Marketers of Technology
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?
00:06:41 · Malte Landwehr
[00:06:41] S0: Yes. So when we started two years ago, it was agencies. That was our bread and butter. There were even cases where agency purchased Peec and then told us, well, we only bought this because our client wanted us to buy it because they wanted a software quickly and they didn't want to deal with their purchasing department. We have no idea what to do. Like we had never had an AI search client, no idea what to do with the data, please tell us. And then over time, it's shifted more and more that also in house marketing teams have started to purchase us directly. It's now more of a fiftyfifty split. And industry wise, B2B SaaS were the very first, because I think already last year, like most markets in B2B SaaS had realized, hey, people are actually asking LLMs questions to create a shortlist or to compare products on their shortlist. And so they have very early seen, okay, we need to do something. And also in B2B SaaS, there were companies very early last year that publicly shared, hey, we are now getting 15% of our new leads from AI Search. And a few months later, hey, we are now getting 20% of our leads from AI Search. So everybody saw this and was like, okay, we also need to do it. And then more recently, also travel has become a big segment. E commerce has become a big segment because of also the ChatGPT shopping feature. So actually any industry that cared about what Google said about them or that they ranked in Google, they will at some point also care about AI search.
00:08:11 · Andres Figuera, Malte Landwehr
[00:08:11] S1: That's amazing. And I totally agree because like, what's it called? AEO has been changing the game completely because people now don't go just to Google to look up stuff, but they actually just ask ChatGPT or the LLM of their choice about the decision they're making or how they should do it, and this is when the companies are trying to meet the customers in that journey. So totally understand that those that wanted to appear in Google now need to appear in AI. And Malte, is there a region or certain regions that you only work with, or is this a global service that is offered and anybody can use it anywhere? [00:08:45] S0: So what we are offering is global. We also support countries around the world. As long as we get a proxy server there, or actually multiple, we can offer it. Our main customer segment is in The United States. That's our biggest market. And then Europe is our second biggest market. We also focus our marketing efforts on The US and Europe, but we also we have customers from all continents. We have a few customers in Australia, in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, from all over the world. But we are not super active in our marketing outside of The US and Europe. And since our headquarters in Berlin, of course, we had a bit of a Germany bias, especially at the beginning, so it's still our second biggest market.