The logo trap of selling outside Silicon Valley | AJ Goyal

Brett (0:00)

Does the CMO matter to you? Are you trying to influence the CMO, or is it more like the VP of Marketing Technology or VP of Marketing Analytics?

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (0:06)

When we go in with a pitch on agentic experience optimization, I think CMO matters a lot, because they can stop at the mine, they care about it. But when you go in a pitch with like, I'm gonna add a million dollar to your top line. I think CMO do care, they're more brand focused, but like head of growth, head of performance marketing, like head of optimization, these people become a more relevant champion for us. We are still selling into our marketing analytics or marketing technology. It's just that we moved from like D2C brand to consumer regulated industries.

Brett (0:32)

Why do you think you started to get so much traction in those, you know, regulated industries?

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (0:36)

A regulated industry, for example, a bank or an insurance take like a year to 18 months to close and as a founder, I'm always skeptical. Is it going to close? Is it going to get stuck at compliance? Are we ever gonna see any money from these guys or I'm just wasting my time? Typically, the ones that I'm talking about are healthcare, insurance, banking. They are that big that an optimization becomes very important for them.

Brett (0:57)

And how are you even trying to get people in the first place? Are you doing cold email, cold calling, LinkedIn?

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (1:01)

Yeah, so I think...

Brett (1:06)

AJ, welcome to the show.

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (1:07)

Hey, thanks, Brett.

Brett (1:09)

Are you having fun? You were a consumer founder, now you're an enterprise. Are you bored?

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (1:12)

Sometimes I feel I'm super bored. Right now, it's okay. There's some traction, some interesting things happening, so I'm happy right now. But at times, I feel I miss the energy of, or like the dynamism of the entire consumer market, the PLG flow, etc.

Brett (1:30)

I've had a lot of friends do that recently. I had a lot of few friends go over from their whole life in consumer. They go to B2B and I just ask them why. It's a good world, but it's probably not as fun as in the consumer world, depending on how you define fun.

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (1:43)

Yeah, I think so. My personal view is you always see the other side and you see it's greener and that's how I came in here. I was like, okay, I've been doing consumer CPG for 10 years.

Maybe I'm a good techie as well. And that's so chill, easy job. I just had to be on the phone and sell and nothing has to be done. And I came here and I was like, nope.

It's a lot of being on the ground, going and doing events, meeting people, wining and dining there. So okay, it's equally tough. So I think that's what my take is. I have met so many of my friends who say, oh yeah, I'm done with B2B. I want to go consumer. And they're like, what are your reasons? And I hear the same things. I'm like, dude, this is the reason I came here. And then you're going back to consumers.

Brett (2:29)

You always hear that. I have friends who are bootstrapped and they talk to venture backed founders. They're like, oh man, must be nice. And the venture backed founders are saying the same thing to bootstrapped. I think it's like you said, the grass is always greener no matter where you are.

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (2:38)

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Brett (2:40)

Let's maybe just introduce the company here for a second. So at a high level, what's it going to be do?

Ankur (AJ) Goyal (2:44)

So Brad, we solve for relevance in the AI world. And so when I say relevance, the whole idea is that if you think about 10 years back, everything is about brand.

We always talk about brand and its holdings and newspaper, and TV commercials, and then came this whole algorithmic world, which is meta Google, and where brand combined with algorithm led like ads, etc become important. Now, it's the world of AI, where brand, algorithm and AI relevancy has become important, right? And with AI, one thing that has happened is like, there's a lot of content that are pushed out. So brands are actually losing relevance because now they don't control what AI is going to say about them. People are trying, but it's not in their hand. And that's where we come in. We basically solve for relevance, especially on the own channel, which is your website or your app. And we make sure when a customer is coming from any of these solutions out there, like an ad or AI or somewhere else, we understand their intent context and make sure the web reflect that intent context to them so that they are more relevant experience for them and that leads to higher revenue.