Marketers of Technology
00:07:25 · Stefan Bader
[00:07:25] S0: Yeah. I think go to market is under a lot of pressure for all kinds of businesses out there, right? With AI that is flooding the the channels of the existing playbook, which makes it for many companies out there quite challenging, including us. And therefore, you have to find unique ways to not burn a lot of the capital you have or might not have. And therefore, we're trying to focus on channels we own that are quite efficient when it comes to CAC payback, so that we first make money and then have to pay and try to avoid ads at all costs. We have also initiated a pretty large brand campaign, which is quite atypical for a company at our size and stage, which is called the GTM10 Awards. Basically, an award where we set the stage to five different categories around go to market and award 10 winners each year from sales, marketing, customer success, growth and partnerships. And we have done this now the second year. This is I think something you either get right or you stop it after the first one. And the first year was quite successful and went viral, so we continued doing it. And it was still not free, right? It still requires a decent amount of capital with the bet that we can co finance that. And in the second year we got for every category, for example, sponsors in that basically are carrying the cost for this brand campaign, which now leads us to a still large brand campaign that is completely cross financed with partners we actually want to have joining us on the award like Anthropic, Fin, PKI, EpiFi and LaGrosse Machines. So like partners we believe that are leading in their fields in like different go to market verticals or that are helpful for operators in these verticals?
00:09:09 · Andres Figuera
[00:09:09] S1: No, of course. And if you're backed up or at least partnering with like for example, Anthropic, it really provides, like, it gives this... What's it called? If they're being able to trust you guys and clients you may find, then we'll be... We'll know that they can trust you if you already have people like Anthropic backing you up or Finn, and I totally understand that. And then what do the partners get out of being able to work with you guys?
00:09:30 · Stefan Bader, Andres Figuera
[00:09:30] S0: Yeah, so basically they also get brand recognition. Many of them, many of the partners probably needed less than we do as a smaller company, but they also want to be seen especially in these specific verticals where they have interactions with the winners and the jury. We're basically we're the one that sets the stage and throws the party, and then our sponsors basically provide the capital to do it well. We're doing all the logistics in the background. The jury itself is then the one that is picking the winners, so we as a company don't do that. But yeah, it's around brand recognition. It's about the winners, for example, and the category sponsors get a few seconds each on the pretty known billboard at Times Square. There's a lot of influencer marketing going on around this award. We have physical events with dinners, we just did two dinners in San Francisco, one in New York, one in London the last three weeks. So there's a lot happening around the award, we're trying to build up a pretty special and unique community, which is a pretty high value. If you click through the jury and the winners, you will understand what I mean by that. [00:10:37] S1: Okay, that is so cool, man. Yeah, like everybody wants to be at least have some time on Times Square where so many people are walking through that place every single day. And Stefan, another question I do have is now shifting the perspective a bit more inwards to what Cello is. How big is the company, man? And how many people do you have helping you out on your team?
00:10:37 · Andres Figuera, Stefan Bader
[00:10:37] S1: Okay, that is so cool, man. Yeah, like everybody wants to be at least have some time on Times Square where so many people are walking through that place every single day. And Stefan, another question I do have is now shifting the perspective a bit more inwards to what Cello is. How big is the company, man? And how many people do you have helping you out on your team? [00:10:56] S0: Yeah. We have 24 people in the team. We're pretty heavy on engineering and products, and then a small and mighty marketing or go to market team. [00:11:08] S1: Amazing. Okay. And how are you leveraging AI, not specifically with the Cello platform, but to help you guys out in your day to day task? Or do you have any peculiar or particular ways that you're using it?
00:11:20 · Stefan Bader
[00:11:20] S0: Yeah. On the engineering side, it's probably what many companies out there try to do, lean in as much as possible. Most of the code is already written by AI. We're trying to get more and more into agentic coding where also the specs and basically the whole development process is completely handed off models and also agents like Devin. We're investing in tooling where we're also rethinking about like how the product architecture should look like in order to make it faster and make AI make faster sense of what they should be what one should be building. On the go to market side, we're trying to because we're a small team, we're trying to lean in as much as possible in any given category or department. So customer success for example, we're and support, we're managing all our customers in Slack next to Fin and email of course, But that gives you a pretty good playing ground to leverage LLMs in to assess the for example performance of the customers in our products and then feedback suggestions and updates in Slack directly. We're on the marketing side, content is obviously drafted by AI, making sure though it doesn't be it's not detected and it doesn't read and smell like AI written content, so there's a little bit of curation happening as well. Video production, all types of materials we're trying to do that. When it comes to outbound, we have a complete engine built around because we're quite industry agnostic, we're basically going through all G2 software categories step by step, enriching lists and then putting that into a sales sequencer, reaching out as many relevant people, especially via LinkedIn automatically. So if you have gotten any messages by us and now you know how it works, happy to get in touch. And then we have one of our colleagues based on The Philippines basically replying and booking meetings with our AEs. So quite a lean and energetic setup on the outbound side. Yeah, there's just so many things. I think we're getting a few percent points better each month and trying to do as much as we can but still keeping a certain quality bar which is important that it doesn't that you don't land in sloppland.
00:13:31 · Andres Figuera, Stefan Bader
[00:13:31] S1: It is man. And I really take away what you mentioned that you really need to curate and provide the AI with whatever it outputs to you or gives you as content or whatever it does. You need to make sure that you apply your own taste and make sure that it is aligned with the company's branding, with how you speak, and that it doesn't read or feel as AI just as you mentioned. Because whenever I receive, for example, a message via LinkedIn that I can clearly tell it was written with AI, it's like, I dismiss it quicker than I can read it. It's just that fast that you can notice it, that it really is a bit more counterproductive, even though with all the time you may save by using it. And Stefan, what does a customer's journey with you guys look like if they are interested and want to find out more to work with Cello, to use your services? Like how would that look for somebody that is looking to to what you provide? [00:14:18] S0: Yeah. You simply come to our website cello.so. We have a complete self serve process, you can get into the product, play around with it. If you are if that is something that is of interest of you, you just plug in our MCP into your coding tool, if it's like Cursor, Devin, Claude Code or whatever, and glue our system together with yours in pretty short time and then you go live. So it's I think AI is beautiful for infrastructure companies like us because it reduces that effort to integrate by quite a lot. Or you can just book a demo and talk to a real human that that helps you with anything.