https://www.listennotes.com/e/1a1403a7ac724a9c8c96b38368c393ce

Buyers are in tremendous pain and so are sellers. Nobody built anything for the buyers, right? So there's like an information asymmetry in the marketplace, but that also affects the sellers in a way. We are not just like using these AI models. We are trying to make our solution very personalized to the company.

Everybody, welcome back to Unfucked My Startup. Today, you've already seen, we're welcoming back a familiar face, Santos Charron. He's the former VP of Product Growth and Strategy at Zoom Info, the former COO of Apollo, the former COO of our very own retention.com and RB2B. He also used to be the co-host of this very show with Adam Robinson. Adam's out today, he's with his family. He's got a family, he's got to spend time with them. Santos left retention in December to pursue his own entrepreneurial dream. We're also joined by his co-founder Amit Basudev. He is the co-founder of Clearbit. So we got some heavy hitters today. Amit and Santos have been working on a new business, building a new business in stealth mode for the past few months. And today they're ready to reveal what the heck they've been working on and why. Tell us why they're poised to win over the market. Santos, Amit, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Pete.

All right, we're gonna get excited to be here. We're happy to have you back. We're happy to have you back. The people have missed you. As you can see in the chat, Santos is the goats. I mean, there's just tons of praise flooding through for you, Santos.

So.

Let'S start with our classic pitch-slap section. So, audience, we are bringing up a member. We're gonna bring up Bernie. Bernie is the founder of Latitude 39. He is going to pitch the group about Latitude. He's gonna try to book a demo with the group. There he is, Bernie. Good to see you.

Good to see you guys. How's everybody?

For joining. Remember, you got two minutes, Bernie. Tell us all about what you're building and why we should book a meeting with you.

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you having me on. so Bernie Cassar been in this incentive compensation management space for over 25 years with a couple of different companies from Callidus that got bought by SAP most recently at ExacTly. And then at the last two years, we started Latitude 39. And it's actually, it's not sure, it's exactly not to your usual startup because we actually bought two products from ExacTly that are focused on the SMB market. so to your point, Pete, we are focused on companies that have anywhere from five sales reps all the way to a couple hundred. And what we do is automate incentive compensation. So if you have folks on variable comp, commissions, bonuses, we automate that whole process. You might have been familiar with some of the companies that I, I've been at that I just mentioned, like, exactly and such. Some of the new players are quota path. CaptivateIQ, companies like that, Spiff, which was bought by Salesforce. Our two products, depending on your company, one is natively built on Salesforce, so it's really easy integration with Salesforce objects, opportunities, and it's really easy to automate that process. The second one is CRM Agnostic, and it actually integrates with Salesforce HubSpot and ConnectWise. So if you're an MSP out there, We work really nicely with ConnectWise. Our solution really does three things. One, we automate the process so it reduces time to actually calculate commissions and send out the different reports to the individual sales reps, which is a headache in Excel. Second, by being an application, we eliminate errors. So that's usually what pays for the system. And then lastly, It's driving behavior. So giving the sales reps visibility, it's all about driving, selling more or selling the right stuff.

Awesome. Well, I've managed sales teams before and I know the constant questions about commission, what they can expect this month. So I like what you're building. Bernie, if you could do me a favor or send you a favor, if you could drop your calendar link into the chat, we'll see if folks can book some meetings with you. and make their comp for their salespeople easier.

Perfect. Our calendar link is broken at the moment, so I'll just put in the contact us and we'll pick it up from there's a calendar link in there.

Perfect. Yeah, drop that in. Bernie, thank you so much for joining and telling us all about what you're building at Latitude 39.

Thanks for having me.

All right. All right. All right. So at the halfway mark, everybody, what we are going to do is we're gonna do the unfuck my startup section. So if you are struggling, if your business is stuck, if you can't get past, you know, whatever you're trying to do, if you can't get past that hurdle in front of you and you want advice from the panelists, raise your hand at the halfway mark. We'll bring you up and get advice from some seasoned vets that we have on the panel today. So So let's get into it. So at the end, Santos and Amit, they have been building in stealth mode. They're actually going to reveal right here. They're going to come out of stealth mode at the end of the show live for all of you, which is super exciting. First, I want to talk about the team. I'm a huge believer in this idea of just product market fit, which I think we're all believers in, but product market founder fit. So actually having the right team to execute on the problem and solution that you're building. so Santos, how did you choose your co-founders and your team?

Yeah, yeah, let's get to it. So, you know, everything I've done for the last 15 years has led to this point of what I'm going to do next, and we'll talk about that. And, you know, 15 years ago when I was VP of product at ZoomInfo, it seemed like a new wave was starting in sales tech and martech, and it seems very similar now, and we'll talk about it more, but in terms.

Of team.

December of last year, the first week, Amit was visiting San Francisco and he and I met at the lobby of Hotel Nikko and we spent two hours and it was very clear that both of us had had very similar journey and both of us were frustrated with how go-to-market was evolving. And when you are starting a company, like you said, team is important but also shared perspective and journey is important. We are just in the right phase of our life to kind of do this. Our third co-founder, David, worked with Amit in Cleerbit. So David just quit HubSpot to join us full time this week. All of us have experience building go-to-market tools. for the last decade or more. And we are probably the right people to solve this next big emerging problem in good market.

So something you brought up, Santos, which I think is super important and doesn't really go. It goes a little unspoken is, I mean, of course you want people who have complimentary skills to you so you can have a complete team from, you know, a skill perspective, but also you want to make sure you can mesh with these people and work with them day in and day out and work until you go to sleep and then wake up in the morning and work with them again and actually enjoy working with them. So I think that's a very important thing that people should consider when picking their actual team. Because if you have somebody who's super talented but they're kind of an asshole, you probably don't want them on your team. You would prefer somebody who's slightly less talented but much better to work with. So let's get into this methodology you've used to build. Now, over the past year, Adam and you have been pretty critical of this idea of building in stealth mode, right? But what's interesting is, and I guess I'll give a little bit of context. We've all been proponents of building in public, specifically not building in stealth mode. In the past 12 months, we launched RB2B in a very public way. You, of course, were a part of that team. And this week we hit 5 million ARR. When we launched last March, we were the only player in the space. And a lot of our brand message was around things like legality and just, you know, kind of these intro concepts. Fast forward a year and there's like a sea of competitors offering the same product as RDB2 basically. So it seems that any SaaS being built at the early stage today can and will be copied. So I would love to know kind of your approach to building and launching in this environment and why stealth mode is the right choice for you guys. Of course, this isn't long-term stealth mode. We're talking December to about 20 minutes from now. So it hasn't been too long.

Yeah, yeah, no, let's get into it. So to be honest, I don't quite believe in building in stealth mode. I do believe in work in public and being transparent. The reason we were in stealth mode for the last three months is because, well, three reasons. We didn't know what we were doing. We were still trying to figure out the right solution because we're just getting started. We didn't have the founding team complete because David just joined us and we hadn't registered the company and didn't have a domain or website. These are just logistical issues because of which we didn't completely share. But now that we have a very good idea, we are coming up with a more comprehensive website and we'll be sharing a lot more in the coming weeks.

Nice. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. You're still exploring. I think a bad thing to do is launch a half-baked idea or not half-baked, but launch an idea in the middle of exploration mode and ideation mode when you're just the pivot's inevitable and probably multiple pivots are inevitable. But I want to dive into a little bit about like your kind of theories around how- yeah, like methodology that you mentioned, right?

Yeah. That is really, really valuable. And Amit and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Just as a background, for those of you who don't know, Amit also runs a venture fund. on the side. So he has a peculiar perspective from the other side of how venture should be developed. And Amit, feel free to jump in. Pete, any venture that you build today with AI, it will be copied. So I'm not surprised with what happened with RB2B, right? And what that means is that mode is moving away from technology. over to something else. And that's something else, I think, is go to market and community like this, network effects, business model innovations. And I'm a big believer, some of which I've learned from the past experience, is that a lot of the value is shifting to platform versus endpoint solutions. So now building a platform is, expensive and it takes time and not every startup can do so. We have come up with our own methodology on how we are going to build a platform or a compound startup. We intend to launch what we are calling micro apps every month and eventually they'll all add up to a seamless experience that will lead to a platform. We spend a lot of time thinking what those micro apps are. so in the beginning it may look a little bit disconnected, but that's our approach to building a platform. The future that we see is there's gonna be a ton of vendors, ton of agencies, ton of contractors, consultants, fractional workers. We want to take advantage of all of it and not fight it.

So I wanna ask, especially for Amit, you know, Tech is less and less of a differentiator these days, especially with, like, white labeling. I mean, somebody can come in and white label, you know, a series of partners, basically, and spin up a solution overnight and have a nice marketing site and, and basically run a sales team on top of that. From what you're seeing it, like, what are the big differentiators and sort of moats that people can build today that are not necessarily product and Tech related?

Yeah, I think in a lot of that Santosh and I have deeply thought about, and I think some of which we've done maybe unintentionally in our previous stops, Santosh at Zoom, me at Clearbit, I think as Santosh alluded to, rate of execution and rate of delivering value to people, ideally across multiple use cases at Clearbit, for example, I don't think it was, we were overly prescient in coming up with this, but it worked really well where we create value for Folks and when they had that pain, they'd come to us for X. When they had a different pain, they'd come to us for Y. Sometimes you'd come for Y and say for X. And I think that with the generally the sort of, I guess, jewels of effort that go into software having gone down, I think that as some of those mentioned, we're, I guess, you know, our long stealth period of two and a half months, we're going to be releasing a lot and we want to solve a lot of different use cases and ultimately want to build something pretty ambitious. and so to do that alone is a moat, right? Like rate of execution and delivering in multiple ways. I think there's really, you know, if you're a talented team and an experienced team, like you can do that. Now, all that being said, I think in terms of, you know, the moats that you'll see out there, of course, in hard tech, there are real and defensible technology moats still. I would argue that, you know, for kind of average or thin SaaS, it's a little bit harder to come by, but they do exist for a lot of businesses. Sometimes that comes in the form of a data network effect, sometimes that comes in the form of a lot of system of record. I mean, some of those motes are still the same, but I think really brand motes, community motes, again, more value from the network, a lot of things that have been true forever, they've just become more important now. And certainly, I think at the end of the day, users do like to feel some sort of emotional, authentic connection with what they're using, especially if other options are 90% the same or 90% as good. And so for somebody, you have to ask yourself, what's the practical value for why they're going to use you? What's the practical value of why they're going to stay? What gets better? Is their memory, is their state? And then emotionally, what's the reason why they're going to use you? Is there something that they're going to get more value from, continued value from? Maybe there's a way to give the user status or brand themselves. And I think, of course, within that as well, the platform effect is very important where the more you do on the platform as a company, as folks build and contribute to it in different ways. And you see that sometimes with developer products, like if folks build on top of things and rely on the platform at whole for its distribution and other things like that, that alone, sort of an ecosystem mode as well. And we're kind of trying to tackle several elements of that with what we're doing.

Yeah, I like this idea of go to market and sort of like your business model are, are the differentiators, not necessarily the product under the hood. I mean, there are countless products that are, you know, functionally the same, but from a message and go-to-market standpoint, approach it from a very different way, both in terms of like the audience they're targeting and the message they're targeting with. So is brand marketing and is that something that you guys are going to lean very heavily into as that vision and, sort of platform becomes a little more clear and concrete?

I think so. I mean, you know, but it's authentic, right? And part of why I think we felt strongly by doing this is we really are in love with the problem. And Les Santos alluded to earlier, it's almost like our careers have led us to this point. So we care a lot about the problem and what we think is a very large opportunity for disruption. And hopefully that comes across in what we're doing, where we actually care about solving problems for different constituents within this marketplace. or within this problem space. And I don't think you can fake that. I think we want to earn trust. We want to build stuff that people like and do that across a lot of different problem spaces, a lot of different use cases. But I don't know if it's, we're going to be sitting around and being on podcasts every day versus building product. I don't think that's, there's certainly such a thing as overdoing it on the brand side. I don't think you can shortcut PMF, even if software is a little bit easier to build today.

We overdid it a little bit last year, I would say. I remember Adam was on like, what was it, like a podcast or two podcasts today, Santosh? I mean, you had made your rounds as well. So, you know, we were learning there something. It was Michael Hopkins. And then, yeah, dropped something in, said so many people never launch because of all these reasons. You just have to do it. Learn, iterate, improve something that you guys had, had which I think it really summarizes this very well is this idea of, you know, Santos launching micro apps or kind of features and apps that eventually are going to sort of modernize into a robust platform. But if your goal is to is, hey, I'm not gonna launch until the robust platform is built.

Right.

You're gonna spend all your money and never get to launch. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, Michael says 100% on it. Legacy technology is slow to iterate and deliver continuous value. Yeah, I mean, this is exactly it. Older tech has the bureaucracy that naturally slows them down. Are there bigger players that you guys are taking on with this product, or are you trying to have something that's completely new in the market?

So we'll talk about what we are exactly doing and how we intend to solve, but there are a few bigger players We think our solution will be slightly different with a different approach. But yeah, I'm happy to get into it now.

Well, actually, we're going to pull somebody up in about five minutes here. So we'll introduce the problem and then you'll unveil the solution shortly here. There's some good questions coming through now, though. Akshar says, Are the days of unicorns gone in the B2B SaaS world? Well, Santosh, you've been a part of a couple of years. Yeah.

That'S a great question. In fact, I can address that, talk about that all day. You know, this is very closely related to how venture capital is going to evolve, right? Because earlier capital provided a moat and it provided defensibility and unicorns could cash out, right? I think inherently now that it's becoming so easy to build this tech and defensibility is coming from go to market and cost of customer acquisitions and business model innovation, which itself can be copied in some cases. I do agree that there's going to be a lot more alternatives and substitutes with far fewer unicorns. And that's just the future we live in. Doesn't mean the end of VC or investments, it just means the game will change a little bit. And overall, I think it's going to be great for entrepreneurs. The agility and the speed with which people are going to see success is just going to be dramatic.

Yeah, I think one of the large kind of premises for why we're doing what we're doing is I just think that there's going to be more options than ever to solve problems, and that's going to change week over week over week, whether you're buying or building. and that's something that we're squarely taking on, helping people with. And that is directly a function of how easy it is to build software, start new companies. But in terms of capital distribution, I mean, capital is finite, right? If you have a million CRM companies and they all have pieces of the market share, by definition, probably none of them are going to be worth $100 billion. The pie will basically be spread thinner. And so I think that's going to happen with a lot of categories, and it already is. I mean, already you're seeing, you know, a lot of companies say, okay, I want the AI native versions of this part of my stack because I hate all the providers I have and I want cheaper ones. And that's going to continue to sort of be a downward trend. So I do think that the predictable days of, like, you get to 10 million ARR and then you just crank your way through to 100 and IPO, I think that's pretty much, you done for, and certainly capital and venture as one of the main tools or sources of oxygen for that. I think that playbook has changed. That said, as you're seeing, there are tremendous opportunities to grow really, really fast with excellent products. You're seeing that with some great companies like Ryder and Curser. They're growing revenue at staggering paces even compared to the fastest-growing SaaS companies. and so if some of those can continue, there's no reason why they won't be worth billions of dollars either on paper or in the market. But yeah, I think the sort of predictability of it is less because there will just be overall a much bigger pie and everything will be spread much thinner.

Yeah, I think about this a little bit like the way entertainment and media changed over the past 15 or so years. I mean, in my parents' generation, everyone was tuning into the same five shows, but nowadays, I mean, I watch podcasts and shows on YouTube and Follow creators who maybe myself and 20,000 other people follow, which is a very small market. And the same is true with music. I mean, there's tons of artists that the pie has become more distributed. Everybody's getting, there are more people at the table and they're getting a smaller slice of the pie. Now, on top of that, I think what's interesting is you also see these very small teams growing these massive enterprises. So I'll just take an example from the creator world. I mean, you look at the biggest names in media. It's like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, on, like, Mr. Beast. These are, I mean, you know, small teams. I guess Mr. Beast is a large team now in company, but my point is, like, there are still those people who can kind of have that more, you know, Spartan approach and, and, and, and still come out, come out ahead. So I think those people probably won't be raising billions of dollars the way they were the past 20 years, but, yeah, it's, it's, it's. very interesting. I know there's some predictions happening in the chat right now. Yeah, this is. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think we're all kind of on the same page, but also, nobody, nobody can predict the future.

But the trends are pretty cool. Capital follows. If you're kicking ass, like, if you created something that's awesome and is growing fast, capital and the valuations that come with it will ultimately follow it. But again, to the point I made earlier, I think that you don't have to do that to get to a certain type of velocity. And then certainly, I think Everything you can do, you can do more efficiently. So the need for capitals have changed a bit, but, you know, it's not an accident that a lot of the best companies out there, whether it's OpenAI or others, you know, they're using cash, they're using it very smartly. They're probably using it more efficiently, but they're still using it.

And so I think, again, the rules have probably changed a little bit, but it's not, you know, one or the other. Yeah. Jonathan did mentioned in here, says they're not looking at, we're not looking at valuation. We're looking more at ARR. Jonathan, I'm curious, do you, you're on the VC side of things, but Yeah, I mean, that's it. And in hindsight, it makes you think like, wasn't ARR always the most important thing? I don't know how we got clouded from that being the actual money you're bringing in being the important thing. But I guess in the valuation mania peak of 2021, we somehow lost sight of that. Well, we're gonna dive into, in the second half of the show, we're gonna go through the problem that Amit and Santos are tackling. and then they're also going to reveal their solution. So, yeah, Jonathan just agreed there. So too much focus on head count. That's over soon. So it is now time, audience. It is now time for the namesake of the show. Audience, we're talking to you. If you're listening, I'm talking to you right now. We are going to bring somebody up for the namesake segment of the show called Unfucked My Startup. What we're going to do, if your startup and your business is stuck right now, for some particular reason, we're gonna give you two minutes to tell us about your business and why you're stuck. And then we'll spend a couple minutes with both the panelists here and comments from the audience, giving you some advice as to how you might be able to move forward and get unstuck or unfucked. So, Gabriel, I see with a raised hand here. John, you wanna promote Gabriel to the panelists? And Gabriel too, if you could please drop in your URL, for your company, I'm going to share your website on my screen briefly while you're presenting it to the audience here.

Gabriel needs to accept.

Oh, Gabriel, you gotta accept.

Here he comes.

He's coming now.

Oh, there's so there's two Mike Hopkins here. There's Mike Hopkins, the CRO at Seamless AI is in here. So we know seamless. Santos especially knows seamless. Well, welcome, Mike, not to be confused with Michael Hopkins. And we have Gabriel. Gabriel, you're coming in. Oh, there we go. Coming in nice and clear now. Great to meet you, Gabriel. How are you doing?

Very well. How are you doing, guys?

Doing great. Where are you calling out of?

I am calling from Tel Aviv.

Tel Aviv, all right. Beautiful. It's getting a little late there for you, I bet. It is, it is. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks for staying up late. Could you do me a favor and drop in your website into the chat really quickly? Yeah, yeah. All right. Now, folks, if you would like to be featured on either the Unfuck My Startup section or the Pitch Slap, go ahead and email producer@rb2b.com, I'm going to drop it right here in the chat, drop an email, send us a little paragraph of what your business does and we'll pull you up for a section next week and beyond. But Gabriel, you are the man of the, well, not the hour, I guess the five minutes. Why don't you tell us a bit about what you're doing? I'm going to share my screen so everyone can see your website. Two minutes to tell us how you're stuck and then we're going to try to help you out. Great.

So thank you much for the time and for the stage. So basically we were creating a vertical AI for aesthetic clinics. the guys offering Botox and injections. Basically, these guys are really struggling to grow their businesses. Basically, because they have zero business acumen, they really can't use tech or integrate automations, unable to access this data or their data. They just make decisions based on guesswork. So, We are creating the future CRM to help them run patient integrations, interactions, sorry, super efficiently. Now we are starting by creating this tool, and this is the first thing that we developed, our MVP, which is our foot in the door to clinics, which is a tool to collect and images before and after images, which is a huge thing for clinics. So we allow them to easily collect and create marketing assets and publish them directly into the social media. So that's basically where we're at. We are at the go-to-market. We launched just last week. So we are getting our first users. We just got our first paying user, which is super cool. Why we're starting with images, I can understand if some of you might think it sounds disconnected to the purpose, but we're starting with images because this is a market flooded with CRMs. much more CRNs that you can count, probably thousands. And to be able to enter that market, I must find some point of value that can deliver quickly and scale from that. Now, before and after images is the number one factor in patients decision making and 75% of clinics they, they, let's say they, they accept or consider before and after content very important, but they struggle with content creation. So this is the first thing that we're doing, hopefully failing very soon to, to the full system.

I'm curious. Is someone, and I think Michael Hopkins, not to be confused with Mike Hopkins, Michael said, what's the problem your ICP has? Start with the what and why. I don't necessarily see that called right away on your storefront. So is there a very particular problem that you saw that this specific segment was having before you decided to zone in on them?

I worked for this segment for 10 years and I got to speak with hundreds of aesthetic clinics owners and marketers. and this is a huge problem. They use images for almost any part in their customer journey, for traction or discovery to create content and share, but also for their sales cycle and for insurance purposes. But surprisingly, there is no one tool that helps them collect images, organize them, tag them and create content easily and with one click using AI.

So that's how you've been reaching out to them. How have you been reaching out to them?

So it's tricky because the easiest way for me to reach out is through LinkedIn. It's very easily I use Clay to find the leads and just contact them directly. They're not necessarily my ICP because clinics that are owners that have a LinkedIn page, they're probably the biggest clinics and they have better processes in place.

So.

Interesting. There was, okay, so I'm going to give you and I'll see if emits. And so, so kind of your main problem right now is just reaching, is actually getting a hold of people and you're trying to do it through LinkedIn. Is that kind of a good summary?

I'm again, sorry, I was reading comments.

Oh yeah. So your, your big problem right now is basically just getting in front of more clinics. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So I have a learning I had from talking to a lot of businesses just on the RB2B side, especially when we launched. the folks who are having the biggest or the most trouble making sense of R2B2B and R2B2B, just for folks who don't know, we de-anonymize website traffic. We deliver business profiles to you from your website traffic. The folks who are targeting doctors and dentists were having the biggest or I guess the hardest time connecting with their ICP directly from the info we were giving them. What I have heard is because these people and someone just dropped it in as a comment, those people aren't as active on LinkedIn. For most doctors and healthcare professionals, LinkedIn is just having a robust business profile online is not a part of their kind of daily habits. But what I have heard is they are one of the few sort of business types that are still in the office every single day and you can actually reach out to the clinic directly. So have you tried calling at all? Is that something you've started to do or you've just been doing LinkedIn?

I haven't tried calling mostly because these guys are either meeting people or doing research. So they're not, if I call them, I will speak with the receptionist and they will just, yep. So it's very difficult to reach them. I could visit, but I'm not in the US at the moment, so.

Fair enough. Well, I'm going to give Amit and Santos a minute if they have any advice for Gabriel as he goes about his go-to-market in in these very early days, and then we'll get back to the show here.

Yeah, just quickly, I think it was already mentioned in the comments to try Facebook and Instagram type B2C type networks instead of LinkedIn. Also, some data companies may have those B2C data. In fact, retention tylor could potentially help as well. They are not the traditional B2B lists that you can find. But explore some of that.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

There was just a couple people from the audience just so I can call it out. Someone said, Get a hold of their marketing managers or receptionists. They can give you a foot in the door. Some are going to shut you down. Others won't try to build a relationship with that. Just the other people who are sort of champions of the deal, but they're not the economic buyer. So I think that's a great Great piece of advice. There's a bunch more advice coming through the chat right now. So Gabriel, thank you so much for joining. We wish you all the best.

Thank you so much, guys. Just to answer one question that someone asked if I'm sure that people would like to see their faces on social. So they need to obviously approve it to be published. So no privacy risk here. Thank you so much, guys.

You bet, you bet. We wish you all the best. And then Michael Hopkins also said referrals, referrals, referrals, focus on the word of mouth velocity in healthcare. That's great. So a lot of good advice, Gabriel. We hope you crush it and we'll have you back in about a year so you can tell us about how great you're doing. Well, guys, it's time for, I think, what everyone's sort of been waiting for, which is like, let's start unfolding this reveal. Let's get out of stealth mode a little bit. So let's first, before we unmask everything, guys, what problem specifically are you solving and how did you validate that this was a big problem with your target market?

Yep. So the way we validated is by speaking to over 150 buyers and sellers in the last two months. and here is what we learned. And then that will lead to the problem we want to solve. And then how we intend to solve. So buyers are in tremendous pain and so are sellers. And let me elaborate. We established that number of tools is just going to rise, which means the search cost for the buyer is rising. There, why we built a lot of data insights and automation for sellers. Nobody built anything for the buyers, right? So there's like an information asymmetry in the marketplace, but that also affects the sellers in a way. And buyers, because they are frustrated, because they don't have content other than vendor sponsored content, they don't have unbiased way to take decision, they churn. Sellers are frustrated because they are not meeting their financial quota. Buyers are churning. All of this is leading to a problem that's only going to get 10x worse in the coming years. And we feel like this is a moment where another hack that will help the sales reach to buyer, another automation is not going to help. This is what I have been part of for 15 years because anything else we come up with Within a year, it will render itself ineffective. We need a fundamental reset or a fundamental change in the way we think about B2B go-to-market. That has to somehow be less interruption, more bi-led, and more problem-solving research-led. That's exactly what we intend to solve. We couldn't build this company like three years ago, five years ago, because all of this has to involve llms and AI. The technology has reached a stage where we can actually solve the problem in good B2B good Market the right way for the first time.

You talked to over 150 people, basically found that neither buyers or sellies or sellers are happy or basically sufficed with the way that things are working today. And there's this huge information asymmetry. So can you just touch on a couple things that buyers or sellers are super frustrated with, with the sales process? Buyers particularly. I had seen some notes in here, so I would love to hear. Yeah. So.

The buyers are for, particularly frustrated. They do not trust the content that they're receiving from the sellers. They do not have time, they said, to do a comprehensive kind of vendor comparison to find the right vendor. So they try to settle for whatever they find, and then that leads to churn later on. But a lot of this is an issue not just for the buyer, it leads to other problems that sellers end up having to deal with. Did I miss any, Amit?

No, no, you nailed it. I mean, look, basically business is running a business of any type is a constant set of solving problems, often with external solutions, whether it's vendors, again, consultants, agents, we think these are massively emerging categories in both volume and variety of solution. But if you're trying to solve your problem, like a Clearbit, our biggest problem was churn. You know, Googling software that solves churn or hoping that I see something interesting on social media is a really poor way of solving that. And we think that, again, that's going to get worse. You know, we used to joke, I would say this kind of sadly at Clearbit, that people would show up to Clearbit and say, Hey, we want to help improve our website conversion. well, the clear bit AE that they talk to is going to give them an extraordinarily biased answer on how to improve website conversion. It's going to be how to use clear bit to do it, whereas to some those point, we think there's an opportunity largely because there's this kind of incredible new technology that can do a lot with unstructured data in real time that didn't exist with llms, where, you know, why can't people have control or basically almost like a garter level concierge that can basically automatically get you to the right solution to your problem. And that's going to come across a variety of different methods and channels and types, but it's constantly going to be finding the right things for you to do. And, you know, we see that as a, you know, it's almost like, I can't believe that doesn't exist already versus having to Google something or ask your friends. I mean, nobody's happy with these things. You know, you kind of mentioned companies that you know, we, we kind of, I think, have very low NPS that we're probably, you know, gonna gonna, you know, potentially go after. And, you know, there's the gardeners. Like, we want to put gardener in your pocket and make it much more automated. But any business can use it instead of spending a gazillion dollars on, frankly, probably pretty crappy Tech behind the scenes. And also, you know, we've seen that people don't really want to use review sites like the G2s of the world, because, again, nobody trusts the data. They're obviously selling out to vendors, whereas we want to be high trust, sort of buyer centric or problem solver centric world. And then again, take the sort of collective hive mind of what people are doing out there, the best answers, best playbooks, which by the way are shifting at an incredibly fast rate week over week, but use this kind of, again, data technology that exists to get people to ideally the right solution for their problem. and do it in a way that gives full kind of trust and control to those looking to solve their problems versus which vendors are good at SEO or which vendors are good at harassing them or which ones are good at social media branding. So we think there's this massive kind of unstructured data problem that can really get people to, you know, the right solutions better. And again, to Santosh's point, we think that's equally valuable for the vendor side because, you know, a lot of vendor pain right now is felt around churn because they get people to buy something that maybe isn't the right fit. But they happen to be better go to market and they happen to be doing this, that and the other. And so, you know, an intent as well, right? Intent is one of the big challenges. And so we think there's a big bridge there and nobody's done this and we think we're kind of the perfect team and at the perfect time to do it. So yeah, that's kind of the area that we're gonna be playing in. And we have quite a few crazy ideas of things we're gonna do very specifically within that. But at a high level, that's the.

Vision we wanna create. Yeah. I love a more easy solution. Hey, John, can you just the first poll.

And while John's running the poll, so guys, we're gonna run a poll. We have two polls before we, we're about to jump in and do the unmasking. So. Oh, yeah, Santos, you want to set up this poll? You want to. Do you wanna.

Yeah, we were curious to know what are the biggest challenge that you are facing while trying to identify products or tools for your job. So is it around lack of content or noise because of competitive solutions or the workflows involved in evaluating different vendors or talking to sales? Some of our agents actually address these very workflows or points.

So the winners right now, we have all of the above. So people have a lot of challenges and then navigating noise and competitive solutions. So I think what's really interesting the first half of the show, we were talking about the fragmentation and just that the, you know, the pie basically getting split into smaller and smaller slices. Well, for the buyer, that just means there's a lengthier and more convoluted, you know, decision making process in front of them. So I think that's really interesting. So, I mean, yeah, all of the above and navigating the noise and competitive solutions, yeah, valuation research, think it all kind of stems there. Well, guys, let's do it. We've been building up. We've been building it up. And now it's time for the unveil. So I think it's the moment we've all been waiting for. All right. So what are you guys working on? Let's take the mask off. Get out of stealth mode.

Excellent. So here is what Zer does.

And it's called Zer. Zer.ai.

That's our website.

Yes.

So we will have a series of AI agents. We will have a very good understanding of your business. So you will engage with our agents very frequently. These agents will have the ability to join Zoom meetings autonomously, to attend conferences and webinars independently, and to also send emails and text and so on. So you'll be able to call this agent. if you so wished, and it will have a really good understanding of your business and your context. So the recommendations that it gives to your business problems are going to be extremely personalized. And through these recommendations, you'll be able to get business playbooks, introductions to other peers that are facing similar problems, introductions to vendors and agencies and consultants. And also you'll be able to run workflows like vendor research or RFP or and all of this using automation. One of the big complaints or frustration that buyers shared with us was they simply don't have time to buy products because that's not the primary goal. They're oftentimes line managers and this is something they don't spend time on. So we are building agents that you can send to take sales discovery calls. So sales reps can make a pitch to your agent rather than you having to attend a 30-minute call. So you can send these agents to five different vendors and receive pitches and then make recommendation. That's our first micro app. that we are launching in the next maybe four weeks. So please go to zia.ai and sign up for early access.

So it's basically automating the buying process, which is like, I mean, everyone's automating sales. I would say overly so. Everyone's trying to send 40,000 emails a day. But you're taking the opposite approach, like let's fight AI with AI, right?

We're starting something a little crazy. We're like, you know, life's too short, fuck it. Let's go to let's because we have five or six ideas that we're going to be launching in pretty close succession. As Santos mentioned, this broader ideas, this brain that can just magically understand you and solve problems for you, but not just give information, but actually go take action on that. Like, don't just give me the three vendors, go and find out their pricing and do a demo with them and then come back to me with the information and maybe even go create a trial for me. try the product. I mean, there's a different level of automation that can be possible now, and we want to deliver that to people based on information. But the first thing we're going to do, which is pretty nuts to say, okay, for people who are in the market to throw money at solutions, why not train an agent or make a clone of yourself? Like I would have loved to say Clearbit as CRO and give people the chance or vendors or solution providers the chance to basically pitch your clone. and then that information, we're going to match, make it all, and make it extremely easy for you to then decide what you want to do next. So the crazy thing is the vendor side loves this. They're like, oh, I'd love to pitch this, a clone of this person, because I'd never get in touch with them anyway. I send them 40 app on email, we're going to reply to it. And then, of course, on the buyer side, it's like incredible arbitrage of your time to get really deep with great answers. So, and that's just one of many workflows you want to create. But yeah, it's the first one that we're super excited to put out there for the world. And I don't think anybody's done this yet, so it'll be pretty cool to see it in action and get it out to people. So if you're in the market for, if you hate taking calls with sales, which most people do, and you're running out of time, and if you, but are in the market for something, right? You're looking to deploy something, maybe a bunch of legacy SaaS that sucks, you want to find new AI versions, whatever. Give us a shout and we'd love to get you into the beta and help you do this in a way that's pretty cool.

I want to add one more thing. We are building a go-to-market solution. It's not just for the buyers. A lot of our micro apps will help the sellers as well. Eventually the vision is that sales can hook up our platform and they'll start seeing revenues and highly engaged buyers that have already done 80%, 90% of the sales process themselves using automation and using these bots and agents. So they're really ready to buy by the time they get to sales.

So there's a lot of comments in here about like, I'll have my bot pitch your bot, I'll have my guy call your guy. If my bot thinks it's good, that's all.

That's very real. We are actually working with those use cases where two bots enter a meeting and they're pitching each other.

Yeah, wait, so is there like, what are some risks in that? Like, you know, with bots duping each other? each other, right? Because they don't have the sort of the human emotional reasoning to sniff out BS, you know, if you will.

No, no real risk. I mean, we're looking at multiple use cases, but you generally train your bot either through content or like a 510 minute call prior to the meeting. So you tell your bot what you're trying to get out of this meeting. So you have a grade that you're trying to populate in a way. Think of it like a a form.

Right.

So when they enter a call, both Bots have some agenda in mind that they're trying to get to. So it's, it's actually not that crazy.

Yeah.

Our guess is that they'll actually be way more efficient than your average, uh, SDR Discovery call.

Right.

Uh, but I think the thing that probably for us, you know, again, this is going to be very important for our part of our brand is Again, because we've lived so much on the sort of like creating some, you know, technology and all this leverage for the vendor side, we're trying to do that for the buyer side or the solution seeker side. So, you know, we're going to be extremely careful about, you know, everything a buyer or solution seeker does is opt in. Like they will choose to engage with whom and how, whereas so many of the products today review sites, they just sell you out to vendors. I mean, that's literally all they do. They just sell you out. immediately, right? And so we are kind of like, okay, let's be the change in the world that we seek. And I think, again, nobody's really done that. So that's something that I think is, you know, it's not really risk because we know what we're doing, but I think it's going to be really important to get right.

I'm going to piggyback on Akshar's question. Do you think there's going to be a marketplace of AI agents eventually where people will go and you know, basically have AI buying and selling agents to help them select their new solutions?

Yeah, we think it's so much more. And again, by us kind of establishing ourselves as, you know, the place you should go when you're trying to figure out a solution to a problem, there's everything from, okay, what vendor or combination of vendor should I use or what should I switch out? What's new? There's best practices. There's what agents or consultants should I use? Again, we think software agents are, you know, essentially going to become like new mini vendors that people can either spin up for you or you can use and then even building versus buying. Like there's amazing things that people are doing with the replets, the bolts. And we think that, you know, we want to help people get to the right solution of the problem. And sometimes it's going to depend on what it is, their context, what their preferences. And so our systems are going to get really smart over time with every company that uses it and get them to the right answer, but it's not always using a vendor, it could be building it yourself. And so yeah, to your point, we think that each part of that agents can really orchestrate in a very, very interesting way.

And this is something that will get more powerful as you get more companies on it. It'll just kind of continue to build its capabilities and understandings as you get more people on it. Is that true?

Well, even just for your company, right? Your company will get you and your company, your information, you know, it'll get better for you. But yeah, I think without question, I mean, it's just intimidating how much noise there is. And people, you know, it was stunning when we interviewed people, it's like I'd log on to social media and hopefully I saw a good idea that day and that would inform my decision, which is insane. Or I go, you know, like ping a Slack group and hope I got a good answer. I mean, none of those are good solutions to figure out what you want to do with the business investment. So I think we can make a big impact there.

Yeah, I think too, is these just, you know, these AI models get better every day. And in, you know, when did GPT launch? Like November of 22, I think. So we're, you know, you know, a little over two years from, from that first llm hitting the market. I mean, in two or three years, it might be, I mean, it's going to be, not might be, it is going to be far easier to do, you know, text to text inputs, code outputs and spin up these sasses even quicker. So that Market's going to be I would think exponentially noisier in the years to come.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And we'll take advantage of these models. But there was a comment somewhere up there. We are not just like using these AI models. We are trying to make our solutions very personalized to the company. This is where when we show up in meetings or look at proprietary data, we are able to use that to come up with intelligence that is highly personalized for the company. So we have context and so on, which if you do a deep research on ChatGPT, you'll completely not get personalized response.

Do you think too, this is going to help solve? So like, you know, Santosh, you actually, you and I have evaluated some softwares together. And look, anytime we do, you know, I can't get a full download of your brain and experience and you can't get a full download of mine, you know, in 20 minutes we can get a little bit of conversation back for it? Do you think this is going to help solve the gap of really getting, you know, everybody on the team's full desires and context kind of downloaded into that single agency?

We are building this for the new world where buying tools is not done by one decision maker anymore. There's a buying committee that keeps on growing.

Right?

So we are trying to get, and a lot of that requirements and content is unstructured as it grows. It's difficult to put it in a form or so it'll certainly help in the scenario you are laying out, Pete.

So let's run, that makes a ton of sense. Let's run the final poll here. We got two minutes left, Sean, if you want to tee that up. And while folks are filling this out, actually let's just, we'll have Santos set up this one too. if you want to read this off to the audience. Yeah.

So I was curious with this poll. Where will you find zero agents most valuable in your business workflows? And we are building agents for to that will address all of this. But would you be willing to send your agent on behalf of you to attend internal meetings, external meetings, webinars?

Yeah.

Just curious. How far would you trust this agent to do the meetings? Would you trust the agent to do deep research on your business problems, not just around vendor, but all kinds of other business problems like churn or so on? And then would you want introductions to agencies, peers, consultants and so on, or all of the above? And if you have further comments, I would totally love to talk to each of you. Just go to zia.ai or my email is santosh@santosh.ai. please reach out so guys the beta.

You can join the wait list right now on zer.ai I just dropped the the link in the chat here santosh Amit where can people find out more about you LinkedIn I assume LinkedIn yes.

LinkedIn zer.ai yeah.

Well everybody follow I'm going to drop the links into here Follow Amit and Santos on LinkedIn for future updates. This is just the beginning of Zer and I think this whole AI buyer, I'm certainly intrigued. And guys, thank you so much for joining. I think there's an old way and a new way of starting startups. It's happening right now. So let's get into when is it actually right for you? You happen to have a large organic social media presence in your target market is relatively far more attractive than if you do not have that.

When your product sells itself, it scales way easier.