Founders in Arms
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?
00:41:13 · Rajat Suri, Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze
[00:41:13] S1: Right. But how do you know if you're building the right product? [00:41:19] S0: I mean, there's a reason humans still have jobs. I do I do think that, like, if you think about the product development life cycle from, like, come up with an idea, you know, or maybe even before that, like, talk to talk to customers, figure out what's the idea, figure out, you know, how are you gonna build it, what's in scope. Yeah. The actual, like, engineering part was the expensive part previously. Right? Like, you've spent maybe 80% of your time on the actual, like, coding, and now that's maybe, you know, 20% of the time. So, yeah, I think the rest gets more important. There are things that help with AI. Well, AI helps with the rest of it. You know, you can look at all your support tickets and, like, summarize it better. Maybe you can plug that screen into kind of linear, and then, yeah, I can have a go at, like, trying to do a prototype or something like that. So there are, like, things that are speeding up our process, but it's definitely not uniform. And, yeah, what we think about it, I guess, everyone's thinking about it. So, you know, what is the next biggest thing that you can credit with these 90% of the new coupon? Kinda squeeze all the bottlenecks. But it's not... I don't... Like, there's a magic answer to it necessarily. I think one thing that I think is important is that engineers do more and more of those other tasks. So, like, previously, because coding did 80% of [00:42:42] S2: the time, you would want
00:42:42 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund
[00:42:42] S2: the time, you would want [00:42:44] S0: an engineer to be kinda distracted by some of those other things. And now, like, you know, that's the small percentage you want