SPEAKER_00: okay everybody we've got a great show for you today remember ai is changing everything it's moving at a pace that we've never seen and you need to listen to every episode of this week in startups because i am bringing a different ceo on almost every day to talk about this ai revolution today we have the co-founder and ceo of wizard it's spelled u-i-z-a-r-d it's basically jetter of ai you know build stuff for you but it does it for ui design tools so you can take a sketch on a piece of paper and make a pretty decent website in just minutes it's very impressive technology this is stuff that used to take you know days weeks and now it takes minutes it's a great interview and then we have another amazing segment for you kelly on my team who co-runs founder university that's our 12-week course she's going to show you we like to do some practical tactical stuff she's going to show you how to build a crm inside of notion we did this ourselves i can tell you from experience building a customer relationship management system inside of notion is brilliant and this notion crm that kelly is gonna do has saved us um i kid you not a hundred thousand dollars in software costs and it's made my team bionic this is a very short talk it's only 22 minutes but it's going to save you a ton of time and money and that's what the founder university series we're doing is meant to do it's a 12-week course plus it's a podcast today's going to be a great show you're

SPEAKER_01: going to learn a lot you're going to get inspired so please stick with us this week in startups is

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Chamath Palihapitiya: there are incredible ideas that have been floating around about you an individual talking to your

SPEAKER_08: computer and having the computer design and make beautiful things for you uh we saw this in uh star trek when captain picard would say to the replicator that he wants earl grey tea right well one of the holy grails of voice interaction with a computer would be to build an app or build a design something beautiful so instead of taking out photoshop or taking out canva or taking out any adobe figma all of these great tools uh bubble comes to mind um envision what if you could instead of learning all the layers and learning how to use all the tools and the plugins could simply speak and simply speak to your computer and have it build magic for you well we're going to see a demo of that today on this week in startups joining me is tony beltramelli he's an italian who grew up in france

David Friedberg: i'm a french that grew up in france you're you're you're a french who you're you're french but an

SPEAKER_12: italian last name as we're talking about confusing thanks for having me what what's the penultimate like

SPEAKER_08: or i should say the ultimate what's the ultimate italian dish that the french do just as well i'm always interested in these crossover dishes because the japanese do a number of french and italian dishes particularly well but what would you say the french with that italian dish the french do particularly

SPEAKER_15: well well you know what i i think i'm not going to be able to judge really well because my italian ancestry is just so far in the few in the past so you know but i would say anything with cheese i think

SPEAKER_17: both countries kind of nail it they nail it on the cheese front i agree i agree all right so you

David Friedberg: have a company called usard as in wizard am i pronouncing it correct usard fantastic jason okay so is it wizard or usard you know what we like to say whatever people like to remember it because you

SPEAKER_15: know ultimately that's what they speak you know that's what they say to their peers so we like to call it wizard internally but some people call it user some people call it uizards it doesn't matter

SPEAKER_08: okay so uizard.io is how you're going to find this uh app so you've been working on this for a couple of years now this isn't part of the chat gpt4 3.5 boom you've raised money um you know back in 20

SPEAKER_21: well you raised your series a in 2021 but you've been working on it for a year or two before that

David Friedberg: is that correct that's correct we started in early 2018 so it's been a while okay you've been at it for a

SPEAKER_08: a while and so when did you first become aware that ai could help with voice to product voice to

SPEAKER_27: product interface or did you just start free ai with voice to ui interface we actually so this this

SPEAKER_28: company actually started as a research project um so you know i have a computer science background i've

SPEAKER_15: always been frustrated by the way we were designing and building software and so all the way back it was not voice like or text to design it was like um sketches or screenshots to design and the idea was can we use machine learning to kind of like automatically generate design from my dirty napkin sketches uh or from you know a screenshot from the app that we pushed last quarter and kind of like automated design process and i was you know way before text to design was even close to be practical

SPEAKER_08: for productive use cases and so let's just do a quick demo of the product because i think once people see this they'll understand how far you've come from the initial idea so maybe you can share your screen and you'll have to support us remember a lot of people are listening not everybody's at youtube.com slash this weekend uh watching this episode but uh i'll help you

SPEAKER_36: sportscast it so here we are we're on a a simple screen and uh maybe you could start walking us through this

SPEAKER_38: yeah yeah so you basically select the device you you want to design for mobile tablet web um okay and

SPEAKER_12: you basically describe your project so we have a form and the form is asking you what do you want to design for mobile tablet or web which one did you select there i selected web um well except if

SPEAKER_38: you have a good idea but i thought it would be fun to generate a website for the all-in summit great

SPEAKER_15: let's do it all right um so then you described your project a website for the all-in summit which

SPEAKER_23: is a tech conference um from the hosts of the all-in podcast and then you describe this style you want

SPEAKER_46: to go after oh okay so how about cyberpunk cyberpunk i like this one cyberpunk i guess cyberpunk

SPEAKER_36: techie loss uh classic hollywood and uh modern post-modern los angeles

SPEAKER_18: i'm just throwing out wild stuff here let's go let's go for it um and generate you go get your second coffee of the day or whatever that is um and what is happening here because we just filled out

SPEAKER_08: a simple form with i think four fields or so three or four fields and then the ui wizard is doing

SPEAKER_18: something right now what is it actually doing so we've built some of the building blocks you know

SPEAKER_15: from 2018 and we have an engine to understand the concept of layouts within user interfaces we have a model that can understand styling and then all these kind of like work together um to basically generate the entire thing um and then we use a large language model to just understand the text and

SPEAKER_18: generate text so now we have our all-in website all-in summit the future of tech um buy tickets

SPEAKER_15: i don't know if this is not going to be accurate location san francisco i guess this is miami um

SPEAKER_08: but here we go it gave you some text like chat gpt might are using chat gpt for the natural language

SPEAKER_23: model or a different one for the content the the text in the content is actually a build with gpt3

SPEAKER_27: correct yeah got it okay uh so you have access to the gpt3 uh api but you need to get access to gpt4's

SPEAKER_23: api shortly we have access we haven't integrated yet in the tech you can see right now okay got it

SPEAKER_59: and so you'll you'll this will get dramatically better um as it keeps going from there but it gives us

SPEAKER_08: a bunch of different website designs um and these are classic website designs uh with a contact form and uh just various amounts of copies so this is going to start and it has here one of them looks like a more like a an itunes or a spotify kind of interface so you're just

SPEAKER_21: throwing different interfaces at us with different styles yeah yeah exactly and so once you're there

SPEAKER_15: you you're there you can basically modify everything customize it to your liking um the goal of wizard is to make design accessible to everyone so the entire editor will thought of you know thought as you do it needs to be easy to use if you can use powerpoint you can use wizard and so the the goal of other designer is really to overcome the blank page syndrome that so many of our customers are facing every day i want to get something to start from and instead of either blank screen for like you know an

SPEAKER_21: hour um and it actually pulled in illustrations where did these so we're looking at these illustrations and it has like a nice stock library i would say images of people walking around with their laptops and talking to each other um and uh you know some you know people like sort of

SPEAKER_08: collaborating around a desk it looks like these illustrations were those made in some stable

SPEAKER_34: diffusion or something are they unique images or are these pulled from the web from clip art libraries

SPEAKER_18: where did the images come from really good question so if the model actually also make his own prediction whether to use our stock imagery or whether to actually generate its own and so these illustrations

SPEAKER_15: we see here uh were completely generated by the model uh to kind of like fit the uh the conference

SPEAKER_18: um theme um so these are actually completely generated we we've basically fine-tuned our own stable diffusion to do that um and then you can see others that were pulled from unsplash or you know some

SPEAKER_08: of these online libraries got it now it seems quite random here uh as a starting point it doesn't feel like exactly what i asked for i don't see any cyberpunk for example so i have to give it a second round a third round and kind of do some reinforcement learning here in my mind is that built into the product yet could i pick one of these and say okay now let's work with this one but let's add some cyberpunk elements to it including the city of los angeles in a as the background can i just talk to it like that and give it more prompts and edit the screen or am i now just left with okay now it's time

SPEAKER_15: for me to start typing and moving stuff around no so what you can do you can't like type a new prompt directly in the editor just yet but you can use all the other ai features that we've built over the years so you can also say for example we could actually go and pull out the all in summit existing

SPEAKER_18: website um i use that as a prompt and use this as an example so all in summit i guess you already have

SPEAKER_15: one for last year dot com and it should be always yeah um and you can take take a screenshot of this and then go in with it and say you know what i want to create a new screen from the screenshot and then basically start from again something else and just a blank screen and this enable our customers

SPEAKER_23: to just you know not reinvent the wheel when you already have something to work for it with oh and import it as a mobile screen let me just do this again we want to build this for the web

SPEAKER_08: um fascinating so i could pick five websites i like on the web i could pick five other people's websites and say hey these are ones that are inspirational to me let's start with theirs so and that wouldn't be necessarily stealing it would be a starting point maybe and you'd have to make it

SPEAKER_15: your own starting point yeah exactly and so you know here the ai is doing the work in the background and then once it's is done we'll basically have all the elements from the screenshot editable customizable you can just change the color change the style change the the the copy and so if you're a marketing team or product team it's just so much easier to just you know kind of like modify what

SPEAKER_20: you already have tweak it to your own needs and then you know ship faster basically so you're going

SPEAKER_21: to make this so that each element i could do a prompt for right that's the next shoe to drop exactly instead of doing like a starting prompt i could say okay let's go to the contact page it

SPEAKER_08: opens the contact page okay let's make the contact page include uh your twitter handle and your linkedin handle and boom it adds those elements and i could just you know rework one page

SPEAKER_15: at a time with more prompts right or generate one screen like okay no we have build this flow i would like to have the sign up flow um you know improve with more you know attractive color for example and it will just generate that one screen for you and so you can see here we've imported a screenshot from the all in summit like 2022 and we can go ahead and just modify everything the text the the imagery yeah and you know it would have taken some a long time to recreate this in the design tool if you don't have access to the to the to the source file but now we can actually

SPEAKER_23: go ahead and change absolutely everything and we have done this in under like you know 10 seconds

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SPEAKER_08: fantastic this is very powerful people paying for this yet who's buying this are you and which market are you going after because it does seem to me that this is pretty early if i was a design snob and did this for a living i would be offended that you even built this product so some high-end person who is you know doing can't not doing canvas high-end person doing figma doing this for a living is like this is going to be more work than me just coming up with my own ideas and then i could see people who are really early they might just prefer using squarespace picking a template making something beautiful and being done with it so where does this land who is this product for because it seems like you're maybe too advanced for people who just want a simple website for their portfolio or restaurant or project and then maybe

SPEAKER_12: you're not advanced enough yet for the figma design head to want to give up figma or envision

SPEAKER_62: that's a great question so all customers are basically the folks that don't have the skill

SPEAKER_15: set to use figma or envision or adobe these are imagine like product leader head of product

SPEAKER_18: they're maintaining slack and just want to have an easy way to just put a few ideas together communicate

SPEAKER_15: to the team and then ship or a marketing team you are spinning out new landing pages new new ads and you basically want to have a quick and easy way to to do that and what we see every single day that these folks have a need to do design but they don't have any idea on how to use adobe they don't have any idea on how to sketch they don't know how to use figma and basically provide them with a better tool to kind of like turn their vision into some shareable ids that ultimately can be built by the

SPEAKER_08: product team fantastic so all of the business people who are not part of the design team and the wire framing team can now start annoying the people who will eventually do the work by coming to them with a bunch of designs that are 70 or 80 percent let's say of what the designers will eventually get to and so in in the way this is me as a ceo sketching stuff on a napkin and then handing it to the design team and saying hey why don't you guys run with this from here uh yeah pretty much i mean we see two

SPEAKER_15: things like some design teams are really frustrated to just get some really rough really weird requirements and would rather get like a design file that's kind of like workable so they can see where where are you going with this vision but we also see some teams that are like okay our design team is already way too overworked they don't have time for anything new so i'm going to go create this in wizard and then i will just give it directly to the to the developer who is who is going to

SPEAKER_23: implement it using their library of components and basically save time to everyone how do you make

SPEAKER_18: money subscription good old sass uh people pay uh you know seats per month depending on their volume uh first bus first uh tier the 12 bucks a month and then the business tier the 39 a month got it so

SPEAKER_08: if the 10 people on a product team want to use it 400 bucks a month 5 000 a year and everybody can make reasonable designs and go faster so have you seen anybody be able to let's say say reduce their workforce or um maybe fire their outside design firm because this was good enough for the non-designers to make product have you had those stories yet start and then what are your thoughts on you know uh the elimination of you know people having to have this as an in-house job

SPEAKER_15: function are you there yet that's a good question so what we've seen is startups that would basically not have to hire an expensive agency um to build their first mvp this has happened a ton so it's not someone getting fired is someone not getting the job got it um but this reminds me of logos like

SPEAKER_08: in the old days you would hire a logo firm you would charge a minimum of 1500 bucks probably on average 3000 maybe you know in high-end cases 7500 to 25 000 a series a a series a firm would typically take of their three or four million they might spend one percent of it 30 or 40k building a whole design a logo so here instead of and now we know everybody just makes logos on their own

SPEAKER_84: to start or they hire somebody for 500 bucks uh and they're done exactly yeah and it's done and at

SPEAKER_17: least you get something to start from and then you can iterate on it pretty cheaply as well got it so normally what would people would have startup spend making this sort of mock-up design

SPEAKER_21: over their prototype and then yeah we can compare that to what you're charging which for a startup

SPEAKER_84: would be i don't know five people times 40 200 bucks a year 200 bucks a month 2500 bucks a year yeah

SPEAKER_20: roughly we've seen everything from you know like agencies charging a startup like 10k to you know

SPEAKER_15: even more just to build like five screens mvp for a sas or like a mobile app which is pretty insane when you you know you don't even know exactly what you're building yet you just want to explore ids get the first few users or paid customers so it's yeah i like that i think you've

SPEAKER_34: figured out who your customer is this is this was the big question i had coming into our interview

SPEAKER_08: was who is the customer here i think actually that makes a lot of sense because there are design firms right now saying two thousand dollars for a screen we're going to spend three or four days on that screen we're going to spend a month on your project we're going to put you know we're charging you ten thousand dollars but we're going to put a hundred hours into it wouldn't put 200 hours into it it's going to be like 50 bucks an hour for us that's barely a living that's a hundred thousand dollar salary like that's what a great designer or at least a very good designer should get but what they don't realize i think in this calculation is now there is an easier way and then your customers just like the logo if the logo is 80 of what it will eventually be that's fine for now that 500 bucks is fine for now the 2500 bucks they're going to spend with you is fine for now this is a very smart strategy and it's not how did you come to figure out that this was your customer maybe let's talk about

SPEAKER_112: that and you also used raul vora from superhuman previously of reportive uh an amazing founder i've

SPEAKER_27: invested in twice and lp in his fund he had a really great product market fit machine blog post

SPEAKER_86: he did you read that so maybe you could talk about how you found product market fit how you made sure it was strong product market fit and found this group of customers so actually the product market

SPEAKER_15: fit uh engine um although rahul has been the one kind of like um turning into a machine uh the the core question of that survey is actually was done by sean ellis which is like asking your customer how would you feel if you could no longer use a product and then you know if at least 40 of them will say i will be very disappointed if i could no longer use a product then you have a measurable sound of product market fit and early on we know we've we've built an alpha we've built a beta and we've haven't invited a ton of people and we've measured um that very number how many people answer very disappointed to how would you feel if you could no longer use wizard and then we use this as a way to basically segment customers ask the right question and basically iterate when we started this company we thought we were building a tool for designer and developers and then we realized through this journey that actually people benefiting the most from the ai automation we were building worthy non-designers basically everybody else in the team so it's been kind of like an interesting journey building for the wrong people and ultimately finding that there is a market for the product we've built um but no although this was a great way to product to measure early sign of product market

SPEAKER_20: fit or like rhino or ultimate product market fit check or validation is basically long-term retention

SPEAKER_15: how many people keep using the product over and over again after 12 months after 18 months after 24 months um but this engine was amazing to start from when you don't have a lot of data and you kind of don't

SPEAKER_08: really know how where to go amazing yeah it's it's such a great question to ask and to just be absolutely brutal and honest with yourself if you've hit it yet um how depressing is it to deploy this inside of a company talk about how the emotional wreckage the reality of strong product market fit is

SPEAKER_117: in in terms of like us as a company trying to find product market fit you mean yeah because it's one

Chamath Palihapitiya: of these things where it's really hard is it not when you don't have it and it takes years to get

SPEAKER_08: to it so maybe you could talk about you as the leader of the company with your co-founder keeping your energy level high in the face of day week and month after month not having strong product market fit not having a product that people would care if it went away yeah and then eventually do you feel

SPEAKER_119: like you've gotten there that people actually really care uh that's something i was going to say

SPEAKER_20: like what's interesting about product market fit is that it's really hard to know when you know if

SPEAKER_15: you have it once you have it you know right you can see it in the data i just it just works and so

SPEAKER_23: when did you know you had it we knew we had it when we opened the beta in february 2021 and we saw

SPEAKER_15: the adoption and then we thought we and then you know you think you have it growth is is on the right direction and then you you hit another inflection point you're like oh no that's how product market looked like we thought we had it but it was actually just the early sign um so it's actually interesting

SPEAKER_08: how it goes in like phases um so that first wave was just people signing up downloading and then the second phase was this group of people who were just using it a lot was it the engagement that turned

SPEAKER_20: it over for you in the second phase people using it a lot people telling us that this is too cheap for what the value they get oh really that's an interesting sign so people telling you you're

SPEAKER_15: idiots before your pricing model yeah that was really interesting to hear as an engineering like background founder you know you're always too scared to charge too much you know i'm a developer i don't pay for anything i'm i'm spoiled by the market giving me free stuff yeah so realizing that oh people are willing to pay more for what we offer that was a good like instruction point like okay

SPEAKER_17: we found product market fit did you ask a follow-up question to those people who said it was too

SPEAKER_08: cheap like why do you think it's too cheap what would you pay for it what was their reasoning what what did they say i'm curious because this is something i have been working with the founders we invest in we invest in 50 to 100 new teams every year between founder university and the accelerator and direct investments and one of the great lifts we have as a firm is having candid discussions about pricing and man sometimes we will see somebody increase their price and usage goes up and adoption goes up and more people are interested in it because they were starting at ten dollars a month and people didn't see value but when it was 199 a month people put more effort in to using the product

SPEAKER_84: learning how to use the product they were more committed to it so maybe you could talk a little

SPEAKER_105: bit about your price discovery that's something that was the most surprising to me is how much

SPEAKER_15: psychology is at play when you when you discuss pricing and actually just we when we started we just had free and pro and just by adding a more expensive business tier had an impact on how many people convert to pro because they felt like okay there is a more expensive package i'll just sit in the middle just this trick helped also convert more people to pay and then to answer your first question when we you know got into a conversation with a customer and they were like this is too cheap of course we will ask you know what would you pay for it and and then try to figure out exactly where would be the falling apart like how much would be too expensive how much would be too cheap what do you think would be the right price and then when you do this for you know over a thousand of customer you start kind of have a ballpark of what the price should be but you know full disclosure our current price is still lower than what those discovery highlighted we should charge for because you know it's always a trade-off between charging and optimizing for revenue versus slowing your growth so it's kind of like i mean pricing needs to change on a regular basis um but it's

SPEAKER_08: always hard easy to say the good news is you know at the price you're at it should be sustainable for your company you have a company you tell me of 45 people and there's definitely you know 10 20 30 000 seats that are out there waiting for this product at 40 bucks a month and if you can get but 10 000 of them uh you know 10 000 times four dollars is 40 000 and add a zero if it's 40 bucks that's 400 000 and that puts you right in the break even space with 45 employees in my experience so somewhere between 10 and 20 000 paid subs your company's break even you're playing with the house's money you raised a bunch of money uh so you'll be in just absolutely great shape so i would just say the march to 10 000 and then you get the data right i mean that's the other thing if you charge too much you have less users you might be more profitable but then you get less data and you get less use cases so it's one of the things that has influenced me a lot is watching what happened in skiing over my lifetime it used to be 60 then 80 then 100 for a lift ticket i know in europe it's much different

SPEAKER_20: right way cheaper in europe you guys are insane yeah pretty much like and let's pull that would be a good resort like ski skiing is so expensive in the us it got so crazy if you walk up to a lake tahoe or a

SPEAKER_08: colorado resort now it's you know 175 250 dollars per day but at the same time they came out with the

SPEAKER_27: epic pass and the icon pass which are for just a local area just if you did colorado local or lake tahoe local might be four or five six hundred dollars for the entire year in other words on day

SPEAKER_08: three you're break even and then there are like no blackout dates and it's 700 let's say if you ski 10 days a year 20 days a year um with even one of those passes you're way into the break even and it's just extraordinary how it's changed skiing now there's so many people at the mountain um and they get the money in advance so they've discovered their own sort of sas model where you have to buy these yeah before the season starts which gives them they don't have to take loans or money to maintain the mountains they get the money in advance from the user base which was elon's big

SPEAKER_112: thing with taking pre-orders for cars right so it's all kinds of great learnings here i think i think

SPEAKER_15: the same with conferences that always sell the tickets you know uh on on the year before the

SPEAKER_17: actual when you're out yeah yeah exactly yeah it's a great way to do it it works yeah yeah listen we

SPEAKER_01: work with super early stage companies that my investment firm launch you know pre-series a maybe you got a couple of thousand dollars a month in revenue you've raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars maybe a million dollars right it's the early days year one or two of a startup and i'll be honest a lot of times startups they don't have their insurance they haven't set that up yet they haven't set up their accounting properly they're getting things cleaned up uh in fact i was recently

SPEAKER_00: had a great startup but they didn't have dno insurance that basically protects your directors and officers that's the d directors people on the board officers the people who work at the company right directors and officers insurance is super important so what do we do we send them right to in broker our friends over and broker are a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups you just fill out a simple application right and then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes four quotes four lines of coverage 15 minutes easy breezy lemon squeezy that's right they connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy and listen you might think oh it's too early to have insurance it's not that expensive it's not that complicated because in broker makes it easy so here's what i want you to do try and broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10 off their startup package at in broker.com twist that's in broker.com twist we love in broker i use in broker they're an amazing team they do a great job for startups whether you're in year one or year five go use in broker.com twist so what do you think about

SPEAKER_21: competition now that you have um you you've already started to see adobe has their own stock image um

SPEAKER_08: generative ai product canva lets you replace images and do some ai on them figma will obviously release things it's part of adobe adobe's got a big push on ai so how do you think about competition um when the world now is on to ai and applying it to every vertical and certainly applying it to design because generated design really is a function of topography copy images illustration and layout and not much more right so you know all of those things logos stock images those things are all being iterated on so how do you survive and carve a niche for yourself when all the big lumbering elephants are right behind

SPEAKER_38: you and they're going to release products i think the issue i have with products that are plugging an ai

SPEAKER_15: element on top when it's not built in or like you know where the product is not designed for being ai

SPEAKER_38: first you create this really weird user experience shift where the user has some really easy to use feature the ai powered feature but then they have to cope with all the complexity of the existing

SPEAKER_15: products and i create this really weird you know dissonance in the user experience and so the way we believe we have an advantage is that our assumption and our vision has always been to build you know an easy to use tool and then the ai element just becomes natural as an extension to that so i guess if those companies you just mentioned need to really want to enable ai inside of the product they're also gonna have to rethink the rest of the user experience because ultimately who's the user of this ai you mentioned it earlier if you're a professional designer do you want to just type text or would it be faster if we just create a screen from your existing library of components and so it seems to me that there is a dissonance between the user of this ai enabled features and the rest of the product and who that serves um actually canva is a good example i think they are the one that can nail it because they've always been an easy to use software you know and we are often called the canva for product design we do the same that canva did for marketing design for product design so they're probably the one that i think will just execute the best on sure this front yeah um

SPEAKER_59: but this is over your you obsess over your user base they pretty much will probably find canva too

SPEAKER_21: simple and they already think figma is too complicated so they probably want to have this ai first and the great thing is you can really cater to them and their needs in a way that the other products maybe

SPEAKER_15: don't and i guess something that's also interesting that if you are adobe you sell to designers but if you make design easy don't you replace or like get your own customers out of job you know what i mean so there might be this weird like you cannibalize your own customers if you are it is an

SPEAKER_08: innovative dilemma you're absolutely right wow what a great profound insight tony if you're adobe the more you incorporate ai the less you need designers and the less designers there are the less or the the two arguments would be the more like what you're saying there'll be less designers because or less dedicated design positions because everybody can do design just like now you don't need to have copy editors everybody can do copy with chat gpt four i'm pretty convinced between four and six the idea that you would need to hire a blogger or a copywriter or somebody to write a press release that's out the window i think anybody in the organization will be able to write a serviceable press release just like everybody could write something without spelling or grammar errors thanks to grammarly and you know just the grammar tools built into word processors so this is like a brave new world um and then adobe's customer base would have to shift from designers to everybody

SPEAKER_84: that's that's kind of a hard thing to do i think right while definitely yeah time will tell

SPEAKER_112: but that's that's that's going to be tricky to solve man it is going to be a brave new world and uh

SPEAKER_08: super excited to see what you come up with when chat gpt4 gets incorporated into the product and um plugins so have you started to play with the plugins that uh are available for chat gpt4 and do you have any favorite ones or crazy ideas that have inspired you since you started playing with the

SPEAKER_117: plugins actually we went really deep into the the plugin api because we wanted to figure out how to

SPEAKER_38: build our own but i i must admit i haven't used the plugin myself much i'm using chat gpt every day

SPEAKER_08: but not the plugin just yet do you think chat gpt is going to replace search what do you think the

SPEAKER_21: impact will be on search like have you found yourself using google replacing a google search with the chat gpt4 uh chat session oh that's interesting one i find myself oscillating between

SPEAKER_15: the two when i mean for programming i use chat gpt the qu i mean i need to tweak things but i will need to tweak things from google search either way but i find the level the the communication experience is so much better like hey tweak this that line was wrong maybe you should actually you know i can re-specify my requirements then code changes when i'm going for very specific information i'll still use google um got it but i think what what i find interesting as an entrepreneur is that of course seo and content is a big part of our acquisition play in the long run and no the big question is like do we keep optimizing for ranking high on google search how do we start optimizing for working high you know in a database that ultimately will be used for training chat gpt it's kind of interesting as well that the the entire game of seo is also changing for both companies um well what would

SPEAKER_08: the what's the point of seo if people are going to stop searching and just get answers and then the answers don't have links in them so it basically means you know and i think that's going to be the big rub that's coming soon which is uh i think chat gpt4 is going to be forced to put in citations to where they got information from as part of their reasonable uh negotiation with content holders because they just served up the entire web from what i understand um but they're not going to be allowed to use quora reddit youtube transcripts tweets facebook craigslist amazon reviews all of those are going to be siloed out and you're going to have to license that data so chat gpt's performance could go down because the model will have to remove that training i believe the lawsuits will be such that they'll say to chat gp4 we know you learned a lot now you have to go back to 3.5 and redo your

SPEAKER_21: model but you got to take out reddit you got to take out quora you got to take out wikipedia you got to take out this open source project and you got to redo chat gpt4 in chat gpt5 with citations and with a licensing deal and i think that's going to be the really interesting part have you played with

SPEAKER_114: bard yet do you have any early thoughts on bard.google.com i love google product but bard is not

SPEAKER_15: one of them i must admit it's it's it's it's so shocking to see that google was the one building

SPEAKER_18: trend the transformer architecture and then they got completely outpaced by yeah by open ai it's it's

David Friedberg: kind of sad to see i must admit um especially with all those employees all those employees and they

SPEAKER_08: can't build a better product yet would you say bard is where 3.0 is of chat gpt or 3.5 obviously it's

SPEAKER_15: not four it's hard to tell you as you know as a machine learning researchers is the fact that well google might actually be very secretive on the research now because of this and that's kind of like penalizing everyone so yeah that's kind of like i think the side effect that people don't talk enough about like are these companies still being willing to share the research with the open ar

SPEAKER_18: community if they are scared that someone will use it to basically um kill their business um it's a

SPEAKER_17: back to innovators dilemma we had the innovators dilemma with adobe with designers and more they

SPEAKER_08: innovate the less designers will be necessary in the world possibly is one argument um and then here

SPEAKER_21: the argument is yeah if google does a better job with bard then people do less searching and then less ads get clicked on because if you get the answer you don't need to click on an ad except if

SPEAKER_62: they figure a way to just embed the ad in the uh in the uh in the in the results that's what i think

SPEAKER_21: they're going to do i think they're going to put them right in the results so when you do something

SPEAKER_08: hey i want to design a world-class logo it's going to be like from this book you know world-class logos and this book and this article and those are all going to be paid links and then there'll be other you know somebody who bought the term logo design their ads and will say for more resources here's this this and this and it'll explain what that page is in a sentence so it'll give you 10 bullet points at the end of search that'll be like a really thoughtful description of the page that the ai will write with the link and those people will pay per click why wouldn't they pay per click to be at the bottom

SPEAKER_169: of your discussion right this chat is brought to you by these five related resources all right listen

SPEAKER_08: tony great job continued success and thank you so much if anybody wants to check out the product

SPEAKER_21: the url again is uizard.com all right europe-based company you're scattered all over europe from what we talked about and are you hiring right now any uh positions that you need to fill asap not at all we believe we have all the right folks until service b perfect all right i like it a little austerity

SPEAKER_08: we got the right team we just need to put our heads down and build it's not about the size of the team it's about the impact the team has absolutely all right uh continued success and we'll see you all

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SPEAKER_00: started for free okay everybody tony did a great job on the show you got a lot to think about but i want to get into some tactical work now kelly from my founder university team is going to show you a nice tactical talk on how to build a crm a database of people so you can manage those relationships inside of notion and by the way if you enjoy these tactical demos you're going to love the founder university podcast i'm going to put some founder university podcasts at the end of this week in startups so you get familiar with them but all those tactical talks are available on youtube or your

SPEAKER_86: favorite podcasting app just type founder university go subscribe if you want to rate it and write a review that would be super helpful to me i'd really appreciate that uh or if you go into the descriptions here at this week in startups you'll find all those links tucked away for you take some notes pay attention stick with us this is a great tactical talk hey y'all i'm kelly and in this episode

SPEAKER_181: of founder university the podcast we're talking all about setting up a customer relationship management tool or a crm for short as you scale your business you'll need to implement new processes to create visibility and avoid things falling through the cracks a well set up crm is a bit of work up front but when done well it'll save you and your team a lot of headaches so in my first full-time job when my boss left i was stuck going through her email to find important client information and all of the history that went along with each of those folks and i managed all of our major accounts i actually ended up with more email than the ceo and since then i preach that nothing should live only an email for this reason and this is where a crm will kick in and save the day for you so i've implemented various crms at about a dozen different businesses now and i'm here to share with you today some best practices i've learned along the way and some pitfalls to avoid all right in this session we're going to cover what to consider when selecting your crm how to set it up and we'll wrap up with the top four most common failures that will lead to a useless crm so you can avoid those all right let's go with literally hundreds of options to choose from how do you begin to narrow your search for the right crm here are three steps to finding the right tools for your team first up we want you to think through who will use the crm and specifically why they're going to use it so let's talk through a few use cases here if the crm is going to be used by your sales team and the goal is to streamline your revenue operations and create visibility into your sales pipelines then you should probably start looking at different sales crms there's really great options to choose from and these are going to have reporting that really largely focuses around things like deal flow and pipeline projections and having that all in mind and having it pre-set up for you is going to help you get a successful process at the end now another example here could be if the crm will be used by your customer success team so in this case they may be tracking ongoing relationships in which case you'll want to find a tool that focuses on that customer support and they're going to probably have features like chat box team inboxes canned snippets and even email templates that again are going to go back to helping that customer success team be successful in their roles and so you'll want to pick a tool that has that preloaded already all right another use case here is if your marketing team is going to use the crm you'll probably going to want to pick one that focuses on more robust marketing features like campaign tracking and has social media integrations and there's also a ton of other use cases so just a couple off the top of my head you may want to find a crm to track your investor pipeline or even your recruiting efforts and then once you've determined the who and the why you'll want to narrow down the search even further and a good way to think about this is thinking through the features that are non-negotiable for you so you may need to focus on an industry-specific crm which often will come preloaded with customer workflows that again are really specific to your industry so for example here you might have an e-commerce crm that includes let's say a cart recovery workflow preloaded that you don't have to custom create it's already in there and easy for you to set up with just a couple clicks again this is going to take out a lot of the customization and sometimes just entire roadblocks later on again if you go with that industry-specific option another great example here is some crms are actually going to be built out with even more specific features like hipaa compliance for healthcare companies again that might be critical to your business and the decision you make so keep that in mind as you're looking through the options up front and then there's going to be some multi-use tools that will have crm capabilities like your notion airtable google sheets that if you're looking for a lightweight option you don't maybe need some of these bigger workflows and customizations with the industry-specific tools that might end up actually working out well for you all right now there's no wrong answer to the who and the why and helping you pick those non-negotiable features but having a clear understanding of this before you jump into looking at the options is going to help you really narrow it down and not get lost in that sea of different options that again can be very noisy early on in this process and once you have this short list of crms that you want to consider you're going to want to be sure to set up a demo and ask a lot of questions so for example some tools won't offer support or a dedicated contact unless you're at a higher tier and having a human to ask questions to early on is really going to help you save a lot of time and energy down the line so make sure you get on the phone with somebody again ask for that demo make sure you understand how it's set up and the features it has and also the limitations that go into it a last point here i can't move on without saying this be sure you ask about costs at scale there are a lot of really great tools and most of them will have a freemium option and if you're not careful they get very very expensive as you grow so make sure you have an understanding of what it looks like for when you'll need to upgrade the package what that looks like for you and your business and what the associated costs will be again that way you hopefully won't have to move off of that platform later on and have to redo this process awesome so now you've selected your crm and it's time to get it set up and it's really important to understand how the crmu chose structures contacts and how accounts have relationships between the businesses and people within them so let's dig in since this is a really important part so for b2c companies you may only have one main profile for each customer and really no relationships between people and companies that you need to consider however if you're a b2b company you'll probably need to be tracking by the company and then by the person and you'll want to make sure that you can link people contacts underneath the company and understand how your crm you've selected handles these relationships so in each organization you might have one contact or as you can see in the example here you might actually have many contacts so for example you might have a decision maker that you want to keep their information so that in the future your sales team knows exactly who they're looking for you might also have another sales contact or a customer support contact who takes over the deal after it's closed you may even have some marketing contacts to get logos and approvals from right so there may be a lot of different people within this organization your team has to interact with we want to make sure there's a way to account for those within this crm and make sure that all of those relationships and titles are very clear all right another factor to consider as you're looking at these relationships and how your crm handles them one thing to consider is if you have parent or umbrella profiles that will be needed so sometimes when you're working with enterprise companies there'll be multiple divisions within that company you'll work with sometimes they act very similarly and you can lump them all under one organization like we just saw on that last screen however if they have entirely different processes different contacts and there's not a lot of overlap you may want to actually have these fall under one umbrella but act as two independent organizations so an example here might be like dell usa and dell amea under one dell umbrella but again visually and the way that the system should set it up could potentially be entirely different organizations under that parent company as you work this through with your customer support person at the crm you've chosen they'll be able to tell you the best way to handle these situations and how to make sure you're setting it up successfully okay we're going to dive into a few best practices for setting up company profiles so one thing that i always like to mention early on is to standardize your naming convention so set rules around how you're going to name each profile in the crm so for example hp might be listed as hp or you might always require your team to use the long form name hewlett-packard the the reason you want to think about this up front is because if you don't set rules and people aren't searching for the right uh names you could end up in a situation where you end up with multiple profiles and then having to dedupe this later on which is going to just create another layer of work and additional tasks for your team uh and so go ahead and get ahead of that by just making some standard rules up front on how you're actually going to name these profiles all right in these profiles you may also want to include some generic contact information for the business phone address or location you'll also want to include you know potentially billing information so that you have all of this information again out of email and into an easily searchable easily findable place so that your team doesn't have to go digging for this later on a few other fields that you might look to consider here are who is the account owner and also who is the salesperson you also might have some custom fields like status and health that we'll go through in a few moments when we go and do an example as well as some freeform notes all right now over to people profiles here are a few best practices for setting these up you should always include a field for the first name and keep this separate from the last name so that you can customize emails later on without having to manually change the first and last name into different fields from there you'll probably want to include details like department and title sometimes how you actually work with that contact again is this the marketing person is this our sales contact so that your team knows exactly who to go to for what questions and then here's one that i've seen also create a little bit of a mess address it seems like a simple thing what is a physical address for this contact however i've seen sometimes where sales folks or customer support people just trying to get it done rather than asking the question to the contact they will just search online and pull the corporate headquarters and if you're going to do that just know that if you decide to send holiday or thank you cards gifts later on you might be sending those to the wrong place again if you're not asking the actual specific question so just set up rules internally for what is going to be included and also what you're not going to include in each of these also if you don't plan to ever send anything physically by mail you might not want to include the entire address to save your team a few steps but you probably would still want to include things like city state country so that you could eventually pull a geographical report later on if that's something that is needed let's pause here and talk a little bit about custom fields and freeform notes because this is going to be really critical as you're getting set up and could save you a lot of headache down the line so i've noticed that folks tend to default to freeform notes when in doubt and unfortunately these should probably be used sparingly and i'll show you an example for why in just a moment instead what you want to do is think through the information and the data that you're inputting into the crm and really understand if this is something that you might ever want to track or report on if you think that it is something that you might need to be able to get an entire list of or again pull that data pull that report then you're going to want to enter this as a field or a tag because if it lives only in freeform notes you're never going to be able to pull that out and get that list all right let's jump over and look at an example together okay so here i actually have a just dummy customer crm that i created this morning to show this example you can see a few different things here one we've got a list of all of our customers and you can see just general top line information on these if i click into one of our profiles here you can see this information broken down in a bit more detail and a few things i do want to point out so again have a naming convention for the company have a status column that helps you understand exactly the health of these this account i like to do red yellow green because the coloring is really helpful when you're talking about this in a meeting to understand where you should spend your time so here we've got green is happy the client is in good shape we don't need to necessarily do anything yellow this is going to be for the accounts that need a little bit of help in the moment a little extra tlc and then i also have red here which in this situation is for your unhappy clients the ones that are going to need the most attention you're going to want to be able to pull reports and to understand exactly the health of each of these accounts as well as the action plan from there i always like to include an account owner so the person knows exactly who owns the account and who is the primary contact internally for them last day contacted follow-up schedule just to create some visibility that way if somebody in the company leaves you know exactly where they left off with the last communication as well as if they're able or if they've already scheduled a follow-up and when that will happen again i've included location here because in this situation i don't need a full address i just need to know where geographically they're located in the states i've got the sales rep here so again when in doubt if i have a question i know on the team who i can go back to because when your teams get very very large you might not know exactly who closed a deal at scale right i've got primary contact information remember first and last name should always be separate email title phone number and then i've included a few notes here so i have in the note uh the account first closed by matt in 2021 kelly took over account in 2022 now this is the type of information i don't necessarily need to be able to pull a report on but i also don't want to lose that knowledge just because i don't have a field for it so that's the type of thing that you can include in a free form note and then i've included also some call follow-ups so in this example i have an update from february 27th i checked in i shared the data on the conversations we're having and i linked the report that we covered with the client on that call and i've also included a note here that the client is happy and that they would like on our next regular check-in to cover the conversions from their entire program and we should review renewal options again this is really a helpful tool so that when folks get busy or again if somebody leaves the company you know exactly where everything was left off but again this information doesn't specifically fit well into a field and so that free form notes is going to be your key again use the free form notes as sparingly as possible if you think you might ever need to pull a report and run the data you want to make sure it is in a field or a tag all right before we leave this example i want to show you how useful being able to pull these reports is based on those fields and tags all right so you can see i have a couple other reports pre-populated here which my crm was able to do with just a few clicks and here you can see in addition to all customers i also can pull a report of accounts by owner and i can see who on the team is maybe reaching capacity on the accounts that they're managing and who has room to take on some new accounts you can also use this view again if somebody leaves the company to make sure that all of their accounts get handed off and nothing falls through the cracks you can pull reports by status again happy helping or unhappy so in your one-on-ones or if you have team meetings that you like to go through all of your customers for you can really focus your time and energy on the companies that are listed as yellow or red as long as your team understands those fields and is using them appropriately next up we have accounts by sales rep again just an easy way to see exactly who has brought in what and then i have accounts by location here just another way to show how these different tags can be incredibly helpful let's say i was headed out to the west coast i want to quickly get a list of all of our accounts that are on the west coast to reach out and see if i can meet them in person this is the way i'm going to be able to do that without creating hours of work for our team to research these folks on linkedin or wherever else they may be able to find that information go ahead pre-populate it into your crm and help yourself out next up i want to talk a little bit about internal ownership and workflows and this is really important to think through because when everybody is responsible nobody is and so you'll want to have answers to this as you start to roll this out to your team and getting them into the crm and using it daily so you'll want to have answers for questions like when does the profile get created who actually creates that profile who updates the profile and then who's going to pull reports and when again if you have multiple teams and departments using the crm this may differ between groups and there's really no wrong answer as long as you set clear expectations with the team and then follow up to ensure that it's getting done unfortunately i've seen time and time again we set up a crm folks get busy they move away from it and again when it's everybody's responsibility it's no one's and so if you want to have a crm that is useful to you and actually beneficial to your organization you want to have clear understandings of who is going to be updating these when that happens all right very quickly here once you get all of your data into your crm you want to start playing around and implementing the automizations and customizations that the tool you've selected has built in those are going to be the easy wins they're usually a little bit easier but you can also look to do custom workflows using tools like zapier and gpt tools again this might take a little bit more work and effort but if you can offload ongoing tasks and relieve your team of a little bit of that manual labor involved in managing the crm it's going to help them out in the long term all right last up we have the top four failures i have seen that are going to make your crm slightly useless and we don't want that to happen since you're going to a lot of work and trouble to get this implemented so these are the things i recommend avoiding the number one thing i see happen with crms is a lack of enforcement and frankly nobody really wants to spend their time doing data entry and updating a database i've seen this with sales folks customer support teams even the ceo managing their investor list they just don't want to do the data entry or they just forget to put it on their calendar and block time for it so as the business owner you need to communicate how important the crm is and set the expectation for how often it's updated the best practice is to update it in real time and have your team add 30 minutes to the end of every day to force the behavior and i promise this will work wonders if it's on the calendar and they have that reminder even if they miss one day it's more likely that you're going to have success more often than if it's not on their calendar and it's not top of mind they're going to miss it every time all right one more best practice with enforcing your crm you want to whenever possible default to using the reporting the tracking and just pulling up the crm in your team calls and your one-on-ones if you're defaulting to in-app use you're going to force the team to have the information updated there versus having it updated in two or three different places and then none of them are accurate and nobody's defaulting back to that crm so when in doubt open up the crm have that be the default view that you're looking at all of this information in next up on our failures is garbage in garbage out the crm is only as good as the data you have uploaded so you need to be maniacal about having your team put in accurate information having them update it frequently again hopefully on a daily basis uh or definitely weekly if daily is a little too much you want to make sure that you also have a process and a cadence for deduping and cleaning up the crm because eventually there are going to be problems there are going to be things that got duplicated and you're just going to need to spend a little bit of time to clean it up to make sure that it's as valuable as possible later on anytime somebody leaves the company ensure that one they put time on their calendar to clean it up to get all of their notes in there and make sure that the crm is accurate and then you'll be able to hand off those accounts and just assign it to a new owner and hopefully they can pick up exactly where the last person left off and not create any headaches for you and your clients all right our third failure here is choosing the wrong crm will lead you to endless customizations and sometimes the inability to achieve the goals that you set out to accomplish with your crm so as you're thinking it through as you're really looking at your different options at the very beginning of this process please be super mindful again of the who and the why for the crm as well as those features so if you're trying to enforce a lightweight sales specific crm but you're really trying to force it to do more robust complex customer customer relationships you'll drive yourself nuts and sometimes you just won't ever be able to get what you need with the views the reporting and the automations so again be hyper hyper diligent in looking at crms and make sure that the one you're selecting early on is going to be able to grow with you and will have the features that you need because you might not be able to build them in later even if you're willing to go custom and last here it's so important to focus on what is allowed to be included in free form notes and then what has to be labeled and tracked in fields and tags when in doubt make sure your team knows that the free form notes should be used sparingly and anything that you want to search or pull reports on now or years in the future needs to actually live in a field or a tag all right everybody thank you so much for joining me on this episode of founder university as we talked through how to select that crm how to actually set it up and then those four most common failures that i've seen that that will lead you to a useless crm thanks so much