Marketers of Technology
00:00:00 · Malte Landwehr, Andres Figuera
[00:00:00] S0: When LLMs download your website to maybe use it as a source, they don't take the whole document. They take chunks of texts and score each of them and only use one or multiple of those chunks. Hey, [00:00:17] S1: everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Marketers of Technology. My name is Andres Figuera, and this show is brought to you by Front Lines, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're looking to launch your own show, we offer a full podcast as a service experience. You just show up and host, and we handle everything else. And with that said, let's dive into today's episode Because today, I'm here speaking with Malte Landwehr, CPO and CMO at Peec AI, a company that helps brands to measure and improve their visibility in AI search. So, Malte, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today. How are you doing, man? [00:00:53] S0: I'm great. Happy to be here. [00:00:55] S1: No. I'm very happy that you're here with us as well and that we're gonna be able to host this episode for you. So, Malte, just so that we can hit the ground running, would you be able to tell me a bit more about your background, how you came to become CPO and CMO at Peec, and then what Peec does in your words.
00:00:55 · Andres Figuera, Malte Landwehr
[00:00:55] S1: No. I'm very happy that you're here with us as well and that we're gonna be able to host this episode for you. So, Malte, just so that we can hit the ground running, would you be able to tell me a bit more about your background, how you came to become CPO and CMO at Peec, and then what Peec does in your words. [00:01:10] S0: Sure, sure. Long story short, when I was at school, I started building websites, people came to these, I discovered what SEO is and that search engines exist and PageRank and backlinks. So I started building websites, getting traffic on them with SEO. In parallel, went on to university, studied computer science, did a lot of machine learning, natural language processing, web data mining stuff. Started a PhD, but aborted it because I realized academia is not for me. Co founded an SEO agency, paralleled university, then worked a bit in management consulting, and then went to Searchmetrics, large software company in the SEO space back then. Stayed there for five years, had various roles in product and marketing. Then did in house SEO for five years at Idealo, the largest price comparison website in Europe. And while I was there, started looking into AI search, got super excited by the topic, and joined the Peec team when we were like, I don't know, five, six, seven people. And yeah, that's what I've been doing the last two years. [00:02:15] S1: Wow, and then Peec, is it still five to eight people or has it grown a little bit more?
00:02:15 · Andres Figuera, Malte Landwehr
[00:02:15] S1: Wow, and then Peec, is it still five to eight people or has it grown a little bit more? [00:02:21] S0: No, we crossed 100 people recently, a few days ago. So the last two years have been a bit of a rollercoaster in terms of growth. [00:02:30] S1: Okay, and how big is the team you have helping you out as CPO and CMO? [00:02:35] S0: So actually, I'm mainly focused on the product team and our research team. And Noah, our VP Marketing, is taking care of all the marketing stuff. The traditional marketing or growth team has around 10 members, lots of specialists for events, design, etcetera, etcetera. And then a few, a lot of specialists and then a few more generalist people. And then I have three people in research. So just trying to reverse engineer how AI based search and answer engines like ChatGPT are actually working. And this gives us input for both marketing and product development. And then in product right now, are so we have one person incoming and we are six without that one. [00:03:22] S1: Okay. So then you're mainly focusing on product then, not marketing? [00:03:27] S0: Well, product and AI search, basically, because what the whole company is doing is AI search and that is a marketing discipline in and of its own. And of course, as a member of the executive team, have my fingers in a lot of things. Just when it comes to the day to day operations, I'm not that deeply involved in every single marketing activity.
00:03:27 · Malte Landwehr, Andres Figuera
[00:03:27] S0: Well, product and AI search, basically, because what the whole company is doing is AI search and that is a marketing discipline in and of its own. And of course, as a member of the executive team, have my fingers in a lot of things. Just when it comes to the day to day operations, I'm not that deeply involved in every single marketing activity. [00:03:46] S1: No. No. Understood. Understood. Then now, Peec, I like... I love what you guys do in terms of that it's measure and improve visibility in AI. And how are you guys differentiating yourselves in a time when everything has to do with AI and everybody has some claim or some solution? Like how are you making sure that the brand for Peec is being visible to the audience and differentiated?
00:04:10 · Malte Landwehr
[00:04:10] S0: Yeah, so brand wise, I think what differentiates us from basically all of our competitors is the fact that we have 3% of the company just working on research, how AI search works, and that's not even including our data science team, that's of course also does partially that. So we publish a lot of educational content, a lot of news around this is what changed, this is what it means for your marketing strategy, this is a trend we are seeing with how LLMs are using user generated websites as a source, this is how ChatGPT six is different, These are changes brought by a new version of Gemini, etcetera, etcetera. So it's really a lot of creating knowledge and sharing that freely. And that is basically what we build our brand around. And then also from the very beginning, we put a lot of effort into data quality and into a nice UX, because at the end of the day, are software product, right? We are not a consultancy. So when people log into software, we wanted to feel nice, feel good, be fast, be responsive, look sleek, have nice animations. And I would say in the past, we were not always the fastest one, like shipping every feature first, but we always made sure to do it well and in a way that is actually sustainable. Since we have grown a lot, both in counts of customers, like we are very close to 4,000 customers now, we recently announced 70,500,000 ARR as our milestone, Team grew to 100 people. Nowadays, we are actually much, much faster than most competitors because we have also built a software in a way that we can react quickly. A few days ago, ChatGPT launched a couple of new models by API. We added them immediately. Yesterday, released a new... Like yesterday from the date of the recording, we released a new Gemini model. We sometimes are able to support a new model in less than twenty four hours without doing anything crazy just because we have a team that's ready to go and knows whenever that happens, they shift their focus. We also were, I think, the first one now to adapt to the new layout from ChatGPT where it's now often asking you a couple of clarifying questions with bullet points or showing more charts, this generative layout that they released together with GPT-six. We are actually now in a place where we can be very fast with our implementation.
00:06:30 · Andres Figuera
[00:06:30] S1: That is so cool, man. And regarding also the... Like, what you offer, do you notice that there are certain types of companies or industries that are using Peec services more than others?