#79: AI and Marketing (with Austin Distel, Head of Marketing Innovation at Jasper)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup and we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us.

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit. Exit, exit.

All right, so Austin is here. I've just cut us off because I love chatting before these things, but then sometimes we get too hot in the green room and I don't want to miss anything. So before we get too deep into this, can you give your name, background, who you are, what do you do and just quick career story and we're going to come back and peel some of that.

Yeah, sure. So Austin Distel, Entrepreneur, marketer, currently head of marketing innovation at Jasper. And yeah, I love all things marketing, always have since I was a child. So there's probably a lot of stories we can talk about.

Well, how did you get into this world of B2B SaaS? Like, take me a little bit back into these various roles. You were CMO at Proof before this. You've been at Jasper since the beginning now, but how did you get into B2B SaaS?

Yeah, I gotta kind of jump to the middle of my story. In college, running my marketing agency, I was trying to figure out how to like grow from being a consultant to a CEO of my marketing agency doing mostly like PPC and SEO work. At that time I was like, I need a salesperson and I need maybe like someone to actually do the operations. And so I went and sought advice. I attended some webinars and then eventually I found this one guy from Kansas that I thought had it going on. So he taught. I basically spent all my spring break money to buy his course and then in the midst of that became I guess one of his star students and never had to get a job after college and grew the marketing agency.

Who was this guy from Kansas?

Well, I'll get to that. Eventually he. We started working together a little bit more. I moved in with him and his wife up in Annapolis, Maryland to join them as CMO of Proof. And so that was Dave Rogen Moser, CEO now of Jasper. So we began as him, as my mentor.

Whoa. So he's been in the. I didn't really know this about him. He's been deep in the marketing game for his whole career.

Yeah. So him and his two pals, co founders of Jasper, Dave, Chris and JP are the three founders. They have been working together probably on six or seven companies now at this point. And before they were in software, they were in courses teaching marketing agency owners how to scale. And that's when I kind of came into the mix. Before that, they were running their own marketing agency together. So, yeah, kind of a natural progression.

And I'm sure that you have. Much of your marketing career has been probably talking about the founders. You probably know these stories in and out. You could ghost ride for any of them.

I've lived with them in multiple states. Yeah. Through Y Combinator, moving out to California, going to Annapolis. I've traveled the world with these guys.

All right. I thought I was close with founders in the past, but I have never lived. I've never actually moved in with the founder and their spouse. That's the next level.

Well, not many founders would also offer a bed to stay in, so I got to give props to Dave for being that kind of leader.

It seems like you have a personal relationship too. Like, is that, I don't want to say awkward, but, like, there's, you know, you must have a relationship where you can be real and candid with each other. That. That doesn't kind of cross the boundary of a friendship, you know, I'm trying to get at.

Yeah. I mean, I would say for the last two years now, maybe even three, where, like, it hasn't been kind of a direct report relationship. I think even gained more friendship from that in the beginning. I mean, I started off as being an entrepreneur, kind of putting that aside to then join with them on launching their second software company. And he wanted to step from marketer to CEO just as I was looking to in my marketing agency back in the day when he was teaching me. So it's kind of funny how these things roll out. But, yeah, that was one of the best decisions of my life is to move in with a stranger across the country that I met on a webinar.

I love that. Well, and I just think it shows. Like, some people think, like, courses and stuff are nonsense and crazy, but from what I'm hearing in your voice, you're like, no, I saved up my money and spent on a course that literally changed the trajectory of my career and my life.

I've always Believed that personal development and getting the education is the shortcut. And so I started going to seminars at like 16, like everything from rich dad, poor dad stuff. Started studying under Bob Proctor from the Secret and then going into college, I really started doing our own seminars and like helping entrepreneurs, including myself, grow subscription income.

So my guess is you see yourself more as an entrepreneur than a B2B marketer. Air quotes.

I personally do. Yet I know where my role is as an entrepreneur. The hat that I wear best is marketer. So whenever I come into a project that is always like the CMO or head of marketing or what, you know, whatever the title thing is, it's always just I will grow the company through revenue.

All right, so you go to Proof and you're running marketing there. Just take us into just so people can have some background. Like what was the business model and what was the product with Proof.

Yeah, yeah. So we had basically a community of marketing agency owners asking them what are some of the problems that you face pretty often. And there was like, hey, we get traffic, we get organic traffic through SEO, we get paid traffic through Facebook ads and we just can't get our client's site to convert as well. And in that problem statement we're like, well, what are some commonalities between all companies? And a conversion mechanism that works always and that's social Proof. If you can showcase that other people recently took the same action that you are thinking about doing, it's proven to increase by visually seeing action being taken. You are more drawn to take that action as well. So that was the premises and Proof got started by, you know, a very raw mvp. And then over the course of about a month we had a webinar to launch it, see if it would get traction. And it did. Over the course of that first year, I think we got to like 80k mrr in 12 months.

What was in the marketing playbook? Like what plays were you running? Because it seems like this was. And I think people, many people out there have probably seen Proof, right? It's like you would go to somebody's website and you'd maybe about to purchase or something and it would say like Austin just signed up 12 minutes ago from Austin, Texas or something like that, right?

That's right, yeah. So real time validation that other people have taken the action and the model.

Was like sign up free. Or was it like free trial or kind of high volume type of SaaS?

Yeah. So PLG motion, you know, no salespeople, no talking to anybody. Basically there's two to three routes into the funnel that eventually get you to sign up. So one would be watch a recorded walkthrough demo and the second would be download some kind of piece of content that shows you examples of different pages to put it on the third. And the most common that we found especially for paid traffic to work is a seven day trial. Seven or 14 days, I think that's up for discussion on your own product. But credit card required follow up, get them activated and automatically renew on the plan they selected at signup. Yeah, that worked best for us. And it's also what launched Jasper as well.

Okay, we'll get to Jasper in a couple minutes. What was one of your secret sauce of marketing at Proof? I'll give you an example. So like I was at drift. I would say our secret sauce was like our brand and our content. We use that to build an audience. We had a podcast, we built a community that helped us create a moat with our brand. My guess is, and I asked this question because it's usually not like, oh, we were, we had some one tiny little optimization that we made. There's usually kind of one or two channels or moats that a company is builds their marketing around. What was that for you all at Proof?

Yeah, it was finding famous marketers or people that had famous businesses that were also in the coaching space. And they would then put our product on their pages and other people would just copy them. And so they would see that widget on their admirable hero site and then they would be like, okay, well if they're doing it, I should do it too. And so if you look at like Oprah Winfrey put it on her course challenge is like the 21 day meditation challenge. Tony Robbins put it on his thing. Dean Graziosi put it on his thing. And so we actually made a list of about a hundred influencers, business influencers. And we said if we could get proof on their sites, then everybody else will follow through. And it really did work that way. So we put Powered by Proof on the widget originally. And then as everybody started copying us, we realized the reason why they liked having proof on their site is it gave them validation as well that they're getting sales in. It wasn't always just for the customers on the page, it was also for the companies. And so we kind of realized, oh, this is a brat, a badge of proof. So we changed it from Powered by Proof to verified by Proof. And when we did that, people stopped requesting to get the branding removed. It differentiated us from competition. It gave the visitors More trust. And so small copywriting, things like that actually do make a meaningful difference. But ultimately it was the network effect of people seeing it on their hero's website and they'll just copy that.

I love that. I'm going to come back to the Powered by verse verified by proof. But this is a great example of basically taking something like, hey, our product is going to be on people's websites and generate and getting in front of that thousands of eyeballs. And so it's not like we need to find a new channel. You kind of already had this house money, this real estate where you were playing on, and we just needed to find a way to direct the traffic back there. Why would an Oprah or whoever runs that site, like, was there any skepticism about, like, this company's offering me this tool for free to put it on the website. I'm not sure I want to do that.

We actually never gave free product away, which is pretty wild.

So that list that you had of a hundred people, you actually, that was kind of like your Dream 100 list. Like, we're going to go sell to these a hundred and then we'll get the secondary benefit.

Yeah, exactly. And we, you know, shared that list with all of our friends in the space and said, do you have any connections to this 100? And we made it worth their while to make those introductions. And then we'd always run an A B test. Right. So we proved ourselves to give them more money. And so that's one of the easiest things to sell is more money. Right. If you pay us, you'll make more.

Okay, I love this example because. And I see this like in the Exit 5 community or just in general conversations that I have with startups, it's like, how did you get your first customer? And I think for whatever reason or how do you grow? Initially, it's almost always like email and outreach with some type of offer. It's very rarely like this channel or that channel. It's like, we have this product, here's what it can do. We're going to make a list and send an email out. And people are like, well, that's it. And I'm like, well, yeah, because the whole. That tells you everything. You have to be able to pitch your company. You have to have a compelling offer. You have to have like a why you? Why now? You send out 10 of those, you get no responses. Okay, we gotta tweak something about the Met. Is it the messaging? Is it the offer? Is it. They don't want to get on a Call and you learn so much about the business that way and then you can go and like staple on the highly scalable channels. I love that. That's where you all started.

Absolutely. And they are pretty related. The way that we launch Proof and the way that we launch Jasper, Facebook group, email marketing and then direct outreach. Those are the three that, you know, got us to probably the strategies in our first two or three months.

How did the decision to change from powered by Proof to verified by Proof come up?

Talking with customers so they would ask, hey, can we get your branding removed from that widget? And we're like, why do you want that removed? And they're like, well it doesn't like really benefit us. It more benefits you. Right? They click on it and they leave our site and having it powered by Proof doesn't really add any value. They're like, well, why do you like it on the site? Well, because our customers obviously increase conversion rates. But secondary we found out, you know, they feel one, they go, the CEO or the founder often would go to that page and just watch the ticker come up and down and they'd be like, okay, cool, my business is breathing. That's what they would say. It's a lot.

It's like, I don't know if you've ever had an e commerce business but like getting like the Shopify alerts for your e comm business is like addicting you just cha ching, cha ching. I mean I even feel it with like stripe and exit 5 like all day. I love getting notifications in my slack about like new sign up, new sign up, new sign up. And it's, it is so verified by proof is basically you're saying like, oh, this transaction actually happened and it's proven by proof as opposed to saying, hey.

Look, we're using this tool totally. And then, you know, it kind of branched out more top of funnel. That's where we found even a wider conversion rate for social Proof. That would be content downloads, webinar, opt ins, event, RSVPs. And so when you say like, hey, sign up for this webinar and 800 other people have signed up for it in the last 24 hours, that was a super powerful message and often the founding team would love to go and just feel like, wow, that many people's eyeballs are on our page and opting in. So it was a lot of validation to the, not just to the customer, but to the business owner themselves. That's why they also stick around not even looking at the metrics anymore. Right. We're talking about emotional appeal, not logical appeal. And so that emotional appeal said I am validated, not my conversion rates are higher.

I just made a note to myself that I need that tool on my page today. Like that would be the best easy way to improve conversions for Exit 5 is like show me that other marketers are on there signing up for Exit 5 right now. Anyway. All right, so let's talk about the transition from Proof to Jasper. Is Proof still around as a company?

Yeah, Proof is still around. Basically the software works as it should. We've tried to, you know, grow it into the enterprise or at least the mid market and we just found it very hard to turn this into like a sales LED motion. And all of that we really tried for and we basically were building what Mutiny has done very well with website personalization. And so this is right after Y Combinator. We were trying to figure out how to turn this conversion data into more conversion optimizations on the site like personalization. And technically we were able to get it to work, but getting people to spend the time on it and it's so hard to get statistical significance on that with the amount of visitors that our market was having. So it just was a hard product to scale up. And then after about a year and a half, Dave made the strong hard leadership decision to hey everybody, take a break this winter break. This is winter of 2020. And he's like, go ahead and just tinker of think and give yourself some brain space to go in, relax, but also figure out what is the next horizon. And that's when we started teaching OpenAI how to do Facebook ads as well as we did.

And who was everybody? Like the whole company?

Yeah.

How many people are at the company?

So he had decided to let go of half the team and say, hey, we're going to put proof onto basically a automated self serve route and we're going to go on and start something new.

Got it. And you were part of that group. So this is winter 2020, like January, February 2020 before Christmas. Okay. So pre Covid like 2019 into 2020.

20 going into 2021.

Got it.

Okay.

I don't know why that detail is important to me. It's not just I'm trying to get a picture of it in my head.

Okay.

And then you mentioned just now about teaching OpenAI to run Facebook ads. Like who was on Everybody's talking about OpenAI now. I don't know that many people that were talking about in 2020, like who was poking around with that.

Yeah. So I Guess through like Y Combinator, we had learned about OpenAI a lot. We are kind of like the API was still in private, but we were able to get off the wait list and start tinkering in the sandbox. At that time we felt a strong competency in Facebook ads. In fact, actually at the same time, Dave started consulting at companies, B2B SaaS, companies, teaching them how to do a Facebook ad campaign. And me and one of the other marketers at Jasper would kind of do some setup and implementation there too. So that was a small little mastermind that lasted about 30 days. In that time is also when OpenAI, our CTO JP got access to OpenAI. And so we are also teaching that that course essentially to OpenAI, figuring out how to optimize the model for direct response.

Do you want to talk through like some of the first, because I know the company has changed a bit since then. Do you want to just give like the kind of brief overview of the launch and the pivot into who you are today? And then I want to talk about how you launched Jasper because you have built a pretty significant audience that has been given you a great advantage in marketing. But let's talk about like kind of the evolution of the company.

Yeah.

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By January 1st, we're like, hey, we're going to give this a shot. We're going to turn off any consulting or other little side startups and this is the one that we're all going to go for, at least until we know it's validated or it's not going to work. So it was totally an experiment, but we felt good about it enough to like turn off other things. At that point, we're like, let's start building a Facebook group. The AI powered marketers. And we called it Conversion AI because honestly that was just a domain that we'd been sitting on for years. So not a lot of thought to why. We were just like, we got to get up and going. At that time we were asking fellow marketers, what should we train it today? So my roommate, Darby Rollins was the first customer of Jasper and he was like the top copywriter on Upwork for Amazon Brands. So he would basically get your Amazon listing to convert. And so he was the first one to buy it. And we were like, cool. Like, you want Amazon listing optimization? We'll teach you how to do that. Tell us how you would write it. And so we built it for him to get that first dollar. Then we started teaching it to other people. Like, they're like, how do we make it right? Product descriptions and metadata and all these other use cases. Now, that was all private. We started to talk about it on social media and we're like, hey, we're letting five more people in today. And we're going to onboard everybody one on one, record their reactions. So I'll get to that in a moment, but that was important. Okay, so we record all of the onboarding their reactions, figure out what do they like, what do they not like? And so that was an experiment in itself. After 30 days, we probably had about a hundred people pay privately, where we sent over like a. A stripe pay link, said, hey, go ahead and pay for this. Now we'll wait on Zoom until the credit card processes. And that's how we let in, like, the first hundred.

Love that.

And we packaged that. And so that's what gets us into phase two.

Want to talk about videoing their reactions?

Yeah. Phase two. So at this point, we gotta go from, you know, that kind of outbound, you know, invitation, Hey, I want to invite you to try this AI that we've taught how to do marketing for you. Let's see if I can have AI generate a robot generate an ad for you. That was kind of like the pitch. We began posting clips of people's reactions, not the screen, because that was honestly, like the UI UX was changing every day, so we couldn't get people's, like, brains locked into a frame. We had to say, let our customers reaction to the product be the marketing. So it would be things like, oh, my gosh, this robot just wrote an ad for me. This is incredible. And like, a lot of cursing. It was like, holy crap.

Shit, yeah, yeah.

And so that works so well. And then we created a compilation at the end of 30 days. It was like, okay, and we'll just put the logo across and say, here's like 20 sound bites in 30 seconds. And, you know, kind of tease that there's an app to it and that's what they're reacting to. And from the context of these sound bites, you could get, oh, okay. It's a robot that writes advertising copy for you, and I can sign up for a wait list. That's the gist.

Well, because like, and probably if you try to do a product demo at the time, even still the text, it's amazing what happens on the back end, but it's like, hard to show that. And so just kind of showing the text interaction isn't like the sexiest demo. And so I love that you led with actual people and you Kind of let them. Maybe they didn't perfectly describe your product, but like people could get the gist of what you like. I believe that good messaging and positioning is kind of just all about like getting you to keep going. And it's just like, oh, yes, I want that. Okay, tell me how, like, tell me more, show me how. Like, hey, I saw your video. Like, how can I do this for my business? And like that's the position you want to operate in from a sales and marketing standpoint.

Yeah, exactly. And similar to Proof Story, you know, we found that dream 100 and we're like, if we can partner with these people, then we can actually influence the rest of the market. So the domino effect. And that's when I started finding who are the seminar, who are like the keynote speakers at conferences and you know, other famous marketers. And we're going to do a training with them on how to implement AI in their zone of genius. So for example, like I partner with Rachel Peterson who teaches social media to people. And so we did a webinar every 90 days on how to create three months of social media content in three hours with Jasper. It was a workshop. Now she was an affiliate. So she got paid for promoting to her audience. We gained new audiences there, but we also promoted to ours. We gave her a platform to be famous on. And I did this every Thursday at noon EST with someone new. So it would be a copywriter, it would be an SEO expert, it would be an E commerce expert. And so I go industry by industry. I'm trying to like every week, hey, I'm going to go hard on E commerce, hard on info marketing, SaaS, businesses, et cetera and just trying. We're also poking Marcus to see which one reacts the most right, and who will pay the most and what's their conversion rate. Kind of a cohort analysis.

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Yeah, no doubt. Me too, man. I'll be honest. Me too. I really enjoy the community side and the content side. And it's like that first 10,000 MRR was the most exciting to ever get.

Definitely. I think it seems like you were set up to be successful there versus if the founders or whoever was like, we need to generate X dollars in pipeline in the next 30 days or else we're going to shut this down. Like there seemed to be some type of Runway where you got to do those things. You were like, look, we got money coming in so like everybody's going to get paid. There's something to this. And I'm trying to articulate. Like when I joined Drift, the founders were well known founders and so they raised a bunch of money before even having the product out there in the market. And I think, you know, a lot of people say, well, like not everybody can do that. But just hear me out where I'm going with this. What that gave us was the ability to do marketing this and to really find product, market, fit and go at it the right way. As opposed to like if you and me start a company tomorrow, if Austin and I start a company tomorrow and we gotta make a hundred grand in 30 days, the tactics are gonna be much different than what you lined out, which is like find a list of people in the industry, send them this Send them this link, do the video, do the webinar, do the follow up. Like, you know what I'm trying to get at with this? It's like you, you didn't have the instant revenue pressure and that's why you were able to build a could scale down the road.

And it's funny because also it was only me and one other marketer on the team. And so what that also forced me to do is think in a multiplying effect how do I build leverage into every single activity? So essentially what we would do is I create a landing page for the webinar, I say, which affiliate kind of maps to this topic that I'm trying to fill. And I don't have time to come up with the webinar topic, to be honest. So I'm going to let them come up with the content and I'll fill in the details live. And so I don't have to like record a video, edit that video and all of that. It's live, it's done, we can ship it. The replay. I love webinars because you send hey, on Thursday. On Monday you send the first notification for the Thursday webinar the day before on Wednesday. You now get to send another email about that Thursday you say, hey, we're going live in 30 minutes. And then the next day you say, hey, here's the replay link. And so four emails a week that were valuable. And also in that I would always do like PSS with extra value or other statements, but like it really allowed us to say we have one event a week about a topic teaching AI. So now you feel on the cutting edge because you're learning. It is a bit of a sales LED motion. But half the people there, I never said buy now I do a value stack and all of that. It was more of like, hey, you're, you're going to learn how to implement this and save time in your daily work. And by the way, if you're not already using Jasper, you should start a free trial. But most of y' all are probably already using it. So it's kind of led with that mentality that this is for customers and if you're here, you're just, you know, on the other side of the fence.

Well, it's great because it's like the perfect pitch, right? You, you basically you can smartly tie this to like a bigger industry trend and so you can be like, hey, you're in X industry. Like, you need to know about AI in your job. And we're going to teach you how to do it and like. Oh yeah, behind the scenes. Like the product that we're using to talk about these examples is ours. And so by the end of the webinar when you want know how to do it, like you're going to want to use Jasper but you're able to like it's the perfect. I don't think this topic gets enough shine in the like the what works in marketing. It's like it's so much of it comes back to the product and the pitch and, and the offer that you created. It's less about this channel or that channel. And so you can basically lead with this education first. Like huge trend happening, huge new technology shift. We're going to teach you how to do it for XYZ industry. Oh yeah. And it happens to be like our product that we're showing you how to use behind the scenes.

Absolutely. And of course all that time we're building a retargeting list. Right. So now we have Facebook ads running for a five day credit card required trial and that converted really well for us especially with like literally an endless line of follow ups. So all of those pieces of content by the way were also once done, I queued them up at the bottom of the list and said now on day, you know, three days later after signing up they're going to get webinar one replay, then webinar two replay. And so we're basically hitting use cases every single day with another way to use it. We can do roll ups and say here's the top five ways to use Jasper. And all of them are links to videos that I've already recorded with other people. So not only am I getting my live event, but I'm also getting a ton of content for the backlog and for follow up for other people.

And you are a two person marketing team. And so another reason why I love this example and love this stage is like as the team gets bigger and now you have specialists in different roles, it's very easy to fall like in that world you're not just like writing a blog post for the sake of writing a blog post. Because we have a content writer on the team, it's like, nope, everything that we're doing is aligned. It's gotta be related to this funnel, it's gotta be related to this webinar, it's gotta be related to this product demo. And I do think that sometimes it's easy to just grow the team, add lots of marketers doing lots of marketing stuff and you're like, well, why aren't we having the same impact that we did? Where this is just a perfect example of like, why goals and alignment matter so much because you're both able to work on these almost weekly campaigns as opposed to thinking like, what are we gonna do six to nine months from now?

Yeah, you've nailed it. That's exactly right.

All right, so what happens with Jasper? Things start growing like crazy. Then what? Now it's a different company than it was when you started. I'd like to talk about the evolution of the company, the evolution of your role, where things are at today. And then I'd love to talk about what you do in marketing.

Innovation.

Yeah, so that was two and a half years ago. Right. And so in the first year we hit something like 40 million ARR with a team of 7 to 12 somewhere in that amount of people, and it was just really wild. I felt like that was also the most fun year of my life.

That's everybody's dream right there. Every CEO that's going to listen to this is going to send. They're going to count how many employees they have, being like, the Jasper team went to 40 million ARR with 12 employees. That's a good number.

Yeah, totally. And that was really exciting. And every day, like we're ringing bells, we're having fun, celebrating, going, just really living life. And all the family members are all coming together at dinner time and we're like cheersing. And then during the day, like we're putting in our best work. Every day I feel like we're putting in our best work. And so now going into year two, see, this is still going into year two is still a year out basically from ChatGPT coming out. So at this point, we now start building a more advanced product, doing integrations. And we've had a couple integration players that have been very helpful. I think that's a really cool route to go. So like we work with surfer SEO and that became like a top use case, long form content. We start having to do some differentiation because you see like copy AI is out there, writer is out there. And so now we're starting to get into a space where we're starting to create edges and niching down. And that's also exciting. So I kind of get thrilled by that. And like, I'm competitive and I like to win. So we're building up testimonials, we're building up SEO plays, start hiring for specialties that I'm not an expert at. I'm not an expert at SEO. I'm good enough to manage an agency to do it. And there's other, you know, I start hiring for other operations of the company. And it gets to this point where now we're starting to grow into the up market and a free trial isn't how they are likely to buy. It's more like a sales LED motion with a demo where they have to show up, they talk with someone, there's follow up, there's hurdles to jump through. And so this starts getting out of my zone of genius and we start getting into a place where we're starting to fundraise, raise our Series A. And so we start to begin now we eventually raised $125 million Series A at a $1.5 billion valuation. We start getting that whole executive team on board and that's when you get to meet Megan Keeney Anderson, the VP of marketing now at Jasper. And so she comes in with this great expertise, that upmarket motion at creating a freemium offering that builds pipeline for sales and allows differentiation and easier access. And that starts to get into a world that I'm now a newbie in. I'm really good at like this kind of self led PLG SaaS and start hiring teammates that are more specialized for the up market. So now we're about a year, year and a half into that motion.

Well, you see, you're more of like back to the beginning. You seem to be more of like the entrepreneurial marketer. I don't mean to use, you know, the word growth. Hacking is not what I mean here. But I think of myself in a similar way, which is like I love figuring stuff out. I love, you know, trying new things for the first time. Just let me be the one to like figure out V1 and be super scrappy. And it seems like that's kind of like what your playbook has been from the beginning, which is it's hard right? Then you raise venture capital money and you got to bring in a management team and every. Everything gets different. Did you want to be the CMO of Jasper at some point or did you realize like, man, this is not the stuff that I want to do anyway? Because I think a lot of people don't realize how much that CMO is not really doing marketing. It's definitely a people management job.

Yeah, certainly. So there was a while that I was kind of holding onto it and feeling like, oh man, like this feels like a demotion or I mean it kind of is. Right, like by title. But I realized like there are things that get me lit up. And even if I have the title, I'm not doing marketing stuff, which is what lights me up. And I felt like I was really just overcome by meetings and spreadsheets and, like, I was not operating in my zone of genius, and I wasn't serving the company and it wasn't serving me. And so, yeah, recently I'm excited to have moved over to head of marketing innovation, which is kind of like, you know, a labs role where you start just tinkering and thinking about the next horizon and doing a lot of education, a lot of talks, a lot of helping our team, you know, understand the latest and greatest in the AI world. And personally, just using AI a ton, like, for everything. Literally just eating our own dog food, but also not even Jasper stuff. Like, I'm using every AI tool.

Yeah. Okay, I want to hear about all that. And that's how we're going to. We'll spend the last part of this podcast. But I wanted to bring that up about the CMO thing because it's something that I went through in my career, and I know it's very relatable for everybody out there, which is like, you get on this path, and oftentimes if you are the rock star marketer, that puts you on the path to then become cmo. And what I didn't know at the time was how different that job is from the things that I actually like. And so just I'm putting this out there as a way to say, like, you have to know what you're getting into. And so if you want to be on the path to be cmo, understand that maybe, yes, you might get to tinker on some projects here and there, but the majority of that job is going to be working with the executive team. Headcount, planning, budget planning, strategy, hr. This person on the team is not happy. This person on the team wants a raise. This person isn't getting along with this person. This thing's not working. Like, that's what that job is. And so if you love the marketing, you have to have that hard conversation with yourself. Like, what do I really want? I think you talk about this zone of. What do you call it?

My zone of genius.

Yeah, zone of genius. Right. And this goes all the way back to Peter Drucker, managing oneself. He talks about, like, you have to know what you want, what you like, and grab, like, double down on those things. It's much easier to go from like a B player in an area where you're strong to an A player than it is to like go from a D to a C. And so I think what you've done is you've found this stuff that you're really good at in marketing and instead of trying to become someone else, you're doubling down and you're realizing the most growth and success in your career is going to come from doubling down on this skill set. So I just wanted to put this on the audio for folks out there that like, you don't have to be locked into this CMO track. If you're a high performing marketer on the team and you have a good relationship with the founder, like they're gonna find a way to like keep your brain on the business.

Yeah, you've nailed it. And way to pull some Peter Drucker quotes into here. I love.

I got all the hits, man. I got all the hits. I didn't get my mba, but I got my MBA thanks to David and Elias at Drift. Okay, we gotta talk about AI. I could talk about the CMO stuff with you forever. We gotta talk about aiu. So you're the one pushing the Jasper team on AI. Let's take me into some of this innovation. How are you using Jasper? Don't give me the fluff. I want the real. I want to know how you're really using it. I also want to know what's interesting out there. Give me some AI talk, my friend.

Yeah, well, I think that we can all get real as marketers here and be like, AI is pretty damn generic. The content it creates might be educational, it might be well thought through. You can get it to produce great quality content, but it has no human voice and it's pretty bland to read. You can kind of sniff out that it was written by AI. So that seems to be the number one thing that for our audience as Jasper's built for marketers by marketers, we're like, we needed to be on brand. So over the last few months that's been a most of the how I've been thinking about building and using Jasper is the brand voice, your own tone of voice having analyze your voice. Secondly, what do I need to teach it? Because like we just did a huge survey of why people don't use AI and the number one reason is because it's inaccurate or not factual, especially not just about current events but for your own business. And so we found ways to like you would see in YouTube videos, people are, they call it seasoning the chat. You copy and paste a ton of like context information before you even start writing to it. And you Start saying, do you agree? Are you okay? Do you understand what I've written here? And you get that confirmation from the AI and now you've seasoned its mind for what you're about to start asking it.

So in the example of like using Jasper, so if you just, if I just say, hey, give me, you know, come up with 10 headlines for this thing that I wrote, it's going to spit me out 10 headlines. But if I can do some upfront work and tell Jasper some more specific things and, and prompts and give it more context, then it's going to be in a better state to then go and write me 10 headlines.

That's right. And in ChatGPT, you would go and just paste all of that stuff from your Google Doc, probably into the chat. And so we're like, well, Jasper, there's a few things that we want to make easier. One, you should be able to upload your campaign briefs in a way that you've probably built notion and have that saved to your account. Also, like all your product descriptions, your company story, that stuff now you don't have to season it anymore. Secondly, prompt engineering is like, you got to get really good at giving directions to the AI. And so we've saved a lot of steps there where we enhance your directions to it. And then third is like a layer of voice tonality. How would you describe, with adjectives the way that you talk? And so once you save those settings to your brand voice, now it starts being accurate. Now Jasper starts becoming really that marketer on your team, whereas before is more of a tool.

I think that's a super smart addition because one of the areas I've done a lot of the copywriting at the companies that I've worked at. And I think ultimately what happens is you either become the bottom, you become the bottleneck, or then the CEO says like, oh, this doesn't sound like Dave or whoever wrote it. And so if I could train AI to like write things in my style and my tone of voice and get them on brand, then a launch email, a new landing page copy, that stuff can be much easier. I've had a really hard time training multiple people on how to write like the company. And I think that's a cool use case other than like, oh yeah, you can use it to write ad copy, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then I look at, you know, what are the next steps? So you probably have a bunch of tabs with your AI and I can say it's ChatGPT or it's Jasper or whatever you Got tabs side by side. And so it's just part of that workflow. Now, what are the next steps? What are the steps before and then what are the steps after? Using AI, it's likely you're going to go and post on social media. You're going to upload it to WordPress as if it's a blog post and so forth. So that's really where Jasper is moving towards, is that full integrated solution where you can submit and it ends up directing all the way into your apps. And so that's like working with HubSpot, working with all that.

Yeah. Something I've done is like, use ChatGPT or use Jasper to outline an email or something. Like, hey, I need to promote this webinar. I'm just not in the mood today. Like, I need somebody else to, like, help me get this going. And then I actually just copy and paste it into, like, my Apple Notes app and then I pull up HubSpot and then I go into HubSpot and then I mess around in there. So connecting those two things would be awesome. You mentioned. I just want to get to this before I forget about it. Prompt engineering. A question that I see come up all the time in the Exit 5 community and in and around marketing day is people are like, okay, I want to be good, like, Austin at this. Like, is there one resource or somebody or someone that you point people towards to like, to do some of this and get better at it? Like, you're talking about.

My personal learning community is like the Jasper Facebook group, but there's other discord groups and there's certain websites. If you go and probably just look up, there's going to be even paid memberships, there's newsletters. So I like just getting inspired by those. One of the ways, though, that I think as a simple hack is that you tell it an identity to act as. And that tends to work really well. So I have an Airbnb here in Austin for bachelorette parties. And so when I'm like, working with the AI on that business, I will then say, hey, you are an Airbnb expert. Do you understand? It'll say, yes, I will hear. I'm here as a consultant. And so then I start going into it. And so now it kind of understands, like, where to connect its knowledge from.

As opposed to, I'm now being B2B marketer Austin. Or you're now a B2B marketing expert.

Yeah, exactly. So it's training it on to be. It's also like, AI is a mirror of you unless you give it an identity. So if you want it to be in America, it's a two sided political spectrum. It will be Democratic, it will be Republican, all you. It's just depending on what you prompt it, it will mirror back to you what you want. If you are a vegan or a carnivore, it will make the argument whether vegan is the best diet or carnivore is the best diet. And so if you don't give it an identity, it will just mirror yours. And so that's what I would recommend. Like, hey, you are this X, Y and Z. You believe these things and then you can go into creating the content that you want to make.

What are some other ways that you and the team are using AI as an actual marketing team? Like tactically, like, we're using it to do X, Y and Z. Yeah.

So right Now I'm using 11 labs to train my voice for a voiceover. And basically I upload a long audio clip and it starts to, you know, create a few versions of my voice and I can start writing a script, I can start typing that sales letter and then it will sound similar to me. It's not exactly great yet.

Whoa. I could be taking all these podcast episodes and feeding them to 11 labs and doing some cool stuff, couldn't I?

Yeah, totally.

I'm not gonna host this podcast anymore. People are gonna think that it's real. It's not. I'm just hanging out on the beach.

Somewhere, you know, it's funny though, my experience so far is that I'm more. I like, like it as a tactic, but I'm actually enjoying or I find that I just end up doing a quick voiceover recording, reading the script so I can get the inflections and the pause and all of those, like, nuances in salesmanship that you would need. And then I'm using descript, another app, to translate and turn that into a written text so I can edit it based off of the transcript.

Do you think, like, how big of a deal is AI as a tool to a marketing team today? Like, if you're not using it, are you missing out? And I, obviously, I know what you're going to say because of what you.

Do for work, but I want to.

Kind of just like explain to people, like, man, this is a wave that doesn't come around often. Like, if you're not leveraging this, you're missing out.

Well, you know what? There are five major events that have disrupted marketing. First was the Internet. It allowed access to information anywhere in the world. Second was mobile allowed you to be able to buy anywhere you got social, allow you to connect with anybody, all of your audiences. Then collaboration with the cloud and then lastly now as generative AI removes the barriers to creation. Now if you were to go back in time and you were to look at those five historical moments in history, you knew that they would change marketing forever. In the moment it was considered a trend or a fad. It was considered maybe removing jobs. The Internet's going to remove jobs. Or if you're a mom and pop store, you're like, do I really need to be on the Internet? All of a sudden social media came around and people are like, I don't know if I want to get on social and post about my life all the time. And then mobile came around. I don't know if I need to build like a mobile store or mobile app. It's crazy. Each one of these things that came around, yes, some jobs went away also. A lot more were created and the technology is now just a part of culture and embedded in everything that we do. So we can obviously say that if all of those have happened in the past, this is the fifth trend. We can expect that some jobs will be lost, but a lot more will be made and it will be ingrained into our everyday life, everything. Right now there's call it 600 companies in generative AI and coming soon, it will be a part of every single marketing tool in the whole martech 20,000 or whatever it is. So it's coming everywhere and you should just get really good at using it, tinkering and having fun, even if it's not like the most effective, which I've seen a lot of case studies that it's very effective and we love it. Obviously we're eating our own dog food every day, but if you're not yet, don't be afraid of it, embrace it. Those that use it will disrupt those that don't use it. And just look at, I'm starting to see resumes all the time with like AI powered marketer and AI. I know these tools.

I'm going to Pivot the Exit 5 is going to just be an all AI community. That would be the wisest decision for growth, I think.

Well, at least have it a part of the topic. Right. You know, I think that like yes, you have a great community and the everybody here is likely a damn good copywriter, content marketer, et cetera. And so they're like, I don't really want an AI to do all that, but the fact is there are five parts of your content writing workflow. You have the idea phase, the research phase, the composition phase, the editing phase and then the distribution phase. Most people are spending all of their time on composition, putting pen down to paper, trying to come up with the ideas. And so I would argue that you're going to now spend a lot less time putting pen to paper and you're going to spend a lot more time building your brand, which is the idea phase and the research phase, to build your argument and have evidence to support y to buy. And lastly, the distribution. So when you think about our job as marketers is to create the great idea, the hook, the offer, and then it's to distribute that as wide and as far as possible.

I think you need to be like, I think if I was a CMO right now, I would be like saying to the team, like, I need every department and every team to like, we're going to spend a month learning about how AI can, what AI could do in product marketing and demand gen in content. I want you to come back to me and tell me like three things that you learned. Because I think like, it's literally like saying like this is like in 2005 and you know, HubSpot starts talking about inbound marketing and like how content is the new way to do marketing. I feel like it's like saying, no, nope, we're not going to do it that way. We're going to just continue to do outbound. We're going to continue to do field sales. That's what worked first. Like the way you get in, there's. There's so few opportunities in your career and in business where you can be early on a channel like this. And so like, I think you gotta be pushing your team. I'm not saying replace the whole marketing team with AI. I'm saying like, how can you push the team to get creative and find new and innovative ways to do things? Even if you don't even put that into production just as like 20% of the job, how is everybody poking around and doing that stuff? I think that that's like the type of boss I would want to be working for. At least right now.

You absolutely should. If you're in video marketing, you should be using descript and 11 labs and synthesia. If you're writing content, definitely you should be using Jasper and Surfer as a integration. If you're marketing ops, you should use OpenAI inside of or I think now, coming soon. Jasper's API is available as well, where you can make it in your brand voice, but you should be using that inside of Google Sheets. There's some amazing things you can do with prompt engineering inside of formulas. And so if you were to, like, for example, export all of your comments, your reviews, your social proof, and then gain data from that stuff, we're doing a campaign creating a hundred pages in a hundred days for SEO using Google Sheets, zapier, webflow, and Jasper. And so altogether, you can literally optimize landing pages through Google Sheets. There's so many unique ways to do all of this. But just figure out, like, where are you spending your time every day? And then what tools solve the problems that would open up more of your time. Tinker around with like three to five of them because there's more coming every day. Go to Product Hunt and check out what's going on there. Go into discord channels, Reddit threads. But yeah, ultimately, like, the person on your team that's going to be the most valuable in this generative AI landscape will be a person that has a creative and editorial eye, because you need the creativity, the ideas to use it, and the editorial eye to review it and make the updates as needed to be able to use it.

All right, Austin, I could talk to you forever about AI. I actually just made a note to myself that I think in 60, 90 days I gotta have you back and we should do a full, like, hour long of just different recipes and examples, all using AI. I think people would love that because I think you got them all. This was great. Do me a favor, go to LinkedIn, go find Austin. How do you say your last name?

Distal.

Go find Austin Distel on LinkedIn. Connect with him, send him a message. Be like, man, I heard you on the Exit 5 podcast. That was great. I want to follow you to learn more about AI, generative AI and Jasper. Austin, we'll have you back along soon. Make sure you go and check out Jasper. You can follow along all the stuff that they're doing. I hope you enjoy the rest of the week down in Austin and we'll see you next time.

All right, thank you.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community, a community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends. And at Hatch, that's Hatch fm, they produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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