember too, I remember watching that when the Rover, you know had landed. And I remember that one of the things that they had talked about was, you know, we lose communication and we can’t just remote control this thing all the time. And it has to be able to be self-sufficient in case we can’t give it commands. And so is that kinda what you’re talking about? Like that self-sufficiency of being able to take it that step further and saying, yeah, I’m not getting a command to do this, but I know that this is my goal and what I need to do. And so here’s what I’m going to do next. Is that the kind of cognitive AI you’re talking about with absolutely. Yeah.

Leonard: To be exact the communication lag is seven minutes, right? You’re talking millions of miles between Mars and Earth. So in seven minutes, there could be a lot of damage done to the Rover if it tumbled down the slope or fell in a crater. So that’s exactly why this independent thinking and decision making based on very limited data is so critical – mission critical.

JC:. Oh yeah. That’s fascinating to me. I had no idea that you guys had kind of a NASA, you know, background or history and whatnot. And one thing I did see on your website as well on and by, and by the way for the audience here, if you want to go to beyond.ai if you’re following along so to speak, that’s their website. But I do see, you know, right now we’re going through a Corona you know, COVID pandemic right now. You may have seen it on the news once or twice. And I see that you guys are talking about predictive modeling with this. And I didn’t know this before we got on the show. Can you tell me a little bit about how your company is using its technology to help or to analyze what we’re going through right now?

Leonard: Yeah, absolutely. And yes, we were all living through this pandemic together and I hope everyone’s staying safe and doing all the right things. So we as a company we also have big ambitions in the healthcare industry. And we were fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with, actually, Cleveland clinic. And we actually had a press announcement a couple of weeks ago where we worked with the Cleveland clinic to build a COVID-19 prediction model. So basically what the model does is it takes in again, a lot of numeric data, like the number of hospitals in the area, PPE supply and volumes of that doctors and density of people, mobility factors like how many people drive cars versus public transport versus other modes of transport. So it takes in all of this data. Plus of course, the epidemiologist infant expert knowledge, the doctors and the clinicians, and it combines all of that into a prediction model and what the and right now, as we speak, there are 16 hospitals in the Florida area run by Cleveland clinic that are actively using this model as we speak. And what the model provides is it’s able to predict based on the input and the expert knowledge from the doctors and the hospital system to predict what would be the curve of number of infections, number of ICU admissions how long a hospital stay per patient, and therefore able to help hospitals basically prepare the entire supply chain, whether it’s hospital beds, number of ventilators, ICUs and PPE, right, which is so critical. So they use that in their daily operations of the hospital to prepare the supply chain and at the end of the day basically give patients the best quality care possible.

JC: Well, that, that I find fascinating because a lot of things that I’m seeing on the news right now is, you know, a lot of people assume that because the pandemic is hitting, like, for example, in America, they’re saying, well, we don’t have enough PPE, but it’s not that broad of a reality. There are hotspots that don’t have enough. And then there are cold spots that have too much, like I thought, for example, that nurses were, you know, in supply and that’s true in hotspots, but in other places, you know, they’re being laid off. Right. And so what I think is interesting about your model is that it sounds like any way that it helps create efficiencies within that. And especially with supply chain, which means, tell me if I’m wrong here, but does that mean that essentially when you have this issue of too much in one area that doesn’t need it and not enough in another one that your model could basically predict, analyze that and reroute resources to make sure that the right amount of resources are getting to the places that needed it and, and taking away from places that don’t quite need it just yet. Is that how it’s kind of working into the supply chain, more of an efficiency algorithm?

Leonard: Yes, absolutely. That’s definitely one of the outcomes. And one of the benefits of using this, and if you think Cleveland clinic obviously is a huge healthcare operator and on the East coast, so in the 16 hospitals, so they would be exactly using it for that purpose, right. Is to optimize the supply chain that if my prediction is I’m going to have a swell of patients, you know, in the next two weeks, whereas another area, I mean, I’d have such a steep spike. Then obviously I will move my supply around and personnel and ventilators, you know, whatever the related equipment is to the spots where they need it most. So absolutely.

JC: Are you struggling to generate warm leads fast for your B2B tech company? Do you wish you could hand up the entire process to a team of professionals and have leads flowing in daily to fill your pipeline, convert to big ROI sales? At Infinity Marketing Group, that is exactly what we do. We are lead generation masters, who specialize in the B2B tech industry. So whether you’re in hardware, software, or even tech services, we here at Infinity Marketing Group can turn your company into a lead generation machine. So for more information, visit our website at www.infinitymgroup.com. Email us at infoatinfinitymgroup.com or give us a call at (303) 834-7344. We look forward to helping you realize your revenue goals.

JC: What about the human factor though? So I learned how to fly planes at a young age. I was flying planes about the same year that I was driving cars. I was 16 when I had to fly. And one of the things that we were taught is if you get into a situation where you can’t see out of the cockpit, so maybe you’re in clouds, it’s called the IFR instrument flight rules. You have to trust your instruments. Yeah. IFR. So you have to trust your instruments. But one of the things that they talked to us about is that if you get into a situation where you feel like, for example, you’re like, I feel like I’m steady, but my instruments say that I’m leaning. You have to trust your instruments. The reason why I bring this up is because my, you know, cause when you don’t trust your instruments, that’s how planes crash because your internal balancing mechanism in your head thinks one thing, but it’s wrong.

JC: Your instruments are basically never wrong. Essentially is what the lesson is. My question to you is if your system can tell people, listen, you need to reroute, this does PPE to this place because you don’t need as much here or there. Do you find though that the human factor of making that decision changes the outcome? So your system is like, no, this is right. We know just on these stats that this area needs more, this area needs less, but what do you say about the people staring at the data and then maybe trying to override it? Cause they think they know more like, have you seen something like that happen and how do you work with your clients to help them trust their instruments, so to speak?

Leonard: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think, especially in the world of AI that you know, the school of thinking is that it could automate everything, then will take over humans. So that’s one sort of a line of thought and that’s, you know I think it’s far from the truth. But to your point first of all, you know, avionics background, I worked for Airbus still love those big big toys.

JC: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Leonard: First of all, I think there are probably two parts. One is it is also part of so when you build an AI model, whether it’s a symbolic model or a conventional AI model, it has to be taught and learned, right? So some of this expert knowledge that you were talking about there has to be a way to feed that back into the AI model and for, for us that expert knowledge and or industry guidelines or regulations all of that is very useful knowledge base that we build into our symbolic model. So as the machine just gets better and better as you provide that feedback into the model, so I think it’s, we can call it reinforced learning, or basically, you know, if the machine, for example, today, based on certain circumstances, it’s recommending decision A, but the operator chose decision B. So we then have to have a way for that feedback to go back into the model. So that the next time, the exact same situation arises, then the machine knows, Oh, previously I said, I recommended a, but they saw on the human input and expertise is actually decision B. So that’s how our model..

JC: How do you get the humans to trust it though? How do you con it could, because it’s a gradual learning thing, just like all AI is at what point, how do you get the humans who are having to make the actual decisions? How do you get them to trust that the AI is smart enough to make the right decisions? At what point, you know, do you work with your clients? Do you have a system in place where you say, listen, it’s going to learn for about this long, but now at this point you got to trust what it says. If it says send 10,000 gowns and facemasks to Boston and, and reroute it from Kansas, then you have to do it like at what point? Yeah. Do humans know that they say, okay, this is smart enough now. And now I can trust what it says.

JC: That’s really, my question is, cause it’s such a gray area, right. It’s not a matter of that. It’s not that people don’t trust that AI is very smart. I think the problem is that most humans don’t know when it got smarter than them. Right. So like, I guess I’m just curious. Has your company solved the human factor to when humans should now say yes, I trust the software. If it says, do this, I’m going to do that. You know, have you, have you discussed with your clients at what point they should make that transition to allowing the system run itself a little more?

Leonard: Yep. That’s a great point. I just, there’s an analogy. I have a Tesla and then there’s an autopilot mode, right.

Leonard: Of course in the beginning, no matter what you do you put two hands on the wheel, just, you know, more and more as you drive the car, you figure it is pretty good. And it’s probably better than me when I’m sleepy on the wheel. So to that point what we do is, first of all for a project deployment we have a period of POC, proof of concept. So where we ask the customer for data, whether it’s three months of data or six months of data, and then we put it into the model and then show them what the model has predicted and they can do a so-called back-testing on some of the decisions or the results they were expecting manually versus what the AI model predicted. Right? So in the case of the COVID prediction model we were working with the doctors in the Cleveland clinic on a daily basis to fine-tune the model based on some backtesting. And I think at the end of a three to four-week period of testing and tuning they were very happy with the accuracy of the model. And I think from that point onward, that’s how we were able to deploy across 16 hospitals. And they’re using that on almost a daily basis.

JC:
I like that analogy of the Tesla, by the way. Cause I think a lot of people can relate to that idea of right now of, you know, automated cars. Right. You know, especially when you hear about, and unfortunately, you know, you hear on the TV like that, you know, one went wrong and it crashed and they’re like, Oh look, we can’t trust it. And it’s like, yeah, but you really can’t trust yourself because about 30,000 people a day, you know, like crash their own cars, you know, so it mathematically speaking, you’re far safer, you know, letting the computer do it, but you know, again, it’s a human factor thing. Let me ask you this, what are some of the big milestones that beyond limits have reached that you are personally proud of?

Leonard: So I think as a company we were founded about five, six years ago here in Glendale, California. So without I think, rich technology heritage from Caltech and JPL and NASA, we were able to quickly breakthrough in the oil and gas industry, which I think a lot of AI companies out there, you know, there’s a lot of facial recognition AI, a lot of NLP and language processing and chatbots but to go into an oil and gas industry and go real deep to solve a very complex problem, I think that’s what we were able to achieve with some of our early customers in oil and gas. So we’re pretty proud of that. So the next couple of big milestone is clearly we are at the finishing stages of our series C investment round.

Leonard: We’re very pleased with the results so far and we’ll be making some announcements in the next couple of weeks. But in terms of operational milestones we went to do a couple of things. One is to expand globally. So Asia Pacific is a key market for us for many reasons, right. We all know about the growth in the different economies. And also there are certain countries in Asia that are leading the way in FinTech, for example, or healthcare, for example, right? So market expansion is one and then also because of our oil and gas, you know, you gotta be in the Middle East. So we are also doing some, some good expansion in the Middle East and in Europe as well. And then the second would be around new verticals.

Leonard: So the healthcare that we just talked about, that’s clearly, that’s something we wanted to break into in 2020 and 2021. And then also because of our presence now in Asia, specifically in Hong Kong which is a big financial market and big IPO market. So we have some fantastic strategic partners in FinTech that we’ll be working with.

JC: Is there any that you can tell us about right now about any of those partnerships or are those still under NDAs?

Leonard: Yeah, I think right now in the NDA, but two or three weeks, we can definitely say there are large financial institutions. One is a bank..

JC: I had to try..

Leonard: So certainly and to share with you also, we’ve only been on the ground for 90 days. So we’re very proud to have really set up the infrastructure across four countries, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. So now we have companies and we have teams boots on the ground, engaging customers and close a couple of deals already. And this is all in the midst of a global pandemic. So we’re pretty proud of 90 days on the ground in Asia so far. That’s, that’s amazing that that’s, that’s a huge feat.

JC: I have two more questions for you. One is a personal question. And then one is a business one at the end. I’m curious what, you know, you know, what you do now, of course, right. Obviously, but what did you want to do when you grew up? Like when you were a kid, what was your, when I get older, I want to do this. So what, what was your childhood dream?

Leonard: So it goes back to airplanes. So literally when I was you know, three, four years old, I wanted to be a pilot. So at the time as I went through college, first of all I think the family didn’t have the means to put me to flying school at the time. And then also I didn’t have 20/20 eyesight nowadays, you know, they’re a lot less stringent than, you know, I have had Lasik surgery since then. So then I thought what’s the next best thing is to be an avionics engineer. So I’m still in the cockpit, just at the planes on the ground, right. So I still get to see the plane touch everything and even better, I made these avionics equipment. My first job was with Honeywell or allied signal. If those in pilots in the industry, the Bendix King range, that was my first job.

Leonard: I was making the GPS and the radio and the transponders. And so I had a lot of fun. And then from there I moved to it and then business. And but the last I had the chance to work with Airbus and there was at totally, you know, different level as part of the leading some of the digital transformation efforts. And there, I got to see, you know, the A380 and A350, and being in these massive factories that are as big as Disneyland building the A380, A350, and even things like the Eurofighter, for example. So yeah, you know, as a little kid growing up that’s just a dream come true to really see in person how these magic machines put together.

JC: That’s awesome. You know, I’m the same as you. I mean, I couldn’t afford flight lessons when I was a kid either. I got lucky we had this. It’s the weirdest thing. Cause I went to high school in Tacoma right off near McChord air force base. I don’t know if you know that, that Seattle area. So they had this program where they took like 20 students out of the whole district that they would give flight lessons to for free. It was like for lack of a better term and kind of a pun, it was a pilot program, but in both sense of the word, you know? And so I got really lucky. I got to do it for free. Otherwise, that’s definitely not something I was gonna be able to afford.

JC: And then I ended going to Embry-Riddle which I’m sure you’re very familiar with Embry-Riddle being in the avionics industry out in Daytona. So, you know what I was doing with my major, cause we talked about psychology. I started out in the human factor, psychology. We were helping to design the cockpits, not in the instruments, but where the instruments go. So a lot of what you did, you know, creating these panels and whatnot, we would put pilots through these cognitive tests and for example, track their eye movements while they were doing a flight SIM, because if you ask a pilot what their top 10 most important instruments are, but then you actually track their eye movements of what they actually look at the most. They’re not the same.

JC: So we would help redesign cockpits based on what pilots actually subconsciously thought we were the most important. So that’s just interesting. I just I’d like talking to definitely avionics people like that. It’s pretty cool. Alright. So my last question for you here, before we wrap it up again within the idea of the title of the podcast, the future of BizTech, I mean, you talk a little about healthcare, but I’m going to leave this open to wherever you want to go with it. What part of beyond limits do you think is going to be the future of either of any of the industries that you go after? You know, what is that 5 or 10-year plan where you see beyond limits really, really contributing to innovation in one of those industries?

Leonard: Yeah. I think so as we look mid to longer-term I think there’s two things. One is, you know, AI in general, it’s still a, let’s say an emerging technology in the sense that businesses are still trying to figure out if I invest X amount of dollars in AI, what’s the return that I get, and this is kind of the same transition. And I was at Microsoft at the time the transition from on-premise computing to cloud computing, right? So back in the day, people would ask, Oh, you know, why should I do cloud? I’m perfectly fine with my server under my desk. And, and then, you know, what’s the advantage of the cloud. And so I think we are going through that kind of a transformational shift in, in technology and, and the benefits that it can bring.

Leonard: So I think we, I firmly believe after seeing a few of those technology transitions that AI is, is definitely going to hit home on ROI and benefits and efficiency and all of that. So for us, clearly we want to drive kind of the cognitive AI industry and how that impacts the verticals that we’re in. So AI industry as a whole, and then secondly, to really make an impact for the verticals and industries that we work with. So oil and gas is a key one with our oil and gas customers like, like BP and the like, and then second in healthcare, as we just talked about, I think there’s still so much more we can do with AI in healthcare both on the clinical side, as well as like a hospital management you know, how do you do billing in the hospital? How do you do bed management in a hospital and so on? And then third is the financial services and FinTech. So I think we really want to drive the whole AI industry forward without cognitive AI IP blocks and then in these three industries that we really want to go after and together with our strategic partners in those industries.

JC: Well, that’s fantastic. Listen, this was a fascinating talk and I want to thank you again for coming on. If anyone listening wants to engage your company what’s the best way to go about that? Is there a phone number, email website? I mean, what’s the best way to get a hold of you guys?

Leonard: Yeah, sure. So first of all the company website as you mentioned earlier, it’s Beyond.AI, my personal email is llee@beyond.ai. So you can kind of reach out to me personally or kind of hit our website with some great you know, use cases and white paper that talks two to how cognitive AI is a huge differentiator versus the conventional AI feel, feel free to chat.

JC: Thank you so much again for coming on, sir. I appreciate your time.

Leonard: All right. Thanks a lot, JC.

infinityadminEpi 4: Using Cognitive AI to Drive High-Value Industry Growth – Leonard Lee, President of Beyond Limits Asia Pacific
FutureofBizTech-Epi3-ReBrand.png

Epi 3: How Technical Applications are Changing Business Development – Matthew Segur, CEO of TimeSeries

infinityadmin November 18, 2020

Learn more about TimeSeries at: https://www.timeseries.com/

Find Matthew Segur on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-segur-4ab90b8/

JC: Well, hello everybody and thank you for listening to The Future of BizTech Podcast. I’m your host, JC Granger and I have with me today, Matthew Segur of TimeSeries – Matthew, thank you so much for coming on, and I’m very much looking forward to asking you some questions here. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your business here. Just kind of give everyone the quick 32nd overview before we dive in.

Matthew: Yeah, sure thing. And then firstly, let me say, thanks for the opportunity to speak with you today. I’m looking forward to this conversation. So Time Series, we are a rapid application development services provider. So in essence we utilize a well, the leading low code application development platform called Mendix. And we deliver consulting services to our client base, which varies across industries and delivering applications across those enterprises via that platform. And the reason why I call it a consultancy is that we bring not just the technical acumen or the application development acumen, but we also bring the business management consulting side of the equation as well, which is really integral to success of low code development. Cause you’re breaking down that barrier between businesses and getting all those parties to the table. So you need to have the acumen across both spaces to be successful.

JC: And let me ask you a question here. I was going through your website and taking a look at you guys for a while before, and I saw specifically something that caught my eye, which was your energy suite. Can you tell me a little bit about that? The smart app suite and cause I mean that, I feel like, you know, cause you specifically talk about climate change and things like that. And there, I’m very curious specifically about your energy suite product. What can you tell us about that?

Matthew: Sure. So that, I mean, well that even speaks to the origin of our company named Time Series. So when we go to our start, we you know, created a very novel basically a big data platform. So we took a valuable at the time we’re bleeding edge big data technologies and the, you know, open-source created a proprietary stack to be able to handle a sort of a new issue that was coming to bear, which was smart meter data, right? So, really large volume of fine-grained time series data. And so our company name time series and then that platform was successfully delivered in the energy utility marketplace. And then what we were getting was this ask out of that existing customer base, which was, this is great –  we can ingest this data, we can process this data. How do we then turn this around and actually generate information into our business, into our customer base and then take action on that?

Matthew: So we needed a way to do that. So that was sort of the Genesis to the smart apps suite, which was marrying up the Mendix rapid application development platform, which could, in essence, be that front end with this other advanced technologies on the back end or elsewhere that could be considered these smart apps. And we started to take that out to market around these various use cases and energy being one of those use cases, right? So how do you best manage that data? Communicate that into organizations and then take action, not at which was that. And then we’ve also started to extend that same thought process into other areas as well and other industry verticals.

Matthew: So, you know, we’re launching one in the Marine space, right? So Marine meaning like shipbuilding and that kind of thing. So, you know, what are their unique issues? How do you digitally transform that part of the industry? And then in essence, productize that. Now our smart up suite is not a product. It’s not a standalone SAS. It is an essence and acceleration module or templates, if you will, that quickly enable our client base into these use cases, right? So, you know, you still have to do customization. So you get sort of the best of both worlds, which is off the shelf, plus customization, all sort of wrapped into one package.

JC : That’s really cool. You know, I’m curious, you know, I talked, I talked a lot of CEOs in my line of work and I’ve always been curious as to that one defining moment or at least set that timeframe where you realize, holy crap, we’re going to make it right. Because everything before that was Holy crap, we might not make it, like the struggle is real. So can you, do you remember it, was there a defining moment or was there a timeframe where, you know, you went from being like, “I hope we make it, I hope we make it to like crap. This is it. Like, you know, we’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna nail this”.

Matthew: It, you know, it’s funny, like, I mean, I guess you sort of have that thought every day in some way, right? I mean, you look at what’s happened recently with COVID-19 right. Again, you sort of question, do I have the business continuity of valuable to my organization to sort of survive this huge market change? I would say the defining moment, you know, outside of this Covid space which actually came fairly recently in our work with Siemens, Siemens is a very large organization. We’ve been, we’ve become a partner in their digital industry software space. We started that process last year and, and, and successfully brought that to conclusion and the latter part of 2019. And I think it was in that messaging and in those conversations were in essence, this global organization, like Siemens, which has been in this digital industry software space for, for, for so long and very successful on that validated what we were talking about, that it made sense to them that yes, there’s value there that yes, what you guys are doing are, is unique and can be brought into not only their customer base, but also other customers that they’re trying to bring into their fold.

Matthew: So I think that was really that defining moment and, you know, outside of the financials of course, but you know, it was that really that market validation that said yeah, we’ve got the right message and we’re in the correct space.

JC: So where did, I’m curious, what, like, where did your, the idea come from? Like, you know, date day, zero before you started this, this company, when, you know, what was that, was there, was there some interesting story as to like, you know, you, you were out doing something and something happened you’re like Eureka, right? Like the light bulb goes off, you know, what was it that really got you started even to even create this company to even take that leap?

Matthew: Sure. So maybe just a little bit of history of work, Time Series guided star, which was in the Netherlands. And I was part of, I was a cofounder in another startup here in the ear, in the US and we were doing predictive analytics in the asset-intensive industry space, right? So like oil and gas process manufacturing, that kind of thing. And it was in that role as co-founder there and driving growth for the organization that I got introduced to TimeSeries and their founders over there. And it was in that relationship that what I saw that they were doing was unique and valuable, but really the opportunity came when it was like, hey, this isn’t happening in the US why is this only happening in the Netherlands? And to a, maybe a little bit of a broader space in Western Europe, you know, the US North America is a huge marketplace, so let’s get that going here.

Matthew: It was in that relationship, right? Which is, you know, network is so meaningful in any kind of business that really sort of presented that opportunity. Now I took some time to say, you know, what’s that market look like, what are the challenges you know, based on my own experience in that previous startup and said, yeah, let’s get this thing going. So, you know, let’s, let’s put this thing together and open the doors in the U S marketplace and give it a go, I would say, you know, certainly advantaged by having you know, the other partners with which to rely on. And but growing into a market that was, you know, brand new was certainly a challenge. You know, finding credibility is an instantaneous challenge, right? I mean, you know, Time Series, you know, we’re three years old, three and a half years old here in the US right. So nobody knew us before. So you get that credibility by, in essence performing, right?

JC: Ah, it’s a good point. And I, I guess I’m curious also, like, what are some of the big milestones that the company has gone through that you are specifically proud of yourself?

Matthew: Oh, sure. I would say our culture, the team we’ve built. And I think, you know, some of that was certainly by design, you know, I, I, I have a background in big management consulting firms. Right. And, you know, I worked with a lot of really bright people doing very interesting, innovative type projects and those organizations, but the structure of that organization was very top-down. Right. It was very military-esque. Right. You know, I’m in control, I’m in command, if you will.

JC: And I look at me, I’m the captain now. Right. 

Matthew: Great cultural references.  You know, and it was just like, it’s not that I pushed back against that, but I just thought there was a, you know, a better opportunity for an organization to be an essence, a little more, a lot flatter, right. Everybody gets idle and I have a title, but, you know, I have to sign certain things and I’m accountable for certain things, but open the space up to everyone involved in the organization and being transparent in that has been wildly successful for us. You know, everyone has a sense of, I don’t work for, I work with, you know, my leaders or my company. And that’s sort of, you know, I guess I’m really, really proud of that culture because it has served us very well. And not only in loyalty of employees, but their level of engagement, how they then engage and ultimately with our, with our clients, you know, they carry that culture with them into that space. And it’s been very successful and transformative for them and their professional growth. And seeing those people grow so quickly and becoming leaders themselves is a fantastic thing to see.

JC: Are you struggling to generate warm leads fast for your B2B tech company? Do you wish you could hand off the entire process to a team of professionals and have leads flowing in daily to fill your pipeline, convert to big ROI sales? Well, at Infinity Marketing Group, that is exactly what we do. We are lead generation masters who specialize in the B2B tech industry. So whether you’re in hardware, software, or even tech services, we here at Infinity Marketing Group can turn your company into a lead generation machine. So for more information, visit our website at www.infinitymgroup.com. Email us at info@infinitymgroup.com, or give us a call at (303) 834-7344. We look forward to helping you realize your revenue goals.

JC: Well, I think it’s great that you put so much credence into, you know, your people. I’ve always been a big proponent of, you know, if you take care of people, they’ll take care of you, you know? And you can’t just say it, you know, you have to prove it, you know? And we have very little turnover here at our company as well. But that’s just, I think because people are, they’re happy, you know, because they have concerns and whatnot like you listened to them. Right. You know you can’t, no matter how long we’ve been doing this, I mean, how long have you been in your, in your industry? Just out of curiosity, roughly.

Matthew: Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s been a long time. I don’t want to hide it.

JC: No, I’ve got, I’ve got the gray covenant here. Right. I don’t know if you can see it. I got some coming in here

Matthew: I’ve been in that space and the technology side of it now. I mean, this has been my entire career, right. It has been in this space, so it’s been a, quite a number of years and, you know, you see what works, you see what doesn’t work and, you know, you need to sort of put ego aside and really just open the door to ideas, open the door to criticism. Right. And, and also take risks. Right. but if you can share that risk with others of like-mind and they’re supported, then you know, it doesn’t necessarily become risky anymore.

JC: Well, I want to turn this conversation for our audience real quick here to more about, very specifically that, again, coming back to the energy part of this, of your company, I find that to be very specifically fascinating. You have a ton of things about your company, by the way that I think are great. But I really dialed in on the energy piece. So I have two questions. The first one is going to be, what is it that time-wise is doing now that is solving. And I guess to re, to go back a second, actually, what are the biggest problems that the energy sector is having right now? And how is timewise solving that? Like if I own a solar company or wind energy company or something like that, what am I dealing with right now that’s a problem? And I say, Holy crap, timewise can solve this. What is that right now?

Matthew: Yeah. I mean, the big thing for that is really, you know, look at it from like digitization, right. Or digital transformation of their existing business processes and what they have in place – legacy systems, right? The need to modernize you know, we’ve walked into, you know, organizations that are running like these old mainframes and, you know, cobalt and I mean, just like 30-year-old technology, right. Where the people to keep that part of their technology- portfolio operating don’t exist in the marketplace anymore. They’re all retired, right. They’re, they’re all in, you know, sitting on a beach somewhere. And so, you know, that’s their biggest challenge. So their, their, their operations, their business success has been hamstrung by, by technology. And they’ve got a lot of debt that they need to get over. Being able to rapidly address that by delivering applications very quickly and with a short ROI is, is incredibly valuable to those types of organizations.

Matthew: And then also creating technology that is also then future-proof right? I mean a rapid application platform like Mendix and building an app on that and delivering that, which is it’s rugged, it’s enterprise-grade, but, you know, and the platform has hundreds of readily available APIs, right? So we can connect to anything. So as other advanced technologies come to market and we can bring them to bear at a specific client, then we can easily do that. And the ability to iterate and quickly do that and make changes without having to scrap what you’ve done is also wildly valuable, right? So I think, you know, those, you know, traditional energy companies are really, their business model has changed, whether they’re in oil and gas or whatnot, right? I mean, they used to be very cash flush. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago, but a few weeks that, you know, in essence, the speculators have driven the price of oil to negative, right?

JC: It was like, it cost more to make the barrel than what was it

Matthew: It made me producers were in essence having to pay to take their oil, their product madness. Right. So the days of being cash-flush and throwing money at things is dumb, right? Like you just can’t do that. So now you need to be a lot smarter in your business decisions, right?. And it is, you know, as Forbes said, several years ago, every company is a software company now. And whether it’s an operations, how they go to market, how they engage their customers or clients, whatever. And that’s, you need to bring that to bear. And that’s, that’s the space that we really enjoy being in.

JC: So I think my last question then, and this is in this one, I really want to focus on a lot for me and you to go back and forth on here. So, you know, in the whole nature, of course, of the future of BizTech the title of this podcast, you know, you just described what you guys are doing now and how it’s helping the energy sector now. What’s Coming down the pipeline, Matthew, what can we expect from not just TimeSeries, but maybe even just your expectations for the industry in general. You know, I want to know first what timewise is going to be coming out with that can help, you know, if there’s any, any companies listening right now that are in the energy sector. I want them to know what’s coming down the pipeline from you guys, but then also, if you could tell me what you think just in general, it was coming down and how, you know, TimeSeries will change the industry and how other things are gonna be affected.

Matthew: Yeah, sure. I mean, the big advances is, you know, we’re moving from sort of business process applications to like machine-level applications and pushing parts of those processes as close to the edge as we can. Right. So some of our processing like say some of the aggregations that we may be doing outside, we’re now trying to push some of those aspects down to the edge. Right. So you’re an essence then having to deal with, you know, even smaller volumes of data that you’re having to push out and then to manage from a cost perspective. I mean, those are some of the things, I mean, I would say low code in general is from a general market perspective is in its infancy. You know, Forrester, Gartner, all these guys are pushing some great research around what low code is doing, not, and across the industry.

Matthew: Right. I mean, yeah, we do a lot in the energy space. We do a lot say in manufacturing, but we’ve touched, you know, insurers, we’ve touched a life sciences company, healthcare you know, all of those kinds of things. So low code is going to be something that is going to be coming more and more and more, not just relevant because it already is and it’s been proven, I mean, we’ve delivered enterprise-grade applications in the energy sector utilizing this, but it’s also going to be it’s going to be business essential, right? I mean, the market’s changed very fast. Business changes very fast, and you need technology that’s going to be able to respond to that in that same timeframe to have the flexibility, to have the capability across the enterprise to achieve that. Otherwise if you’re waiting, you’ve missed, right?

Matthew: I mean, time is money. Time is of the essence and that’s really it. I mean, for us as an organization, expanding into different markets, right? I mentioned Marine earlier, you know, that, that all came out of a client engagement and seeing there’s a whole industry here that is an essence right for modernization or digitization. So what are those common use cases that we could start to build applications towards, right? That would not be just applicable to one, but to many customers. And so we’re starting to look at that we’ve recently engaged in the construction space. So again, another industry vertical of which, you know, as all these other opportunities, right. So let’s, let’s see what those are and start to push product out into that space as well.

JC: And, you know, for people who, you know you know, climate change is obviously a big topic right now. I mean, it’s, it kind of always has been in a sense, but, you know, it’s come to its peak, you know in the recent past here because you have, you know, basically you have previous administration’s current administrations that have different views, right? So the country’s very divided on their views of climate change and whatnot. My question is, and I guess this would be a vital one here for everyone. How, what direct link do you see between timewise and how that could, because again, like I said, you do work, you know, you work in Marine, you work in construction and you have the energy sector one as well. Do you see a direct link in any way of what, where your company and how it contributes are effects and overall, you know, like if every industry, if every company in those industries were to adopt what you do, would that change things?

Matthew: I would say, are they measuring that or are we measuring that right? I mean, I certainly get a better part of my career in that space. You know, I will say that, yeah, I think we are having an impact and, and we will continue to have an impact as you improve operational efficiency. You ultimately reduce the footprint of that operation overall, right? But you know, what’s interesting about energy is that, you know, you need energy to produce water. You need water to produce energy, and you need both of those on the food side of it, right? So you get this huge nexus of space. So yes are we affecting climate change? I think we are in a positive way by improving the process or operational efficiencies at our clients and I don’t know if anyone’s measuring that.

Matthew: I’d certainly be curious to see if anybody would want to put it. I mean, they’re certainly measuring the dollar ROI, are they bad impacts from say, you know, carbon footprint or whatever? You know, maybe not maybe some of them are, I mean, some of those companies, you know, do have sustainability programs. But I like to think that we are making that difference. You know, if we have an application in the energy space that a group that improves great efficiency will absolutely right. I mean, that’s, that’s less loss of energy or in that type of thing. So, yeah, absolutely.

JC: I think that’s great. Yeah. And, you know, there have been a lot more people trying to make those connections and pull that data, especially carbon footprint, right. Reducing carbon-footprint is a big deal and you’re right. You make a great point when you operate, when you make your operation more efficient – you can do you become leaner, right? You could do a lot more with a lot less, and that’s the entire point of reducing the carbon footprint. So no, I agree with you. I think it’s fantastic. For our audience, is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think would be beneficial to the people listening about either yourself or the company?

Matthew: I don’t mean to Self-Promote like this, I would say, you know, with this whole COVID thing, right. Speaking of climate change, right? You know, obviously, you know, climate change is going to result in new and interesting or novel diseases entering the market – that’s a symptom of the overall issue of climate change. You know, I would say let’s, you know, let’s be thoughtful, let’s think beyond the self think of, you know, it takes a village, right – that old phrase in what we do particularly now.  We’ve had a political environment that’s been difficult and one that’s been a rife of conflict. You know, I think now this sort of exposes the weakness of that conflict and the importance of continuing to work together and thinking of broader, you know, thinking of as a part of something bigger and so I would just like, you know, people to take that into consideration and be thoughtful in what they do, whether it’s, you know, their own job, how they interact with their colleagues or employees. And that kind of thing is, is to sort of take that community view. Right?

JC: Absolutely. Listen, Matthew, I greatly appreciate you coming on the show here today. If people wanted to get hold of you or your company to try to learn more, or maybe hire you for your services, how would they get hold of you? What kind of contact information are you able to give?

Matthew: Yeah, of course you know, timeseries.com, so all one word there. And then you can also reach me at Matthew Seger, Matthew.Seger@timeseries.com. I’m happy to have a conversation about you know, those modernization or digital or technical debt problems that people are having and how we can potentially bring our expertise to bear and solve those. So, thanks.

JC: Absolutely. Thanks for coming on the show.

Matthew: Thank you, JC.

JC: Well, thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I hope you got great value out of our discussion today. If so, be sure to subscribe to my podcast and rate it five stars. This helps the podcast jump in the ratings to help other techies like you and I find it too. And remember, if you own or work for a B2B tech company and you’re looking for highly targeted hot leads delivered to your inbox daily, my agency Infinity Marketing Group can help. We’ve been in business since 2010 and have helped hundreds of companies just like yours make millions of dollars in marketing and lead gen ROI. So be sure to visit our website at www.infinity, M as in marketing, group.com. That’s infinitymgroup.com. Or you can email us at info@infinitymgroup.com, or you can call us at (303) 834-7344. We look forward to talking with you and I look forward to you listening to my next episode of Future of BizTech.

infinityadminEpi 3: How Technical Applications are Changing Business Development – Matthew Segur, CEO of TimeSeries
FutureofBizTech-Epi1-ReBrand.png

Epi 1: Why Automating Employee Training Will Change Your Company Forever – Chris Ronzio, CEO of Trainual

infinityadmin November 2, 2020

Learn more about Trainual at: https://www.trainual.com 

Find Chris Ronzio on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisronzio/

JC: Welcome to another edition of The Future of BizTech. I’m your host, JC Granger. And I have Chris Ronzio here with me, the founder and CEO of Trainual. As a quick transparency, I’m a client of Trainual, I love Trainual, that’s why I have him on. So, Chris, thank you so much for coming on. I love what you guys are doing. Why don’t you tell the rest of the audience here other than myself, what you guys do and who you help out?

Chris: Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, JC. I appreciate the invite and the endorsement from the get-go here. So Trainual is a simple system, that’s really the playbook for a growing business. So when you think about all of your policies, and procedures, your standard operating procedures, just how you do what you do, Trainual is a place where you can put that all, you can onboard your new team members and train your existing team on what their role entails. So training, SOPs, knowledge management. It’s kind of all that stuff in one.

JC: What would you say has been the biggest pain point for the clients you guys have? I mean, we use it a lot and I’ll go into more about how we use it later, but what do you find is the biggest thing people go, Holy crap, how did I ever go without that?

Chris: Yeah. I think every business gets to a certain size where they’re just dealing with chaos and there’s disorganization of who does what? There are overlapping responsibilities. People are doing things inconsistently. And so at some point in every business, you start to feel that, and you have this tendency to want to jump back in, and fix the way things are supposed to work. And so, at that time it makes sense to document, formalize how things are done.

And so you start to work on these things, but often you’re doing it in documents, and email templates, and all over the place. And so, that’s really the pain point, is when you start to lose the grip on how things operate, and you want to make sure things are done consistently, that’s when it makes sense to start to invest in this stuff.

JC: What motivated you to start Trainual? I’m just curious more or less, if you know what usually comes out of a pain of your own sometimes, right?

Chris: Absolutely. So my first business I started when I was 14, it was a video production company. We did youth sporting events and I ran it for 12 years. So all through high school, all through college, set up an office after college set up a second office, and we were doing events in all 50 States. So we had a little over 300 camera operators doing events for us. And so I was feeling that pain of how do we operate consistently when we get an event in Chicago versus in Los Angeles or New York or Boston. And so we developed this online training, and checklists, and policies, and how do you operate like a franchise would? So I was just really passionate about that, and did it for my own business.

And when I sold that company, I started consulting for all other businesses on that, on systems and processes, and being efficient in scaling. And it really just all came down to my clients, and my story was centered around like, you can only scale when you’re doing things consistently. And so I was frustrated that everybody’s just using documents, and random ways to patch together how their business works. It felt like there’s got to be a system that’s designed for this. So Trainual initially was just like a prototype for my own consulting business for my clients. And as more of them started using it, I thought, okay, this thing could really take off. Let’s go all-in on this offer.

JC:  What was that turning point? I mean, there’s always that day, we were like, Holy crap. This can be a thing now. I mean, do you remember like what that moment was, when you realized that you guys were going to really make it even if accidentally because it wasn’t even supposed to be this kind of business model?

Chris: The moment initially when I decided we should go all-in on this. So my consulting business, I had five employees and we could only work with like 10 or 12 companies at a time. And we had this big aspiration that we wanted to work with 25,000 businesses. That was like the BHAG, that I put out there. And I thought that the way to do it would be hiring other consultants, and licensing my consulting model to people in different cities. And so the first two consultants I brought in, I trained through Trainual. I had this internal tool, and I thought that’s how I’m going to train them. And they loved the system. And so more and more, me and my employees were saying, I wonder if this is the thing that could really grow. And so it was December of 2017, we decided let’s just give this a go.

And so we put in notice with all our consulting clients, and the next month, January 2018, we were all in on the software business. So we span out, Trainual as its own entity and we didn’t take on any consulting projects. And we just said, let’s give this a go. And for me, the validation was when strangers were using it, people that weren’t friends of friends, it was just random people from Facebook or from wherever else found us and were paying monthly for this tool. That’s when I really felt like we had something.

JC: Yeah. So that’s that good feeling, right? When all of a sudden it becomes almost completely out of control, it’s not like you’re going after people, and there was a process and whatnot. Now people just… Like you said, strangers are coming in, kind of became a monster, had a life of its own. For the audience… So I heard about you guys, I think through a Facebook ad. I think something like that. I think I just saw the Facebook ad, and I own a marketing agency and our biggest issue was… So we’d have a lot of contractors that would come on initially, a couple of years ago we would try to onboard contractors, and whatnot. And I was okay, we were having trouble with our system and our process to get them on.

What would happen is, for example, we’d bring one on and I’d say, okay, great. Now sign the contract agreement. Cool. And then it would just fall off as far as where they got in their training, they’d say, “Oh yeah”. Some people they’re… “Well, I don’t understand how to do this”. I’m like, “Wait didn’t we send you that video?” And just the whole thing was messed up. So I see Trainual. I’m like, “Oh, okay. That looks interesting”. And I start looking at it, and the more I looked at it, the more I’m like, Holy crap. If I upload this stuff, one time, if I just spend a little time up front, then after that I can just invite someone, and then they just go through each thing, each module, whichever one, we assign them, and I’d be able to track their progress.

Right. So then it became so easy. So we saved so much time and complete chaos, and pulling our hair out from, bringing on contractors. Now we’re bigger. Now we have more, W2 employees and in-house and whatnot, but we still use it though for training them. So we have less people to train now, but it’s a really great tool that we use. And it’s funny, there are two systems. There are two tools that I say changed my life for my agency. First one is Gusto. That thing is great. They’re a payroll company and it’s so user-friendly, and has been so easy to onboard for employees, everything like that. And the other one’s Trainual. And I tell people, listen, if you’re trying to scale, may the difference between you being, a two, three-person team or 20 plus team is going to be Trainual basically.

Because there’s otherwise, you guys are just going to fall through the cracks. There’s just no way you’re going to be able to take, and handle that. And so then when, and I’m not sure… I know it was recently, I said, when we started this podcast where I think you are maybe our sixth or seventh guest on it, and we have a pretty large audience that we have a marketing-wise, but I was like, “who do I want that real keynote one to be” And I was like, I’m just going to reach out and see what happens if I just reach out to Trainual, and there we go. So it’s awesome that you’re on, I’m geeking out on your soft. I love B2B, SAS stuff, especially things that can save time because the time is money.

Chris: That’s amazing. Thank you so much. First of all, I love that you use it for contractors because that was like the story of the first couple of companies that were on it. We had this moving company, they still use it today, but they hired moving contractors all across the US to move kids in and out of college. And they needed a system to just… every season is like this new batch of people, and they need to get them up, and running on how they did that. And so Trainual was amazing for them when they were growing.

And then we have this other business, that is worldwide graphic design service. They’ve got remote designers, contractors everywhere, and they use a system of hire hundreds, and hundreds of those designers. And so it’s so cool that you started that same way. And now agencies, whoever’s listening, B2B type services, like exactly what you said. If you want to automate and streamline, how you explain? How to do something? So that you don’t have to do it over, and over again, if you just want to explain it, once you write it down, you put the time into documenting it once and then it’s really just like turnkey things. So I love that you got that experience.

JC: Yeah, well, the one thing I realized too is, we really wanted to scale on the sales side. I’m good at sales and whatnot, that’s great, but ultimately agencies can be crushed under the way of their own sales success. And the only way to get out of that was to be able to scale the delivery side, proportionally, because if you’re good at sales, that’s great, but you bring in 10 clients in a week, that’s a near impossibility for some sized companies to be able to deliver on immediately. The only way to get that delivery was to be able to scale bringing more help in fast, right? Because the second they sign that contract, you owe them work right now, you buy yourself a week or two with other things going on. But if you need to find someone to help deliver on that, because your other people are at the end of their bandwidth, you’ve got to have a system that can get them up and running.

And we play everything in there from like culture stuff too. It’s not just training on processes. We talk about our culture, our communication policies, and we talk about our mantra as far as, design and just things that are more existential, not necessarily A to B to C to D kind of thing. Sometimes it’s just I put in, I upload, sometimes I have a section in Trainual. I also realized it’s funny when I used Trainual first, you have this section where you can upload videos right? Now, If you make your own videos, that makes sense. Well, what I was doing, and this was smart to me at the time, I would take the other softwares that we use, and I would go to their tutorial section. I would download their videos, and I upload them in the Trainual.

Well, that was awesome in the beginning until they started updating their videos. And now our videos were out of date. So I was like, wait shit. So what I do now, is I just put a link to whatever vendor software we use. So there are videos and that’s just the Trainual section. And it’s like, click this link, and then whatever’s there, watch all that. You know what I mean? So even I had to figure out how I wanted to do it myself, but you guys have all those options, which kind of let my brain, run wild. I mean, I made my own mistakes within it, but I quickly learned my own lesson. So I thought that was fun.

Chris: Well, man, you’ve got to dial it in. I mean, from teaching how to use other tools to your culture, and your brand and your communications, whoever’s listening to this can learn a lot, but what you said there about the problem agencies have, I think is really key. So a lot of people swing like this pendulum between sales, and delivery, and you put all this effort into sales, and then you get a bunch of work. And now all your effort goes into delivery so that you don’t mess up the delivery. But in the meantime, you’re not selling any more work. So then you finish those jobs, and you come back to selling. And so in a scalable business, the ideal state is that both are operating scalably all the time.

And so if you want to grow your delivery team, and you want to grow your sales team so that you’re not the one doing it, and jumping back, and forth, then you document both of the processes, for how to close deals, and how to do calls, and how to book appointments, and how to present proposals. And then on this side, for how to put the deliverables together, and have client meetings, and have team meetings. And if you can get there, then the business just operates. And that’s, I think the ideal state that most of us want.

JC: Yeah. We had a lot of peaks and valleys early on, and then bringing in systems like this allowed us to do both at a steady pace, which was nice.

JC: Are you struggling to generate warm leads fast for your B2B tech company? Do you wish you could hand up the entire process to a team of professionals and have leads flowing in daily to fill your pipeline, convert to big ROI sales? At Infinity Marketing Group, that is exactly what we do. We are lead generation masters, who specialize in the B2B tech industry. So whether you’re in hardware, software, or even tech services, we here at Infinity Marketing Group can turn your company into a lead generation machine. So for more information, visit our website at www.infinitymgroup.com. Email us at infoatinfinitymgroup.com or give us a call at (303) 834-7344. We look forward to helping you realize your revenue goals.

JC: Definitely as much as I love the software, now I’ve actually been able to hand off software to my own people. Since, I don’t deal with it as much anymore, but I get your emails, your newsletters about some new features, but what a couple, maybe new cool features that have come out in the last few months that you’re really proud of?

Chris: Man. So much stuff. Our July customer newsletter, we had to cut stuff off the list, and do the sale. Let’s save this till August. But the big thing was we did a redesign in June. So the app got a ton faster. That was exciting. Then we launched this embed feature, where you can embed things from over 700 locations. And so, it’s different apps that it’s integrated with. And so the most common ones are like Google slides, and PDFs, and all the video hosting sites. But you can also embed a Spotify playlist, and Instagram photos. And if you don’t talk about that-

JC: I didn’t even know that. I literally didn’t even know about that release. Like that’s how I’m now. Just like I said, as much as I love the software, I can’t even keep up with how fast you guys are releasing things. I mean, that’s a super cool feature. Now I’m trying to think, especially the Spotify playlist, I feel like I have this. Do you know what I probably put on there? Our hold music is “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley.

Chris: That’s great.

JC: It is the best. People keep thinking they get Rickrolled. Like if I don’t get on first, and they’re getting the whole music, they’re like, I thought this might’ve been a joke. I thought it might’ve been popping up. Like, no, no, that’s just the most brilliant whole music I’ve ever heard of. I wonder if I can get that now into the training..

Chris: So yeah. I mean we rolled out like auto time estimates. So as somebody consuming training, you want to know how long is this? Like, I’m going to do some work here. How long am I in for? And so in the same way, medium gives you the estimates for how long it takes to read something. We have that now. So yeah, there are constantly things rolling out that we are excited about.

JC: That’s awesome. Let’s just do a personal side. I hear either current or maybe previous, who were your mentors professionally, coming up through the ranks? Is there anyone that you’d say was kind of a big, stepping off point from your knowledge base or your motivation or anything like that?

Chris: Yeah, totally. So the first one I’ll point to is a guy named Scott Fritz. He wrote a book called The 40 Hour Work Year, which was kind of a play on Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek. And he was like, if you’re really going to sell your business, and you’re just kind of a passive owner or investor in your own business, if you don’t want to be the operator anymore, you can run a business on 40 hours a year. And the idea is that it’s really just like your monthly, quarterly, strategic planning that you’re doing for the business and checking in with the operators. And so his book is amazing for its 10 years old now, but it’s amazing content. And so I worked with him, he facilitated some strategy meetings. And then when I was consulting, I did personal business coaching with him.

And so he’s been really influential for me, even he has done some of our strategic planning at Trainual. And the more recently, a local guy… Trainual is based in Arizona. And so is a company called Infusion Soft. Clate Mask, is the CEO, one of the co-founders of Infusion Soft. And he’s been an amazing advisor and partner, and now he is on our board of directors, which is great. And then another one is Michael Lee Gerber, who wrote the E-Myth. He has been an advisor for me, and it’s really cool to see some of the ideas that he kind of the first person to put those in writing, and like the seventies, and eighties still haven’t been addressed through software. And so it’s exciting to tackle some of these problems so that every growing business feels like they can really have a system which can run business like a franchise. So those are three I’d point to.

JC: And then going I guess, even further back, it might have nothing to do with this, but, what did you want to do when you were a kid? And then where did that kind of transition? What was your childhood dream, career or job?

Chris: I had a few. I wanted to be in the NBA, which didn’t pan out because I’m only five-eight. I wanted it to be a sportscaster. So it’s funny, when I started my video company, I got into video because I wanted to be in front of the camera, doing ESPN kind of shows. And I ended up just editing, and running the camera, and then building this sports video business, which is similar, but never realized that dream. And then I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be in business. So my dad was in business, but in the corporate world, and he was never around, he was always on a plane, and he was always traveling. And so, I would go to his office, and I’d see the shiny office buildings, and the mahogany desks. And I was like, I want that, I want cool feeling of business, but I don’t want to be always away from the family. And so entrepreneurship seemed to provide both. And so as a kid, I was always doing car washes, and landscaping, and selling wrapping paper, and lemonade stands, and just making money, however I could.

JC:  That’s awesome. That’s really Cool. Obviously right now at the time of recording, we’ve got COVID going on. How have you seen your software either adapt internally or have you seen it being used more because of this? Obviously people are working remote now. So companies are having to switch to these processes. Just how has Trainual either adapted or been sucked into the current nature of the world Right now?

Chris: What’s been really cool is, we’ve become like our own best customer because we were based in an office before, but we haven’t been in our office since March. And in the last four months or five months, we’ve hired 14 people that we’ve never met in person and use our own software as the only way to onboard these people and get them up and running. And so it’s been really cool to be our own case study, using the product and coming up with cool ideas for the product.

 It’s been a wild ride, the demand for remote onboarding, and training has gone through the roof. So we’ve got tons of people coming to the website for content, and advice. We really doubled down our content efforts. We’re producing more videos, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on podcasts. We went from one podcast, and now four podcasts. The YouTube channel, the writing articles on other sites, Inc and Forbes. And that’s probably the biggest change, is like we’ve gone really deep in brand, and content to try to be as helpful as we can, because this is something that everybody needs a solution for, even if you’re not at the point yet that you’re hiring, and scaling and ready to pay for it.

JC: That’s awesome. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask the next question here, given the title, how do you think Trainual will either change or be the future of the B2B industry, right? I mean, this is The Future of BizTech. I mean, is there anything you’ve got maybe coming down the pipeline, you can give us a teaser on or is there anything you see happening? Let’s say looking forward six months, 12 months, something like that.

Chris: Yeah, sure. So I think that a lot of different categories are converging, and in just talking with investors, and other people in the industry, the way you would talk about Trainual, the category you’d try to put it in, is all over the place. People say, training management or knowledge management or compliance and governance, or the standard operating procedures or onboarding, there’s all these different categories. And really, I think that it’s simple. It’s like, who’s who in the business? Who does what? How do you do each thing? And so I’ve been calling that just the playbook for business. And so my belief is that every business has a playbook. Some just haven’t written it down yet. Some haven’t taken the time to write it down yet, just like everyone has a culture, but maybe you haven’t documented that culture.

And so the reason you don’t do it is because it’s so hard. It takes time. It takes time away from servicing customers, doing whatever else you do. And we want to make that easy so that everyone can have a playbook. And so fast-forwarding a few years into the future, I think it’ll be less about creating your training, creating your process documentation. It’ll be more about collecting, like you already do these things. We’ll just watch you do them, and turn them into natural language. So I think you’ll start to see that shift happening, and same with instead of assigning training, tracking it, and making sure everybody goes through it. I think it’ll be a little bit more on-demand. And just in time, people will get access to the answers they need, where they are? When they need them? Rather than having to sit down, and learn stuff that maybe isn’t relevant to them right now. So I think those are some of the trends that you’ll see over the next few years, and we want to be the leader in this playbook space.

JC: I find you to be a very inspirational CEO. So I have two-part question. First is what’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten? And then, what’s the best advice you can give to the audience?

Chris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

JC: Gosh, I’m stumping you. I’m doing my job.

Chris: All right. Now people know you don’t provide questions in advance.

JC: No.

Chris: I would say probably The first thing that came to mind, the best advice I’ve ever gotten was that, it’s just as hard to do a million-dollar deal as a hundred dollar deal. There’s something to that standpoint, I think when you’re getting started in business, you don’t have the confidence to go after bigger deals. And so you spend all this effort, all this work to just kind of break-even, because that’s sort of the threshold that you set. You’re like, I’ve at least got to cover my costs. And so you set out to do that, and that’s all you ever do. And I think if I could go back, I’d be aiming much bigger. My threshold would be like, how do we make this much? Or how do we do a deal that’s this size? And in the past, I kind of incrementally challenged myself to push the envelope each year.

And I think it could have advanced that a lot quicker. Another awesome piece of advice I heard was something like, if you could go back to college or something, spend all the money you had on a nice suit and the invite to the right party. And it was more about the people you put yourself around, determines the opportunities that you get. So that’s one area I’ve been really fortunate, I guess, or just action-oriented in that, I connect with the founders that I admire reach out to them. Just like you said, you’d take a shot and reached out. If you’re persistent enough, you’ll get people on a call or you’ll get people that become mentors. And so that’s something I think everyone can do.

JC:  That’s awesome. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you think would be beneficial to the audience?

Chris: I think maybe what’s the first step? People listening to this, not everybody that’s listening to, this is going to leave this recording and say, I’m going to work out my systems, and my processes, and my training, and all of this stuff right now. And so if you’re not there, I want to remind people that most small businesses are still in this experimentation mode, where you don’t have enough of a formalized process, that it makes sense to write it down, and create training.

And so you only document something, you only write it down when you’re ready to delegate it. And so if you are listening to this and you’re feeling you are sick of doing something in your business, because it’s boring, and you do it the same over, and over, and it just feels like this job you don’t want anymore. That’s the thing that you should write down, and give to someone else to do. And so the way you delegate is to document, to write something down, to make a process, to define it. Don’t force yourself to document all the things in the business because most of them are going to change, and it’ll be a big waste of time. So I think that’s the advice I would give is, take a little bit of pressure off of you, and just figure out what are the things I want to take off my plate. That’s where you start.

JC: That’s awesome. Listen, I appreciate having you on here. How can people reach out to you? People listening they’re like, god, I want to email Chris or even go to Trainual. How do they get hold of you or the company?

Chris: Yeah. Sure. So Trainual, is just trainual.com like training manual, and you can hit me up on Instagram, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, all of them. It’s just at Chris Ronzio, R-O-N-Z-I-O. So I’d love to hear from anyone, and I’ll always message you back.

JC: That’s awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on. It was a pleasure to have you, and I hope to have another conversation with you sometime soon.

Well, thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Future of BizTech. I hope you got great value out of our discussion today. If so, be sure to subscribe to my podcast and rate it five stars. This helps a podcast jump in the ratings to help other techies like you, and I find it too. And remember if you own or work for a B2B tech company, and you’re looking for highly targeted hot leads delivered to your inbox daily, my agency Infinity Marketing Group can help. We’ve been in business in 2010 and have helped hundreds of companies just like yours, make millions of dollars in marketing, and lead gen all live.

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infinityadminEpi 1: Why Automating Employee Training Will Change Your Company Forever – Chris Ronzio, CEO of Trainual