In this episode of Full Throttle Leaders, host Michael Falato interviews Hank Leber, founder of Standify, an AI‑driven platform that helps large brands manage social media comments and direct messages at scale while preserving brand voice. Standify learns a brand’s voice by ingesting all of its past social and web content within seconds, then drafts replies that humans can edit, allowing rapid model refinement. The conversation touches on the ethical limits of digital twins—Standify will not impersonate humans but can power virtual influencers and creators. Leber explains their enterprise‑focused pricing, which aims to be a no‑brainer cost comparable to language‑model tools while delivering human‑level output. He shares early‑stage lessons: the need for deeper customer discovery, safety concerns, and extracting signal from massive comment volumes. Standify runs a design‑partner (CAB) program to gather direct feedback from key clients, and they pursue partnership channels through agencies, holding companies, and private‑equity owners of large brand portfolios. Leber notes rapid growth—ten‑fold client increase in six months—and a globally multilingual model that can serve brands in any market. The episode ends with contact details (standify.ai, hello@standify.ai) and a call for interested parties to book a call.
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All right, today is April 16th and we got Hank from Standify here today on Full Throttle Leaders with your host, Michael Falato. How you doing?
Nice to see you, Michael. Excited to be here.
So tell me, what is Standify?
Yep, Standify is a company that helps Businesses engage with their audiences on social media in the comments and DM section using AI. So think of it as your best community manager that speaks in the brand voice at scale when you post and there's hundreds of comments and you're not answering them. We do that. We help businesses do that. And it's mostly enterprise actually.
Mm-hmm.
As it turns out, the bigger the brand, the bigger the problem of tens of thousands of comments. And when we know the brand voice, We can be in there at scale helping community teams get 10 times as much done or 100 times as much.
How do you learn their brand voice?
What's that?
How do you learn their brand voice?
Yes. So we read everything that you've written online. When you authenticate with Standify, you authenticate your socials, right? So Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. When you auth, like you would with Hootsuite or Buffer or any of these tools that have official API connections, we have that. When you authenticate, we read everything you've ever written on social, and we also on the backend go read everything you've written on the web anyways. And that takes about 30 seconds, and then we become the best trained employee from out in the wild. So that's the beauty of language modeling is a lot of intelligence can happen real fast. So we show up on minute 1 with a wow factor for our customers. And then from there, your Standify experience is we'll draft replies to your comments and you can just post, post, post, post, post, or edit, edit. And if you edit any of our drafts, we learn from your edits. So you can take us from nearly perfect to perfect pretty quickly as we start working with a new customer.
Does this help build a digital twin model as well?
So we are aware of that opportunity. We haven't done it yet, but we can because of how much knowledge we have about the brand. Yeah, surely we can. One area that's important to note is we are not in the business of being a human in a way that like fools other humans into thinking that's a human. Brands are a brand, right? Pick any brand out there, Nike or Apple or something. Those are not clients of ours. Yet, but that's a brand. So if it's powered by AI, there's still a human in the loop that's posting, but you don't mind if there was AI in the mix there. We found we've done millions of comments across the, across social. Nobody minds that it's AI. But as you know, platforms like LinkedIn and some of the others, you can see this like AI slop where people are making it seem like it's them and it's not. We don't want to get in that base because we're not in the business of fooling anyone. So the digital twin, we can do that stuff, but to what, to what end? Trying to fool people?
You definitely want to say this is my digital twin versus this is a, you know, this is me.
And that's exactly right.
It's got to be upfront and honest.
Just like, that's exactly right. So that what it'll have to be, and you, you stole the punchline, is when you're announcing this is a digital twin and everybody knows The environment, there's a great opportunity there for what we do as a business to help power that digital twin. One area that we're already executing in that is one less consideration there is the virtual influencer space, virtual creators, right? So like a model that was never real in the first place.
Yeah, I've heard about that.
You see all these are popping up now and there's good reason why. They cost nothing essentially. They don't have to go eat. They don't have a drug problem.
And they do what you want them to do. Tell them to do without—
they work 24/7. So, but there, when they post and there's hundreds of comments, that person who's not even a person, how do they— how do they—
Thank you, Michael, for that.
So that's a huge opportunity zone for us to power the entire industry of virtual creators. And we're just getting started there. There's a lot of agencies that are doing that, building the creators, and we're the voice sort of engine for that kind of stuff.
And how long you been in biz?
A year almost to the day, about a year and 2 weeks. And we've been in market for maybe 10 months. We had 2 months of getting started, so not very long. And to have enterprise traction in the first year is, it's great. We're happy. It's intense because, you know, there's a lot of needs. to service at the enterprise volume and enterprise grade, 99.999% quality. So, we're having a great time, but man, we are drinking from the fire hose right now. It's been a heck of a first year.
So, tell me a little bit about your average revenue per client, and then how many clients did you have 6 months ago and how many do you have now?
Yes. And so, some of this I can, disclose publicly and some of it I can't. I'll give you as much as I can right now at our stage of the company. We are on par with the cost of language model tools and productivity tools. We do not cost thousands of dollars a month, but we bring the amount of output that humans would cost thousands a month. So our business model is to be kind of no-brainer pricing. But with the quality and output that helps your internal teams do more with their human selves. We're not trying to replace humans. And so by way of that, we've gotten enterprise customers that they have giant networks of brands. So these holding companies that have big CPG brands, they have thousands of them or hundreds of them. They really see—
Like Procter Gamble has thousands.
Yeah, Procter Gamble, Johnson Johnson, Unilever. Not all of those are clients and we can't quite say yet who are and who aren't, but if you go to the website, you can see some of them. But like, that is where we're seeing huge efficiency gains for their teams, but it's more productivity gain. Like, you are having to spend less human time on the work that we're doing so that you can take your human brain and your judgment and your creativity and all of that and use it in more strategic ways for the business. So we see ourselves as an empowerment boost, not a cost-cutting job loss kind of a business.
Doing the human behavior side of things and letting automation do its thrust.
That's right. This is where we see the future of social media being run exactly the way that we're doing it. All of the day-to-day safety, like removing harmful things and spam and scams, we can easily identify and automatically remove that. And then a human can go judge which of those shouldn't be hidden from the feed, but we've done 99% of the work. That's fine for machines to be doing so that social can actually be about a healthy environment for actual engagement. And the humans that work with the brand can go out onto your page when you mention a beverage or whatever. They can be in there and have fun with you. Like there hasn't been enough time for fun For brands on social because they've been too busy just covering off on the basics, which is what we're essentially taking care of for them to free them up.
What's one thing, if you could do a do-over in the last 12 months, that you wish you did do and that you learned from it?
Man, we—
Probably hire my company earlier.
Well, absolutely that one. And But also we didn't ask enough questions of the customer. We didn't listen. Like we started off with like automated, automatic replies to comments and social. Neato.
And so features and functions versus asking questions that you're saying?
Yeah. What's it like to be you every day? What's your day to day like as a community manager? What does your manager want? What does your manager's manager want? What's your goal this year? Like those kinds of things that we know now about our customers, kind of wish we'd have known that at the beginning. We would have just moved faster into the opportunities.
Yeah.
Which is, I'm worried about safety. My brand can't engage the way we want to because we're afraid to put stuff out there because we're not safe enough yet. That's a huge insight, one. Number 2, the signal that is out there in thousands of comments, we can't see it. It's too much noise. We just can't see it. So we would really like to know that. That it took us a while to understand.
Are you taking that, those comments and deciphering what they mean with AI as well? Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, the best question to ask is, hey, Hank, you booked a meeting with me today. What grabbed your attention? I love that because it just, it doesn't say what keeps you up at night. It's just a very lackadaisical approach to saying, They'll tell you what's wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah. I love that question. You could borrow it.
Yeah. And I will, I will take that away from here because we're still not asking it enough because it turns out we're solving a lot of problems that we didn't even know were there. And now we do. We know what we didn't know, but we still don't know what we don't know. So we're excited because now a year in where we've got a good rhythm, we've got, uh, so you asked how many clients we have. Well, we have 10 times as many as we had 6 months ago. So I can say that it's plenty for us to know that we've got a thing here that is a global opportunity. So our language model speaks every language and each customer gets its own modeling so that, you know, a brand that's in Spain or in France or in Pakistan or in wherever, they have their own language modeling that is unique to that brand in that country. Yeah, so we have a global opportunity in front of us that is kind of ours to lose. We just want to get the word out there beyond a bunch of podcasts that are going to go viral, right, Michael?
Viral. Viral. Crazy. Joe Rogan Jr. here. Um, so how do people get a hold of you? Who should get a hold of you?
Yeah, so our website is designed to generate a call because we're still in learning mode. We don't have self-serve. Our product is very simple to get started. It's like 5 minutes. It's very simple, like Slack. But we don't have self-serve out there yet because we're still learning about the entire market. Like we have enterprise traction right out of the gate. Okay, well, mid-market SMBs, SMEs, startups, influencers, they're all different. They have different needs. And before we just go out there and sort of guess what everybody wants, We're learning from what we've got, enterprise, and moving that down into the, to the mid-market and mass market. And so right now the website is book a call because we want to learn who you are.
Are you doing a CAB approach? You know what that is?
No, tell me about it.
CAB is a client advisory board that you use to basically get your clients to tell you what they want and what they don't like and shape the product, but it also happens to be something that helps them feel like if I sign this deal with you, that they become part of the solution to build it. And it's a really good closing technique as well.
That's great. I hadn't heard it called CAB before. We are doing that and we call it a design partner. And this is just like, we're making it up as we go here. We're a great team, but we literally like, we haven't done a lot in enterprise before historically. So Design partner, similar. What we do is for the right, the right brand or business or company that has a lot of potential learning, a lot of feedback that we can, you know, really utilize and maybe custom build some things to their needs, we call them a design partner and we'll give them a dedicated channel with our product team, whether that's a Slack channel or WhatsApp group or whatever. We have a few ways to do it and they have a direct line to us for feedback and thoughts and issues or whatever. And we don't do that for everyone, that would get unwieldy. But for the key, you know, verticals and industries, we do have that and it's been great. And that's why when you asked what do we wish we'd have done more of, more of that earlier on to have that direct line.
What's your partner approach?
So we have a few approaches to partnership. Number one is when there are groups of businesses who would like Standify's value props of safety, engagement, workflows, and insights at scale, groups of those businesses are interesting to us. So agencies, agencies who have a bunch of clients, agencies who have a bunch of clients whose brands are on social. That is a great one for us. And we're having more and more of those agency relationships because we just want to find where we can add the value the most. And with an agency, Mm-hmm. one relationship with the agency can get us 10, 20 clients out of it. And so that's a really good one. Also holding companies of any shape and size. So like you've got the Unilevers and the Procter Gambles of the world who have hundreds or thousands of brands, Nestlé, 2,000 brands, but also like private equity. They might have 10, 20, 30, or 50 portfolio companies. They want those companies to run better.
Awesome.
We could talk to each individual business Or we could talk to the private equity owner. And we're finding talking to the owners of these different networks is where we're getting a lot of immediate value add and growth.
So how do people get a hold of you, Hank?
Yes. So we have contact information on the website, which is good. That does route to our team and often comes straight to the founders. But the one that would get to the founders every time is hello@ So don't— maybe this video shouldn't go too viral because you don't want a million emails coming in, but we're pretty easy to get a hold of because we're listening. We want to know what questions people have about what we do because the ones that are working with us are really happy and we want more happy people. So please email me over, hello@standify.ai, and you can find us online at standify.ai and our socials are there.
Thank you. And obviously myself, Michael Falato, Full Throttle Falato Leads, uh, michael@fullthrottlefalatoleads.com. Happy to help people with their podcasts, roundtables, masterminds, and just their top of funnel. Um, Hank and I are doing this together today to just spread the word about Stanify. Thanks.
