Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:04:03 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:04:03] S0: Yep. [00:04:03] S1: Where it pivoted through a desire to monetize a consumer app. We started meeting with advertisers, which then pushed us towards video. And that pushed us into kind of going more down the media path, but we're trying to use software to kind of enable what had been a very human and capital intensive business. Yeah. And I I think, you know, the the business is still going. They're doing well. I stepped away in 2022. I come with that business to The US and stayed here in in The US through COVID. And yeah, it's really hard, you know, working with co founders across time zones is very tricky. And yeah, felt like the right time, so I stepped away in 2022. But really, yeah, Kyra, I think had I not worked on that business prior to this business, ProFound, there's a lot... ProFound's been a real rocket ship. And [00:05:04] S0: Truly. I mean, wow. [00:05:06] S1: Yeah. It's been it's been a wild, wild ride so far so far. And, you know, there's a lot of people telling me or us that I'm clever. And I think I would have taken that more on board and, you know, attributed more. I think it'd be it'd be easy right now to start to believe my own bullshit and believe that this is some, you know, this is some stroke of genius on my part. And I think if I were 24 doing this now, I would... And without that experience at Kyra, I think I would maneuver very differently. So I'm very grateful for that experience. Think it taught me a ton of very hard lessons, that first business. [00:05:43] S0: Yep.
00:05:43 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:05:43] S0: Yep. [00:05:44] S1: That have allowed me to keep my feet on the ground with this business and stay super paranoid and understand that things can get really hard. And understand that we're very blessed to be in this position and that there's a lot of timing and good luck that has allowed us to get here. And when you get presented the opportunities like this by the universe, you could say God. Yeah. You repay those opportunities by just working super hard and meeting the opportunity with an appreciation and a recognition for how lucky we are. [00:06:21] S0: I appreciate that mindset. First of all, I appreciate the admission that a lot of life is luck. And I've been lucky. I appreciate your point of it's luck and then meeting the moment with extreme amounts of hard work. And it sounds like having some things that didn't work as well helped you get to something that is working wildly well. So let's go back to Quickly Profound. The world is shifting pretty profoundly, dramatically underneath all of us right now. In plain English, AEO and GEO, which is for people who maybe don't fully appreciate that. What is that?
00:06:56 · James Cadwallader
[00:06:56] S1: There was the birth of ChatGPT in 2022, and everything was very generative. It was write an email to my boss. It was help me craft this poem, etcetera. It was a generative work. Around 2024, end of 'twenty three, early 'twenty four, what we saw was this inflection where radio's perplexity that pioneered connecting the LLM to the web and allowing the LLM to synthesize from the web to generate an answer. Replacing the need to go and browse the web as a human. Instead the TODR is what we saw in 2024 was people shifting away from BlueLinx search. And instead just asking an answer engine like Perplexity question, and then Perplexity will send agents, so you could say bots interchangeably there, to the web, browse the web, browse the web, and then pull together a synthesized answer with Citation, telling you where it went to get the answer from. Yep. We went all in on that idea with the understanding that information retrieval is one of the most important primitives of our species. Yep. Know, it began with sharing ideas around a campfire, then went through iterations of like newspapers, television, the internet itself. And you know, blue link search dominates the idea of information retrieval or dominates the the the category of information retrieval and seeing that disintermediated by bots, I don't need to go to the web anymore. I can just ask an answer engine light. ChatGPT, and it will send agents to the web in my behalf. It's this giant disintermediation. And what that... There's a second order effect that what that means for marketers globally is, hey, how is AI talking about my brand, products and services?
00:08:39 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:08:39] S0: And how do I help that?
00:08:40 · James Cadwallader
[00:08:40] S1: And then the next question is, what do I do about it? Yep. And then if you start to go, then we can tie this all together because there's basically three stages. There's, oh my God, this is a problem. Because the world is now using Gemini, Grok, ChatGPT, Claude to, Do everything. Do everything. That's where they, that's where people are getting information from. So how does my business show up? And do I show up? And then if you recognize that, then the next question is, okay, well, they'll log into ProFound and then we can show these brands, these CMOs, these marketers, this is how ChatGPT talks about your products. This is how Gemini describes your brand. This is the difference between Claude and Grok. And this is how it's changing over time. And this is why, this is where these models are going in order to answer these questions about your brand, they're visiting these websites. It could be Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, yourown.com, competitor's websites, comparison sites, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So we can give you the what's going on and the why. And then that leads us to step two, which is they say, okay, that's interesting. Thanks, ProFound. What do I do about it? Yep. My competitor's beating me, or I'm doing really well here, but I wanna do it better, or we're completely invisible in this topic and we don't wanna be because this is important. This is a new product launch. So the answer to all of those questions is just do more marketing, basically. And do marketing, a new kind of marketing, marketing that is designed to be consumed by an agent rather than a human. Yeah. It's like machine... Marketing for machines.
00:10:13 · Alexa von Tobel, James Cadwallader
[00:10:13] S0: You have a great example. It was the showerhead example where you were trying to buy a showerhead for your apartment. Can you just, like, give everybody that example? [00:10:22] S1: Some people get it. I'm seeing we moved into a new apartment around Corneff because of the Flatiron Building. The shower pressure sucked. Obviously, don't care that much about showerheads, so I just asked Chat. I'm like, hey, you know, I'm looking for a showerhead. The pressure's no good. What ChatGPT does in the background is it send... It's 65 different web searches. Yep. I think I was using thinking mode. I used 65 different web searches to synthesize a selection of shower heads for me. And if you compare that to the human experience, know, pre LLMs, the experience might be... I I would have been lucky to have visited two websites. [00:11:01] S0: Yeah, you're definitely not going [00:11:02] S1: to 65. No. So I think that the obvious thing that we're highlighting there is that agents are now consuming this content. And when they consume that content, look for different things. Our minds are influenced by top of the range, best in class, like these kind of platitudes. Whereas agents, when they're crawling, they're looking for all kinds of granularity. They're looking at weight to pressure this, this. They'll guide to the specifics and granularity and indexing on super. [00:11:31] S0: Would you say they're doing a far better job than we would do as