Inside The Pipeline: B2B Sales and GTM
00:18:33 · Tris Tusa, Nick Casale
[00:18:33] S0: And so what were you actually doing? What was the biz... Handoffs. Right? [00:18:36] S1: It was called handoffs, and this was early early ChatGPT. Okay. I think it had just come out. And I was like, it's funny in hindsight. The the entire thesis we built the business off was, like, so wrong. It's not even funny. Like, there was there was two there were two core thesis. One was true, which is, like, the handoff process sucks, and AI can make it better without it being painful for either the AE or the CS person. Thesis number one. Still true. Yeah. Thesis number two was, like, large incumbents will fail to add AI to their products. Okay. Might have Like, we could... That is like everyone has added AI Yeah. To their products. A bit wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were like, they'll never figure this out. [00:19:19] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Turns out AI made it quite easy for [00:19:22] S1: people to do. Wrong We there. I'll I'll hand up. That was that was dumb. But, no, it was... Mean, it still an incredible experience. Like, we did it for did it for two years, learned a ton. But I I I really learned intimately throughout that process Mhmm. That I loved growing businesses. Yeah. Like, I knew that. Right? But I took I took very for granted that the... There's a very... There's a huge difference. It sounds obvious, but there's a huge difference in growing from zero to one and growing from one plus. Because that zero to one is such a binary... The path from zero to one, as you know, is darkness and despair until it's A bit of bliss. Out. It's like, oh my god.
00:19:22 · Nick Casale, Tris Tusa
[00:19:22] S1: people to do. Wrong We there. I'll I'll hand up. That was that was dumb. But, no, it was... Mean, it still an incredible experience. Like, we did it for did it for two years, learned a ton. But I I I really learned intimately throughout that process Mhmm. That I loved growing businesses. Yeah. Like, I knew that. Right? But I took I took very for granted that the... There's a very... There's a huge difference. It sounds obvious, but there's a huge difference in growing from zero to one and growing from one plus. Because that zero to one is such a binary... The path from zero to one, as you know, is darkness and despair until it's A bit of bliss. Out. It's like, oh my god. [00:20:06] S0: We did it. Yeah.
00:20:06 · Tris Tusa, Nick Casale
[00:20:06] S0: We did it. Yeah. [00:20:07] S1: But you don't... You have no depth perception to one. Right? You don't know if it's, like, one call away, one feature away, or if it's forever away, and this isn't... And it's never gonna get there. Right? I think I have... So one, I think I I... It crystallized for me, like, give me something that's working even a little, and I wanna figure that out for sure for you. Like, I love that process. And working with founders that are way smarter than I am to, like, take something and help them really scale it massively, I learned that I loved that, and I built so much founder empathy too through it, which I think has been invaluable in this process. Because I definitely now thinking back didn't quite have that. Like, at Sendoso, was like, oh, like, founding AE. And it's like, you can call founding AE if you want, but, like, you're you're you're either a founder or you're Yeah. Yeah. Or you're just the first AE, my man. Yeah. There's a big difference because, like, you didn't go through that, know, the pit. Yeah. [00:21:04] S0: And then AirOps. I think it was late twenty twenty four when you joined? [00:21:10] S1: Two years ago. Yeah. [00:21:12] S0: Talk to us a bit about that because, like, in terms of the the SEO, GEO Mhmm. Well, the GEO, AEO space Yeah. Like, that was a pretty early move. I mean, you mentioned before where you guys were at in terms of revenue. What stage was the business at?
00:21:12 · Tris Tusa, Nick Casale
[00:21:12] S0: Talk to us a bit about that because, like, in terms of the the SEO, GEO Mhmm. Well, the GEO, AEO space Yeah. Like, that was a pretty early move. I mean, you mentioned before where you guys were at in terms of revenue. What stage was the business at? [00:21:27] S1: It was it was a series a business. There were two AEs here, but it was still... It was probably, I'm I'm gonna say eighty twenty SEO to AEO, and and even that's probably generous. It was probably ninety ten. [00:21:41] S0: Sorry. 90 SEO. Yeah. Okay. [00:21:44] S1: Yeah. Like, we were not Wow. I mean, not until well into the following year where people like... It it shifted. It went it went really quickly over the course of a year from SEO and people had curiosity around it. Like, it was it was not at the time immediately obvious that ChatGPT... In fact, I still remember there's a LinkedIn post I got ridiculed for. [00:22:05] S0: What was it? [00:22:06] S1: It was a shitty, shitty graphic of the ChatGPT traffic ticking up and Google traffic tipping down. And to be fair, it was a horrible, horrible visual that was like if trend... It was like, you know, sort of the trend line extended. [00:22:22] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [00:22:23] S1: Yeah. And it was like, oh, [00:22:24] S0: It's guys' era.
00:22:24 · Tris Tusa, Nick Casale
[00:22:24] S0: It's guys' era. [00:22:25] S1: It was like, ChatGPT could surpass Google by like... And it was like twenty thirty six. Wow. It was some like crazy faraway number and people still were like, that's not how this works. Like, that's total bullshit. But I'll find it. It's still... To be fair, it's still a dumb photo. But the premise... Like, even the premise is really cool, which is like, this can be as gig... As big as Google. I think in hindsight, the mistake... Like, Google's not going anywhere and I think that's the confusion. Think like in many ways, I don't think search is gonna be... I don't I don't think this next phase of search will be a monopoly. I think that to me is very clear. Search is gonna happen. If anything, think in the past couple we've realized that it's gonna play out on more surfaces than we imagined even. Like, instinct is gonna matter. Muse is gonna matter. Like, there's just... There's this proliferation of channels now from a search standpoint. And I think the good news is most of the core, like, you know, good behavior will be repaid across all of them to some degree, if that makes sense. [00:23:23] S0: It does. And ChatGPT now has almost like, what, 1,500,000,000 users or something. [00:23:29] S1: ChatGPT has reached in two years the... I forget the exact figure. The amount of users that it took Google, like fourteen years [00:23:38] S0: to reach Insane. [00:23:39] S1: In the daily active users. So what it, like, 1,400,000,000, you said? Yeah. I think
00:23:39 · Nick Casale, Tris Tusa
[00:23:39] S1: In the daily active users. So what it, like, 1,400,000,000, you said? Yeah. I think [00:23:42] S0: I think overall, I think it's maybe around a billion, like, actually. [00:23:45] S1: Yeah. I was gonna say, don't call [00:23:46] S0: me a bit too billion. No. [00:23:47] S1: No. And ChatGPT ads is already a billion dollar run rate business. [00:23:50] S0: Insane. Insane. If you could give the listeners, like, two... One one piece of advice when they're thinking about how to optimize their company for search in AI LLMs, what would that one piece of advice be? [00:24:05] S1: I think... I mean, perhaps cliche. I I gave I gave... We had this convo. Get off here. Yeah. Can I repeat it? [00:24:12] S0: Go for it. [00:24:13] S1: My advice is don't half ass it. Like, either do it and really invest and go for it. 80% of the investment will compound out to other to other things, and I'll and I'll give an example in a minute. But I think spending... I think trying to shortcut it as sort of like a growth lever is gonna get you nowhere. That's just what I've seen time and time again. It's just because it's many different problems that end up converging into this sort of how do I show up in search surfaces. Right? [00:24:46] S0: Yeah.