The Achieve Podcast - Preston Zeller (Zellerhaus)
In this episode of the Achieve Podcast, host Taylor Baker interviews Preston Zeller, founder of Zellerhaus and former Chief Growth Officer at a real‑estate data company. Zeller shares his eclectic background—spanning agency work, high‑growth SaaS, documentary filmmaking, and a personal grief journey—and explains how he now runs a solo operation that does the work of a 15‑person team. He argues that AI is not a simple bolt‑on but a paradigm shift that can restructure company functions, citing examples from large layoffs and his own experiments. Zeller details his primary growth engine, Songmong, which relies heavily on organic content creation and AI‑automated pipelines that turn RSS blog feeds into short videos scheduled across social platforms. He dives deep into unit economics, emphasizing the importance of understanding CAC, LTV, activation metrics, and cohort analysis for both B2C and enterprise SaaS. The conversation moves to untapped marketing opportunities such as in‑person events, influencer outreach, and programmatic competitor monitoring via Reddit, SEO data, and scraping tools. Zeller enumerates his AI/automation toolkit—Claude Code, Cloud Code, N8N, Data for SEO, Firecrawl, Paperclip, among others—and describes how he stitches them together for data extraction, content generation, and workflow orchestration. When asked about the next 90‑day focus, he identifies dialing in CAC/LTV, especially paid acquisition targeting for Songmong. He reflects on lessons learned: aligning motivations with faith, the perils of raising capital without purpose, the decision to stay solo without a co‑founder, and the value of rigorous research before launching projects. Finally, Zeller expresses excitement about discovering a breakout customer segment and scaling paid media funnels, while encouraging listeners to visit Zellerhaus.com and his LinkedIn for more.
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Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs— those who are shaking up the industry, making an impact, and changing the world. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and today excited to be joined by Preston Zeller, the founder of Zellerhaus and many other projects. And so Preston, thank you for joining us today.
Hey Taylor, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here with you.
So looking at your background with the Faith Tech founder, award-winning documentary filmmaking, grief journey, like so many things, give us the backstory for those getting to know you.
How—
what brought you to this point?
Yeah, you know, I think the, uh, simplest way to understand kind of who I am, how I function, is, uh, I, I very much straddle this sort of right-left brain hemispheres. So, you know, that I, I will go into the super abstract and visual and all that kind of stuff down into the very binary kind of engineering mindset. And, um, I, I just bounce around between those two. So that's a lot of what my career has been defined by. Uh, it's great in many ways, can also be kind of, um, difficult in the sense of I, I have a lot of diverse interests. And that's just not something I'm ever going to let— to not be. Like, I think I was, you know, created that way. So, um, in that sense, I have done a lot of different things for sure, as you mentioned, but my career has been predominantly in and around technology companies, building SaaS companies. Um, and then also, you know, before that, there's a lot of agency work and so consulting and, um, you know, a few companies in particular I went to were high-growth SaaS companies. And so that's really where I got a lot of that firsthand experience of seeing what it's like to grow from, you know, $20 million to multiple hundreds of million ARR. And then most recently, I spent 3.5 years as Chief Growth Officer at a real estate data and technology company. And so we exited two of those companies to a large title company. In the country. And then, um, you know, since then been, yeah, building my own products and getting distribution out for those and, and going through that, um, which is its own, uh, whole endeavor when you're starting from zero again. Yeah.
So how big is the team, the organization now?
That's just me. It's just me. I'm, I do the work probably of, yeah, 15 people. Uh, that's for sure. I mean, a lot of my sort of thesis around going into what I was doing, um, was basically like, how does AI fundamentally restructure how you can run a company?
Mm-hmm.
And so I've, that's a lot of what I've been kind of experimenting with and, um, you know, seeing, seeing where you can implement AI. And, and that's like the conversation I've been having a lot is that AI, as it came out, became this sort of like bolt-on technology. Huh. And it requires a much deeper assessment than that, a much, uh, deeper implementation, a paradigm shift really in terms of how you're functioning. And I think you're seeing this with some of these massive layoffs. Now, some of that might be AI is just getting the, the rap for overhiring. Or, you know, through like the 2020 to '22 time period. And so like Oracle laying off 30,000 people, how much of that is them just doing a total restructure because of AI versus, you know, overhiring, that type of deal. But, um, companies like that, I think you are seeing, uh, try to reassess how are they implementing AI workflows, agentic stuff, whatever it is. And then rehire out of that same pool to the extent those people want to, um, to, to come back into a new way of functioning within that company. So, um, I, I think there's just, there's so much change going on and I've been seeing it firsthand for sure, as I, I'm sure you have as well.
Yeah. And it is a rate, is amazing with AI, the unknown. And the biggest thing is like, learn how to use it or be used by it.
Ah, yeah. Well, I, I think that's a fundamental challenge that is in just the, you know, you know, kind of entrepreneurial space, technology space, all that kind of stuff is especially if you're, I'd say 5+ years of experience, you start to feel like, okay, can I have a handle on what I'm doing? I'm just continuing to get deeper experience and, you know, learning new things along the way, but it's very incremental. And what AI has forced, I think everyone to do is relearn a whole new system. Mm-hmm. And people are at very, what, a, a huge array of stages of that. And what I'm playing in is very much on the bleeding edge of that. And, and not in every capacity for sure, cuz there's a lot of different applications of AI. But what is kind of possible in it, and I, you know, I see this with people who have bigger companies where, you know, the policy there maybe isn't very progressive with AI, especially if you're in the, in the EU, you're gonna, the guy, you gotta, that's a whole nother thing. But you have to be, I think no matter what, experimenting on the side right now. With something, whether it's a passion project or whatever, to kind of see what can these tools really do. And not just like in a— yes, there's tinkering, that's, that's okay, but then actually applying it is a whole other deal.
Yeah. Now what would you say is actually driving growth for you right now?
The Saw Mog is my biggest, um, passion growth lever right now. I mean, I've spent you know, over a year at this point. We're building out an organic engine there, and, um, we've done some paid as well. And, uh, yeah, that's, that's kind of the, the product that's the best in terms of like, um, you know, methodology. I think it just depends on, on what it is, you know, uh, what product it is and whatnot. But organic has been a huge play for us there and building out directories online, our blog, different tools, and then kind of how we're able to automate the social media aspect of it to some degree. I mean, we have a lot of good, great source content. So, you know, one interesting kind of AI use case there is I built a tool that takes the RSS feed, creates scripts out of individual blogs, and then uses another video API to then create like viral type shorts. And then once those are created, they get all automatically scheduled into a social media account or a number of them. So within, once I built that, it was like I could push, you know, 40 videos to create a month and a half worth of content if it's just, you know, publishing one video a day.
That's amazing. And you mentioned the very beginning, like you do the work of 15 people. Like when you learn how to use AI properly, you can do that. The redundant tasks, automate them.
Yeah.
So looking back for you, what turning points have had the greatest impact on how you've run your organization?
Um, man, it depends on, depends on where I go. Certainly, I think in the way I approach what I work on and how I work on it, um, certainly I lost my brother in 2019, and so there's a whole, you know, grief component there, and made a documentary out of that. So that's where that came from. And I— my last role was the job I actually came back into after like releasing that documentary. And so that was interesting. I went back into this like C-suite role and, and just taught me a lot about how to work with people from a leadership standpoint. You know, I think leaders get really tone deaf about the fact that we're people that have lives and lives outside of work. And, you know, when you don't show a care for that, it really, it's, it's speak— people get it. People aren't dumb. I mean, if you treat them like that, there's— doesn't mean they're dumb. They're gonna be like, they don't have respect for you. Um, your— the employees may not have respect for leadership. So I think it's really, it's really important to, to show that. And so being, uh, attentive to You know, the fact people may have home things and that affects their work, that someone could show up for 8 or 9 hours a day and only do 2 hours of work because they can't mentally handle it because of something really stressing. And I had this happen when I was going through like really early period of grief for my brother. So that was a huge pivotal moment. I'd say in the last like 3 years though, it was— we saw some attrition in my previous organization. And so the question was always Hey, do we backfill this person or is there an opportunity to, um, level up the existing, um, employees or, you know, uh, give them a different kind of responsibility and incorporate AI into that. So it's like it was a slower transformational process of seeing how, uh, you could use AI to start augmenting workflows and not always just have a, a automatic one-for-one rehire. Um, which is usually the case.
Yeah. So this next question for you is kind of a two-part question. When it comes to your messaging, getting out there, getting the word, making an impact, your marketing systems, what have you found that's been working well to gain and keep customers or clients?
Well, I mean, you're, um, on the gaining front, you have to have some sort of renewable source of customers, right? Um, that can be paid for sure. Uh, I think people oftentimes like get paid is like, um, maybe overly simplistic and you don't test enough and you know, you lose kind of the metrics there. Look, I'll just say this to Taylor Baker Baker, like there's a lot of, there's not enough financial literacy, I think, amongst leaders to understand what are the true unit economics of a business. And entrepreneurs have to learn that too. And I think in some ways, if you're an entrepreneur and you just kind of fall into an opportunity and it's easy money, you still won't understand that. And I've seen that as well. Um, and so you have to, of course, like understand what is my customer acquisition cost? What is the lifetime value? Um, what, you know, what are the, the, the cogs of the business? Um, all these different kind of things and then go, okay, when you break that down to say acquisition, ideally you'd have a by source acquisition. But even if you can aggregate that across all your sources and say, hey, truly we're spending this much a month on marketing and sales depending on, you know, where, where you're heavy in that. And this is how many, you know, leads we're getting. This is the waterfall down to customers. So what does it actually cost to get a customer? Um, and then how long are they staying with us? And so in terms of how long they're staying with you, I think that's gonna really depend on, uh, what kind of product and what, whatnot that it is, right? You have, if you have a very B2C product, it could be a few months is, is typical. Like if you have a resume builder, people aren't gonna be staying around that long. But if you have a more, you know, enterprise, uh, type business and you have, you're signing one-year, multi-year contracts, it's very different. But either way, um, you're going to have to understand all that. For, for me, I have like more B2C kind of SaaS products. And so, um, the time to value has to be incredibly good for activation. And so it has to be as low as possible on the time to value. And then, uh, also like where you see the drop-off, right? That's where you're, you have to continue to refine and tweak and So, um, I'm kind of going back and revisiting that on a regular basis to see throughout the acquisition funnel where are they staying, and then in the activation funnel, especially the first 30 days, um, what is going to make them, you know, use the product, adopt the habit, that kind of thing. So just kind of— and it, it could depend on the type of plans people get, what cohort they're in, that kind of thing.
That makes sense. And so the second part of the question, with your sales and marketing, where do you still feel like there's opportunity or money being left on the table?
Well, you know, I'm so— I'm bootstrapped, and so I don't, I don't have necessarily the war chest that, you know, someone with a bunch of funding does. But there's a lot of, uh, in-person events that I think could actually be really good, say for Songmong in particular, um, that are just— you can't, you can't replicate in person online. It's just, you just can't. Um, so, you know, from an awareness standpoint, because that's a newer product and newer concept, and like face-based. That's something I'd like to do more of. Um, definitely different kind of media vibes would be interesting as well. Um, one thing I've actually been doing is doing stuff like this, going on a lot of podcasts and then using that as source content to clip up and get out there as well. Um, the influencer aspect is also has a lot of potential. And again, depending on what your niche is, that can be hugely beneficial. Another thing I've been leaning into though is, um, just like how you're found in LLMs, right? AEO, whatever you want to call it. But, um, I think there's this, uh, perception that, oh, I just need to be in like Reddit and some other forums and be commenting. But it's interesting in that the way those, uh, channels are actually referenced, they prefer certain threads within those channels. And so there's a way to kind of reverse engineer that and see which threads are being mentioned and do that in a programmatic way. So whether it's weekly, monthly, however you want to do it, you can get that kind of report to see where my competitor is getting mentioned that I'm not, and then go be proactive in those spaces. And it's tricky because you have to do it in an organic way. I mean, you can't— if someone goes and sees that your, say, Reddit account is just always mentioning the same thing across all these channels, it's it's going to look like you're not doing anything but promoting yourself. So you have to go provide value. So there's a lot of proactive ways to do that. I think the other is, again, from an organic perspective, using a combination of something like Data for SEO with Firecrawl. And so Data for SEO is going to pull, of course, the— in relativity to your competitors, if you give it this, where are your competitors showing up that you're not? Okay, then what pages are showing up on that competitor? And then using something like Firecrawl to scrape all that content and figure out how you can leapfrog it onto your own site. And then what backlinks do they have that you don't? I mean, none of that's necessarily novel. It's just you can do that in a very quick way now that you would normally hire an agency for. At least that's how I function. Yeah.
There's so much you just used to have— you just delivered right there. So are there any other tools with AI and automation that are your go-to?
Okay. So last year, this is a kind of funny shift that happened. I think a lot of people were into just pure workflows like N8N. And N8N has its purpose, but it's very deterministic. So not a lot of flexibility in how that works. They try to introduce some of the agentic stuff, or they do have that. Um, I think Cloud Code is kind of blowing out that, all that out of the water. Now it's kind of like, okay, I, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna connect with whatever MCPs I can, or if it's just the straight up API, great. Um, ideally there's an MCP and cold data. I mean, this is This is, I think, the crux of what makes any of these kind of systems good is the ability to pull data from disparate sources and have the, um, have Claude Code and the different skills that you load help you make sense of that to give you a plan around what you're trying to do. I mean, that, that's like, that's how I've been looking at it. So it's, um, Yeah, it, it's just a matter of, yeah, connecting those different types of, uh, tools, whether it's like outbound messaging. Um, again, you know, something like Data for SEO, Firecrawl, just these different data sources that you can take advantage of to, um, yeah, to then have better guidance on how you, um, how you perform different campaigns and whatnot.
Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. And they're always changing. Like to be on top of it, it's like daily, if not weekly.
Well, yeah. And to that point, I, um, so I was putting up a new, uh, site for a kind of, um, prospective product I'm working on. It's a physical product actually. And I, um, I took it like a break, week and a half break from digging into AI news just cause it gets kind of overload. And of course, uh, Claude released their design tool in that time. I'm like, well, this is interesting. And I had, I had put up, I had started a website using the Pencil MCP, uh, which Pencil is a really cool other design tool as well. And then Claude Design came out and I'm like, well, let me, let me try this out. It's crazy what that can do.
Yeah.
Um, and I just, I was, I exported that project, put it into Claude Code and you know, about an hour later I had it fully wired up and you know, out there. So, and, and it was, I mean, and it's doing such a good job at getting being able to use, uh, different kind of motion libraries and stuff like that and animations. Things that look very high-end.
Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's just fascinating how quickly it's gone from where it was just in the last 3 months.
Oh dude, like the last month, every, every, I mean, that's compounds. Someone, someone on LinkedIn said this funny. They're like, can you, can I just put a fill a filter on my feed so it can filter out Claude right now. Because I mean, they're, to their credit, they're doing a phenomenal job of releasing all these things. Another thing I've been messing around with is Paperclip. Uh-huh. Have you heard of that?
I have.
Okay. Yeah. So, I, you know, I've been noodling with what is the best way to get the most out of something like a Paperclip and That's still pretty experimental for me. I have had it work to some degree, um, but with any of this, the— and I, I think everyone is feeling it in the sense of, okay, I only have so much time to like vet all these things. Like, I did nothing with Open Claw just because everything I heard was that was a giant rabbit hole. And not that it wasn't good for some people, but more often than not I heard it kind of a time suck and not really like, is this like a cool thingamajig or, you know, that, that kind of mentality. So I, I, I try to be really protective of my time too. Cause it's like we all have to actually then like do, you know, execute on the business. Yeah. Um, so set aside time to, you know, tinker, but then go back to real work.
So that brings me to the next question, Preston. If you had to fix or focus on one constraint to solve over the next 90 days, to change the trajectory of the business, what would it be?
Hmm. I think just getting like the, getting the CAC LTV dialed in. Okay. Um, and probably more particularly the CAC because I have, I have a heavy mix of organic and paid. And so for, for Songlong in particular. And so getting the, um, paid acquisition to the right place would be awesome. It's kind of a nebulous group of people that I have to target. And, and so, um, yeah, yeah, identifying the most active users there.
When you think about the next stage of the business, what are you most excited about?
Well, I think the potential to find a true breakout source of customers. I mean, I have like some coming in from, you know, different places, But then who are the most active? Like, how are they— what is that profile? How are they finding me? And I'm getting a lot closer to that, um, because that product in particular, it could service anywhere from a 20-year-old to a 60-year-old, easy, uh, men and women. And so because it's dealing with people who have like— they have, you know, some issue in the faith world they want to solve. But I know actually, because I did a, uh, I did a commission, a research study last fall. I know probably who's like the most likely in there and actually who I'm getting right now customer-wise is confirming that. And so then it's a matter of like, okay, from the paid standpoint, more driving to those types of users. Um, and ultimately the ones who are like gonna pay. Um, the interesting thing about like paid media is if you have, uh, fresh conversion metrics, you can't— ideally you don't want to just jump to a super down funnel event that you have zero feedback loop on. So you have to kind of step it up from, um, you know, the registrations to the trial starters to the converters. And yeah, and you know, you can do lookalikes and all that kind of stuff or working off an existing customer list, but even then you have to have enough info, uh, for those customers, for Meta or whoever to, to connect the dots. So, um, yeah, close to dialing that in. It's just, you know, again, tapping a truly repeatable well there.
Mm-hmm. That makes sense. Now, when you look at your own journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you and what do you feel like took longer to learn than it should have?
Yeah. I, you know, I think having your motivations right is good. Like knowing who you are and what you're after. Yeah. I mean, these are all kind of the, I'm very cerebral and always like kind of reflecting even in terms of, for me as a person of faith, like how I am working with God in my plans. Not just, oh, here's my grandiose vision, I'm gonna go do it because it's going to give me some source of self-justification, um, but also going like, okay, well, how is this actually pleasing God in the process, and how is God ordaining this? That's important to me. Um, beyond that though, um, you know, researching, uh, before you just go headlong into a project. So you have kind of like, and if you are a heavy idea person, how do you hedge these different kind of bets that you do have?
Yeah.
Um, and knowing when to cut them off. That's what I was saying to you right before we got on that. I'm like, I have two products that I'm just gonna kill because they served a purpose, but I just don't have a, a reason for them anymore. Uh, I'll probably just try to sell those frankly. But, um, yeah. And I, I think those are some things if you're, if you're trying to Um, you know, get a co-founder, great. Um, I'm at the point now where I'm like, I just don't want a co-founder. Um, I'm married to one person. I don't need to be married to another in that sense, but I don't feel like I need it either. I think co-founders are really good oftentimes if you're going into a sphere that like you just know nothing about, but you can provide a really, uh, specific kind of, you know, value, then great. Or if you're really early in your career, I think that's where people tend to pair up. Um, the other I'd say is like, don't— like, don't raise money just to raise money, right? Because that can become a full-time job in and of itself. Um, I do think it's a lot better to, depending on the product, just bootstrap it to a point, maybe raise like one round, and then, you know, and then keep it at that. Otherwise, what anyone will tell you who's raised a lot of money is you start to you really lose control of that company and is effectively not yours anymore. You know, you can be voted out by a board. Um, and you take growth equity or, you know, any kind of growth capital, PE, VC, whatever, you're gonna have a huge amount of pressure on you to perform, which makes sense. I mean, they're in it to make a fat return on their money. It can't be, it can't be just like a, um, lifestyle kind of business at that point that's affording you a certain way to live. Yeah.
Preston, I appreciate you coming on and dropping so many nuggets, like, like the tools you've mentioned and how you can apply them and the generosity you've given in that is a wealth of knowledge. Thank you so much. Thanks, Taylor Baker. As for those who wanna learn more, they can go to Zellerhaus, so Z-E-L-L-E-R-H-A-U-S.com, LinkedIn, Where else can they find you?
Yeah, those are the best, uh, two best spots. Um, so you can see the different projects I'm working on. Um, there's a new one I'll probably put up on Zellerhaus as well, but yeah, those are the main ones.
Okay, so reach out. And again, thank you to our sponsors of today's episode, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership growing businesses. And if you're tinkering with something and you're not sure, like Do it. Step out. If you have questions, reach out to Preston and the team. Like, so much help, so many good people, resources to reach out to. So reach out, and we'll see you in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.
