Founders in Arms
00:34:09 · S4, Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri
[00:34:09] S4: Well, AI doesn't have a good... [00:34:11] S2: As good a training set on mobile, for example. Because the code... The the mobile code bases of the best apps in the world are, like, not... They're not available for the world to see. [00:34:20] S0: Are we gonna open up to questions? Yeah. Yeah. [00:34:23] S1: We have forty five minutes. We're gonna do forty five minutes chat, and then [00:34:28] S0: And I've lost track of time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's been forty five minutes. Yeah. K. Yeah. There's someone else. Yeah. [00:34:35] S1: Can you repeat the questions? Questions? If because [00:34:36] S4: we we don't don't have have [00:34:37] S0: Yes. Yes. We'll We'll repeat repeat the the questions. Questions. Repeat Okay. The questions. Just stand up and shout them. [00:34:43] S1: Any questions, folks? Or me or us? I have a question for you, I wanted just to start. Like, you've been announcing this week. Tell us about what you've been announcing as, you know, I catch you over the first time. The bookstore sounds pretty cool. [00:34:57] S0: Well, the bookstore wasn't an announcement per se. We had... We were at a three day bookstore in Jackson Square. Okay. [00:35:03] S4: It was kind of it was kind of fun. [00:35:04] S0: It was, an activation because of our Mercury Books product. It was refilled as we got the ads and talks, and we were giving away books. Okay. I don't know how much it cost, but no one asked me. So I don't know. Don't know. What else did we launch [00:35:34] S2: So it's [00:35:34] S0: nice that
00:35:34 · Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze, S5, Rajat Suri
[00:35:34] S0: nice that [00:35:35] S2: you can just put in somebody else and Yeah. Take care [00:35:37] S0: of it. Alright. There's a question. [00:35:40] S5: Yeah. It was family, like, understanding how town is different than... Like, I use superhuman family, so in that perspective. [00:35:49] S1: That's our last part I sketched. Yeah. [00:35:53] S2: I mean... [00:35:56] S0: Well... K.
00:35:58 · Jean-Denis Greze
[00:35:58] S2: Sorry. I'm the high road. It's a pretty different product. Right? First, it's... It connects to all of your systems. It just starts out an email in your calendar. So it it automates everything. So I'll give you examples of things that people use it for. You are a... You're a restaurant in America. You have wholesalers that you're buying the things that go into the ingredients for your restaurant. Every month, your wholesaler sends you an email with a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet of the prices for the things that you've ordered. You will have... You'll ask your assistant, hey, what I would like for you to do is once a month look at the prices, tell me if there have been any increases in prices, and move those orders to a cheaper wholesaler. And it'll start doing that for you. And after a couple months, you're like, it's pretty good, but why don't you also look at other wholesalers in my market that maybe I should sign up for and so that I have more, you know, prices to choose from? And maybe it'll be like, okay, cool. Let me use the browser to do that. But our trajectory optimization is for tasks like that, so we're good at dealing with money and spreadsheets and things that you tend to use in work. It comes out of email because your wholesalers are going to email you their new prices and your bills at certain periods. That's one example of a thing that someone would use out of town. I know that Superhuman has some AI capabilities about email drafting and things like that, but we're much more full stack. So another example, if you're a recruiter on town, we have private data sets for recruiters. So you might say something like you have a new client that gets in touch with you, they're like, hey, here's a job rep that I would like for you to help recruit. And then you can have the agent be like, okay, can you do a market map for me?
00:37:40 · Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze, Rajat Suri
[00:37:40] S0: And we'll [00:37:41] S2: do, like, market map for you. And then you can be like, hey. I want you to put in this spreadsheet on Sunday a list of 200 new candidates that match the job description, and I'll review it manually. And then after you're done reviewing manually, you [00:37:54] S1: can be like, hey. [00:37:55] S2: Can you start emailing the candidates to see if they wanna talk to me? And... [00:37:59] S1: Helps solve business problems. Yeah. You know? [00:38:01] S2: And it... It's like it does all these kinds of human workflows that are coming in and out of email, your SaaS, your system of record, your calendar. Like, the goal is to automate as much of that as possible. And it's pretty simple to use, so non technical users are able to create those kinds of automations without a ton of work. [00:38:17] S0: I do feel like this is a tricky thing for you that everyone has, like, AI assistant and email, and you have to, like, try to differentiate, like, you know, where you are amazing when, like, everyone seems like they're building horizontal tooling. [00:38:33] S2: Yeah. The the thing is if you talk... If you're, like, in Cleveland talking to people, they're, like, [00:38:39] S1: so far from this. Yeah. It's an s f... Yeah. Everyone's gonna work [00:38:42] S0: on Everyone. This is weird. Yeah. No.
00:38:44 · Jean-Denis Greze
[00:38:44] S2: No. And it's it's totally okay. But, like, the the the the the question that I ask myself is the capabilities problem. And so I actually think on the capability side, meaning what can the assistant do, all the assistants will be able to do the same things. Because the harnesses will normalize more and more. Third parties will provide you the ability to, like, you know, shop online, order flights, deal with spreadsheets, all of those things. So right now, we're still in a period where the hardest matters, but long term, it doesn't matter that much. I think the places that are different is, like, what users are you picking? How proactive are you gonna be for those users because you're willing to go deep in the use cases? And then how do you market? Like, what what is... What is your go to market strategy? And so the reason why Town works is we focus on personas that are basically not Silicon Valley personas just by having a lot of users here. And our entire onboarding experience and our marketing is very good for those personas. So I I would say the recruiter example, it's like, if you're a recruiter in the Midwest as a small firm, and you see our ads or you see a LinkedIn post from someone who uses a product today, you click on it and you sign up for a product, the onboarding experience will make you feel much more like, oh, this is AI for recruiters. And you've actually never had AI for recruiters. And for them, it it doesn't feel like an AI system. It feels like an AI system for recruiters. And what we're working really hard to do is to make people feel like that in as many roles as possible. And the mix of product and marketing around that is why it's working right now. Will it work long term? And we'll see. Right? Like, I'm in the arena, and that's the best I can do.
00:40:28 · Rajat Suri, Jean-Denis Greze, S4, Immad Akhund
[00:40:28] S1: Okay. Alright. [00:40:31] S2: It's a [00:40:31] S4: question for all three of you at some level. The cost of development is close to zero right now, as you're saying with codecs, cloud code, and stuff. But when you're trying to build a product, it's about the product taste, it's about user feedback. What is the equivalent of plot code or codecs for that? How can you accelerate? And I know we have second brain. We are trying a few things. But is there anything that shortens the cycle in terms of product building or... [00:40:55] S1: Do you [00:40:56] S0: wanna repeat the question? I think [00:40:57] S1: the question... Let me see if I understand it first. You're saying the... Solving the problem of what to build, can AI help with that? Is that the question? Yeah. And [00:41:07] S4: how do you make sure that you're not adding another key in the... Not the keyboard, but instead [00:41:11] S2: coming up with an iPhone? [00:41:13] S1: Right. But how do you know if you're building the right product?