Why Creativity + Data Is the New CEO Superpower

So the business was not good business in that sense. But as soon as we were like, okay, let's call this company what it is, it's a marketing agency. I hated that idea because I loved software and I didn't want to give up on building stuff, but we were running out of money and the business was going to die otherwise. And we decided to call it an agency. I was like, everyone on the team was like, yeah, of course. Like, that's what it is. What took you so long to like admit it, basically? And then the thing that happened though, I was like, okay, for an agency, then we can charge real prices. And then we did that and then the business started to make lots of money. And then like maybe a month after that, we went from burning lots of money to now like making lots of money, which was nice.

Welcome to the Startup CEO Show. I'm your host, Mark MacLeod. In this episode, I sit down with Reza Khajavi, co-founder and CEO of Mocean. It's harder and harder to stand out in this world. There's just so much noise, so many brands. Everyone's competing for our attention. And there's a trend happening where, you know, only kind of really truly creative ads actually get us to stop scrolling and pay attention. And so Reza's company helps advertisers do that and actually connect science with art and figure out which creative advertising actually works. We walk through his whole journey. Motion actually came out of a previous agency and then they went and disrupted themselves. And Reza and his company have been through a whole journey with AI. And so he walks us through all of that. Tons of actionable insights. And one of the biggest ones is really just like B2B brands really need to step up their consumer DNA and almost market as if they were marketing to consumers. So lots of really great stuff here. I hope you check it out. Reza, welcome to the Startup CEO Show. It's a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

I'm doing well. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Yeah. I've been looking forward to having you on for some time. For folks who don't know, maybe just just tell everyone what Mooshion does. Sure, sure.

Yeah, Mooshion is a creative analytics platform for growth marketing teams to be able to ship more winning ads. So a lot has changed in the, in the world of advertising where it used to be for the first maybe decade or so of advertising, it was a lot about audience targeting. So if you were a growth marketer, and you were able to figure out how to get in front of the right person. That was probably the biggest lever that you can pull when it came to paid advertising. And then over the last few years, especially all of that's kind of flipped now where the most important, most critical, increasingly only lever that there is to pull in advertising is the actual creative. So these days it's not like you're doing much. Audience targeting anymore. It's just that the creative that you produce is determining the audience that sees your creative. And that creates a lot of challenges for teams to figure out how do I produce more creatives that work? And the challenge there is that you have creative teams who are typically not very revenue driven. They're not necessarily comfortable in a spreadsheet. They just like to make their artists, their artists, right?

Yeah.

And then you have like the growth marketers who are just like living and breathing in spreadsheets all day. And you actually need the best of both worlds to make winning ads in this environment. And so Motion was a platform that basically tried to balance like the left brain and the right brain. So it's a very visual product where you can see and consume and like play videos, but it's also a very data-oriented product where you actually can understand what's working and what's not. And so yeah, we, we tried to build a product that would take the best of someone who is very analytical and people who are very creative. And merged that into one platform, and that was Motion.

Wow. I love it. There's so much to explore there. Now, I understand that Motion came out of Shoelace and you were sort of forced to innovate in some way because Shoelace was being disrupted. Is that right? And if so, maybe tell folks like that about that, cuz it sounds pretty interesting.

Yeah, it's a fun story. Very, very long and brutal as we went through it. But look, like looking back now, it's kind of a fun, fun story to tell. But we started, uh, we started Shoelace maybe 11 years ago, and we were one of the first apps in the Shopify app store. At the time, I think Shopify had like 50,000 merchants on the platform, something like that. Very, very early days. Um, their app store was just getting off the ground. It was also the time that Facebook was going more direct-to-advertiser. So like a few, few years prior to Shoelace, you would still often go through some like third party to buy ads in, in Facebook. And so they had this whole like partner program that they sunset and they were going like all in direct to advertiser. It's when they started to roll out their Facebook Pixel. And it's a really interesting timing. It's like, like for other founders obviously were like working on stuff. Timing is such a like a factor that you can't control, but it turns out much factor that's like such a big part of everyone's story at this moment in time. It was basically like Shopify is emerging as this commerce platform, letting anyone sell anything, but actually Shopify would not, I don't think, grown as fast as they did if it wasn't for the emergence of this like perfect distribution channel in Meta ads for every single advertiser to be like, okay, I sh— I started a Shopify store. How do I get in front of my customers? And Facebook was like the perfect answer to that because for all these like niche stores that you might create, like a yoga brand and they're okay, how am I gonna get in front of yoga enthusiasts? They're not necessarily searching for this stuff, but I know that they're an enthusiast. So if I can get my brand in front of them, they would buy. And so Facebook was like the perfect distribution channel that was emerging at that time. And every single merchant on Shopify needed to figure out how they're going to advertise on Facebook. And at the time, like the problem that Shoelace solved was a very simple technical one, which was like, if I'm a Shopify store, I need to take a bunch of code from Facebook and pop it onto my Shopify store so that when someone buys from a Facebook ad, I know that it came from there. And I also need to like sync my product catalog to Facebook so that when Facebook is running like product catalog ads, it can show like my latest product catalog. And, um, it was very technical to do for these like, you know, merchants that weren't necessarily technical. And so our app was like a perfect example of the type of niche apps that were really interesting in, in, in Shopify at the time. Um, so that's how the business started. We, we obviously got a bit more ambitious over time where a lot of what we tried to do in, in the early days was like, automate the role of an advertiser. And this was like obviously pre-LLMs and it was very hard to do. So we actually had a bunch of our team with tooling that we built, try to like semi-automate the role of a marketer. And you know, this, this typically happens with a lot of companies that were trying to solve problems around advertising is that they'll accidentally build an agency, which is kind of what happened to shoelace, like we went through several pivots in terms of what the product could be, but ultimately we weren't quite able to like automate the human job, which was our aspiration. And it just kind of meant that like we needed to have humans at the wheel helping do this thing, but we were also charging software prices. And so like, here's this model, human, human cost of goods with software pricing.

That doesn't match.

Yeah. Yeah.

No.

So the business was not, was not a good business in that sense. But as soon as we were like, okay. Let's call this company what it is. It's a marketing agency. I hated that idea because I loved software and I didn't want to give up on building stuff, but we were running outta money and the business was gonna die otherwise. And it was like taboo at the company for a long time. It was like everyone kind of knew it already was an agency. It's just that I didn't want to call it that. That was like, that was the only, that was the only, but otherwise, like, when we decided to call it an agency, I was like, everyone on the team was like, yeah, of course. Like, that's, What it is, what took you so long to like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Admit it basically face reality.

Um, and then the thing that happened though was like, okay, for an agency, then we can charge real prices. And then we did that and then the business started to make lots of money. And then like maybe a month after that, we went from burning lots of money to now like making lots of money, which was nice. And then, and then at that point it was like, we still had an engineering team and the question was that like, We could have let go of the engineering team and then this company would've been even more profitable 'cause they didn't need it anymore. But I looked at that and I was like, well, this sounds like the best thing in the world because we can pay for all these salaries through the company's profit. And that means we can spend the next forever coming up with new ideas and we don't need funding from any investors. So we kept the engineering.

Had you raised funding, fundraising previously?

We had, we raised a little bit, I think in total Shoelace may have raised like $3 or $4 million max. So like not a lot.

How did your investors feel about investing in a thing that was now an agency?

Oh, by that point everyone had already written it off. They were like, they didn't even care about the company. They were like, this thing, like, good luck to you. This thing is over as far as we're concerned. So I don't know if any of our investors at that time, I think they just all wrote it off. Like it was, it was not a company that they were Thinking about—

I don't know if you did that, but maybe just for everyone listening who's maybe facing a similar situation, that's a great time to buy your, those investors back for like a dollar or something.

Yeah, totally.

De minimis amount of money, right? Because they've written it off anyway. And then you just repatriate a whole bunch of equity.

This episode is brought to you by Limitless. Limitless is an exclusive community of VC-backed CEOs who want to scale themselves and their companies without limits. The biggest outcomes in the startup world are founder-led. Meta, Amazon, Shopify, Airbnb, Canva, NVIDIA. Behind every one of these companies is a founding CEO who didn't just scale their business, they scaled themselves. They added one zero at a time and today run companies with billions of dollars in revenue each. That's the goal of Limitless, to give you the tools, strategies, mindset, and community to lead at the highest level without sacrificing your health, relationships, or purpose. Through group calls, an elite peer network, a proprietary AI coaching bot, members-only library, and in-person experiences, Limitless gives its members everything they need to keep scaling themselves and their companies for as long as they want. Go to Limitless.ceo to learn more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it would've been a good idea. Like we, we, we started, um, so kept the engineers, started working on exploring new ideas and one of those new ideas eventually became, um, Motion. And then we spun out Motion into a separate entity and it kind of just took off from there. Um, but the premise of like exploring what became Motion was like, we knew that, um, when we started solving problems for Shoelace, one of the, the challenges that we were solving, like niche problems at the edges, right? It was not like a core fundamental high priority burning issue for the company to like figure out how they're gonna synchronize their Facebook code with their Shopify store, right? And so like when we went and start, went back to like talk to our customers and people that we, we knew we wanted to still build for the same industry cuz we knew it well. The exploration that we did was like, how do we try to find and identify like the most important, highest priority, urgent problem that these companies are facing? Because that was like the insight that we felt like if we were not solving a high priority issue, it always felt like you're pushing a boulder up a hill. It's gonna be harder to get people on demos. People are gonna churn. But this one simple difference that if you just solve a really high priority problem, now you have people's attention, they really care about it because it's like, it's an urgent, it's an urgent problem. So I think that insight led us to a lot of conversations with our customers where we were just very pointed questions, like trying to get to the heart of what really, really mattered to them right now, which I think is another, um, maybe first-time founder issue or like the difficult problems feel scary. You're like, why don't I just like stay over here? It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Solve a few. Simple problems, don't get any in anybody's way. But the problem with that becomes that, you know, it's just not high priority enough, but go right into the heart of the most difficult issue for customers. And then ironically, everything gets easier because like momentum is on your side if you're solving a, uh, an urgent problem.

Mm-hmm. Was there some kind of extinction event in, in Shoelace that forced you to make motion the thing, or was more like you developed it and You were getting positive feedback and you're like, oh, this thing's just way better.

So once we decided that Shoelace was going to be an agency, I, I kind of knew that, that moment that I was not the right person to run an agency. I was not fired up about it. And so we had a general manager basically take over running the business immediately. And then I was just off from day one with one of our designers at the time, uh, just exploring. A bunch of ideas. One of them became Motion. So like, I kind of just knew that it was not the right thing for me to work on, um, an agency business. I was not fired up about it. Um, so as soon as we made the call, I, I found the clarity that, okay, this chapter is kind of closed. This business has become what it has meant to become, and I'm free to explore what I'm, what I'm excited about.

Amazing. You know, when I think about— so I'm inside Shoelace and now the CEO's off doing this shiny new thing. By definition, I'd be like, I want to be where he is. Like, how did you get people to stay at Shoelace versus follow you?

Yeah, that was definitely— that was definitely challenging. Um, that was definitely challenging. I think in the early days of Motion though, it was not clear that like there was anything going on there. So like, you know, first, first little while it was just exploration and, you know, there was a lot of excitement at Shoelace at that time because like the thing is making money, it's kind of found itself and it was, and it was also right at, I think this was right when COVID happened as well. And so e-commerce was growing really fast at that time.

Yep.

And so in the like absolute early days, there was a lot of momentum and energy. On the Shoelace side as well. I think once Motion started to take off, that's when the whole thing was a little bit weird where like you have this like project that's really taking off within, within a company. And, um, and yeah, like some people did start to move over from, from Shoelace. Actually, a lot of the early employees of Motion were all kind of, uh, Shoelace staff. So I think it was like a few people, one after the other, started to hop over. And even to this day, like a bunch of the earliest employees are, are people that we were working together with, uh, from Shoelace. And so it's kind of been cool to go through this experience with a lot of people who were on the, on the Shoelace era as well. Um, so yeah, one by one people started to, to, to hop on over when, once it started to become real.

That's cool. You said something else that I want to double-click on, which is like you were charging software prices. You realized you needed to charge, become an agency. You started charging agency prices and then you were instantly profitable. Did that mean like the exact same customers now just paid you more, or did you have to get new customers? 'Cause the old ones were used to getting you for, you know, not enough money.

No. So, so it was the same customers paying us more. And, um, in order to try to automate advertising, we were like, we can't possibly automate all of it. So we're only gonna try to automate a subset of it. And, um, so it was like basically the, the, the retargeting side. So when somebody visited your website and they would leave, we tried to build this whole like experience around the ads that people would experience when they would leave your site. The thing that people really wanted from us though is like, could you also just do my acquisition? Could you also just like run the part of my ads that would attract new customers? And we like resisted that for a very long time. Because we're like, if we do that, then the surface area is too broad and there's no way we can automate it. Um, and so when we decided to turn it into an agency, we're like, hey, let's just do the thing that all these customers have been asking for all this time as well, which is like, can you do my acquisition? Um, because it was very weird. I remember it where we, we were so adamant that we wouldn't do the top of funnel, and so customers really liked our approach to the kind of elaborate bottom of funnel retargeting where they would bring in another agency and then the other agency would be like, what the hell is this? Like, why do you have some other company doing just this part of your advertising? It doesn't make sense. We should do the whole thing.

Right.

And so a lot of our churn at the time would come from customers who were like, guys, this doesn't make sense that like you guys are doing this part, these guys are doing that part. And so when we flipped, we're like, okay, we could actually just do the whole thing. And then that allowed us to really increase what we were charging at that point. And it wasn't necessarily that the work was all that much more. It was just like managing a few more campaigns within the ad account. So that was, that was the jump. But yeah, a lot of it was just the exact same customers, just kind of upselling them into a bigger offering.

Cool.

And sure, they still exist today, right?

It does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.

That's wild. Yeah. Um, so I think about show, you know, showing an advertiser, showing a brand which creative works, like that just feels like something that should have existed all along. Why didn't this exist before?

Yeah, cuz the, to answer the question of what works is not a simple question.

Mm-hmm.

You know, like if you, if, if you run, uh, Part of it is that like the volume of creatives that people run today in particularly paid social advertising is a lot. Like if you want to deploy any kind of a meaningful budget, you have to produce a ton of creative and feed that into the algorithm and see what sticks and see what works. Um, the best teams had this taxonomy around the elements that were part of their hypothesis. So like. If I'm creating a set of ads and I'm putting them into, into Meta to run them, the teams themselves usually have some hypotheses around what are we testing? Like what, what do we care about? It's kind of like how product teams will apply event labels when people are using their product so that they can go back and see what's working. So you have to go and set the event variables of like what it is you want to track based on like the hypotheses that you have. Um, and, and so the problem is if you, if for a lot of people weren't really good at that, at like writing good naming conventions, and then when you have, when you pull out that data and you wanna analyze it in a spreadsheet, it's a very strange place to do creative analysis. So prior to Motion, people would have like these data platforms, like whether it's like Tableau or like at the time it was called Google Data Studio, now it's Looker. Or honestly, just like pivot tables and spreadsheets, and they would export that data and try to figure out, okay, this like ad underscore this, that, and the other variable versus this other one. And like, you don't have the frame of reference of the actual creative. And you can't bring the creative team into that discussion and say, hey, like we're evaluating our creatives right now. Let's talk about it. So you're looking at just like a boring sheet of data, that's not the right environment for like a creative brainstorming discussion.

Right.

So I think the reason was that, um, and this is something I think as we get into the era of AI, I think it starts to become even more interesting. But since the beginning of the internet, anybody who ever built a data product or an analytics product built it for data people, obviously, right? Who else are you gonna build a data product for? But then the thing that needed to happen was that creative people needed to start wrapping their heads around performance data. And so our, our design principle that went into the product was that what if you built an analytics product, but it was built for creative people, not built for data people. Data people do have like the tooling already. They don't, they don't need another one, but creative people are completely blind to performance data and it's creating a really big friction between teams that needed to bring, build the bridge between their growth people and their creative people were like really coming from different worlds. And so what we started to realize over time with Motion is that we're, we're, we're almost like a translation product where some people speak two different languages and we're like, hey, you two actually need to like talk to each other. So we need to find a common language that you understand and you understand. And what started to become really interesting is that there, have always been people— everyone knows a handful of people like this that are like, this person is really creative, but they're also really analytical. It's kind of a rare combo, but they exist. And we found that the best companies had these types of people. And, and it could be that somebody was from like a more traditional data background, and once they started to get exposed to the creative side, and like, this is actually pretty interesting, like, I'm, I'm I'm having a good time. And they were curious and then they developed their creative side a little bit more and they became these balanced individuals that were like part analytical, part creative, and vice versa. We had a ton of stories from people who were designers. They got introduced to Motion, they started to see data and they started to connect the dots and then they became really good at the, at the data side. And at, in the early days of Motion, we were like, hey, this, there's something happening here. We need to, we need to like call this out as like a new type of job. And we weren't the ones to like name this job, but we definitely popularized it. There was a term of the, the creative strategist that a bunch of people were like starting to use, but like no one really knew what that role was. We just noticed that some of the best teams were like calling this out as a dedicated job role. And so Motion basically went all in on this, this individual job role. We're like, this is the future as far as we can tell. This creative strategist role seems really important. Who knows if this name sticks or not, but we need a new way to express this like type of person who is equally data-driven and creative. So we push that role pretty hard. We do a virtual event every year called the Creative Strategy Summit. The first year we did it, it was like crickets. Like no one really showed up and no one knew what it was. The one that we did this year in October had 17,000 people register for the event. So yeah, like now we look at our CRM, if we search by like job role creative strategist, like pages and pages of people with that job role. And so this idea of like skill sets collapsing, I think is a, is a common theme that we're seeing right now with AI where, you know, if you're a person who's like really good at design, you might be able to like build stuff now and not be limited by an engineer. And like these, these kind of like, where does the line end and another line begin with regards to like talent? And so in the marketing world, like this feels like the most important skillset ingredient for the marketing teams of the future is you have to combine extreme creativity with like extreme rigor on the data side and the people and the teams who figure that out. Are the ones whose companies are gonna grow the fastest. We have like no, no doubt about that at this point.

Mm-hmm. Love it. I've often said, you know, when I look back on my time as a VC and just a general observer of VC-backed companies, that, you know, the biggest outcomes are based on some crisp, simple insight. Not simple to make happen, but simple to articulate. But unfortunately, that insight is only kind of obvious after the fact. So what you just described, is that the foundational insight of this business that there's Marketing's changed and there's this new creative strategist that blends right brain and left brain and they're the future of marketing.

Totally. Is it that or, yeah. Unclear what the job roles of the future end up being called. I think that part is like really in flux, but the principle of creativity and data rigor, or, you know, the, the, the, like those two left brain, right brain meeting as one, like that is definitely the core insight. Of the business because, you know, like we were just talking with a brand earlier and we were talking about direct response marketers who are so in touch with their customers and understand there's a term that like direct response marketers use this term called hooks and hooks is this really interesting direct response principle, which is like, you have to say something that will really attract the attention of the person that you're trying to talk to. And sometimes people who don't understand direct response really well might use that and just like, I've seen silly things like they'll pop a balloon or something in the first few seconds of an ad. It's like, okay, you got my attention, but like, I'm still gonna scroll past that. Whereas there's a company called Fixer who we really love. They're, they're an AI product that automates a lot of your email. They have a really cool ad that that is centered around this idea of like the guilt of missing family dinner. And that's like a hook that they use in their, in their ad. And so like they could say something boring, like our AI will sit there and like sort through and automate your emails. Like, okay, everyone is saying that. But if you say something like tapping into the guilt of missing family dinner because you're sitting around doing something that AI could do for you, like, okay, that That really gets me. I go like, I don't want to be that person. And so like, it's the direct response marketers who are figuring that out and they're figuring it out in their creative because you'll, and like organic creators do this like naturally, right? Like if you're creating YouTube video or like posting stuff on social these days, like you're kind of just thinking about things in hooks and you want to say things that are relevant to the audience. So now, now that that's really important, you have companies who are like, you have the direct response team and the creative strategists who are like frontline talking to customers through their advertising, like understanding what sticks. And then someone shows up and says, okay, we have a brand campaign about this like theme and message that we want to take to market. And like the direct response people like roll their eyes and they're like, No, this is not gonna work. Like, there's no way this is gonna work. And, um, and so I think there's something really special happening there where the things that are working in creative, like those are actually the things that should be, that the whole company strategy should be built around. Um, this is kind of one of the viewpoints that we have is the companies that can't build a tight feedback loop between what is happening in their go-to-market and their company strategy. Like that feedback loop needs to be really rapid and really tight. Um, and the only types of people who can do that very well are the types of people who have like rigor and business acumen and they, they're comfortable with data, but then they can put that to the side for a second and just be really creative. And I think that's the skill that is going to be the most in demand. As products get easier to build, software gets easier to build, and the bottleneck becomes how do you get people to care? How do you break through the noise? And I think that's always been the case where attention is, is a difficult thing, but the competition for attention is just like increasing is like, at least it was hard for someone to build a product like yours. And so you have to compete with less people, but like, as it becomes easier to build stuff and then you have more competition and you have to find the parts of the market that really resonate with you and talk to them, but then also build for them, right? So it's, uh, it's, it's, I think this really interesting idea that, um, the direct response team is the biggest, most interesting signal for founders to think about, like, what is the market think about my product and, and where do we go from here?

Hmm. That's interesting. I'll bet you there are not a lot of CEOs who've connected the dots. They just think of this as a means to an end versus this source of signal that we really need to kind of focus on first.

Totally. And you know, there's this thing where like consumer, consumer companies are always a few years ahead of B2B companies and, uh, we see now like actually a lot of B2B companies doing a good job in their advertising. Though this was one of our predictions a few years ago that consumer companies tend to have like elite direct response teams, whereas B2B companies were like, install my, like download my white paper. And it's like, you know, it's the most boring thing of all time. But now B2B companies are actually starting to do a good job there. Where I think the best consumer CEOs I would argue that like the, the, the best consumer company CEOs are like the chief creative strategist, whether they understand it or not. And I think it's probably lagging on the B2B side quite a bit. But, um, you know, one of our favorite brands is Jones Road Beauty. The founder, Cody, sorry, the CEO Cody is in the weeds, in the trenches with his team, thinking about like their organic social strategy, which creators they want to work with. And we were on a podcast together and I basically told him like, I think you're a creative strategist. Like you're the CEO of the company, sure. But like you are acting very much like a creative strategist and you understand these principles. And I think this is catching on quite a bit on the consumer side where like, you know, you just really have to understand your customers and what better way to understand them like there's probably two channels that really help you understand your customers. One is support and one is ads, right? Like those two are like the sharpest signal. And I think people have always recognized that support is a really good avenue for understanding customers, but, um, support is like a lagging indicator, right? Like you learn after and, and ads you learn.

Yeah, lagging indicator and then perhaps some bias in the signal. Like I have an issue, right? Yeah. It's like, it's not a representation of all of the viewpoints, right?

Yeah.

By definition, it, you know, you, you don't hear from most of your customers unless you have a crappy product, which means support's giving you some of the signal, not all of the signal.

Totally. Yeah. We talked to one brand who was like, they've done, run all these tests. They, they know the hooks that work. To the largest audiences and they spent so much money on paid social advertising. But then when it came time for the company wanted to do like a billboard campaign, they ended up putting like the most boring stuff on the billboard because somehow that counted as like a brand campaign. It was a different thing. Whereas this team was like, if they just put our hooks on there, like those billboard ads sort of crushed. But yeah, they didn't, you know, and, and, uh, and so I think, do you think B2B marketers should hire some B2C talent? Totally.

Yeah.

100%. Yeah. On, on, on the go-to-market side, I think the lines between good go-to-market on the B2B side, like it's starting to feel very much like consumer. I think pe— people talked about like the consumerization of software was like a thing people were saying.

Yeah.

Like even many years ago. And I think with that comes like the cons— like the consumerization of, of go-to-market, even if you're, if you're a B2B company. I think what becomes a little bit different is probably for B2B, there's quite a bit of education to do around like, what is this? Why should I care? Help me do my job. And so even Motion's own go-to-market is like really advanced in, in my view. And like the way, the thing that we do really well is we don't lead a lot with, hey, here's our product, here's why you should buy it. It's more around, here's some content that you would be interested in, or here's an event that we're running. And, um, and doing that in a way that people really care about that sort of thing. I think in B2B, a lot of people want to get better at their jobs and they want to learn a lot around the problem. And so I think that's one area that I've generally felt like B2B companies don't do a great job is just being elite at education and helping teach the buyer around like the problem space. Um, and doing that in like a fun, engaging way, cuz like no one wants to show up to a boring webinar. So if you see, for example, one of our webinars, Evan who runs them, uh, it's like really fun and exciting and like full of life. And I think B2B companies, uh, just like skew too boring sometimes and it's just not, yeah, not great.

I love it. When I think of like HubSpot and they kind of created, not themselves, but like certainly played a large part in creating this movement around inbound marketing and like that there were new job categories that popped up as a result of this inbound movement. Are you trying to do the same thing here? And if so, like, do you have any playbook that you can share for how you're kind of trying to create a movement here?

Yeah, we've thought about HubSpot quite a bit. I think the creative strategist is basically a similar thing to the inbound marketer. Um, but I think even when you look at HubSpot's story and the inbound marketer, I was thinking about this recently, no one's quite thinking about inbound marketing. They don't really use that term anymore. Right. But like the principles around the idea have really stuck. And I think that's the part that we care the most about as much as we evangelize the role of the creative strategist. We're like, you know, even if you don't call yourself this formally as your full-time job, even if you're like, the head of growth or the head of creative or a designer. It's almost like, or the CEO, like someone should just wear this hat of the creative strategist and like thinking about the world this way is really useful. What it ends up becoming called is very unclear, especially in this, in the age of AI, how job roles kind of collapse into one becomes quite unclear. Um, but yeah, this idea that the disconnect between creative and data or, you know, brand and demand gen as like B2B companies would, would, would call it like this needs to be solved and you need excellence in both. And, and, uh, and that's like a very important part of, of marketing at this point. My bet is that like that will stick because I think the way to, to create a movement is probably the wrong framing, cuz like, I think it's impossible to do that. It's more like you see a thing that's inevitable and it's happening with or without you. Like if Motion didn't exist and if we weren't saying these things, all of this stuff would still be happening. I'm convinced, like it's not happening because of us. It's happening because like, this is just what's going on. This is the reality. There's a book around this, Play Bigger, I think it's called, around this idea of defining categories and being like category leaders. It's basically around whoever can articulate best what's going on. They basically help shape the category, but it's gotta be real. Like it's gotta be happening. You gotta be able to point to it and say, hey, this is happening. It's real. Here's all these examples of it. And, um, help give the industry vocabulary around, uh, doing the thing that everyone feels needs to be done and just helping them get there faster. So I think the, the, the thing about like creating a category is dangerous because it can be code for like, okay, there's no market here, but there will be one day because we are going—

Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.

Like, wait, no, hang on. Hang on. It also could be that like you're just talking to yourself.

Obviously the biggest kind of force in technology at the moment right now is, is AI. And I'd love to actually just maybe even spend the rest of our conversation there and just explore, first of all, like your personal journey with AI and like what do you think CEOs should be doing and like what you're doing with, uh, as a CEO around AI and how it's transforming your role and your impact. Like maybe let's start there before I. Add questions on top of that.

Sure. Yeah, I've been having a lot of fun. So my, um, prior to shoelace, I was, I was a software engineer by way of like hacking and I had a lot of fun in those, in the, in those days. And I think over the last like maybe 8, 9 years, I didn't touch a line of code, right? But I always like loved it. And AI was like kind of my way to like parachute back into like, oh, I missed all this stuff, but like, it doesn't matter because I can just jump in and, and do interesting things again. And so that's been a lot of fun for me personally. I've been using it in, in a few different interesting ways. So like, I, I think the, probably the two use cases that I find are really interesting. One is like, if you have an idea for a feature or something that you think would be interesting, I've, I've tried not to do things where like I go to the team and I say, hey, we're building this thing. If people are not bought in, they're just not gonna do a great job. But if I'm like fired up about something and I want to get other people excited about it, it can work to take a very compelling narrative and say, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we did this thing? And I heard it from this customer and like so on. And like you try to get people excited. But what I found really interesting is if you can just like build a prototype to do the thing that you're thinking about, and I think for CEOs or like literally anybody at the company should be That's probably the number one most interesting use case for any tech company is that like, um, ideas are now like just prototypes. Like that's what they, they should. So I get, we, there's been a couple of things that we ended up building cuz I just like put together a prototype and people are like, oh, this is really cool. And then they kind of ran with it. So that's one. The other is I've been finding myself use it quite a bit for taking like large chunks of data. And processing it in a way that's interesting. So as an example, like we recently exported like 2,000 rows of conversations that people had with our agent in our system. And I just like built a simple thing with, with Claude code locally to like run through every single one of those messages and find different patterns. And like, I asked the different questions and like, you know, the challenge when you arrive at something that's like a large chunk of data And you try to upload it into either ChatGPT or Claude or something like, some of them have large context windows, but it's still like, it'll get choppy on the answers or like the thing is literally too long. So I found that if you have like a big chunk of data that you want to like have AI process and do something interesting with, I think you can, you can vibe code some really cool, just like local scripts. Um, so for example, I like categorized each one of those conversations to see what are the most common things that people are asking the agent. And like, obviously like there's tools and things that we can build to give us better visibility of that when, and we have a bunch of those, but like if I have a very specific type of way that I wanna look at this data, I can just write something that will help me do that. So I think that's been a really interesting one. Um, I also—

I would say generally like If you had an analyst or data function in the house, you'd be like, you give them that question and they give you the answer versus you doing it. Why, why are you doing it?

Well, it was first of all, a lot of fun. And then second of all, it's, I think even the data team would go about it the same way. Right. And I, and with some of these things, like I can get there in like 10 minutes, in 15 minutes, you know, like the, the just, they don't take that long. It probably took like the, the, the conversations that I wanted to analyze, it probably took like an hour for AI to process it, but it didn't take me very long to tell AI what I wanted done. Right. And so the idea of like asking someone to do something and then going back and forth, did you, did you mean it this way or did you mean it the other way? Like, can't kind of tell what the difference is anymore for some tasks on, am I telling another person to do it or am I telling AI to do it? Obviously for like big high agency type tasks, like AI obviously is not anywhere close to that, but if you have like a specific thing that you want done, um, I don't know, I kind of feel like it's just as fast getting AI to do it than it might be asking, asking someone.

Fascinating. When I think about the CEO role, especially as a company scales, often the role becomes unmanageable. It's just like. There's just more and more, more and more information to process, meetings to attend, like decisions need to be made. And I'm wondering, have you used AI to make that role more manageable, to make you more scalable?

Yeah. So, so this actually the first thing I built was at some point I was like, it would be really nice if I just knew what everyone was up to all the time. Because like the company gets big and we're remote. I think we're about like 70-something people at this point. Uh, and in particular on our product design and engineering side of the business, like it's really hard to keep up. I can join the standups, I can read like linear issues and so on, but like it's really hard for me to have a pulse on what everyone's working on. We do, um, offsites once a quarter and those are always great cuz they, when you're in person, you collect a lot of information, you kind of stay, uh, connected, but remote. I find that's challenging. And so I built an app that, um, each person on the PDE team had a link and each morning they would go to that link and I, I put a character limit just so people don't feel the need to like go on and on about what they're up to. But it just asked a simple question. What's the most important thing you want to get done today? And I think they had to keep it up to like 150 characters or something, and And so they would write it, but then everybody would write it. And then I would get these like one sentence summaries of what everyone's planning to do today. And I can process that with AI and see, uh, and see what's going on.

And is everyone generally heading in the right direction? Is generally heading enough velocity?

Yeah, exactly. Or like if I can see something at some point where it's like, whoa, why are we working on this? And it helps me kind of probe into different parts of the business. Um, the day after when they go to write tomorrow's message, it also asks like, how did this thing go that we were working on yesterday? So it kind of has some like built-in accountability that everyone appreciated too. Um, so that was another example. I, I, I think there's a lot of these types of things that can be done to help kind of scale the CEO job, but I think part of it too is just kind of as a CEO in a tech company building AI products, I think if you're not in there in the weeds, like playing around with this stuff, like I think it's just very difficult to make any product decisions because this, this stuff is so unlike other things that we've had from a technology standpoint that if you don't like really get a sense for how they work, uh, I think it's hard to make decisions. And so I think even, even if you waste a little bit of time vibe coding things that like could have been done in a different way. Like you could have probably done what I've had set up here if we just kind of set people up on like Asana or something. Like it probably would've been just fine doing that, but I learned a lot and it felt like kind of kept me close to, um, working with AI, which I think is really important for, uh, making good, good product decisions.

So would you say you're also the lead product manager? And if so, is that a thing you intend to continue?

Well, I, I definitely love it. I definitely enjoy spending time there. And I think probably, you know, when I, when I said the thing about, um, consumer CEOs need to be chief creative strategist.

Yeah.

I kind of feel the same thing about tech companies, CEOs, and like I think it's really challenging if you're not a very product-oriented tech founder.

It's like, the reason why I never started a startup, I can't code, which is no longer a barrier, but I just don't have the product instincts, you know?

I think it's really important. I think the problem though that I have found with product is that there is today and there's tomorrow, and there's like, what are we shipping right now? Like literally this week. And is the train moving on time? And do we have like good product execution around the things that we've decided that we're gonna ship in the next like 3, 4 weeks? That's a type of product job. And then there is like, where are we headed and what, how are we thinking about products in like a multi-year sense? I think the challenge with CEOs getting excited about product, which we have to like check ourselves, is that like sometimes We're looking at something and it's like, oh yeah, that's like a 3-year-out thing. That's not a right now, tomorrow thing that like doesn't belong in the reorient the entire company and get everyone working on this thing right now. So I think balancing the now, later, much later becomes such an important point.

Anything you say as CEO, it's like you're shouting into a megaphone. You could just have this little aside about something that you're curious about that's way in the future, and suddenly that's like everyone's top priority. Yeah.

Yeah.

And then they drop the ball on today.

I think the times where I've, I've had a good grasp of that, I've been very productive and helpful to the company on, on, on the product side. The times where I've like not kept those boundaries well, I, I, I think the CEO could actually cause a lot of like inefficiency trying to absolutely meddle in the product. But if you disconnect also, that's a problem. So like you have to be very connected, but also try to distinguish like what matters right now and what is something I need to like process for later. Yep.

Maybe last big topic, Reza, staying on AI, but now with the company, like, so there was a Motion 1.0. You start getting more and more kind of AI-enabled, and at a certain point, you're kind of going down the agentic path and maybe thinking of disrupting yourself. I was wondering if you could just bring folks along that path and maybe share any actionable insights for folks who are running SaaS businesses that either disrupt or be disrupted.

Yeah, so we raised our Series B last year, September. And I remember right after that thinking, usually you would raise a Series B and you're like, okay, things are working. We scale this thing now.

Absolutely. It's about everything's figured out at the Series B. It's just like, I can make 10 sausages today. Give me your money and I can make 100 and they all taste the same. That's the Series B pitch typically.

Totally. And like we had taken on a bunch of technical debt in order to get there. And, but I remember realizing that like, wait, no, actually everything has to change. Entirely. But that's not just us. That's like everyone. So like, it, it wasn't a thing of like, we were, we were in no position to raise a Series B or whatever, but it, it was more like any company at any point, whether they're a startup or whether they're like a giant enterprise where they raised a Series A or B, it didn't matter. At like November 2024, looking into 2025, everybody needed to be like, this business needs to be an AI-native business by the end of Next year, like that was the thing to say, no question about it. So that was kind of scary for us, but also very exciting for me. Cause I just like, I love, I love new things. So it kind of gave me an opportunity to like, uh, go back a little bit to the things I love, which is kind of building things from zero to one. So like selfishly, I enjoy that. But, um, for the business it was like, brutal because we had all these things that were working and we had to go all the way to the core and reimagine it from an AI-native lens. And probably the biggest difference for us was that up until that point, Motion, you could think about as like a data visualization product that was meant to help visualize data for creative people. But our system didn't actually understand anything about the data. Like we, we, we were like basically blind to it, but we would help you visualize your own data in a way that was very productive and collaborative between your growth team and your creative team. And if we wanted to be helpful from an AI standpoint, like that was basically a really critical problem to solve is that all of this AI, oh sorry, all of this data needs to be processed in a way that we can be helpful to our customers about their own data, but in a way that they can kind of leverage AI for.. And so it's just like the type of thing that you don't solve on the edges. Like it really does need to like all the way to the core and reimagine. So yeah, it was kind of painful, but you know, when you have clarity that a thing must be done, it really helps. I think the thing that's really challenging for CEOs is when you're not sure, when you have like hesitation. Like, should I do this? Should I do that? That becomes really tricky, but it's almost like even the most difficult thing, if you have certainty that this is the right thing to do, it actually makes— like, yeah, the CEO job is hard. Like, you get punched in the face every day. It's like, all of that is like, you know, part of it. But if you know where you're going, then it's doable. And so like, on this one issue, I felt like, you know, this is crazy, it's really difficult, but It's no question in my mind that this is the right thing. Um, and took us, took us like, you know, now probably December last year, we made the decision that we're like, we're completely like rebuilding this company from an AI-native standpoint. And we just had another offsite a few weeks ago and we're like, damn, like we got together in January of this year and basically reinvented the entire company to be AI-native and the year is not even over yet. And so it was very, it was very, uh, productive from that sense, but it kind of has to be like an all-in, all-in decision.

Um, let me final double-click on that. Having been a VC before, I'm just picturing like, I don't know, writing the Series B check into this proven sausage machine, I think, only to find out, actually, no, we're not making sausages anymore. We're making them a totally different way. Can you? Just talk, tell us like, how did you bring your investors along with this kind of—

you know, the thing that's really fascinating is that when I look at our Series B pitch, the vision for the problem that we're solving for our customers is like completely unchanged. And in some ways, like the problem that we've been trying to solve since day one of Motion, completely the same. So I think from that standpoint, we're very fortunate that we didn't need to change our market and who we're selling to and, and like, uh, the problem that we're solving. So from that standpoint, like, it's been like, we feel pretty grounded that we're still selling to this customer and this is the problem that they have. It's just that with this like tectonic shift of AI, we now are able to solve these problems in this like fascinating new way so we can accelerate. But oh, by the way, if we don't do that, we're gonna die is the kind of trade-off to that. But I, you know, I think it's like we had a lot of really good conversations with our investors about it. The interesting thing is that this situation was like an equalizer for everyone. Didn't matter like what stage you were at, you were at. And it was almost like the conversations I had with our investors that they were worried about the companies that didn't recognize as fast as we did. That this is like existential and we have to move on it with urgency. And like, that is actually the signal that investors wanted to see. It was that like, we, we had the agility to say, this is the most important thing and we're going to do it. And the companies that were too stuck into like the sausage machine was like, wait, you don't understand, like this whole thing is going to change. And, uh, and so the, the, it's like a false sense of safety that you have. And so That's the thing to be concerned about.

Yeah. A VC never wants you to hedge, right? Totally. It's a bold direction, whether it's right or wrong, they want you to be bold.

Yeah, I agree with that. Hedging is so tough. Hedging is like, hedging is the most stressful way to run a company in my opinion.

Yeah.

Because you're always hesitating and you're always unsure and then I'll like, things just don't work out that way. Yeah.

Interesting. Well, Reza, this has been fascinating. Like, I think lots of actionable insights here for folks, particularly anyone who's feeling a need to pivot, uh, these insights around kind of how we need to bring more consumer tactics into how we market and just all of your journey with AI. So I think folks are going to really enjoy this episode. Really appreciate you making the time.

Yeah, thanks so much. Take care.

Awesome. Sweet. Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you'd like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacleod.me. Me or follow me on LinkedIn @TheMarkMacLeod or Twitter @MarkMacLeod_. And if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.