Speaker 1: 0:00Hey everyone, I'm Kevin Kerner and this is Tech Marketing Rewired. I just had the chance to sit down with Jacob Bank and I've got to say this one was a real pleasure. I've been watching Jacob's YouTube videos for a while now and I've always appreciated his energy, his curiosity and his willingness to jump into the AI chaos with the rest of us. In this episode, he breaks down the real difference between AI agents and traditional automations. He also gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how his team at Relay is using agents in their own marketing, and let me tell you, this is really smart stuff. Plus, jacob shares a story of how he finally cracked YouTube and LinkedIn his own personal marketing after a year of testing, tweaking and total persistence. And don't miss the AI roulette at the end of this one. It's a good one. Let's dive in. This is Tech Marketing Rewired.Speaker 2: 0:50

Well welcome, jacob. I'm glad to have you on the show. I'm super excited it's going to be a fun conversation.

Speaker 1: 0:54

So the first thing I wanted to do is just have you introduce yourself, talk a little bit about your journey and then I definitely want you to say what you're doing now at Relay.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Yeah, I'll start with what I'm doing now and then I'll go back to quickly how I got here. I'm currently the founder and CEO of Relayapp, which is a platform that enables everyone, including non-technical users, to build AI agents, automations and workflows. My road here was kind of winding. Once upon a time, I was an artificial intelligence researcher. I thought I was going to pursue a PhD and become a professor. One day, I ended up dropping out of my PhD to start my first company, which was an AI-powered digital calendar called Timeful. We got acquired by Google and I spent six years at Google where I led product for Gmail, google Calendar and several other collaboration and productivity tools, and so I basically spent my whole career at this intersection of AI and collaboration and productivity tools, and that's what's taken me to where we are now, where the stuff actually works.

Speaker 1: 1:47

finally, Well, I think we've now discerned that you're a lot smarter than I am. Far far from it, but I pretend to be on YouTube. Yeah, that's really awesome. Okay, I want to talk first about. I want to. You know, we have a lot of people that are hearing all about agents and agentic AI and all these things. How do you describe or maybe define what you see as AI agents and maybe even the difference between that and agentic AI?

Speaker 2: 2:13

It's easy to get lost in the terminology and I don't think it matters that much. So let me explain it how I think about it as a user of these tools. There's three basic ways that I use AI every day. Number one is I go to a chatbot. That's like ChatGPT or Claude Probably most people have tried that by now. Grok, pick your favorite. You go talk to it and say like hey, I'm about to talk to Kevin on Mighty and True, do some research about him for me. So I show up prepared. That's a chatbot. You're in a window writing text messages to an AI and it's responding.

Speaker 2: 2:50

The second model is a co-pilot. A co-pilot is you're in the tool that you normally use every day and the AI is somehow helping you do things. So, for example, one of the features I worked on on Gmail was that as you're typing out your email, the AI will suggest what you might want to say. Next, if you write code, you may have used a tool like Cursor that suggests what code you might want to write. Or if you've used Google Docs or Microsoft Word, they now have co-pilots where they can help edit your writing or suggest new ideas. So that's a co-pilot. A co-pilot is you're in a tool. You're not in a chatbot. You're in a dedicated tool to produce something and there's an AI experience within that tool that's helping you do it. And then the third class of AI tools I use every day are those that are happening behind the scenes. I'm not actively chatting with something in a chatbot. I'm not actively using it in a co-pilot. The AI is just doing work on my behalf. And that's where people have this kind of technical debate about what's an AI automation versus an AI workflow or what's an AI agent. But I think the fundamental thing to keep in mind is that there's this class of AI that can work on your behalf behind the scenes on things that previously would have required human level intelligence.

Speaker 2: 3:53

For people who are really interested in the technical distinction, an AI automation would be like a single step, like generate a summary of this podcast. An AI workflow would be chaining multiple of those steps together, like generate a summary of this podcast. An AI workflow would be chaining multiple of those steps together, like generate a summary of this podcast and then create a post on LinkedIn promoting it, where we have multiple different AI actions that are chained together into a workflow. And an AI agent is technically a little different. With an AI agent, you just give it a goal and a set of tools and say agent, go do work for me. And so I would give the agent a goal. That's like hey, I want to promote this podcast episode. The tools you have access to are you can read transcripts, you can write LinkedIn posts and you can write Twitter posts. Go, promote it as you see fit.

Speaker 2: 4:36

And so automation, workflow, agent. The line between those three can be very blurry and I find the you know the debates about the distinction between them on Twitter and on LinkedIn kind of beside the point and overly pedantic. So the way I would think about an AI agent I wouldn't worry about the difference between an agent and a workflow and an automation that's just not practically relevant for any of us. The thing I would think about is an AI agent is something that can work on my behalf behind the scenes, without me directly chatting with it or using it as a co-pilot, and it can do things with human level of intelligence that I previously would have needed a person a person to do. And that's a perfect example like promoting writing a really good promotional post on LinkedIn about a podcast episode.

Speaker 1: 5:17

Is there a reason why now it's getting so much? Because these workflows have been around for a while and I guess there's been ways to dig into AI in these workflows. Is there a reason why now, if we're just in a hype cycle, or is there is there a technical reason why now they're becoming more accessible or more people are just more interested in them?

Speaker 2: 5:33

Models are way, way better. The models are way, way better, like, even basic things like extract invoice information from a PDF barely worked two years ago and now works flawlessly. Things like write a LinkedIn post in my voice two years ago didn't really work. You got this like AI generated slop with all the em dashes and all the you know words that people poke fun at that chat should be to use, whereas now now it's, the models can do it very well.

Speaker 2: 6:00

So the models have improved, I think, along two dimensions that I think are important for everyone to know about. One is their core quality at a single task has improved. They are way better at extracting information from PDFs. They're way better at summarizing long form transcripts. They're way better at generating prose. But you've probably also heard of this other kind of models called reasoning models, and those reasoning models are able to do sort of multi-step chain of thought actions where they have to make a plan about how to achieve something and then deliver on it, and they've also gotten way better at that. And it's that second, that leap into reasoning, that has enabled people to shift from very well-defined AI, automations and workflows into things that feel a bit more agentic. And when I say more agentic, I just mean you're giving the AI more latitude to figure out the plan of how it wants to accomplish its goal.

Speaker 1: 6:50

I watch a ton of your videos and I always find it funny when you're building some of the build with me and you put something in the AI and it brings back a result and you're surprised how good it is. You're like, whoa, wow, that got that thing.

Speaker 2: 7:03

Honestly, this happened to me literally today, where I was like I was doing a session today where we were going to do some prompt engineering and the idea was we'd go into the session and then it would get it wrong the first time, we'd try again. It would get it wrong. The second time We'd try again, it would get it wrong the third time We'd try again. And I wanted to show people kind of here's my progression of how I test and iterate to make sure I get a prompt. That's really good and the session kind of kind of blew up because I just did it really well the first time for all my test cases and you know I found some different. You know I found some ways to kind of push it into areas that it wasn't quite able to do. I gave it harder and harder tasks. But I'm like I'm in this every day and every day I wake up surprised by how good something is.

Speaker 1: 7:45

Wow, that's wild. So you can see the improvement, maybe not day to day, but week to week.

Speaker 2: 7:53

Definitely week to week, and so I would encourage everyone. I'm not one of these people who thinks all human work is going to be irrelevant by the end of 2025. And so I always try to present a pragmatic, realistic view of what AI is capable of today. But I would really discount the opinions of people who say it's all hype, it can't do anything Like. Those are people who are not trying hard enough, because if you find the right use cases and you find the right tools and you put in a bit of time to getting it good, it's really amazing.

Speaker 2: 8:22

And one of the things that I'm trying to push back on is a lot of times people will say is like I tried to get Chachi BD to write me a blog post and it wasn't good, and I'm like, well, what did you ask it to do? And you say, like I gave it. You know one sentence of the blog post I wanted to write. Did you give it any context on what key points you wanted to make? Did you give it any of your past blog posts so it knows your style? Did you tell it anything about your ICP and the kind of language those people use? Did you give it any content from customer calls about issues that might be top of mind.

Speaker 2: 8:50

Like imagine if you asked a junior in college intern from a one sentence prompt to just write a blog post. They're not going to write something good based on that information and so you really have to think of like the mental model right now for me that I find most helpful is imagine a really, really bright sophomore in college intern. That's like a good starting point and but that changes every week. If we talk again in three months, it might be. Imagine a really good new grad and if we talk again in three months, it might be. Imagine a really good content marketing professional who's been in the in the game for five years. Because it's the pace of the. The evolution is incredible.

Speaker 1: 9:25

Yeah, the people that don't get really good at that soon are going to be kind of left behind or they're going to have to learn really fast, you know. The other thing I was thinking about in terms of the maturity of your tool and other tools is I don't know if you agree with this is that it seems like the ability to dig into other applications. Other applications are sort of retrofitting to, and it used to be API calls and you know it still is to some degree, but man, it's getting so much easier to dig into other applications and the more you build that ecosystem out of all these different things that can be connected with and have this agent rules engine inside of it, it just it seems like it could be really powerful. I would put that thing in everything you know as much as you can get it into it's hard work.

Speaker 2: 10:03

But here's my current take on what it takes. For an AI agent to be valuable, it needs three things. Number one it needs to connect to your actual tools, because if all it does is spit out some text that you then have to reformat and copy paste like, it's just not going to be able to do work on your behalf if it can't deeply connect to your tools, both to read data and understand context and also to take action. Number two this is something I firmly believe the AI has to show you a plan of what it's going to do before it does it, Especially in these early days, as we're all just building trust and trying to figure out what can it do, what can it not do, how it shows you the plan in the same way that a great new employee says hey, Kevin, this is the task you gave me. Here are the five things I'm going to do, and I'm going to get this on your desk by Thursday. Does that look right? And then you say, yes, no, we're like oh, also check this source or add this step here. And then number three is as the AI is executing, things will come up and it'll need help it. But, like, tell me if you want something different. And so if you can connect to all the tools, if you can be very transparent and trustworthy about what your plan is and if you can loop in the human in the right way, as you're doing, I think that's how you build a useful AI agent.

Speaker 2: 11:15

And on that first point that you were making about tool connections, there's two basic approaches. One is what's called an API that you mentioned, and this is basically a special set of capabilities that software tools offer for other software to interact with them. So you know, Salesforce will expose an API that lets other tools look up records and create records and search over records. But many, many tools don't have an API or don't have a complete API, and so for those tools, you basically need to just go in the browser and mimic a human clicking around.

Speaker 2: 11:47

Now, in my experience right now, I have yet to succeed with a browser clicky tool. So there's Operator from OpenAI. Manus got a lot of hype recently. There's Cloud Computer Use. I would love to see use cases where you're using it for real, but I have not successfully used OpenAI Operator for anything yet. But that doesn't mean you can write it off forever. I mean right now I'm building all of my workflows based on APIs, with some light web scraping, but I totally can believe that six months from now, that I would be able to fold in Operator to some of these agentic use cases that I use, that's cool.

Speaker 1: 12:23

Operator to some of these, these agentic use cases that I use, that's cool, but you and you haven't seen any end applications cutting off access or limiting access, as they want their own AI tools.

Speaker 2: 12:31

The one case that I have seen is that LinkedIn has a pretty locked down terms of service around what automated actions you can take, and so I don't know the details of it, but they got into a little bit of a dust up with Apollo and Seamless and a couple others a couple weeks ago, and so I think, in general, most platforms benefit from being open and having good APIs, and so I expect that most companies will invest more in their APIs and not less, as AI agents become maybe the primary thing.

Speaker 2: 13:03

That's interacting with these tools like making an AI agent click around in your browser is very inefficient. Like we have way more efficient ways to give other computers access to data. Now you will see some providers like my hypothesis is that LinkedIn sees tools like Apollo as competitive with Sales Navigator, and they're violating their terms in a way that makes them have a competitive advantage, and so there will be some players that try to like hold on to their advantage by through litigation or through terms of service, but like I just don't think that's going to be the way the world is moving, in the same way that in the early shift to the web, like there were some publishers who, like really tried to hold on tight and say Google, you can't access my information. And openness openness, kind of, kind of won, and so I expect the same to happen in the future.

Speaker 1: 13:47

Doesn't that always happen? It happened with email, happened with Napster and Spotify and those things. It happens in every the consumer always wins.

Speaker 2: 13:55

That's above my pay grade, but that's my guess.

Speaker 1: 13:57

Well, I will quote you on. I won't quote you on that, Okay, so I want to dig into some of the use cases because I've seen some of the stuff that you've done and, of course, a lot of the people who will be listening to this have are marketers or might be maybe this marketing ecosystem, like marketing sales and product. Can you give some examples of use cases using agents that might be helpful for people Like how would you use an agent in those functions?

Speaker 2: 14:20

Yeah, so this is our tool Related App. But I don't want to make this an ad for Related App. I want to show you kind of the general things that we're using it for and I'm just going to walk you through, kind of step by step, many of the use cases I use AI for. So here is one on market research. So these APIs are changing really quickly Anthropic Croc Perplexity and so we set up an AI agent that basically tracks the changes to their websites and lets us know when we have a new model that we need to research or if they're deprecating an old model. So AI is really really good at checking a website every day and tracking changes.

Speaker 2: 14:57

We use AI for our community management. So we have a Slack community with several hundred members and we have a bunch of things that we want to do. We want to send them a personalized welcome message when they join. We do kind of community challenges from time to time so we want to tally up their points and send them leaderboard scoring. So we have a bunch of assistive kind of community management, community management tools. We do a lot of AI powered competitive research. We follow the blogs of all of our competitors. We follow the YouTube channels of all of our competitors. We follow the pricing updates of all of our competitors, and so these typically like either they run on demand like every time Zapier posts a new YouTube video, we get a little summary of it sent to us or you can run them once a week or once, I think. Our competitor pricing analyzer runs once a month. It's just like, hey, look at the pricing pages of our major competitors and just let me know if anything's changed in the last month, because pricing changes tend not to happen on a daily basis.

Speaker 2: 15:51

We have a partner program, and so we have a workflow that screens applicants. So our partner program is designed for agencies and consultants that help people either with automation or AI or even function specific like marketing people either with automation or AI or even, you know, function specific like marketing, and so what we do is we have a Google Doc with our program guidelines, and then we automatically look up the person's URL and research them online with perplexity and say, based on what you found out about this person and based on our program guidelines, do you think they're a good fit for our partner program? And then we have a human in the loop step where we just confirm to double check. The AI says here's, you know, I think Kevin's a great fit, here's why he runs this marketing agency, blah, blah, blah. And then a human in the loop confirms it. Here's another thing that is really important.

Speaker 2: 16:38

Ai is great at synthesis Synthesis across. For example, in this use case, I always record all of our customer calls. I probably do between 10 and 20 customer calls in a given week and I want to get aggregated insights from all of them. So I have this AI agent that every Saturday it looks at all the customer calls that I did in the past week and it creates a single synthesized report that breaks down. I can actually show you the prompt for this one, because it's kind of cool. It breaks down. You know, for each customer call, carefully look at their industry, their role, their type of business, what are their key use cases for AI and automation. What do they like about Related App? Where do they struggle with Related App? Where do they struggle with Related App? What other tools have they tried?

Speaker 1: 17:18

And then it synthesizes it into a single report Digging into Gmail, finding the notes from any meeting probably prompted by some tag in the Gmail itself.

Speaker 2: 17:30

Exactly so. It just looks for the year meeting recap.

Speaker 1: 17:34

And then it's just sending it to Slack as a consolidated note.

Speaker 2: 17:38

And you can send it to Slack. You can send it to Slack, you can send it to email, you can create it in a Google Doc, whatever works for you. We have a bunch of kind of lifecycle marketing stuff. So we send personalized emails to new users. We send personalized emails to new paying customers. We do outreach to churned users and we kind of look into, like, what they were doing in the product automatically and try to get a sense of like, ah, did they churn because they ran into an issue or because their usage tailed off over time? And then I review those emails before they go out to make sure they're accurate. We have a bunch of SEO workflows. You'll see this folder's got a lot of stuff in it. We create programmatic pages. We refresh all our blog posts automatically from time to time to make sure they're still up to date and accurate. We automatically publish blog posts for new YouTube videos. We automatically create posts for new features that we launch.

Speaker 1: 18:33

Is the agent writing to your CMS, your website?

Speaker 2: 18:36

Yeah, we use Sanity. We use Sanity as our CMS and it. It outputs posts directly there, usually again in draft mode. So then I go in and edit a little bit and and hit publish. Um, we also do a bunch of AI powered social media marketing. So whenever I make a YouTube video, we automatically transcribe the recording. Use that to generate the YouTube description. Use that to generate the LinkedIn post. Use that to generate the Twitter posts and the that to generate the LinkedIn post. Use that to generate the Twitter post and the Blue Sky post.

Speaker 2: 19:02

I have a bunch of writing assistants that if I write in a little after this call, I might say, hey, just had a great call with Kevin. We talked about this marketing use case, this marketing use case, this marketing use case, and then it'll expand that into a full LinkedIn post for me with more detail. I can also feed it the transcript of our call if I want to. I track all my performance on LinkedIn automatically. So I think this works. Every month yeah, every month it looks at all my LinkedIn posts for the last month and then it automatically fetches how many comments and reactions they got and it puts out a tracker and it lets me know.

Speaker 2: 19:36

I can actually show you my tracker because this is pretty fun. It shows me like, um, oh shoot, sorry, I clicked on the wrong. The wrong one I was. This was the AI writing assistant. I wanted to show you the performance tracker, so I'm showing. Here is a spreadsheet. It basically has the url of the post, the post title, the date I posted it, the day of week, the time of day, the post content and then the performance, and then you can look at like wow, it turns out all of my top six posts were on Friday, saturday or Sunday, so something's going on about my content that happens to be resonating on on weekend. So that was. That was a very kind of like tactical and detailed, detailed view, zooming out our major use case in every marketing function that I'm aware of.

Speaker 2: 20:17

We have a ton of use case in lifecycle marketing, email marketing, community marketing, partner marketing, social media marketing, traditional product marketing, and we use it for content creation, we use it for analysis, we use it for synthesis, we use it for research, we use it for updates, and basically what this has meant is I am the marketing team for our company, me plus. Ai is the marketing team, and I still have a very active role to play in setting up these agents, training these agents, guiding them, giving them feedback, because, as you've seen, like a big part of our marketing strategy is based on my relationship with our customers, and I do all the YouTube videos myself, I answer a bunch of the support messages myself, and that's only possible because I have AI doing all the busy work sort of behind the scenes. For me, it's incredible.

Speaker 1: 21:00

It's just absolutely incredible. That was the one thing I was thinking is, when you're showing me that stuff number one it replaces a lot of other tools. I was thinking Tapleo, you know which is, or any sort of social media creator tool, scheduler tool, whatever. It replaces a lot of that technology because you're just building an agent space to do it. It's kind of like citizen-led development.

Speaker 2: 21:18

You're doing it yourself versus going to it, yeah, and this approach won't be right for everyone. So relayapp is a very horizontal tool. You can think of it as like a spreadsheet. Like every single company in every single role uses spreadsheets right, but you use them for vastly different use cases at vastly different levels of sophistication. Some people prefer to use a spreadsheet for modeling their finances, some people prefer to use a dedicated financial management tool, and so and for everyone.

Speaker 2: 21:44

For me, I love the flexibility of working with horizontal tools because it lets me customize things just the way I want to and it gives me much more control. But it does take more effort because you have to tinker with things a little bit. You have to experiment. So me. So what I would encourage everyone listening to do is explore both use case specific tools and horizontal tools, and my guess is we're going to end up with some blend of both. You're not going to use Relay as your CRM. You couldn't even use Relay as your CRM. It's not a theorem. It doesn't have the right data storage. Like you got to use a CRM as your CRM you. You can definitely use Relay to augment some of the capabilities that might be missing in your CRM, like logging certain kinds of calendar events or doing a certain kind of enrichment.

Speaker 1: 22:22

Well, you also had some emails in there. They're going out through Gmail, but it's just amazing to see that that's mind blown on some of this stuff.

Speaker 2: 22:31

Can I show you one other thing that's super cool. This is something that we literally just built today. So we've had a lot of success with this combination of LinkedIn posts and then live events like webinars. This has been a. It's a motion that really works well for us, because the LinkedIn post gets a lot of top of funnel traction and the webinar really teaches people how people to the webinar Like I looked at Zoom webinar, I looked at Luma, I looked at all these dedicated tools and they all just felt kind of heavy and kind of wrong for me.

Speaker 2: 23:09

Like cause. I wanted this feeling of personal interaction. I didn't feel like you were giving your email to some faceless, you know newsletter writer, and so I eventually I tried to do like a public Google calendar. That didn't really work, and so we decided what if we built our own custom landing page for events and we used a tool called Lovable, which folks have probably heard of? Lovable, bolt and VZero these are probably the three most popular natural language-based web app creators and I want to show you this tool that we were able to build in about two hours in Lovable.

Speaker 2: 23:36

It's a totally custom website that says here's when the Relayapp live sessions are coming up. It shows you the list of upcoming sessions. There's one tomorrow, there's one March 20th, there's another one on April 9th. You can click to expand to see other future sessions. You can select a session and enter your email. Hit, sign me up.

Speaker 2: 23:59

And now. This is lovable on the front end and on the back end, it's using a relayapp workflow to automatically add that email address to the calendar event, automatically adding that email address to our loops email marketing tool, automatically sending a personalized email. And then this is something that our head of product, who is working this out just today I think this is a great touch Like you can watch previous sessions and that links right to our YouTube channel where all of our previous sessions are posted. And this is crazy because no engineer was involved in this. It's totally custom and exactly fits the need and the use case that we have. It took two hours to set up. All like no code tools. Lovable on the front end and then relayapp on the back end. It actually works. It actually works. We are actually going to use this in production and send that link to thousands of people.

Speaker 1: 24:46

Amazing. Yeah, I've been on the no-code thing for a few years now. We built our I think I messaged you about us using Glide Like we use Glide to the max man, it, man. It is such an easy tool to use and it's all spreadsheet based, so I'm really interested to see how Relay can work with it, because we can get data in and out of it.

Speaker 2: 25:02

One funny thing Go ahead, oh go ahead, Go ahead.

Speaker 1: 25:05

Well, I was going to, I was going to, I was going to, but Glide is a tool that's a little bit more cautious about access, I think. But I was going to, and what we're trying to do on the Mighty and True side is find people that can build in these no-code tools for our customers. Like, the makeup of a marketer is different now. It seems like it's this sort of creative growth, entrepreneur role, but you have to be able to use or learn these tools, which are pretty accessible. You can easily learn them. I'm curious what you think the makeup of a like. If you were a marketer, like what would you? Or if you were going to hire a marketer or replace you in this stuff? If you were a marketer, or if you were going to hire a marketer or replace you in this stuff, what would you want them to do? What would their makeup be? What type of person is that?

Speaker 2: 25:45

So first, I don't know, because it's been hard for me to know what marketer to find, which is why I've been doing it myself. But let me tell you some of the things I would think about. First, I would think about what marketing strategies are likely to work better in the future and which marketing strategies are likely to work worse in the future. So, if you're used to writing SEO optimized blog posts for really competitive keywords oof, I'm not sure how future-proof that's going to be Like AI is just going to get really, really. It's going to be hard to differentiate there. Ai is going to get really good at writing the content and the companies that already have the domain reputation and the topic authority are going to win anyway. If you're really good at writing cold emails, like ah, are cold emails going to work in a world where AI generated cold emails are a dime, a dozen? I don't know. And so what marketing strategies I think are likely to work in the future? I think marketing strategies that enable the customer base to build a real relationship with the team and the builders. I think those are going to be durable into the future, because people want to buy a product that's from people they trust and that they know. And that's why I actually experimented with fully automating my YouTube videos and I got them pretty good. It could click around the screen, it could do the voiceover, it could generate the script. But I got some feedback that was like hey, we're missing you in the video, because they see me on YouTube, they see me on LinkedIn, they see me doing customer support, and so things that are based on building trust and a relationship with the team. So certain kinds of social media, certain kinds of content creation and then also kind of community led channels, because in a world where there's AI you know AI generated content everywhere it's kind of like when I need to find a plumber for my home, I can't really go to Yelp anymore, because I just don't really trust Yelp anymore. It's so flooded with reviews I don't know if they're meaningful. So what do I do? I ask my four neighbors I say do any of you have a good plumber? That you've worked? And I think that's the world. Software is going to go the way. Software is going to go too.

Speaker 2: 27:38

And so I'd want a marketer who really has great instincts in building community, building word of mouth, building advocates, cultivating advocates. So that'd be one thing I would look for. Are they aligning themselves to the kinds of marketing channels that I think are likely to work durably in the future? That's number one. Number two are they totally unafraid of playing with new tools and learning new things, like and in fact, their first instinct should always be is there a tool that could help me with this? And you know, there are people that we've worked with that are like that, and there are people that we work that are not like that. They're like I know my playbook, I know my way of doing things, I'm doing it. So I really need people whose first instinct is let me try to find the best tool that's available right now, and are always updating their mental roster of like here are the tools that are great, here's what AI can do, here's what AI can't do.

Speaker 2: 28:28

And then number three is I need someone who's a little bit more of a generalist, because I think companies are going to be smaller in the future. Cursor 150 million ARR with 22 people. Bolt 40 million ARR with 22 people. Bolt 40 million ARR with 17 people. Lovable 20 million ARR with 15 people. I might be messing up the exact numbers, but, like, spirit is definitely right. There are just going to be small, small companies with player coach generalists that are harnessing many AI agents to do a lot, and so those are kind of the three things I'm looking for. I don't really care if you've previously written a blog post that ranked on Google. I don't really care if you've previously run an amazing PPC campaign. I want to see that you can learn the tools that are going to enable you to do the right forward thinking thing.

Speaker 1: 29:12

It's a certain amount of curiosity and fearlessness and desire to automate and sort of systems led thinking that I think is going to win out in the end. This is awesome. We could go on. I want to ask you really quickly, so we have a few minutes. Here is your marketing story. You mentioned some of it like a lot of this has been founder-led and those sort of things, but you have this amazing video story. What do you think's real? How have you really done what you've done with the brand by yourself? Where have you seen success? I know some of it's been in the YouTube and on the video side of things. I'd love to hear just quickly talk about that success.

Speaker 2: 29:47

Let me tell you a quick story, and it has been failure after failure after failure. It's been really, really hard. So the book that really shaped my thinking in the early days of the company was the mom test. I highly recommend it to everyone. If you're in the early user research phase or you're looking for your first five or 10 customers, that book basically outlines a methodology by which you can talk to people and get real feedback, Because nice people like Kevin if I say, hey, Kevin, I've been pouring my heart and soul in this thing for the last six months what do you think? What are you going to say to me?

Speaker 2: 30:16

You're going to say I love it so cool. Let me know when it launches. So there's a methodology to kind of asking questions in a way that will give you the truth about whether you're onto something useful. And then I was able to get sort of our first five-ish, 10-ish customers just kind of through my network and using that interview-based methodology. Then the book that really shaped my thinking for the next phase was a book called Traction. It was written by I think his name is Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo.

Speaker 2: 30:42

And that basically outlines a methodology that says there's 20 or 25 different channels, from live events to paid ads to social media and what you should do is, at every phase of growth, you should experiment with the few channels that you think are likely to work at that phase of growth, and then you're gonna have to rerun this exercise many times as you reach different phases of growth. So at the first phase of growth, we were going from, like you know, the zero to 10 customers. The channels we picked were introductions through my network, finding people who had this problem on Reddit and interacting with them, and doing a little bit of like outbound on LinkedIn, based on people who liked adjacent products, and those got us from one to 10 users. But I quickly realized, like, oh shoot, those are not actually gonna get us for one to 10 customers. Going to individual Reddit threads is not gonna get us from 10 to 100. Like that's not gonna work. And so, from 10 to 100, we thought what could work for us? Partner marketing, because we integrate with a bunch of other tools Airtable Notion, smartsuite, et cetera. So if they list us in our marketplace, if we do a webinar with them, if we do a joint template with them we get some traction.

Speaker 2: 31:48

We built some basic bottom of funnel SEO blog posts. We tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work that I won't even mention here. We tried outbound, we tried a few other things that totally didn't work. And then those tactics got us from 10 to 100. But we were like, oh shoot, those are not going to get us from 100 to 1000. We sort of tapped out what we see as the opportunity and bottom of funnel blog posts. We've kind of seen what the ceiling is with partner marketing not going to get us from 10 to 100. And so we rethought and thought, okay, what are the things that are going to compound with our user base and get us from 100 to 1000? And we decided it was going to be a combination of social media. It was going to be a combination of social media, video content and then kind of community and partnership facilitation of word of mouth. And I've been posting two to three times a week on LinkedIn and YouTube for the last year and had no results. No results for the first nine months.

Speaker 2: 32:40

I can show you the chart of our YouTube channel. So here's our YouTube channel. I'll kind of describe it and I'm not saying we have some amazing channel. Now we're closing it on 5,000 subscribers, which is decent at our pace. But if you go to the chart of the historical subscribers, I'll show you the last year Our channel kind of just turned one year old and I'll show you the last year Our channel kind of just turned, just turned one year old and I'll show you the subscriber count.

Speaker 2: 33:02

Sorry for navigating through the whole YouTube UI here. You can see here. If you look at the last year, it was just flat, completely flat. From March to basically December Instinctively got up like six or 700 subscribers painful, painful, painful. And then all of a sudden we kind of found the thing that clicked. In February my videos got a lot a bit better. I was cross promoting them effectively from LinkedIn. We got a bit of word of mouth, the algorithm started picking us up and now in the last month we've gone from 1000 to 5,000 subscribers, and LinkedIn is a similar story. Let me show you this. Did your?

Speaker 1: 33:41

volume of videos.

Speaker 2: 33:44

Nope, nope. Volume didn't go up, it was pretty much two a week.

Speaker 1: 33:48

Great for you for sticking that out. That is unbelievable.

Speaker 2: 33:51

Some people would just go oh well, video's not working. Got Gotta let it go, that's great to see and this is where you know you really have to trust your marketing or entrepreneur intuition. Sometimes the right answers keep going and sometimes the right answer is switch, like I knew.

Speaker 2: 34:07

Outbound was not working and we had to switch. So look at this on LinkedIn I was posting three times a week this whole time Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. I had one post that hit December 31st, 23rd, the day before Christmas, and then I kind of figured it out and now I've got 5 million impressions like 4.7 million of them were in the past 90 days, and I have you know 800,000, 750, 600. And, and it goes, it goes down.

Speaker 1: 34:35

Amazing. I mean, that's. That's one of the, that's one of the most clearly product led growth examples I've ever seen. It's really fantastic.

Speaker 2: 34:42

And so I don't know what the lesson from that is exactly. I think it's a combination of find a channel that you believe in, that you think is going to work for you, and then just be ridiculously persistent and then, once it pays off, double down on it. So now LinkedIn is working for top of funnel, youtube is working for mid funnel, and so now I can just focus on those two channels.

Speaker 1: 35:02

That's awesome. What a great, a great story. Okay, there's so many things I'd want to ask you beyond that. We're running up against time, so I wanted to do one more thing. I haven't tried this before on a podcast. This is the first time I've done it on this, on this podcast series. So I put a question, into perplexity you would probably. I'm not going to tell you what the prompt was, because you're such a prompt expert, but it was something around. Hey, I'm meeting with Jacob, his founder. You know we're talking about a bunch of different things here. Give me one question I should ask him that is provocative, and so I'm going to hit send on this and see what it gives back to me. Hold to me, hold on a second. I should probably just grab my screen, but I'll just give it to you. Oh gosh, if you could go back to your time at Google and undo one decision you made as a product leader, what would it be and how do you think it would have shaped your entrepreneurial journey differently? That's completely unedited.

Speaker 2: 35:47

It's actually a great question and I have an exact answer for it. It wasn't a product decision, but it was a way I operated that really handicapped me for the future. I was the product lead of Gmail for six years and I ended that time with 800 Twitter followers Interesting. That's what was I doing. What was I thinking? A? I was way too insulated from our real users when I was in that position and I was looking at all the data and I was behind the scenes and I was, you know, interviewing small groups of users and making decent product decisions.

Speaker 2: 36:19

But if I look at the best product leaders, they are the public face of their product. They are on Twitter, they're on LinkedIn, they're making demo videos, they're doing interviews and they're directly interacting with users and, for whatever reason, google culture doesn't really value that or incentivize it or encourage it, because and I can see why like Google doesn't want a bunch of loose cannon PMs talking about stuff on Twitter because you can end up with regulatory issues and PR disasters and stuff. But when I look back at it, I was like what was I thinking? I was in, I had this platform where we had 2 billion users and I could have interacted with them more, both by way of getting their feedback and making the Gmail product better, and then I would have had that skill set and that personal brand that I could have brought through to my startup, because I now am up to whatever 20, 29,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 37:10

I've still got nothing on Twitter, by the way, but I had to learn all of this really painstakingly from scratch, and the only thing that actually spurred me to do it is my company's future depended on it. So I was like, okay, I better learn Now. It's not optional, it's required. And so what I would recommend to everyone in any role, whether you're at a big company or a small company or agency or consultant. In the way the world is moving, where people want to build authentic relationships with the builders or creators of the products that they're using, like, you got to get out there and you got to just put yourself out there. Make tweet, make LinkedIn posts, make YouTube videos, host webinars. Don't be afraid of looking silly. That was the biggest mistake for my time at Google.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Amazing. That's an amazing insight. Great question by perplexity. I take no credit, but man, that's amazing. Yeah, and there's a certain amount of courage. You need to put yourself out there. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time, so it's like I think the same thing. It's like, golly, I was doing all this stuff. What was I doing the whole time? Because it was behind the scenes working. It's crazy. Yeah to you, and I'm such a fan of. I think part of what makes your brand work is you're so enthusiastic and so willing to like share with the community. And it's real. You know you really want to do this stuff. So it's just, I feel, very fortunate.

Speaker 2: 38:22

I've always been a productivity nerd. I absolutely love this stuff, and I think the best service I can provide is to show the real. Show the reality, because there's so many demos out there that are very curated, and so I think you've you've seen a couple of my my live sessions. Like I make mistakes all the time, I mess up my prompt, I don't, I don't attach the right information, but that's the reality and so, and so I just want to show people yeah, I make mistakes too, and here's how I work through it when I do, because it's a when, not an if.

Speaker 1: 38:53

Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, there's a bunch of ways to get ahold of you. What's the best way to follow what you're doing in this space?

Speaker 2: 39:02

LinkedIn is the best beginner way. I post pretty broad content about how to use AI to help you get stuff done. None of it is too Relayapp specific, really, it's just general content on ways you can use AI. That's the easiest. And then, if you're ready to go one step deeper, I post very detailed YouTube videos 45 minutes or an hour about how to set up an AI agent for yourself. So those are the two best ways to follow along. But please feel free to DM me. You know ping me directly, dm me, email me at jacob at RelatedApp Like. I would love to hear your use cases, your feedback and any ideas of how we can make AI work effectively for you.

Speaker 1: 39:37

That's fantastic, and I've been through the YouTube videos, the builds, with you. They're very accessible. So if you're a marketer who wants to get into the stuff and you're thinking I can't do this, it is really easy. It's not hard to do. You just need to give it a try and you do a great job at walking people through it errors and all all the way, so it's fantastic. Yeah, Jacob, thank you so much. I am really happy to have talked to you. We'll have to do a recap a year from now to see how this all turns out.

Speaker 2: 40:00

I think the fun thing is yeah, a year from now, I'm sure two thirds of what I've said will look painfully out of date, but that's what's fun no-transcript and I'll be a different person, the company will be different and AI will be in a different state.

Speaker 1: 40:21

For sure. Okay, great seeing you, Jacob.

Speaker 2: 40:23

Yeah, thanks.

Speaker 1: 40:23

Kevin.