The Gold Coast Podcast

Can AI Really Replace Human Relationships? | Pedro Kroeff

• Eric Winegard • Season 3 • Episode 12

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 56:04

Everyone is asking the wrong question about AI.

The question isn't: "Will AI take my job?"

The real question is: "What will humans be left to do?"

In this episode of the Gold Coast Podcast, Eric Winegard sits down with Pedro Kroeff, CEO and Co-Founder of Tundra AI Labs, for a fascinating conversation about entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence, business systems, sales, leadership, and what the future of work actually looks like.

Pedro isn't selling fear.

He's building solutions.

After helping grow and eventually sell a successful technology company, Pedro leaped into entrepreneurship and launched Tundra AI Labs to help businesses eliminate repetitive work, reduce chaos, and create more time for the things that actually matter. 

But this conversation goes far beyond software.

They discuss:

  •  Will AI replace employees? 
  •  What happens to jobs when technology moves faster than society can adapt? 
  •  Why trust and relationships may become more valuable than ever 
  •  The future of sales, marketing, and entrepreneurship 
  •  Why some companies will thrive while others disappear 
  •  How small businesses can actually benefit from AI 
  •  Why human connection still wins 
  •  The biggest mistake business owners are making right now 
  •  How technology can give people their time back 
  •  What the next 10 years could look like 

One of the most interesting moments comes when Pedro explains that AI isn't just about replacing people.

It's about eliminating the repetitive work that prevents people from doing their highest-value activities. 

This isn't a conversation about robots.

It's a conversation about opportunity.

Because every major technological shift creates winners and losers.

The people who learn fastest usually win.

Guest:
Pedro Kroeff
CEO & Co-Founder, Tundra AI Labs

Instagram: @tiko.mail

website: https://tundraailabs.com/

Hosted By:
Eric Winegard
CEO of Rare Blue Moon Marketing

Thank you all for listening in on today's episode of The Gold Coast Podcast!

SPEAKER_00

So guess who my team is? We're gonna win it this year.

SPEAKER_02

I'm sorry you're a Knicks fan. A delusional Knicks fan. Nope. Well, you're not an OKC Thunder fan. Nope. Spurs? You're not from Texas. No, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Are you from Texas? No, no. I just, you know, back in uh I was born in '80. So, you know, 1989, David Robinson got drafted. He was like, Yeah, he was the big he was like the big deal for a little while. So I just fell in love with him as a young kid. He's amazing. And they were always really competitive and good. And then David got hurt the one year, so got him to get the number one pick in Duncan. And then the rest is history. Like, how can you not?

SPEAKER_02

They were the original Twin Towers in the 99 season. Yeah. And then you happened to just get Manu, Tony Parker, the best supporting cast. Like the movies. I love it. Okay, cool. The Spurs kind of have a it's a love-hate relationship because they've they just run the organization the right way. Yeah. Right? Like the leadership, top down, the fundamentals, Pop is the one of the greatest coaches ever. But you guys beat us so bad in 2014. Brutal. If you play pickup hoops now and a team just randomly like passes the ball well, what do the guys say out loud? They're like, oh, that's Spurs. They're playing like the Spurs. Yeah. Um, and that's still a meme on the court at the expense of Heat fans, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00

Not to sound like a sour Spurs fan. But if Ray Allen didn't hit that shot. I know. The Spurs are 12-3 versus LeBron in the finals. If Ray Allen misses that shot, that's that's how much they really had his number overall. That was the most insane sports moment of my life. That was wild. That yeah, do you know how heartbreaking that was for me?

SPEAKER_02

Probably more heartbreaking than it was euphoric for me.

SPEAKER_00

So well, because they were, you know, they they were basically winning a championship every other year. And then they got a little older. So from like 07 to 13, they were they just had like you know, the injury in the playoffs, or they just couldn't, you know, you started getting Kevin Durant in the league and Steph Curry and and Russell Westbrook and then you know LeBron's super teams. You know, the the competition just got like this totally. You know, and the eighth seed in the freaking Western Conference was Dirk Novitsky. Like that's how competitive it was, right? And they so they just couldn't get over the hump. So that year they they felt like the better team, you know, they're up three to two. Felt like it, yeah, yeah. And then, but amen. God bless.

SPEAKER_02

Well, good luck to you guys this year. I'm actually pulling for you, so yeah. I think they have a real shot. Yeah, they're electric. And you know, it it doesn't hurt to have 12 bucks a game from Wendy.

SPEAKER_00

No, that's the thing about him. I tried explaining this to my wife. I'm like, babe, the cool thing about him is there's never gonna be a team that scores easy on us. So even if we're shooting bad, it's a nightmare for them on the other end. You'll see all-stars approach the paint and just be like, eh, I'm gonna turn around here.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I'm just gonna kick it out. Yeah, it's just not worth getting embarrassed.

SPEAKER_00

He um, yeah, I think, and once again, I'm biased, but there's never been a defensive player like Wemby, not even close. No, you know, because back in the day when you had shot blockers, it was it wasn't a perimeter game, it was an interior game. So you were kind of always trying to get layups as much as you can. So it wasn't advantageous to shoot a 17-footer. You you wanted a higher percentage shot of layup. So, whereas today, though, the three-pointer is worth more, so they will take threes. But Wemby, he doesn't just sit down in the paint, he's roaming around and like like everything just kind of gets junked up with him. Nothing is easy around him, even when guys score on him, you could tell they're just like, how did I get that off? You know, that's cool. I I I'm fine, they're so good again right now, and they obviously have this bright future. Oh my god. Then I'm like the little kid again enjoying. That's amazing. Yeah, but I prove for the heat too, you know. Um all the year. Yeah, for no, for sure. Uh dude, the world-class organization. Yeah, you know, even in their down years of talent, they're always as good as a coach as anybody. Yeah. Yeah, and always well run, yeah.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. Well, we can talk about hoops for hours and no, it's cool.

SPEAKER_00

No, I love it. It's playoff time. Let's talk business a little bit. I I always like to hear people's like entrepreneurial journeys, but but I don't know a whole whole lot about Tundra AI Labs. Like, what break break it down for me. What is this company?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So I'll rewind a little bit. Okay. Um, for the past eight or so years, I had worked at a startup called Zendrive. We use the sensors in your smartphone to tell if you get in a car crash. So basically, just based on how your phone moves around, we can detect a collision. And then we partner with companies like General Motors OnStar and trigger workflows that will send roadside assistance or notify a family member. So we, you know, I was pretty early on that team, did pretty much every job other than coding. So I ran finance, ops, go to market, um, customer success at times. And then we sold our company to Intuit because Intuit owns Credit Karma, which was our largest customer. They have, you know, I think 50 million monthly active users on their app, and they decided to just integrate our technology into their app and kind of bring it all home. So once Zendrai was over, um, I looked around and I was about to have a kid. AI was just exploding, you know, in the last couple of years, and I thought now's as good a time as any to just take the leap make the leap into entrepreneurship. And so two of my close friends who are both software engineers and I um co-founded Tundra AI Labs, honestly, as a sandbox, as a laboratory for us to play around with all these cutting-edge AI tools. And we we realized early on, all right, we can build a lot of cool stuff, but why don't we focus on a specific type of customer? That type of customer was small business. I'm very passionate about small business, despite spending a ton of time in big tech. Uh, I wanted to go back to that and basically pull all these cutting-edge tools and have you know small businesses use them in their workflows to save time, to get better outreach to customers, um, you name it. And so we've been hacking away for the last six months or so. We've built a little portfolio of B2B small business apps, typically in uh in a SaaS or software as a service model. So you swipe your credit card and you get the tool, use it as much as you want, month to month, however it may be. Um so yeah, you haven't heard of us because we're you know, a small little indie dev shop. It's okay. But we have some big ambitions and we're we're just building a ton of cool stuff.

SPEAKER_00

Cool. So what do you do you have um like like what are the ambitions? Like what what is what is the I don't I don't want to say end game, yeah, but what are some of the current goals and ambitions you do have?

SPEAKER_02

So we started off building these very niche point solutions. Um as an example, a lot of folks who run clothing boutiques during the pandemic, they scramble to set up a Shopify website. And Shopify is great, it's a super powerful platform, but these are non-technical people who created a problem for themselves because they'd receive a PO or they'd go to a market and get a bunch of packing slips for new inventory, and then they'd have to stay into the stay up till 2-3 a.m., click, click, click in Shopify, manually adding every product. Anyone who's done e-comm knows there's a lot of like grunt work, admin data work. Yeah. Um got SKUs and everything, skews, variants, colors, barcodes, and then something doesn't talk to the other system and it all breaks down and the customer's unhappy. Anyways, we we built a tool where you just dump an invoice or a purchase order uh into our tool, which is called Ohava. Okay, and then it basically helps you create all those products in Shopify or Lightspeed or whatever system you're using in like two minutes versus two hours.

SPEAKER_00

Lightspeed.vt or whatever?

SPEAKER_02

Lightspeed is a point of sale um tool that a lot of brick and mortar like small businesses.

SPEAKER_00

There's another Lightspeed I know of, but okay, go ahead.

SPEAKER_02

It's a good name. Yeah. Um so we started off with that. Uh we have built a couple other projects, but right now we're exploring working with bigger customers, more like medium-sized businesses who uh don't just need a a simple point solution, you know, a simple SAS app. They actually want to, for example, make use of all of this natural language that flows through their business, whether it's through email or documents or support tickets. Um in a past world, uh data really meant like numbers and uh metadata fields and you know, things that are already structured. But the cool thing with AI is you can take anything as unstructured as it may be, like emails or customer support tickets, and now you can structure them and you can categorize them, label them, create workflows off of it that make sense for your business.

SPEAKER_00

So make a customer service department based out of AI. Is that what you're saying? Or am I you could yeah, no, that's I come from a sales background, not a tech background, so I always have to interpret it in my own language.

SPEAKER_02

You could certainly you could certainly do it that way. Okay. I don't think if you're running a world-class organization, you're just gonna replace the customer service people. But what you can do is make their jobs um focus on the higher level, on the higher value activities. Yeah. So rather than just comb through a million support tickets, maybe they like can now quickly triage and identify, oh, this is a an L1 customer or like a tier one customer, and I'm gonna spend an hour like really solving their problem and understanding you know what we need to do. So it's kind of vague and abstract, but uh, that's the the journey we're on right now is like taking all this crazy unstructured data and words and figuring out all right, what are some really useful ways to structure it?

SPEAKER_00

Very cool. So I let me just get this out of the way. I am very comfortable with knowing what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. And my skill sets are, you know, sales, running a sales organization, um, leadership, um, you know, and um and I understand marketing, which is I understand marketing, you know, damn near to a T, right? There's not a whole lot I don't know. Um the affiliate side, I'm I'm not an expert in, I'd say, but of course I comprehend it. Um, but then my weaknesses are are a lot of the things that you're talking about, right? So sometimes systems, workflows, and uh so I have to rely on really talented people, and I kind of just have to believe them, but um, but I'm I'm fascinated, I'm fascinated with you know the idea of of minimizing chaos in a company, right? That's kind of how I look at it, right? So minimizing the arduous chaos, minimizing the menial tasks that you have to do over and over and over that you don't trust to delegate to somebody because you know it inside and out. And I think what I'm realizing is that the world that you bring, and correct me if I'm wrong, is now you can take that expertise, train an AI agent. I don't even know if I'm saying it the right way. You are, yeah, and create a uh a workflow that's based on your expertise and have it be flawless and repeatable.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, well, very well said. I might have to snip that. If this is bro talk, this is bro science. So you said something really interesting there, the chaos. One thing we've noticed, um, granted, I didn't run a company in the 90s or early 2000s, but I've seen them in the 2010s when um the SaaS sort of explosion, software as a service, where instead of buying software that was on a disk or that you had to like have servers in your basement and run, you know, you could just swipe a credit card, get an awesome piece of business software to do your marketing or to do your CRM or to do your you know, email flows, whatever. Um, and it was so easy that companies just started like using all of them. And you get to a point where maybe you're a medium-sized company and now you have a hundred tools. And people move on from the company, right? So you're like, wait, um, Melissa from HR had downloaded, had installed this tool like three years ago. She's moved on, no one can even log in at this point. We're like still paying this vendor $30 a month. It created a bunch of chaos. Um, and I think we had now have an opportunity with AI, with agents, to kind of you know, massage it down and bring a little bit more order to that chaos. And yeah, that example you gave makes perfect sense.

SPEAKER_00

Well, because there's certain things that I do, like uh, for example, you know, my wife and I do the payroll. Every, you know, especially commission week, it sucks because you got to go through, make sure all the accounts came in and and make sure that uh, you know, the commission sheets are accurate and make sure checks cleared, and you got to do it for an abundance of people, and commission percentages change based off of different metrics. It's like a four-hour thing, and you're doing it fast then. Yeah, yeah. Because I know the numbers pretty well, but it's like a four-hour thing, and uh, it's a nightmare. But I could see something like that. Like, how much is four hours of mine and my wife's time? It's valuable, so I could I I would invest in um I'm fortunate I do have a couple people on my team that are very sophisticated developers, and you know, my cheat code is a Harvard grad that we have on our team. His name is Alex. Shout out Alex. But we're we're very in tune to these things, and um I'd be interested to talk to you offline a little bit. I'd be interested to have you conversate with Alex for sure. I'd love to see if there's a way to partner with each other, do business with each other, whatever it may be. But um, yeah, I think that you know, what what's your what would you say? And I don't know if this is relevant or not, but what would you say to what's your def first of all, what's your definition of a medium-sized business?

SPEAKER_02

For going by number of people, I'd say um, let's call it 100 plus. Okay. Sometimes people say 50 plus. I think uh as soon as you get to the have you ever heard of the Dunbar number? Yes. It's 150 people, it's that you can keep track of or whatever. Yeah, it's like villages, once it got past that, it was chaos, and you didn't you've all of a sudden didn't know everyone. To me, that's like roughly when you cease to be a small business is when you don't know every single person pretty intimately. Yeah, everybody's name.

SPEAKER_00

That's pretty good.

SPEAKER_02

Working definition uh that you put me on the spot for.

SPEAKER_00

No, no, that was because you're a a tech guy and you gave a very um a very thoughtful answer. You didn't give me a mechanical, well, that's 50 people and uh they do 22 million in revenue. No, it tells me you're you're more than you're an intellectual in a lot of ways, yeah, for sure. Um Okay, what's your definition? My definition? Yeah, uh man, I might steal yours. I have been struggling to define it. I really have because everybody has different, you know. If you ask, do you follow Alex or Mosey? I'm familiar. I think his definition is probably, I don't know, uh a little higher than yours. I think I think he thinks that that's still a small business. I I I think he would say a thousand employees, maybe five hundred employees, but I think he thinks more in terms of revenue. So he's probably thinking 50 million plus is probably a medium-sized business.

SPEAKER_02

That's pretty hefty. Yeah. I I think it's a little aggressive. It depends the context too, right? Like if you're a private equity buyout fund, your definition of all right, what's our mid-cap versus our you know larger set is gonna be different than someone who's running a boutique franchise. Yeah. Right? Like, I think it's very context dependent. Obviously, revenue and people at some level correlate because you can't you can't have a hundred people if your revenue is like, you know, sub a million.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um, but yeah, it's it's an interesting question. I bet everyone has like a very different answer.

SPEAKER_00

Well, and there's not a there's not, there's not, it doesn't seem to be a clear definition. I just find it not the most important topic in the world, but I do find it interesting. But what would you say to the average business under the Dunbar number? Okay, and uh a real SMB, right? A real or let's say a smaller business. What should their approach be today on AI? How how do they even know where to start with anything?

SPEAKER_02

Really good question. Um, I'll give you some principles and then if you want to work through an example, we can do that too. The first one is don't just automatically buy the hype. Right now, everyone and their mother is creating, I mean, we're guilty of this too, is creating some specific application using AI for a vertical or for a function or like a domain or industry, and they're shoving it in your face and being like, you're crazy if you don't buy this, like this is the future for retail or for you know marketing, whatever it may be. Um, I'd be very like hesitant unless you get to try it, unless you have a really good clear use of it. So that's like one rule. Okay. The second rule is definitely do just play around with ChatGPT or Claude. Don't upload everything, don't like have it make decisions for you, because believe me, you know your business much better than some general language model. But you'll find that there are little hacks, right? I mean, I'd be shocked if you guys didn't use AI at all for your operation, but I'd also be shocked if you just like submitted all your decision making to some model. I'm sure you don't do that. So you just gotta feel it out. It would be silly to just like totally bury your head in the sand, in my opinion, because uh I feel like this is you know as big of a technology as the internet, if not bigger. And if you just ignore the internet in 2000, you're probably playing a losing game.

SPEAKER_00

This is a philosophical question. It's probably a fun one. Yeah, this is but I but I but obviously I think you you'll handle it well. If you have somebody that's been working with you for 10 years and they make $65,000 a year, very committed employee to you, but that five or six thousand dollars a month can be can cost thirty dollars a month with AI. How do how would you recommend to uh getting an air contractor to make that decision?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, this is like those uh thought experiments where the train can go the train for have you heard of these? Where the train is about to go a specific direction and it's going to uh run over someone with certainty, or you can flip the lever and it'll take the other direction and it might run over someone, or it might run over m many people with like a 30% probability, and you have to just make a very difficult decision. Uh this one's less dark, I guess. So yours was yours was morbid. Sorry, it's it's a big uh AI case study. Um I I would say in that example, first, if if that person's entire job can be done with a $20, $30 subscription, what you should immediately do is like think about why they're still doing that job. If they've been there for 10 years, um they probably know a lot more about the business than just doing something that's like spreadsheet work that an AI can do. And I would say it's actually like a revenue generating opportunity. Be like, hey, instead of just like doing payroll for 40 hours a week and just like clicking in spreadsheets, why don't you reinvent yourself and work on our go-to-market or customer support or these things that still involve human bottlenecks where they can add value to the business? Um yeah, I mean it's it's obviously a very difficult human decision when you've been working with someone for 10 years. Yeah. But that would be my first inclination is like, let's really problem solve to find a higher value thing you can be doing. Maybe even it's training the AI to replace your old job so that your new job is more fun and productive.

SPEAKER_00

You know, so to come back to basketball, right? You know how they talk about, you know, it's the analytics era of sports, data, analytics, right? And uh so in that uh case study that I gave you there with this woman that makes 60 grand a year, that you could save money. Well, what the data doesn't say is how does that culturally affect the rest of your employees if you let someone go that's been there 10 years? Yeah. Right? So, so and and maybe advanced data gets there, but I don't think I don't think today in the MBA they have data that goes, um, yeah, this guy's uh really hates Anthony Edwards and he wants to kill him, and even though he's missed three shots, there's such a rivalry there that he's gonna make his next shot, right?

SPEAKER_02

Like, yeah, I don't think we have that.

SPEAKER_00

Right? So, so how how do you how do we how do we as business people and I'm and I'm not asking you this again, I'm just saying this rhetorically, like how do we, you know, decision making with all of these introductions of of AI and case studies, they're not easy. They're they're not easy at all. Um and and I do feel like just my observation with AI, like, um, you know, just use just use the searches. I mean, everything I'm reading now is that Chat GPT is bursting at the seams financially.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, open AI. Yeah. Well they they definitely bleed money, and yeah. People are still throwing all their money at them.

SPEAKER_00

Apparently they're gonna they're saying they're gonna run out of cash in six months or ten months, which is crazy. Yeah. Right? And then Claude comes out, and now it's Claude, the end all be all. I mean, it's it's like here's what I find fascinating about any AI and any application of it. You know, you went from blockbuster to Netflix, but it took decades for this transition to occur. Dude, these transitions can occur in months, if not weeks.

SPEAKER_02

We every technology that's spot on, and it's something I think about a lot. Um, again, probably not so much running my business day-to-day, but just philosophically, and well, my my son is eight months old, like what the heck is the world gonna look like when he's eighteen? I or just you know, when he's like two. Um it does change so fast. We've always had there's always been this, you know, economic theory that says when technology replaces workers, the humans figure out other stuff to do in more productive ways. So, like when computers came around, um, let's say in the 60s or 70s, companies had like a full back office of just people clanking on computers, basically doing like very manual accounting. Like like dozens of people. And then, you know, accounting systems came in with the big mainframe computer, wiped all those jobs out, but those people just translated to transferred to better jobs. But that was there was time involved. It took, you know, probably like four years to implement that accounting system. And then by the time you factor in all the human stuff, it's 10 years, and then you know, people are graduating college, and like it's very clear what everyone's gonna do a decade later. Yeah. AI is just instantly like leading to these massive headcount reductions. Um, the undergraduate sort of like job market is it's hard to tell exactly what's going on, but it definitely looks dicey. Like if you're just graduating college now and you want a coding job, it's way harder than it used to be. Uh so the yeah, the speed of change, I I I think ultimately you have to see where the puck's going, make some bets, but also just remember that or my my strong conviction is that the human relationships and things like trust, you know, you're trusting your team running your business, those things are gonna trade at a premium. For sure. So if you're an introvert, sorry, like you have to get better at talking to people and uh building trust and networking and doing some things that might be uncomfortable, but you know, you want to almost like preserve the human bottlenecks to business because that's where the humans add value and the robots can't quite take over.

SPEAKER_00

You know, there's um if you do business with somebody, you know, let's say company A does business with company B, I've always said, because I've witnessed this, where company A might be the decision maker of the contract with company B. And Company A has interviewed a few other companies. Sometimes they go with company B because of the connection. They both went to Arkansas together. You know, they're razorbacks. That's the connection, right? And or they're more likable, or they're more personable, or they gave them the warm and fuzzy in their sales meeting. You know, maybe these other guys, maybe they even have a better reputation, but they maybe were trying to hard close them, and it turned off this southern man from Louisi Louisiana who doesn't do business like that. So even um in the world of AI, I'm personally not intimidated by it because I I know I know my reputation is stellar. You know, I've been called a whole lot of stuff in my life, you know, but never unethical, never, never um never selfish, never um, you know, never not having a client's best interest at heart, right? So so I feel strong and I agree with you that reputation and character and you know, competence, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you can be an incompetent fool, but that it's gonna carry people through a lot of this chaos that's coming. Um and in sales, you still need a high-ticket closer. Absolutely, right? I don't think anybody's clicking a button for a eventually they will.

SPEAKER_02

Sure, for a Netflix priced subscription, okay. Maybe you don't need a a closer. But if I'm gonna drop, you know, 10 grand on marketing services, like I want to shake that person's hand and make sure that I can use my gut and tell they're ethical and have my interests, you know.

SPEAKER_00

We we run a lot of uh meta ads and we really hammer it here in Boca. Okay, and it's cool because here in Boca, people will come up to me and go, Oh, are you Eric Wanger, the CEO of Blue Moon Marketing? Yeah, it's me. Like, oh, we see your ads, we love your ads. It's almost like it's just funny, right? And I get people that compliment them all the time. And they say, Oh, we watched you and your wife on video, we love you guys. I'm like, wow. So um the element of branding is is huge, right? But watch this. So so we ran a this meta-ad campaign. There was an like an auto body shop that was an inbound lead. My salesperson, Phil, talked to them. Even with the trust that we had online, they asked Phil, they said, Can you we've been burned so many times by other companies? Would you please come to our office to shake our hand and tell us you're not gonna let us down?

SPEAKER_02

Great, you know, great for you because you guys did it, I presume. Of course.

SPEAKER_00

Of course, yeah. And it took three meetings still to get the deal, but but that's that's what I'm getting at is that this element of distrust is rampant, you know. Um, yeah, so I think so. Tell me, like, who the heck were you when you were 16 and 17? Oh, good question.

SPEAKER_02

I was going to high school just down the street at Spanish River. Okay. Yeah, so I always get a tinge of nostalgia. Coming back to Boca. I was uh so I was either the athletic one in the classroom, classroom full of nerds, yeah, or I was the nerdy one in the locker room. I think I was that kind of hybrid, um, loved sports, but also because I like, yeah. Also see You're a cool nerd. Man, that's the best compliment. I'll take it. I'll take it. Uh yeah, just growing up, I mean, like every guy was obsessed with sports. Just there's just no other outcome than being a pro soccer player for many reasons. It didn't work out, mostly because I was delusional and just not good enough. Wow. Um, but I I just sports has a special place in my heart because it teaches you so much discipline, teamwork, just like doing the same thing over and over and over again until you're decent at it and grinding through. Um and yeah, uh at 16, 17, I was failing with girls, looking forward to just you know going to college and starting something new, but no idea. It's funny to look back and you just uh are so naive.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Now, how old are you now? I'm 35. 35? Okay, still a young man. I'll be 46 next month. Wow. Yeah, closer to 50 than 40. That's that's an interesting feeling, but it's all good. Um so still in your prime. I feel yeah, for sure. For sure. Oh, for sure. No, no, I'm I'm I'm at my apex right now. It's awesome. Yeah, and I'll tell you from 35 to 45, I'll say, I don't know, something I really felt I can own a room even that much better in my young 40s. Because I think you can relate to the 28-year-old, you can relate to the 68-year-old in a lot of ways, right? Yeah. Um, so it's a good tweener, tweener age. Um, did you go to you went to college? Yeah, I did.

SPEAKER_02

I went to school in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_02

And what'd you study? Business, uh, entrepreneurship, now what year is this? Uh so I went 20, 2009. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

You're doing some coding and stuff on the side?

SPEAKER_02

You kind of have to when you're there. Okay, yeah. You definitely like feel it through osmosis, even if you're a business major. Okay. Um, that's actually where I met my two roommates who are now my co-founders. They're both way more technical, but yeah, we were all sort of into that.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, okay. You're the last technical one of the crew.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. I'm the one that comes on camera and uh does podcasts, and they're just hacking away.

SPEAKER_00

Cool. I love it. You know, drinking up for 24 hours straight on Ritalin or what what's the stuff that people take? I don't know. We do not take ketamine at the company. If that's the one you're thinking, yeah. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Cool. Late nights for sure, though. So so when did you guys, you know, like how did you you know, so so kind of walk me through. I uh one of the reasons I started this podcast is you run a business today, you have this bright future ahead of you, you guys are probably forecasting in the next three to five years, you're gonna achieve this, right? And I think one of the reasons I started the podcast is you know, I didn't even become an entrepreneur until I was 40 years old. And a lot of it was off of a lot, a lot of self-doubt. Like I was confident in myself, but I was confident in myself to be a great number two. I wasn't confident in myself to be a number one, right? And one of the things I want people to see and hear is that there's always this inflection point, I think that's the right way to say it, of where you're working for somebody, and then you go to working for yourself. And obviously there's anxiety, uncertainty, restrictions financially, uh, maybe restrictions physically. You never know what people are are going through. Um, maybe restrictions with your family. Maybe, maybe you want to relocate, but you now have a son and you don't want to, but now you have a broken marriage. Like there's a lot of stuff that's going on. Take me to the point to where you were maybe working for somebody to becoming an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_02

Great. I'm gonna go back to that 16, 17-year-old question because I didn't answer it well.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um, I thought the adults like all knew what they were doing. But now, fast forward, all right. So I'm in my late 20s, I'm working at a really cool startup, mission-driven. We have some awesome growth, and I've had the honestly like dumb luck to have really good mentors, super accomplished, smart people who I reported into. And even then, I was like, these are really, really smart, awesome people. They don't they also don't know what's going on. There are no adults, like no one knows what's going on. You know your own little thing, but um no one's got it perfectly figured out. And it was then that I kind of told myself, all right, if I I've I've learned a lot here. Um, I know what works, I especially know what doesn't work. And I think I have enough intuition built up, my gut's good enough now to where I can go out and do it. Because I always wanted to go out and do it, but like you said, it whether it's self-doubt or some flavor of it, you're always like, Well, I'm still learning at this other place, or damn, it's a good paycheck. Um at some point you just gotta like rip the band-aid off and trust your gut. So that's that's sort of that journey.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Well, unpack it. What what made you want to rip the band-aid off? What what was the desire you felt to take the risk?

SPEAKER_02

We so I I think I mentioned earlier we sold the company to Intuit.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And it was a great final chapter, great company that acquired our technology. Um in the meantime, AI was just changing everything in the software world. I was about to have a son, I don't know. It was almost like these factors just kind of bubbled up at the same time. And I said, Well, I could get another job, or I could I could try. It's a hard job market, but I I I could get something. I'd probably have to commit because I don't like half-assing things. So if I get a new job, I'm gonna grind, I'm gonna stay there for a few years, and then something else might happen. Who knows? Screw it. Like, let's just jump into this new thing, give myself some time to fail, to make mistakes, and who knows where it goes.

SPEAKER_00

So I have an interesting uh take on what you just said. I think we found I think we discovered something here.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

I and I'm not playing psychologist here, I'm just reporting data to you. Okay. Everybody that I interview on this podcast, the one common denominator is having children. That is the common denominator of when they decide I need to be better. Interesting. You s very quickly said I was having my son, and you didn't dig into it, but you probably felt a sense of urg more of a sense of urgency.

SPEAKER_02

Am I hitting on something? Well, the data point is fascinating because everything you hear is entrepreneurship is a it you just grind even harder than you did at your job, and it's definitely true. Um so you would it's counterintuitive to think as soon as people have kids, they're like, oh, now I'm gonna do this extra hard thing with a young child. Um yeah, I I think urgency is is probably right. I hadn't thought of it that way. The world moves so fast, technology is moving so fast.

SPEAKER_01

Hmm.

SPEAKER_02

I I don't have an answer for you, but yeah, you're a good psychologist.

SPEAKER_00

Well, that was what I studied. That's what I studied, so this is where my brain thinks like this. And and listen, I I think there's people out there, not to go the other way and not to discourage people, but I do think a common denominator the other way of why people never became an entrepreneur was mostly because the fear they needed the paycheck for their kids, and they get too late into adulthood, and you know, their girls playing field hockey and their sons playing football, and and they're traveling and there's and and they don't want to interrupt this financial um safety.

SPEAKER_02

Lower lower their quality of living. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. Whereas you, and and I want people to hear this, it's like you did it, it sounds like you you're like, oh, I'm about to have a fucking kid. Like I oh shit. Uh I better be the best version of myself. You know, you're that's 100% true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

I hadn't thought of the uh causation into entrepreneurship, but it's okay. Yeah, it's really good.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I like that you I like that you're I like that you're techie and um you're you you're a very human techie. Appreciate it. I like it. Yeah, and you're very likable. You whoever you do business with is gonna you're gonna kick ass with, I guess. So yeah. Um yeah, so tell so let's let's let's unpack this a little bit more today. So like so who's a who's a uh prime client for you? What's what are some of the challenges they're actually having in their business? And what what specific problems could you solve?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I can give you a couple of uh examples because like I said, some of the apps we've built are pretty specific.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

So I mentioned earlier the Shopify, you know, boutique owners. Honestly, a lot of times they're solopreneurs.

SPEAKER_00

Yep.

SPEAKER_02

Maybe their brick and mortar makes like mid-six figures in top line, but they can't really hire a full-time person to help them. They might have local college or high school students, you know, maybe doing social media or their daughter does Instagram. Um, these are people who are just time constrained. And so the fundamental thing we pitch, there's actually no mention of AI on the landing page of our product. It's get your time back. We had um the outcome. Yeah, exactly. We had this woman. Um, I was I still do all the demo calls. I literally we hop on a Google Hangout together, and for a very low-ticket item, I still like to do them because we're early. Yeah. And I'm like, hey, look at my screen. Here's what we're gonna do. Give me a sample purchase order. I'm gonna literally run it through live and show you how it saves you time. And she joked at the end, she's like, Oh, this is great. I'm gonna have my hot tub time back. And I was like, What do you mean? She's like, Well, my husband complains I never go to the hot tub anymore with him because I'm just staying up late, like filling in purchase orders. That's awesome. So I was like, love it. I'm gonna I'm gonna trademark that for other dumb.

SPEAKER_00

Hot tub time, baby.

SPEAKER_02

Get your hot tub time. Yeah, it could be a great ad. Exactly. So that's that's one flavor.

SPEAKER_00

Um And I could picture, I could picture a couple glasses of wine, you know, some RB music. Get your hot tub time. It could be a great ad.

SPEAKER_02

See, this is your meta reels, like brain. Exactly, yeah. You gotta send, get some video of that. Um the the other app that we're pretty proud of that we just launched is um it's basically an email assistant app called Tico. And what it does is honestly, we built it for ourselves first. I'm both building a bunch of products with my co-founders, but also doing basically all the sales and marketing myself, which is for someone who's not trained in it like you, it's a wild west. I don't know often where I should be spending time, which tools and which services I should be, you know, paying for. Um needless to say, my inbox is a total cluster. And so we built the tool that does a really neat little job of labeling and categorizing every incoming message that comes in so that I can prioritize it because suddenly like my days are just the time just goes away. It just disappears, as you know. Yeah. I actually have a fun fact about how I came to this podcast or became aware of this podcast through it. So we I would get hit up by vendors, software salespeople all the time, like 10 a day. And in my day-to-day, I'm I'm an inbox zero person, for better or worse. I'm a little OCD about it. So I would see something come in and I'd just like, I know the shortcut to just block and report spam. Block and report spam, like, get away. I'm I'm focusing here. So we created this filter for any cold outreach, it skips our inbox and it goes into a little folder where at the end of the week I would kind of browse it for three, five minutes, and I came across an email from you. And then because I was in that flow of like, all right, this is my five minutes in the week to look at all this inbound outreach. I looked at it, I was like, oh, this actually makes sense for me. I'm gonna hit hit him back up. Yep. Um in a it a month ago, I would have just deleted, like blocked you, sorry, because I knew the shortcut. Um so now you would have regretted now that you know you would have regretted it. Who have I blocked in the past now? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um but all that to say is really busy solopreneurs, you know, freelancers, people running small businesses. Yeah um again, it comes down to saving them time and just like giving them clarity. So that was one app where we're constantly pitching like the time savings.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, now now do you mind saying how much like what price point some of these apps are? Oh yeah, sure. So you said low ticket and everybody's got a different version of low ticket. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02

No, no, it truly is low ticket. So the the Shopify one is $35 a month. You just swipe it with your credit card, off you go. The email one is $10 a month. We do take on um some more like let's call medium-sized B2B clients who want to build customizations. So that will require some, you know, custom work and a custom quote kind of thing. But yeah, they're really lightweight tools. Swipe your credit card and go, and it just saves you time right out of the gate.

SPEAKER_00

Have you this is where my marketing brain goes, have you thought about buying a Shopify list and just targeting everybody on Shopify?

SPEAKER_02

Um yes. This is this is where I'm not an expert and it's a weakness.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um, there's so much noise out there, and I'm sure you've heard of these platforms who will do a bunch of like lead generation for you. Yep. Um there's pros and cons to each of them. It's a good idea. I haven't done it.

SPEAKER_00

Well, because data, so something that people don't even realize is the advancement of data brokers. You can buy a list for anything. Yeah. For anything, you know, and I'm sure there's a list for you know 90% accurate Shopify users, and just using that list and you know, using different versions of uh AI to target that list, you can probably even you know retarget them through Meta. Um, it's kind of a kind of a TF.

SPEAKER_02

We're starting to play around with it for sure. Um, yeah, it's a good idea.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Now, for let me ask you this is if you let's say you did this email thing for somebody with 50 employees, would that be 50 emails? So you right? So it'd be so you want some of those larger employee, well, medium-ish employees or better accounts for you, mediish, medium-level employees are a little better for you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, with larger plans, you know, and you buy it as an organization, there's discounting, like there's most software.

SPEAKER_00

I just always think marketing now. You can buy you could literally just buy that data. Yeah. You know, and I don't who would make those decisions? HR is like who's CFO? Who would make it?

SPEAKER_02

It's a good question. Depending on the size of the company, it might be like the the CTO or CIO, chief information officer.

SPEAKER_00

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Sometimes it actually makes more sense to go to a specific team. So like this this tool's really good for salespeople who just have uh inboxes like getting blown up.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Um so you can go to like the CRO or maybe uh a regional sales manager, depend again, depending on the size of the company as a way to hey, like get your AEs to just save a ton of time and and triage and like do their jobs better. Yeah. Um it depends really the the size and profile of the customer. Yeah, yeah. I mean, today the the bottleneck to our business is customer acquisition. Which, you know, a lot of people say that, but I think it's it's especially true today because we can build some kick-ass software, but we prefer to build it with someone who knows a space really well or who's saying, hey, like we needed this yesterday. That's obviously a better signal than mine.

SPEAKER_00

My thought is like if you're if you're getting a bunch of I don't know, um like a lot of these companies do free seven to fourteen day trials. I don't know if you do that at all. We do. Okay, right. So that's been a good way to get customers in. They test the product, they really like it. Like something like Fireflies that I use, I love it. I would never not pay for Fireflies, but it had to kind of be sold on at first, and you know, I don't even know what we pay for it. It's probably a company wide, I don't know, but um, but I think that if if I feel like if you were running ads, right, to get as many of those trials as possible, I feel like then that's your opportunity. Like, like I'm talking people that are like you not doing the call. Sure. Like just getting the landing page, buy now, boom, demo, boom, you know, customer testimonials, etc. And then and then now you're only doing upsell opportunities.

SPEAKER_02

100%. I've told myself we're doing non-scalable, unsustainable things with my time early on to get the product really good, especially with the shopping one. I understand that. Um, but yeah, you're spot on. Like the dream is to make all this self-serve. And of course, if you have issues, like we'll hop on in a support capacity. But um, yeah, doing doing demos for a $300 ACV is the math doesn't quite work out for me.

SPEAKER_00

Some of the stuff is six-figure customization too. Of course, yeah, easy.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Can I ask you a question about um your your marketing philosophy on this? There's always this tension of well, how much do we want to give away for free? And how much do I want to, you know, build a prototype for someone to prove that they should use our technology? Yeah. Right now it's very easy because we're a small team. My time is it's valuable, but it's flexible. Like I can just go and do whatever I want in a given day. Um do you find that it's worthwhile to be super flexible with potential clients? Or do you actually find that like you need to draw a really hard line and be like, listen, we will do this, but I need I need a contract for even the prototype, if that makes sense. I I need you to like commit to something before we spend more time on it.

SPEAKER_00

Well, let me let me re let me answer it in a very dumb, immature way. If you are a drug dealer and you have some new blue pill that uh makes you feel incredibly fun and loose for three hours, and then it you zap right into uh into normalcy and there's no hangover at all. You just you have a good time for three hours. It's like the world's best drug, zero side effects, you just get to feel buzzed for three hours. Okay. It'd be cool if something like that existed. Not for not for me, everything has always had a hangover, which is why I don't consume anything anymore. Um, but if you had that drug and you had different versions of that drug, the best version, the middle version, or the low version, and if you want to get people to be a lifelong customer, should you give them the best version of it or the lowest version of it? Because if you give them something really good, yeah, the best version, right? They're hooked. So, but I'm giving you one pill. So if we agree that it's one pill, no, you're not getting a second pill. That that could no, that's part of those are for my clients. Right. You know. So don't half ass it.

SPEAKER_02

Give the good one.

SPEAKER_00

I think so. I think so.

SPEAKER_02

But don't give it away for three months.

SPEAKER_00

No, no way. Yeah, no way. Yeah, no way, no way. Yeah. Um, now I I would really have to look at everything and like that's that's a really quick answer. Yeah. And it might be the worst advice you've ever gotten. I don't want to say advice, you're a smart guy. The worst uh perspective you've ever gotten. But uh, I'd really have to look into it. But in general, my my theme is like like this for us, this is like watch this, ready. You're I don't know if we'll ever do business or not. I don't know if you'll buy for me or I'll buy from you. I have no idea. But we invite people onto the podcast, we have $100,000 of equipment. They sit down with a successful CEO for an hour and a half, we then put them up on uh the long form on YouTube, we then cut up a bunch of shorts, we send all these beautiful photographs to you, and we just go nuts, right? And then two, three weeks later, you'll get this beautiful media package, and I'm gonna send it to you. And it's not unethical, it's it's the hopes that in a month or two, whenever you come to a point where you're like, I really need digital marketing, you know, wait a minute. These guys, look what they just freaking put together. They gave me one blue pill. Gave you one blue pill. That's it. No more, no more. And listen, people sometimes ask, oh, can I have this and that? I go, Oh, that's that's reserved for our clients. So I don't know if that was a good take or a bad thing.

SPEAKER_02

No, I you brought it home.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, a little bit.

SPEAKER_02

I do have another random tactical. Yeah, fire away. Um feedback I've gotten for some of these products that clearly will have to be ad driven, right? Because I can't just go and do the demo myself forever. The advice I've gotten, and I'm not a big social media person, but is the user-generated content and um even low production video outperforms even the most beautiful high production sort of like copy or static ad. And it's something I never would have guessed, but is that is that true? Uh does it resonate with some of your clients?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, there's a lot of caveats here. Um, you know, if you're um if you're the rock and you're promoting I don't know, some new movie, I don't know, like no, no, no, high production, right? If you're um if you're watching basketball highlights, some of those edits, you ever scroll down TikTok or anything? Yeah, sure. They're they're awesome. Like they're world-class editors, okay. What we have seen is that the organic, like, there's even a hook right now that people are using with their phone. They literally, rather than saying into the phone, hey, three reasons why you should do this, the hook is the movement of the phone. Wow. So that's a hook, and you hear it, it goes ultra realistic, ultra, right? So now, yes, there's an element to that, and yes, a lot of the organic content hits. And that was mostly only on TikTok. What we saw is that the polished content was really working on Instagram, but we have seen that the organic content is now prevalent on Instagram, and it's just like this year yearning for authenticity, but there still needs to be creativity, right? Okay, so so we can make so if the question is super polished versus organic, I do think an organic scene of two entrepreneurs talking, like I can just picture a guy going, so sick answering these emails. Yeah, dude, Tundra, Tundra AI labs, bro, get on with it, right? Like that's gonna work better, but can you do that again? Uh yeah, right? So, like this, right? Like, oh, and it and you can make it kind of funny, right? You know, and uh so so the hook might be the humor, the hook might be the scene, maybe it's uh the two guys are doing something interesting. There'd have to be some creativity. Sure. Now, I would what I would want to do is do maybe seven or eight different versions of that organic looking piece with different styles of creatives, and then test them all against one another. So just to say polished versus organic, I would argue it's how creative is each piece being.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00

You know, and is it is it hitting the pain, like whoever your ICP is, whoever your target customer is, it's understanding their pain points and how quickly do you get to that for them to pay attention. Yeah, that's right, and then is it done in a way that keeps their attention?

SPEAKER_02

Sure. You know, so well that's where the hook comes in and the authenticity.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and and the hooks now sometimes the hooks like are just getting into the meat of it. So you'll see that like if you go to Chat GPT today and say, hey, give me, you know, 20 hooks for you know, Tundra AI labs and my our email, um, our email sifter, I don't even know what to call it, right? Tico mail. Tico mail. Okay, cool. And um, you know, it might say, Oh, the number one reason you should do this, or the three three best things that do this, or this is why sometimes it's better. What I'm what we're seeing now is actually just getting into the meat of the the content. Answering emails sucks. Or I'm so fed up with answering emails. So it's actually just getting into the meat of it versus it's getting in right into the problems versus the hook itself. So sometimes the hook is the content itself.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_00

Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, it totally does.

SPEAKER_00

So, and I would argue that a very polished piece could be a very organic piece if it's more creative and entertaining. So, really, what it's about is being as creative as you can in the content. And, you know, Hermosy, if you follow Alex Hermozzi, he has a formula and I would study it well. That's what we replicate in all of our content. But it's really just about the testing of it, dude. So you got to test a bunch of them against each other. And because, last thing I will tell you this because the content and because the the algorithms are so good now that they they're spreading to a casting a smaller net, but that smaller net is more targeted. Yeah, because that smaller net is more targeted, you have to keep coming up with new creatives to keep sending it to them. So that's really the hurdle today is you gotta keep doing creatives. How often are we doing creatives, dude? Every week. I'm like, we've got to film some ads. Dave, we've got to film some ads. Dave, we gotta film some ads. By the way, we got to film ads tomorrow. I'm dead serious. Tomorrow. We need more. Are you busy? Right? But it's all good. So um, but yeah, dude, do me a favor. This was awesome. You're an awesome guy. Uh, you know, I hope we can do some business at some point. I'll connect you with my guy Alex. But more importantly, I want to bring you some business. Take a look into that camera, and uh just give a 15 to 20 second pitch on on who your company is, who should reach out to you, and if they do want to buy your product or learn more about your product, where can they find you? On the internet.

SPEAKER_02

So we are building Tico Mail. You can find us at TicoMail.com, T-I-K-O-Mail.com. And we're just gonna bring calm to your inbox. It'll be one of the best investments you make.

SPEAKER_00

Guys, thanks again for tuning into the Gold Coast Podcast. I am your host, Eric Weingard. Like and subscribe. We'll see you again.