Marketers of Technology
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.
00:08:45 · Malte Landwehr, Andres Figuera
[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. [00:09:28] S1: Understood, understood. And Malte, when it comes to product and even marketing as well, how do you determine what features you need to change or you need to fix? Or if you want to open up something new, how do you test that out? And what metrics do you value to see if it's working or not?
00:09:44 · Malte Landwehr
[00:09:44] S0: Yeah, so how we know what to try? Talking to customers. Or also talking to people who did a trial and then didn't convert. Both product managers and members of the growth team spend a lot of time talking to customers, understanding what they want. All of these meetings are transcribed and notes are taken, and those are put in a shared Notion database. We actually built some Claude skills around this so that everybody has a very easy time finding customers to talk to, reaching out to them, getting a briefing before the meeting, having the meeting and putting the notes in there. And then we often see common themes that people want and then we react to it. We are also big on product analytics. So we see, we appear using PostHog and with that, we also see where's the product breaking, where people may be breaking off in the signup flow. And for example, our signup process, we iterated over it multiple times and have seen massive uplifts in conversion rate and then also in trial to paid conversion rates just by making sure people are enabled earlier and in a more automated fashion while using the software. Maybe an important context is we are doing both the PLG motion and the SalesLed motion. And the majority of our clients comes in via the PLG motion. So they sign up themselves. They go through a seven day trial. At the end of the day they either convert or not. But of course, our larger clients that pay us a 6 figure sum per year, they usually come in via our sales motion.
00:11:20 · Andres Figuera
[00:11:20] S1: And a question I do have, Malte, but I feel this is the essence of the business, but I wanna understand a bit better, but I know if you can't tell us any secrets, how are you able to get then brands to appear more in AI searches? Is that something you can tell us more about?
00:11:36 · Malte Landwehr
[00:11:36] S0: Yes, gladly. I mean, what do we do specifically? We define together with them a set of prompts. And then every single day we simulate a human opening something like ChatGPT or gemini.google.com in their browser, typing in that prompt, getting the answer, looking at the sources, identifying the brands and these answers. It all goes back into the software. So step one is you have a reporting, you know where are you appearing, where are you not appearing, and what source are the LLMs using. Then we also download all of these sources and check, is your brand mentioned in the source? Are your competitors mentioned in the source? And then the most easy thing we can give you is we can tell you, hey, these are content pieces that your competitors published that the LLMs are constantly citing. Please consider publishing something similar if you believe it fits to your brand. And we don't just do this for your website, we also do this for LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, like anything we can find. We also tell you, hey, there are these third party sources where your competitors are mentioned and the LLMs are citing it and you are not mentioned. So that can be maybe you are missing the G2 profile page, or maybe all of your competitors have an interview on Forbes and you didn't have one. And we make you aware of that. Or maybe there's a listicle from Zapier where you would fit in perfectly, but you are not listed. All of this information we give you. And then we also go one step deeper and recommend to you how to rewrite your existing content. Because 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 those one or multiple of those chunks. So if you have a paragraph where it says, because of the above mentioned reason for these types of users, the third solution is the best. If you take that out of content, this actually just contained zero information. So then we would recommend to you, hey, maybe reformulate this. Please write it in a self contained manner. Please specifically mention the entities you are talking about.