Marketers of Technology
00:15:44 · Tzvi Vaknin
[00:15:44] S0: No. I'm complete. I'm building this tool with another partner. And basically, as I mentioned earlier, the know how is the moat these days. And I've been operating on Reddit ever since 2016, 2017 when I was working for one of those agencies I mentioned at the beginning of the episode. And we were offering Reddit as a service back then. So I had plenty of experience with Reddit. Now, I talk with a lot of companies, marketing leaders, founders, whatever, And let's say 90% of them tell me the same thing. They tell me, yeah, we know that we... At least the ones that are targeting The US market. They tell me, we know that we need to be active, we need to be present on Reddit, but we don't know how, we don't have the human, the manpower for this, we don't have the budget, it's not in our priority, we have other priorities, etcetera. Put on top of that, the LLM frenzy, everybody are like, everybody wants to be mentioned in LLM, right? ChatGPT, Claude, etcetera. And OpenAI and Reddit have an agreement. ChatGPT uses Reddit more often than not when it comes to citations and mentioning brands, etcetera, heavily relies on those real world discussions, even though they're also subjected to manipulations, obviously, which Reddit are trying to fight. So it added another layer of urgency these days to come up with, we want to be on Reddit. Citotes, ChatGPT have significantly reduced the percentage of citations on Reddit recently. I'm pretty sure it will be back at some point because some people would listen and would argue. I'm pretty sure that at some point these numbers will get back because you really can't ignore Reddit. Reddit has always been there, it survived so many digital revolutions and people are frantic because LLM, but Reddit always had an organic power. Like, even back then in the 10 Google blue links, Reddit used to appear like very high, like top three, whenever whenever there was relevant discussion that addresses a specific query.
00:18:12 · Andres Figuera
[00:18:12] S1: Even with the whole GameStop thing from the company that people on Reddit started commenting about the fact that then they were gonna close-up GameStop, that the investors weren't believing in the company, and then everybody just rallied up via Reddit to start buying more stock, and then this whole thing happened. Like, Reddit has also had a super strong community, and I think that's why the LLMs were paying more attention to it. But it's being abused now by companies because everybody wants to be there. So I get why they would lower the percentage.
00:18:39 · Tzvi Vaknin, Andres Figuera
[00:18:39] S0: So ever... It always has been abused. That's the thing. And Reddit knew it, they always knew it. But right now they're trying to fight it more seriously, like for the last, let's say a year or so. Yeah, they're just throwing curveball after curveball. But for someone who's been operating for a decade, more than a decade almost, there are lots of unreasonable rules. You have the community rules like at the sidebar, right? But there are lots of context and lots of, let's say drops that you need to dance in between. So the platform that I'm working on resolves exactly these type of challenges. Like anybody, if you want to operate on Reddit just automatically, you can build it on Claude Code or whatever, Codex. But that's also the safest way to get your account banned. My tool basically provides you this in-depth analysis of not just sifting between Reddit and find the most relevant communities and letting you know where your brand should be mentioned, where are your competitive gaps, where are your competitors mentioned. On top of that, finding communities and discussions where you can find clear buyer intent. And on top of that, find and detect those communities and discussions that actually affect LLM mentions and citations, but it also takes into account those unwritten rules and the sentiment and everything around it to come up with proactive recommendations for you as to how to operate. [00:20:25] S1: Wow. That is amazing, man. That's gonna be super useful.
00:20:25 · Andres Figuera, Tzvi Vaknin
[00:20:25] S1: Wow. That is amazing, man. That's gonna be super useful. [00:20:28] S0: Exactly. Exactly. Like, I... It came out of a very genuine pain point. It came from dozens if not hundreds of conversations. So I was like, okay, let's do something about it. [00:20:44] S1: Yeah. No. And you understanding Reddit with your past experience then, it seems just like something that needed to happen for you to create a tool that really makes it a lot easier for companies to understand and predict and know how to act within Reddit. [00:20:57] S0: These days when you have the tools to build tools from from scratch without the headcount and the infrastructure cost, etcetera, that's that's that's the age of builders. [00:21:10] S1: It's true. Now we're entering a very particular and interesting time with AI and all possibilities that it enables, like single person companies are gonna be a whole thing in the next upcoming years and the... What's it called? Like, the ability for us to produce things that we weren't able to do before is gonna be unrivaled. It's it's... I don't even know what to expect because it's gonna be crazy. It's already crazy, but it's gonna get crazier.
00:21:10 · Andres Figuera, Tzvi Vaknin
[00:21:10] S1: It's true. Now we're entering a very particular and interesting time with AI and all possibilities that it enables, like single person companies are gonna be a whole thing in the next upcoming years and the... What's it called? Like, the ability for us to produce things that we weren't able to do before is gonna be unrivaled. It's it's... I don't even know what to expect because it's gonna be crazy. It's already crazy, but it's gonna get crazier. [00:21:37] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And because the the agentic abilities just become smarter and even more proactive. Like, it's not three years ago, you used to talk to a chat and you expected an output, but it was like, it was a passive reaction, right? They were waiting for you to operate them. Now these days, and we saw it like only recently with the launch of Rockbot, Instinct, openai. Whatever, like they're coming up with those proactive agents that essentially they will troubleshoot and pen tests and whatever the things that you're working on, you're building right now. They'll they'll proactively improve your your UX UI, find those flaws, connect those API calls that were broken or anything like that.
00:21:37 · Tzvi Vaknin, Andres Figuera
[00:21:37] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And because the the agentic abilities just become smarter and even more proactive. Like, it's not three years ago, you used to talk to a chat and you expected an output, but it was like, it was a passive reaction, right? They were waiting for you to operate them. Now these days, and we saw it like only recently with the launch of Rockbot, Instinct, openai. Whatever, like they're coming up with those proactive agents that essentially they will troubleshoot and pen tests and whatever the things that you're working on, you're building right now. They'll they'll proactively improve your your UX UI, find those flaws, connect those API calls that were broken or anything like that. [00:22:26] S1: I totally agree, man. I totally agree. And, Tzvi, I'm noticing we're almost at time here, but before I do finalize the episode, I did wanna give you the space for you to let anybody know who is interested in your services as a fractional CMO, marketing consultant, or even when the Reddit product tool is ready? How would they go about finding out further? How could they get in contact with you? What would be the best method for that?