Marketers of Technology
00:16:25 · Jeremy Byars
[00:16:25] S0: So the market's interesting. Our direct competitors are generally of our size, maybe a little bit bigger, particularly when you go into some of the bigger utility software providers in Texas and further West than we are. And then you get the Oracles and people like that are also in this space. Obviously they don't care about it like we do. This is no shade to Oracle. It's just they've got a million irons and a million fires, right? So the competitive landscape is interesting and you don't want to on day one go after Target Oracle, for instance, as your number one competition. And I will never speak negatively of any of our competition, But I will say, it blows my mind how much every single year the feedback that we get is our customer service is number one. And know if they want me to say this, but I'm not entirely sure how we do it. And again, it's nothing against the team. It's just, that's amazing feedback year in and year out, unchanging. And you know how it goes. You roll out new product and maybe you miss a few things in the development stage and your service suffers as a result. It is negatively affected by whatever the product is that you're providing, but it doesn't seem to be the case here. But we've also had very good luck in rolling out good products as well. But yeah, our service, time and time again, when we, a marketing team or the support team themselves goes out and gets that feedback, it's incredible. It's incredible. And also too, I used to work in customer service, I mentioned at the beginning. So I understand how important it is to hear that. Because most of the time people aren't going to call you or email you on a daily basis because everything's going great. That's not why you're there. You're there to deal with the negative stuff. So it definitely makes me feel great to know that they seemingly always have that to look forward to. It's like once again, we're top dog when it comes to support.
00:18:24 · Andres Figuera, Jeremy Byars
[00:18:24] S1: That is so cool. And I love how you mentioned that you're not sure how you're doing it, but that just tells me that it's something that's coming naturally to the team and that you have an amazing team that is able to give the best customer service without actually having to work towards it. But it's something that's happening. [00:18:39] S0: Well, tell you, one of the things, one of the secret sauces is that everyone, just about everyone rather, on the team sounds like me. So you get that southern sort of hospitality and maybe that gives us a little bit of a leg up as it were. [00:18:55] S1: I love it because me as a Venezuelan, when I speak Spanish, people also get, like, that warmth and that hospitality that you're mentioning from the accents that we have. So maybe it just could be that. But it's so nice that you're getting that feedback and being able to just have that reassurance that you're doing the proper job. And Jeremy, another question I do have is, how are you guys leveraging AI to help you out in your regular day or with the work you're doing?
00:19:18 · Jeremy Byars
[00:19:18] S0: Yeah. So the development team definitely leverages AI to help with their QA testing and also with their what the product team will help with their basically as much as they can with their story creation and everything that follows after that and the acceptance criteria and all that, AI helps. I don't know in-depth how deep they use it. For marketing, use it every day. I have a very small team. It's me and one other person. I use it for copy editing. It makes me feel a little bit it saddens me. Let's just say sometimes when I've got three English degrees and here I am still making mistakes in my copy and having Claude or ChatGPT point out the most basic of errors. But also I use it for idea generation, of course, and also use it for image generation because sometimes you got an image in your head and then you sketch it out or you try to go into Illustrator or Photoshop and try to mock it up and it's just garbage. I can send it through Gemini in particular, but also ChatGPT has come a long way and have that sort of mock up display in a few seconds. And it saves me a half a day or more of work if it's a really important image like that. They have a long way to go when it comes to vector illustrations, I get that. So I use a lot for graphic design as well, or at least the early stage designs, and then I go and put it, like I said, into Illustrator or InDesign or something like that. But also, we're a HubSpot company, so HubSpot has a very strong AI component. So we try to utilize as much as we can with HubSpot's Breeze intelligence. Now some of it I'm less than warm to because it's not, it still needs work. But... And they know that. I tell them that any chance I get. So, yeah. So anything that's adjacent there around, like I said, the Breeze AI component of HubSpot, we try and do as well.
00:21:10 · Andres Figuera
[00:21:10] S1: Okay. I know. I understand. And, yeah, it's pretty much what I feel everybody's using AI for, but I love that you're doing, like, graphic design and image creation, but this is something that I felt since the AI started its whole boom, and it's the fact that anybody can do anything because the barriers of entry towards these different skills that we didn't have before have been lowered, and therefore, you can meet a product designer or a graphic designer halfway there with your idea, at least in a more tangible way, what's called, delivered to them, and then they understand a lot better what you need from them, and they can tweak it out, make it a lot prettier, or use their graphic design knowledge to really just then revamp it in a proper way. But it's
00:21:48 · Jeremy Byars
[00:21:48] S0: I so think that's the key point. I think what you said is really important because a lot of people, and I have a big background in graphic design, but a lot of people just immediately just cast it off and say, you're taking a graphic designer job and that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm giving them more time to do more work and by them I mean me. So at the end of the day, it's not like we're not hiring a graphic designer here because we're using AI. It's I'm not spending as much time on graphic design because I'm using AI. And it necessarily make certain parts of the job any easier. That is a pretty big misnomer. In fact, you can, if you're not a decent prompt engineer, you can actually take more time using AI. So you've got to be really good about knowing how to prompt. Obviously asking it how you should prompt is a good cheat code that people still don't all know about. And at the end of the day, we've gotta quit reacting with sort of revulsion that, oh, someone's using AI for graphic design, and then they're just, I have no time for that person. And it's like, guys, if if we didn't, so many other things wouldn't get done. And at the end of the day, the finished product isn't gonna be AI generated most of the time. Sometimes it will if it's something silly. On LinkedIn, I have a very different personality than my CMO personality, I'll say. And on a regular basis, I'm seeing these flyers and banners and such that were clearly 100% created with AI. I'm in no way, shape, or form advocating for that. But I am advocating for being smart with it and really looking at how long is it going to take me to ideate on this? How long is it going to take me to put out a decent prototype, even if you want to look at it from development and product standpoint? My goodness, why would you take days to prototype something when AI can do it with your instruction in mere moments?
00:23:42 · Andres Figuera
[00:23:42] S1: In less than minutes. It's crazy. And something I love to do is that I'm sick and tired of the AI gaslighting me, saying everything's amazing, or when I'm prompted to do something, it gives me this is what you need. What I love to do is then ask it to critique itself, and to let me know what it thinks it did wrong, so that I get it to learn from what it's giving me, saying it's perfect, and then find the flaws in what you just did because it's not possible that it always tells me that it's going to be amazing.