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A SaaS product design podcast for non-designers. The Love At First Try Podcast explores how SaaS products become unforgettable.
We unpack the idea of taste in product and brand design, deconstruct what makes beautiful products beautiful, and show how to merge growth with delight.
If you’re a SaaS founder, CEO, or developer building products people love, this is for you.
Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.
Jim Zarkadas (00:27)
So yeah, officially, thanks again for coming to the podcast and making the time today. ⁓ And as I said before, like the first thing we do, we start with is an intro about essentially who you are, what is your story? How did you get started and what are you focused on right now? And since you're like into the service business and you're providing a service, like what are the exact companies you're ⁓ helping at the moment?
You could say like in a more technical way, what is your ICP? The ideal custom profile. So yeah, let's start with that. Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (01:05)
Yeah, so yeah, my name is Anthony. I'm one of the co-founders at Fletch PMM. We are a pretty boutique positioning consultancy. We work mainly with B2B software companies, kind of at all sizes. I'd say the bulk of them are probably startups, maybe Series A, Series B, but we'll go smaller than that earlier in the journey or much larger, like bigger enterprises. And we really just focus on one thing that we do. We run this two week positioning sprint.
Jim Zarkadas (01:19)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (01:35)
And we've thought about rebranding it as a decision-making sprint because it's really, the point of it is to gather the core decision-makers in a business and figure out where are we going to place a bet related to our positioning strategy. That's going to maybe be what we stick with for the next year at least, maybe two years. so bringing all the best minds on the company, all the different perspectives on the product and the market where we feel like the opportunity lies, and then we help them figure out what bet they're going to make.
Jim Zarkadas (01:39)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (02:03)
And then the second piece is we say, let's document this strategy, let's get the messaging down of what are the things that we would need to say to make it make sense. Really, who is the target market? What's the problem they're facing? How do we explain our product or service in, you know, a single sentence? And then what are kind of the core pillars of things that make that believable, like we would call them the supporting arguments. And then we get that documented in a deck. And then from there, we say, okay, well, it's one thing to align on the strategy in an internal deck, we also want to get it in a public facing way.
And so we say, let's take this deck and we're going to rewrite your homepage reflecting the new story that we landed on. And so it becomes a two-sided thing. The reason that we use the homepage as the first, you could say, execution-related part of the positioning strategy is because there really only is one. There's one homepage with one hero section, one main headline, one or two sentences below. And so if you can get everyone to agree what goes on that one singular asset,
Jim Zarkadas (02:38)
Mm-hmm.
Exactly.
Anthony Pierri (03:01)
the alignment of the team is just a lot more likely. There's other people who do work like us and the output is like a sales deck narrative. But for us, that feels like it's too segregated into one corner of the business where, maybe the sales people are gonna say it, maybe not, who knows what the marketing people are gonna say. But the homepage is this really public facing asset. so keeping everyone aligned around that when it's not buried in some Google Drive or SharePoint folder, you can just type the website of the company and there it is.
Jim Zarkadas (03:09)
Yeah, exactly.
Yes.
Anthony Pierri (03:30)
So it's not that we focus on the homepage because it's so important in the overall scheme of things. Some of the companies that we work with, they're selling really expensive software, like six, seven figure deals. And for them, how important is the homepage? Maybe not that important. So even still, even in companies where the homepage is not actually that important, we still bolt that part onto the process. And it's also because it really lets us know, did we actually lay on the strategy?
Jim Zarkadas (03:42)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (03:59)
Does everyone actually believe in it? Because a lot of times people will do these exercises positioning related and they'll agree in principle. Someone will write a sentence on the board, that's our positioning. I'll be like, yeah, guess I agree with that. But then when they leave the room, everyone says different things. It's like, yeah, think it's kind of stupid or I don't want to do it. But again, if you can get them to agree, put it on the homepage, it's just so much more likely that they're going to stick with it and actually buy into it. And a lot of times when we show them the copywriting, show them the wireframe of what the homepage could look like.
Jim Zarkadas (04:03)
Mm.
Mm.
Anthony Pierri (04:28)
they realize like, oh no, I actually don't agree with this strategy anymore. And we're like, why? And they'll be like, well, the copywriting. And I'm like, I don't think it's the copywriting. And then we get down to it. It's not the copywriting. It's the underlying strategy, right? Like if they've positioned against one competitor and we make it very clear that they're trying to take down this competitor and they're like, actually, we don't want to compete with that competitor. And you're like, OK, well, maybe we have to change strategy then. So that's basically all we do. We've done it now. Me and my co-founder, we have two full timers. We've done it about 500 times.
Jim Zarkadas (04:40)
Mm.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (04:55)
So I think we hold the record for most positioning projects done by any positioning consultancy in the world. And we think we have the best framework, but it's only because we've done it the most times.
Jim Zarkadas (04:59)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Because you have like the two weeks and I mean, I found your LinkedIn and you have like, you've done a really good job when it comes to marketing your own service. yeah, if you just kind of see how many sprints can fit in a year, yeah, you've done a lot of them. yeah, on this one.
Let me think, because I have a few things. You got into the specifics and I just wanted to comment on the homepage that I remember that you wrote a post or maybe more ⁓ about it. And I find this like a very smart idea because like one thing that I've seen also with the SaaS teams we're working with, the homepage just feels different. It's an important thing. It's like, it's our homepage. It's not some kind of report or presentation from a consultant you go that you're like, yeah, okay, whatever. Like there is no risk involved into... ⁓
like a presentation you're gonna receive. But when people ask you, this is a new homepage, then it just hits way, way different. then I feel, my sense is like they could also behave in an entirely different way because of how important this asset actually is. And also the content is a good one. Like what you mentioned about competitors, what logos are you gonna sell there? What are the alternatives you're gonna talk about there? How aggressive you're gonna be on that? Like what is the priority of the content? Yeah, so many interesting things that you have to define a homepage.
that force people to really kind of outline a very specific strategy. So I have a few questions. Like one of the first one is pretty high level before we start getting to the more ⁓ tactical stuff, which is, let's say I'm a technical founder with no marketing background. What is the difference between positioning and messaging for people that are not into marketing?
Anthony Pierri (06:43)
Yeah, so
our definition of positioning is two things. If you think of it in an equation, it's target market plus differentiation, and that equals positioning. So it's really who are we going to go after and what makes us different or better than whatever they're going to compare us to. And that's really the positioning strategy.
Jim Zarkadas (06:55)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (07:07)
And then the messaging is, okay, well, if we're going after this market that has this level of maturity and is going to be comparing us to these different things, and we think we're better because of X, Y, and Z, how do we actually frame the problem? Is it more about time savings? Is it more about cost savings? Is it more about something more specific? Getting the problem framing down is really a messaging exercise. And then what exactly are we going to say about our product to make that
Jim Zarkadas (07:20)
Mmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (07:36)
differentiation statement believable, that also becomes messaging. What are the kind of core things we're going to highlight? What do we want to say about them? At what level of specificity? So to me, the positioning strategy is something that's like maybe four or five words. It's like we're going after this market and we're going to differentiate this way. And then the messaging is really, okay, well, how do we actually make that into a story? What's the narrative that we want to tell? And then obviously the next question people have is like, well, then what's the difference between that and copywriting?
Jim Zarkadas (07:55)
Mm.
Anthony Pierri (08:05)
And copywriting is when you layer on a specific asset where this stuff is going to live. Like the copywriting for a home page is going to be different than the copywriting for a cold email sequence. It's taking it from this kind of core messages, like we want to talk about these three things, and then getting them into the format of whatever it is that we're going to use to show it to a potential customer. That's really the copywriting last step.
Jim Zarkadas (08:14)
Hmm.
Mm.
Yeah, it's a good one. I just like to the context that it's being presented out there. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I love actually also like with the infographics and stuff you do is like you simplify things. Like it's a very simple description of like of both that I really like that you don't really need any marketing background. Like that's something that I've seen a lot with people that are into marketing. I have an engineering and design and product strategy background. It's like they love custom terms and like they love overcomplicating things.
And I think like that's one of the reasons we've succeeded like in this space is because you just simply find you remove the jargon actually when it comes to marketing. So on this, ⁓ I have a question because when you made the introduction, you said that it's a decision-making, you're thinking about renaming to decision-making workshop and it's about like bringing everybody on the same table on what bet they want to place.
Anthony Pierri (09:00)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (09:25)
⁓ And I've had position discussions with the substance group been working with. We're not positioning experts. So was more kind of a brainstorming as a team and not really like us leading the conversation on this topic. And what I wanted to ask here is the positioning where you ask the founder, like what is a strategy we could follow versus positioning where you.
talk into existing customers and you figure it out from there. I've seen like there are two different approaches from what I've understood and I'm really curious about your take on this too and how you approach it because from what I've understood you mainly talk like with the team and you're like, okay guys, let's say what are the different strategies that you have in mind? What do you think this would work and what are the strategies we could outline here and test within the next months or years? And yeah, on the other approach you could do like customer interviews and try to...
let the strategy emerge through the existing customer base, which sounds nice in theory, but yeah, I'm not an expert, so I'm curious about these two different approaches ⁓ in a way. And what do you think about it?
Anthony Pierri (10:32)
Yeah. So, I mean, I think you have to separate the positioning decision from any research that leads to the decision, because they are different, right? And from us, again, our definition of positioning is what's the target market you want to go after? And then what will make you different and differentiated from whatever they're going to compare you to? And so that if you don't know what markets are out there, you probably have to do some research.
Jim Zarkadas (10:40)
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (10:59)
before you could make a decision about where are we going to focus. we often tell people, know, people are like, well, you guys don't have any research in your in your process. And what we do, I mean, we research the company, we research the market that they're in, we try to understand, we ask them to give us, you know, sales calls and product demos. And we have to build this big questionnaire. And then we do some of our own primary research. But we're not doing the customer interviews, because we're not industry focused. So we work with companies that are all loosely B2B.
Jim Zarkadas (11:03)
Mmm.
Anthony Pierri (11:29)
software companies, some are selling into fintech, some are selling into logistics, some are selling into e-commerce. We are not subject matter experts and you don't want to pay us to become subject matter experts in your space. We kind of have objectivity because we're not subject matter experts. We think of it like a Venn diagram where it's on one side, you have us, we have the positioning expertise, and then you on the other hand, you have the subject matter expertise, and then in the middle, that's where we're gonna find a good...
Jim Zarkadas (11:43)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (11:59)
medium middle ground where we can say, now we have a really strong narrative together with these two things. But what is a misconception is that there's no research involved. We're just taking the research you have done on your own customers in the markets that exist to help inform how we frame these things for you in our model. So you should know what your customers are about and what buckets they might fall into and we help you frame it. Because I think what happens a lot of times is probably the biggest weakness.
Jim Zarkadas (12:11)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (12:28)
in how people think about going to market is around how they look at segmentation. What is a market? Does it make sense to break up the market in such and such a way? Most people think about it in not the smartest ways because they'll usually start with firmographics. say, our target market is companies of this size with this amount of employees and this geo, that's our target market. And we're like, but nothing in a list of details about company sizes and headcount and stuff.
Jim Zarkadas (12:51)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (12:57)
has any indication whether these companies are actually going to need your product. Like, are they actually doing the things that would be better done with your product or not? That's actually usually not connected to the firmographics. Firmographics is like a very loose proxy for the stuff that you actually would care about. And, you know, the issue is that there aren't tools right now that let you segment by use case or segment by job to be done. Show me all the companies that are doing this specific process, regardless of their size and regardless of their geo.
Jim Zarkadas (13:03)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (13:27)
That software doesn't really exist. So people default to the old way of doing it, which ends up actually making them compete in a lot of different markets. like for an example, they might take a certain size business and say, that's our target market. And we're going to sell in through these five different use cases to get into those companies. The challenge is each of those five use cases has its own competitive set, its own problem framing, its own differentiation that would be required, its own customer
Jim Zarkadas (13:51)
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (13:56)
stories that you would need to be able to tell, not using the same departments are doing all these use cases, so different ways of selling in. So effectively, what does that mean? You would have to run a different go-to-market campaign or strategy for every single use case, which fragments the company. Then you can look across these five and say, do these all ladder up into something bigger? A lot of times the answer is no. So now you've become kind of a loose collection of things that you do.
Jim Zarkadas (13:58)
Hehehe.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (14:23)
for certain size businesses and like that doesn't, that's not like a really nice and easy thing. Again, if the goal of positioning is to earn a place in people's minds, that's what that company does. that's where they fit. that's what I could compare them to. Using this kind of firmographic approach is not a great angle. So a lot of what we're doing is just helping take in the research they've done, the conversations they've had with their customers and help them see how would this map to actual market segments that would require different components
Jim Zarkadas (14:27)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (14:53)
completely different strategies and approaches to actually win these markets. And so from that front, the value we're adding really is more around helping them figure out the segmentation, things like that. It's less on the research side and the input. So whatever you need to feel like I have enough information that by the end of two weeks, we will have made a call of where we're going to target. That should all happen before the two weeks are ever begun. And we've told people like, you're not ready for this sprint.
Jim Zarkadas (14:58)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (15:23)
Because some people will say, we're still experimenting. We're trying new things every different week. Sometimes we call ourselves this category. Sometimes we call ourselves that category. We're trying to see what works and what sticks. And we're like, that's great. There's a time and a place for the experimentation. We went through our own experimentation as an agency when we started. Before we decided to put ourselves in this bucket and for this specific job to be done, we were basically experimenting. And it wouldn't have made sense for us to do a decision-making sprint before we had enough data that we felt like we could make the decision.
Jim Zarkadas (15:23)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (15:51)
So it's really like, once you feel like you have kind of a good sense of who your customers are in the landscape, then you're ready to make a decision. And it's usually like tiebreakers, right? Like, our head of sales really thinks we should go after the enterprise or, you know, our head of marketing really thinks that the SMB has a better. And so you bring them all together and say, let's figure out who our prioritized most important target market's gonna be. And then we can start crafting the narrative around it.
Jim Zarkadas (15:54)
Enough data.
I see, yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. Yeah, and also, yeah, actually, I have a few things I'm trying to structure my thoughts on the things that you mentioned. One thing that stands out to me because it's been like a personal experience is thinking about repositioning as knitting down, being like the same thing that's like the doing better positioning means like having a more like a smaller ⁓ group of commons that you're selling to.
And I'm wondering if this is like a misconception or if there is something there that indeed like they're related or it could be just an option. So that question, that's question number one. And the other one actually, once we answered that, I want to dive into a bit on the horizontal versus vertical SAS because we work with both categories. I'm a huge fan of vertical SAS because everything feels more intentional in a way. you have like less... ⁓
like ⁓ the customers are more similar. That's what I'm trying to say. And everything becomes easier, like from a messaging point of view, from a product strategy, product design point of view, and even from an empathy development point of view to actually get into their shoes because it's one type of business. ⁓ But yeah, before we dive into that, let's start with the first one, which is like positioning and knitting down. How are these two kind of related in your experience and what are some misconceptions you've seen there?
Anthony Pierri (17:36)
Yeah, so I think a lot of founders are pretty allergic to the concept of niching down because it sounds like I'm shrinking my market. ⁓ doesn't, positioning doesn't always have to mean going narrower. Sometimes it can mean going broader. And there's different ways that you can do this. And it's all kind of relative to what you could actually pull off. So, you know, you could take someone like OpenAI. They have all these different products. They were the number one AI company, the first market, probably biggest
Jim Zarkadas (17:43)
Yeah. ⁓
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (18:05)
private valuation of any company for a while. And then you have Anthropic come out. And Anthropic, in related to OpenAI, is significantly more, you could say, niched down. OpenAI was doing Sora. They were doing all sorts of these crazy different products that they were launching. And then Anthropic was like, we're kind of going to market around enterprise coding. That's really the core thing we're going to focus on.
Jim Zarkadas (18:31)
Mmm.
Anthony Pierri (18:32)
Anthropic starts gaining tremendous traction around this use case, so much so that Sam Altman says, I'm going to narrow the company and I'm going to cut all these products. So in that sense, it's like it made sense to niche down a little bit more from where they were. But other times, right, it may not be the case. Like you may be doing something too narrow and you might need to broaden it a little bit based on what you feel like the next level is. Right. Like once you are really growing, you might be able to say, we actually can broaden a little bit or we're going after.
Jim Zarkadas (18:54)
Mmm.
Anthony Pierri (19:02)
And we have this diagram that we've used. It's like, you know, maybe you're in ed tech and you know, your first like, I'm just focusing on, you know, online tutor, like online math tutors, and maybe that gets me to 5 million a year, then I maybe say, I can actually just do all online tutors. Now, I don't need to just say math, maybe that gets me to 30 million or something, right. And so like, as you get bigger, you can broaden. So, again, repositioning can happen in both directions. It's all related.
Jim Zarkadas (19:15)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (19:32)
to what you can actually pull off. And just having everyone be thinking about this is the prioritized group of people that we're going after. And again, it could be small, it could be big. I think a lot of times like positioning consultants, I feel like who are earlier in their career. I mean, I know we were doing this early on. It was sort of like we felt like you had to always pick like, no, it's this industry. like, there's just so many products that have been successful that didn't do that, that like it immediately.
Jim Zarkadas (19:57)
Mm, true.
Anthony Pierri (19:59)
breaks, right? Like you can imagine telling founders, no, you need to pick one industry, you need to pick one x, y, And the founders are like, well, what about this company that didn't have to do that? What about that? And so there's so many examples where people didn't go to market that way, that like, eventually, we realized, like, okay, it's, it's more nuanced than this. It's not just like, you have to pick these things. Again, even falling into that same firmographic trap that we now say, you know, you shouldn't build your segments based on a list of criteria, we can end up imposing those things.
if we're not thinking about it through this more strategic lens of like, where actually is the opportunity? Is it, you know, in this one area or is it actually in a slightly broader group that maybe is combined by something else?
Jim Zarkadas (20:31)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, I agree on pretty much everything. And like on the positioning part, indeed, like can go both directions. And what I really like, you're bringing like a very sophisticated tail here, which is like what you can pull off, right? These are the words that you use. And it's very important because coming up with a position strategy is cool. But if you're serious about it, you need to do then a ton of marketing efforts to actually go to market with this positioning strategy, which is like could be perfect.
advertising, be condom marketing, whatever your strategy is like, outreach and like all kinds of things. And indeed, like you can have this comfort of, we're focused on 10 different industries, our market is so big, we're going to become billionaires. the complexity, the marketing complexity is the actual cost of this. And yeah, it really comes down to what you can pull off over, ⁓ over there. And it's
Like one thing that I've seen there for horizontal SaaS companies that it's scary to niche down when they realize, ⁓ it's not easy to actually advertise into so many, but we have clients from so many industries. If we go and niche down into only one, these customers may get pissed and they may leave because they think we're not good for them anymore. So that's kind of a concern that I've seen sometimes. And what makes positioning so interesting to me, but so tricky at the same time on this part. Yeah, for the...
Anthony Pierri (21:43)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (21:57)
For repositioning, I'm curious, do you have any top of mind examples ⁓ from recent projects that you worked on? I know you have a ton of before and afters on your website, so that's always a good resource. But I'm curious if there's any kind of a real life story there that is top of mind for you that you feel excited about sharing. That would be a really good example.
Anthony Pierri (22:17)
Yeah.
So I'll give you an example.
we started doing these follow-up calls, because unlike other consultants who are trying to upsell you on their ongoing subscription, we just have one thing. so after the two weeks, we're like, good luck. And some companies will come back to us a year or two later and say, we want to reposition. We've learned so much. We've grown. Now we feel like we need to reposition. So we can get some repeat clients. But a lot of times, we don't know what happened. We're like, good luck. And let us know how it goes.
Jim Zarkadas (22:24)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (22:51)
And
in the last couple of months, we started making a more concerted effort to just reach back out to our old clients to see what happened. And the calls were very illuminating and interesting for a lot of different reasons. But a lot of the really fun success stories were the ones that were more longitudinal, like you could look. So we worked with this one company that was making effectively analytics software for, let's say, logistics, specifically trucking companies. So when we worked with them, who was their competitor?
Jim Zarkadas (22:59)
Hmm, sickening, yeah.
Okay.
Anthony Pierri (23:21)
It was the other analytics platforms like Power BI, Tableau, these BI tools. And they were selling into the analysts and the analysts had a really hard time justifying, should I get your tool over the really big ones that I've used for years, right? And I already know them. And they were more expensive relatively to these other tools and things like that. So they were like, this isn't really working. We need to reposition, but we don't know to what. So we go through our process with them and we uncover
Jim Zarkadas (23:24)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mmm.
Anthony Pierri (23:49)
that there is this specific use case for the analytics software, something called a driver bonus program. And it's essentially like they use these analytics platforms to measure all sorts of data points about their drivers who are taking things around the country and to award them financial bonuses, rewards based on them hitting all these specific milestones. It's a big data analytics project, but it's also like an initiative that spans not just this analysis piece.
Jim Zarkadas (24:09)
Hmm
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (24:19)
So through the process, we realized it might make sense for you to reposition not as an analytics platform, but as a software tailor-made for measuring the driver bonus, like running the driver bonus program. And they were very, very hesitant, very nervous about this. We actually ended the sprint. They were like, we're not gonna do it. We got cold feet. And then a couple months later, they actually changed their minds. Like we know we need to do it. So they lean in to this driver bonus program and then
Jim Zarkadas (24:32)
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (24:48)
I don't really hear what happens. I check in with the founder like two years later and he basically says, if we hadn't made that decision, we would be out of business today. And he's like, it completely changed everything. The product strategy had to be drastically reworked because the moment we went into driver bonus, we realized we need to make a mobile app, right? They had been all web app and they were like, the drivers need a way to do this on the go to mark these things.
Jim Zarkadas (24:53)
Yeah, a little bit, yes.
Nice.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (25:15)
So they developed this entire mobile app. Now that's being used by tens of thousands of drivers. And before they were very easy thing to rip and replace. Like, I don't like this analytics platform. I'll just go back to the other one and we can replace it. But now they have their hooks into these companies around this driver bonus piece and it's much more integrated into the business. so their retention like has skyrocketed. And like, he's like, you know, the people that were signed for this who came for this, this new positioning, they're going to be with us for the next 10 years. Cause it's such a big lift to switch it to something else.
Jim Zarkadas (25:42)
Nice.
Anthony Pierri (25:45)
So like when
I see that, I'm obviously like, it's so encouraging. And you could say that was a form of niching down, but also it's just kind of just a pivot. It's like I was in one category for one job into something else. And like, you know, what's the market size for analytics in this industry versus driver? Like it's probably not apples to apples, right? And it's not like they had to go to a smaller market or something. It's just a different market. And it really was transformational for them.
Jim Zarkadas (25:55)
Yes, it's more of a pivot, yeah. ⁓
Hmm
Exactly.
Anthony Pierri (26:14)
So like when I hear those types of stories, know, it's always so like, see, it can really, it can really be great. And again, we didn't come up with the driver bonus angle. It was one of the five or six angles that they had toyed around with, but seeing it on our model against all these other options, realized, ⁓ wait a minute, that actually should be the primary story. We've been telling this other story and that was just maybe one little component of it. Like,
Jim Zarkadas (26:30)
Huh?
Anthony Pierri (26:40)
our analytics software can help you with all these different things like driver bonus, like this, like that, but it still put them conceptually in this analytics tool platform bucket, which was ultimately not where they wanted to compete. moving out of that bucket altogether into a completely different frame of reference made them seem like this much more bespoke, very interesting software that couldn't just be replicated really easily.
Jim Zarkadas (27:01)
That's a really lovely story. it's like, just figuring out what is the differentiation, but also like the core value that people kind of capture. Because sometimes there's a tendency to just kind of join a market that is there and feels kind of familiar, but many times there are many interesting opportunities there. Yeah, I'd say that's a beautiful story. And also one of the best testimonials to have from clients in terms of the impact your work had on them. That's really lovely. Okay, really cool.
Anthony Pierri (27:24)
Totally.
Jim Zarkadas (27:31)
On this, there is one topic that is an interesting one. And I remember you've written a decent amount of content about it, which is testing, positioning and messaging. So you mentioned before about people like changing the category, not the category, like I think the product category, like the positioning every week that they were not ready yet to join the sprints. And I want to get your thoughts and insights from your experience on how do you really test ⁓ positioning and messaging?
And of course, if I try to even answer it myself, I know like it's not that simple. We're talking about a business strategy. We're not talking about a specific add-on meta that you can just run a test on. But I'm curious about what are some frameworks you've seen and some like more of the mindset to have when it comes to testing a position. What are the right expectations to have there? What is the actual risk? And what is, how big is the bet that you're actually taking? So I'm curious about this, about tips on this topic from your experience actually.
Anthony Pierri (28:30)
Yeah, so it's all relative to the size of the change you're making, right? So I used to, I don't have it right now with me, but I use something called a pop socket on the back of my phone. And it's basically a little magnet that sticks on and it's like it pops out and you can hold your phone like ⁓ a, you know, it's like a phone grip, right? So let's imagine that I'm the maker of pop socket.
Jim Zarkadas (28:35)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, know what you mean.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (28:57)
and I'm thinking, how should I position this? Clearly, who's it for? It's for smartphone users. Maybe I want to say it's specific for iPhone or anyone with MagSafe on the back of their phone or whatever thing you want to put there. And then I'm like, how do I want to position it? And I say, do you think it makes more sense to explain this as a phone grip or a phone stand? Because the pop socket also lets the phone sit up like a phone stand would. So
I could probably answer that question of how I should position the pop socket in an afternoon. If I'm running, let's say, big high-scale Instagram ads, TikTok ads, I could test what does it look like to run a bunch of ads calling in a phone grip and primarily showing it as a phone grip, and then a test of it primarily being shown as a phone stand, calling in a phone stand.
Jim Zarkadas (29:30)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (29:48)
So in
an afternoon, I might be able to decide what's the better positioning. And like for the PopSocket, it's very clearly the hand, the phone grip, right? It's not actually that good of a stand. But as a very simple example, you could test that in an afternoon. Now let's think about a more realistic example for a B2B software company. Let's imagine I am Klaviyo and I am a publicly traded software company and I have been positioning myself
as effectively an email marketing tool or a marketing automation tool for e-commerce businesses. What's happened is over time I have gathered a bunch of customer data, all these different businesses, so much to the point that you could say, know what? There's probably a pretty viable positioning for us to put ourselves no longer in the marketing automation category, but in the CRM category.
Jim Zarkadas (30:24)
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (30:46)
in the same way that HubSpot kind of made the same jump for B2B businesses, right? Like you're using HubSpot. You first saw it as a marketing automation platform, then you switched and it became a CRM. So Clavio says, should we make that positioning change to say we are no longer a marketing automation platform? We are a full blown CRM for maybe e-commerce businesses or maybe even broader for B2C companies in general. That positioning strategy cannot be tested in an afternoon.
Jim Zarkadas (30:51)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anthony Pierri (31:16)
It may not even be testable in a year because they have however many years of people thinking of them as a marketing automation platform for e-commerce. And this is a pretty fundamental shift in the minds of customers. And then how long will it take before new customers come through the funnel seeing Klaviyo as a CRM, not marketing automation platform? That's going to take some time.
Jim Zarkadas (31:20)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Anthony Pierri (31:46)
It's going to take a lot of money, a lot of new marketing materials are going to have to be created, a lot of new sales materials are have to be created, and there just needs time for this message to get out there in the market. So, Klaviyo made this change. They repositioned. They're not a client of ours, but I watched it happen. I thought it was very interesting because they're so big, publicly traded. I watched them reposition from a marketing automation platform for e-commerce to a CRM for B2C companies.
Jim Zarkadas (32:05)
Mm.
Anthony Pierri (32:13)
I talked to one of their competitors at this marketing conference and she was like, I bet when they made that change, I bet the conversion rate on their homepage plummeted because everyone who came thinking that they were marketing automation up to that point and saw CRM must've thought, well, wait a minute, did I land in the right place? I don't need a CRM and then bounced. So what should Klaviyo do when they see that drop on day one? ⁓ it was a failure.
Jim Zarkadas (32:24)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (32:43)
Well,
no, they're making a strategic bet about where they think the opportunity is. They've played in very mature space over here and they felt like there was a bigger opportunity over here and they launched it, got it on the homepage for I think the same reasons we say to put on the homepage to align their teams. Because again, launch on the homepage, yes, you're going to see a drop in conversions at first because everyone was coming for the old positioning. But now what's the likelihood that the sales teams are actually going to tell this new story? It's way higher.
Jim Zarkadas (32:47)
Exactly, it's a long term.
Anthony Pierri (33:12)
because anyone new coming in and gets a sales call with Clavio would say, so tell me about the CRM. And the salespeople have to kind of go along with it. Oh yeah, we're a CRM. Because if they hadn't put it on the homepage, it just made some sort of internal strategy decision. People come in, they say, so you guys are like a marketing automation platform, right? And the salesperson who's 50 % salary, 50 % commission, is gonna go, yeah, exactly. We're a great marketing automation platform. You're in the exact right place. They're not gonna tell this new story, right?
Jim Zarkadas (33:17)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Anthony Pierri (33:41)
For me, I think they launched it because that's what they felt like the bet was. And then how soon do you know that it's working is sort of relative to how fast can you get the word out. And in general, I can't remember who said this originally, but there's some stat where it's like if you make a ⁓ product for, let's say like 10 or 11 year olds, if they really like it, they will tell on average, I think 10 of their friends. If you make a product for adults and they really like it,
Jim Zarkadas (33:50)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (34:09)
I think on average they will tell one person. Maybe that. Sometimes they will tell no one. So the challenge is even if you've marketed to people and they really start to like this new thing, it just takes time for the word to get out and disseminate, which is sort of why a lot of times these companies will say, I'm so annoyed whenever I talk to customers, they think of us for our positioning that we had had three years ago. And I'm like, why do you think that is? Like, well, we changed it six months ago. And I'm like,
Jim Zarkadas (34:12)
Okay.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (34:40)
But has it actually percolated enough in the market to make a difference? And the answer is usually no, because it's like you think about a company, they're that company? they do that. Because that's the first thing you heard a long time ago, and you never updated your mental schema of what these companies are. And it takes a lot for people to switch, right? Like, you know, we saw the example with the Allbirds shoe company. It's now the AI data center company. how long is that going to take for people to be like, yeah, Allbirds, don't think of them as shoes anymore. I think of them as an AI data set. Like, come on. Like, that's going to be, you know, maybe never. It's very silly. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (34:42)
you
Anthony Pierri (35:10)
But in that same framing, Like how does Klaviyo test it? How do you test the future, right? They kind of have to launch it and see what happens. And then I do think that it ended up playing out well for them. If I remember, you know, the stock price goes up and the revenue went up over time. But again, it's not something you can do an A-B test to say, let's split reality into two universes where for the next 18 months we stay marketing automation and the next 18 months we become a CRM. And then we can A-B test which reality we want to live in.
Jim Zarkadas (35:17)
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Anthony Pierri (35:40)
You kind of just have to make a choice at the front end.
Jim Zarkadas (35:42)
Exactly.
That's why I feel like the best is the best word to describe actually when like the decision and positioning because it's a really hardcore business decision that you have to bet on and use your intuition, use some data. And also like your POV on where the market is going. That's another thing or like where you want to go. So it really comes down to founders. And that's a very interesting one like that I'm realizing through our conversation is that also the user research when it comes to repositioning a company can be
Anthony Pierri (35:54)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (36:12)
a of a safety retreat, if you could say so, like a place to make people feel safe when there is not full safety when you reposition a company because it's a bet. You want to make yourself that you have control and you're safe and find data points, but only up to point actually. So yeah, that's a beautiful mental framework actually to think about it, that it's a bet and how risky that bet is heavily depends on the company, like ⁓ the maturity of the brand, many variables.
Anthony Pierri (36:35)
And I'll give you an example, right?
I'll give you a more practical example that's not a software company, but maybe will resonate with people. It's like, if you look at your existing user base or your existing customers, they will only confirm what you have already done, right? So at one point, Taylor Swift was a country artist, and then she repositioned as a pop artist. You could imagine that if she had gone to all of her
Jim Zarkadas (36:47)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (37:04)
diehard country fans who saw her in the country vein, saw her play at festivals like Country Thunder and stuff. And she said, what would you think if I wasn't country anymore? Most of them would be like, what? No, that's terrible. We love your country music. You got to keep writing about living in the South and having a truck and going to the football games and all that stuff. And then if she had listened to her existing customer base, she would have never pivoted into pop, which is a different group.
Jim Zarkadas (37:16)
Mm.
Anthony Pierri (37:33)
and ultimately skyrocketed her to the next levels of fame that most musicians could only dream of. sometimes making the bet requires directly alienating your existing customer base because you think there's a bigger opportunity somewhere else. So using the existing customers to determine where the future is going to be is sort of a faulty assumption. It will only ever let you keep doing what you're doing because that's what they came to you for.
Jim Zarkadas (37:39)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (38:00)
And I think there was a story to more software example, but the founder of, I think it was the company called Anchor, they were a podcast platform that eventually was wired by Spotify and became Spotify podcasts. And the founder was on a podcast talking about her journey. And she basically was saying at one point in her journey, she made a decision that directly alienated all of her best fit customers. So everyone who loved her and was in love with the product,
Jim Zarkadas (38:09)
I am.
yeah.
Anthony Pierri (38:29)
She made this big tweak and she basically lost all of her core customer base, but gained this massive new customer base. That was the next huge level of growth in the company's history. And then later she had another decision that could have alienated that group and she decided against it. She said, I'm gonna stick with this group. And then they got acquired by Spotify. So again, existing customers are just one data point, but they can't be the only data point.
Jim Zarkadas (38:37)
Hmm.
Mmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (38:58)
that helps you make the decision, or you will only ever keep doing whatever the existing group says, which sometimes is good and sometimes is not. And that's where the founder conviction and the bet language makes so much more sense.
Jim Zarkadas (39:07)
Hmm.
I love it. Yeah, I'm really happy we're having a conversation because also like for myself, like now, like I feel like my brain is kind of a starts on starts on understanding more like everything on this and how everything is combined like and and how both are needed and also look what you said is like if you only look at your customers, you're gonna just reposition into something similar to what you're doing. Like, yeah, that's a very interesting one. And it's one of the things where like because also on design, there's a lot about A B testing and like, let's make this button.
this way and that way and put it on that place or the other place. Whereas like sometimes, no, like the design doesn't work this way. You also have to use your intuition. It's like you also have a brain and you have a vision. Like it's a big thing there where you need to like paint your vision into the product in a way and the unique approach and ⁓ point of view that you have. And it's pretty much same on the positioning. Yeah. Now everything makes way more sense. On this,
I'm thinking, yes, you have 10 more minutes. So I have two questions, actually. The one is pretty high open-ended because, yeah, I'm curious about your overall takes is around AI, since it's a hot topic, everybody's talking about on LinkedIn, at least. ⁓ And there are two sides of AI, right? The one is like AI companies and the other one is using AI to build whatever you're building. It doesn't have to be an AI product itself. So the question is, what are some super open-ended
how do you feel around AI? What are some top of mind things around these topics? how do you, if there are any trends that you see or anything interesting there, and also what are the ways that you leverage AI within FLETS PMF, for example? Because I know you've made a lot of ⁓ more on the troll side content around AI, so I'm sure you will have some interesting takes on this topic.
Anthony Pierri (41:01)
Yeah, for
sure. So in the last, I'd say, you a couple of weeks, I've gone more into the deep, deep end of, you know, Claude code and trying to learn all the things how it works. And I think, you know, you think about these AI big providers like OpenAI and Gemini and Anthropic and people like that, they go to market with these chat bots. And the chat bots are essentially a black box. Like you don't really know what's happening as the end user, you're just
Jim Zarkadas (41:09)
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (41:28)
asking it and it's producing something that seems very magical and seems like it's correct. And so I think there was this big wave of like, my gosh, these things are these sentient, amazing, almost conscious beings that have all intelligence and all the white collar work is going to die and stuff like that. And obviously that fed a lot of the fundraising cycles of these businesses. know, VCs love a disruption story. So going out and saying, hey, my new innovation is going to remove all white collar work. People are like, that sounds like a great opportunity to make money somehow.
Jim Zarkadas (41:51)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (41:58)
You
know, they love this story. And so I think everyone who interacts with the chatbot has some level of like, wow, this is amazing. But also at some point when they keep using it more and more, they start to notice like, wait a minute, this isn't quite as good as I thought it was, but I don't really know why. And then there's like claims of like, you know, entropic, they're throttling you or they're not giving you the best models and stuff.
Jim Zarkadas (42:00)
Mmm.
Anthony Pierri (42:20)
And for me, it was only until I really got into the backend using one of these like Claude code, you know, or like the CLIs where you have just a much more open window into what's actually happening. Like how are these things actually working?
Jim Zarkadas (42:32)
Hmm
Anthony Pierri (42:34)
And so I start reading more about the context window of the conversations that you have with AI and, you know, like building these files that like help AI be a little bit more deterministic, creating these skills files. It's like, if I want you to take a sales call transcript and summarize it for me, I really want you to do it in such and such a way. So in the past, let's say we were prepping for working with a client and we asked them to give us sales call transcripts, product demo transcripts, ⁓ know, ads they've run, whatever.
Jim Zarkadas (42:43)
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (43:04)
And we would take that all and we're trying to follow what people say or like what you should do and give the AI as much context, like it works its best with context. So we start arranging these things. And again, we'll watch a lot of the calls ourselves, but we're not going to watch 20 hours of footage. So we'll watch a couple of the sales calls, get a good sense. And then we'll feed the rest into our own private instance of the LLM to be able to ask questions of it. So what I would do is I would give it these files. Let's say it's 10, 20 transcripts of like 50 minute calls.
Jim Zarkadas (43:17)
Yeah, of course.
Anthony Pierri (43:32)
And then I would ask the AI, want you to read across these and summarize it for me. It would take probably 10 seconds. So I'd go 10 seconds and then it would spit out the summary. It would cite the sources. So it would be like this pulled from this file and that. So I'm like, wow, it must be really doing a good job. It must be reading these things, stuff like that. And that was me interacting through the chat pod. On the flip side, now I start going down this path where I'm like, from everything I'm reading, people are saying, you can't just give it.
all these transcripts and expect it to keep all this in its head. You actually need to add like a context layer on top of it so that it has something in between that it can work with. Like you should be making highly specialized summaries of these 60 minute transcripts because the context window gets filled up so fast. So like these things that I wasn't really super aware of, I'm like, okay, well, let's try to make one of these. So I start making a skill file to basically say, well, I want to summarize one sales call in this specific way or one product demo. It takes me
Jim Zarkadas (44:17)
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (44:30)
probably two hours to make one of these skills because what they say is you're supposed to basically iterate with it. If it spits out a good summary or not as good a summary, then you tell it to change. You keep asking back and forth, you know, hey, that wasn't quite right. And then once it's kind of done it without the skill file existing, then you codify that little skill and say, hey, Claude, turn this into a skill file that gets added on your computer and then it can be referenced and used again. So when I go through this process, I get the skill file, I ask it to summarize the sales call.
Jim Zarkadas (44:53)
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (44:59)
It takes probably five minutes. And that's to just follow my directions to summarize one call. And I was like, before it was summarizing 20 calls in 10 seconds. But when you gave it to guardrails, all of a sudden it's actually taking long, which makes me realize it's just bullshitting everyone else, right? Like it's, it's not really doing anything. And there's this missing giant layer of effort.
Jim Zarkadas (45:08)
Yeah.
Yeah.
You
Anthony Pierri (45:29)
that is required to get anything resembling accuracy or reality. And that part is missing from this disruptive AI story in my sense. Like most people just either on one end of the spectrum, Like AI is just this magical box, right? And then there's these people saying they're creating these multi-step automations and stuff. I'm like, what is the reality? And in reality, the AI is incredibly dumb and it needs painstakingly created
Jim Zarkadas (45:40)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (45:58)
guardrails at every step of the game, which makes me actually slightly more hopeful about the future. Because again, if it really was as smart as everyone said it was, we would be in for a giant societal upheaval because it would be like this could replace white collar work. And now it's like, actually, if I wanted to just summarize a couple of documents, it is hours and hours and hours of prep work to get it to do one tiny slice. So like we work with a bunch of AI companies.
Jim Zarkadas (45:59)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (46:28)
and they are effectively building bespoke context layers for each little corner of the industries that they operate in. And they're basically, pitch is, no, Anthropec's not going to go in and make, like for me, right? Like my one microcosm was just summarizing a sales call in the Fletch way of thinking about it was a two hour task. But what if I wanted to do a lot more of our process? And what if I'm not a three person consultancy or four person consultancy?
Jim Zarkadas (46:35)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (46:56)
What if I'm a 2000 person enterprise? It's like, this is going to be such a giant lift to get the AI working with agents or not agents at any of these businesses that to me, it's like the hype was so far outpacing what these technology is. But at the same time, it is a very cool tool. Like it functionally is a smarter Zapier. Like when I built an automation Zapier, it took me like multiple hours to do.
Jim Zarkadas (46:58)
Yeah, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, it's a good one.
Anthony Pierri (47:24)
You know, and I'm not the smartest guy, maybe other people do faster, but I'm like, I want to get it. So when someone books on our calendar, I want to create a record in the CRM and I want to send them an email. I want to send us like that would take me a couple hours to build that automation. It's very similar. I'm like, if I want the AI to do anything resembling reality, it's going to be like three or four hours of fiddling around with it. It's not this magical box that just works off the bat, which makes it feel like fundamentally like any other tool.
Jim Zarkadas (47:24)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Anthony Pierri (47:50)
just the next generation of it. Like it is a smarter, much smarter automation tool. And you can leverage that, but it's not gonna replace all white collar work. Because again, we're gonna run into the same problems with building versus buy in the past, where you could say, I could make this bespoke software myself, but it's gonna be very brittle. Cause I'm already thinking, I'm like, if I make 25 of these skills files that are all referencing each other in these, you know, chains and stuff. And then I'm like, well, say if we wanna change our process.
Jim Zarkadas (47:55)
Mm.
Anthony Pierri (48:19)
What's going to be the downstream? Like, this is going to be a massive change. I'm going go to all these, which was always the thing with build versus buy, which is like, you could make your homegrown solution. It's going be very brittle and hard to change and nobody can understand it. It's going to be the same thing.
Jim Zarkadas (48:21)
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is
Yeah, and just to add on like the initial part that you mentioned, like this is just a personal kind of feeling and emotion that I'm sharing on this is that the internet doesn't feel like a nice place to be the last. By internet I mean like the LinkedIn and everything like thing, the last one and half year with the whole AI thing. And what I mean that it doesn't feel a nice place to be, too much hype, too many people talking about things that they've no idea and you can not tell what is truth anymore. One reason that I love the podcast is that I can talk with real people about real stories.
Anthony Pierri (48:48)
Yeah.
yeah, okay.
Jim Zarkadas (49:04)
and like understand what is going on. And that's the thing that I don't like with AI is like too much hype and talking about marketing, it has been marketed in a way. just some insights from my personal experience very quick, is that this kind of a entity that is super smart and that is smarter than you and is going to replace you. That's the story that they've sold to everybody. And it makes everybody when they approach it to think, ⁓ this is smarter than me. They start with this belief, most of the people, because there have been hardcore marketing from the news from everybody on this topic. And
Anthony Pierri (49:19)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (49:33)
This already changed how you're gonna use it and how you're gonna leverage the technology because you suddenly treat it as the godlet, as somebody that is smarter than you instead of a brainstorming pattern, let's say, or a tool that can actually speed up workflows or get access to new stuff. For data analysis, it's been cool, building internal tools, not replacing SAS. ⁓ And talk about SAS, even the SAS apocalypse, I'm like, guys, come on, these just all sound like bullshit to me. Now, I'm not saying that AI products are not useful, but so much hype.
And I'm like, why? This is not a nice world to be in. Like, just be nicer to others. You don't have to scare everybody to make money. Like, this is not nice. So that's a personal thing. I wish, like, on an ethical side, was better marketing because, yeah, there are many cool things you can do with AI. Like, now I'm on the side of I actually appreciate and love AI because I found really cool use cases on the product design process where I can prototype things instead of designing in Figma.
Anthony Pierri (50:08)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (50:27)
where there's a real big amount of value there. And like these are the cool stuff that people should be talking about. One of the cool stuff. So yeah, I pretty much agree with everything. And on the complexity and how they oversimplified because same also with coding, you need to provide a lot of instructions to write proper code. And last comment on this is like what people don't talk about is ownership. It's like who's gonna own it? Like sure AI can do this stuff, but it's not fully autonomous. Who is gonna own this thing? Who is gonna be responsible if the app breaks in production?
with all the vibe coded code that is out there. yeah.
Anthony Pierri (51:01)
And it's, you
I've now built probably seven or eight internal tools with stuff like Lovable. Some of them are customer facing. Like we have three pretty large ⁓ apps that we use to help run our business that are very bespoke to our specific process and how we do things. And I sat for the hours and hours and hours and hours, prompting and prompting and prompting and prompting, right? And I'm like, it doesn't matter how small you get that effort. There will be certain people who say,
I actually don't have any interest in building my own software. And I'm like, well, you know, what if it's so easy? And they're like, even if it was very easy, I just, that's not something I want to do. I would rather hire someone else to do that. Either I'll pay someone to do it or I'll just buy the software that already exists. Right? So the idea that all software will be bespoke and created by your own company is just very silly in many, many ways. And you know, the bigger companies you get, the thing that they're paying for in a lot of ways,
Jim Zarkadas (51:32)
Exactly.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (51:57)
Why do they not vibe code their own CRM and why do they pay Salesforce? As sad as it is, it's when Salesforce gets hacked, it's Salesforce's fault, not the company that bought Salesforce. If you made your own software and you get hacked, your head is on the chopping block. So it's much easier to offload the risk to someone else who's willing to say, you can trust me and I'll take the risk on because I know that my software is secure. And when you're out there vibe coding your own stuff, it's like, people are not going to do it. So it's like certain people will not buy the software because they don't want to
Jim Zarkadas (52:06)
Exactly.
Exactly.
Anthony Pierri (52:28)
take on that risk of being like, no, my head is not in the line if something happens. And then there's just other people who just like, I don't want to build software. Regardless of how easy you've made it, I have no interest.
Jim Zarkadas (52:35)
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Even though it requires the product thinking, like building a software, like you need to think like a product person, like somebody that is, I don't know, like they're running like real estate. They don't think about products. They think about like deals, houses, properties, other stuff. They're in a different world. Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (52:42)
Yeah.
And the idea that you can one shot these apps, right? Make me a thing
in one shot, right? Like, it's so silly because it's like, you know, when you start making a product, there are decisions. It could be like this or like this at every single step of the process, right? Like even the apps that we've created, it's, and you know, the now the AI is getting better where it asks you, would you rather have it be this way or that way? Someone has to sit there and make the decision at every single step of the process. like, what would that person be called?
Jim Zarkadas (52:59)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Pierri (53:21)
Maybe a product designer, maybe a product manager. Like it's almost like we already have roles that do this, you know, and ⁓ maybe those roles will still matter because all of a sudden, I was a, you know, sales director. Now I'm going to sit and prompt all day. Like it's just not going to happen. And the juice is not always worth the squeeze. Again, like a lot of the efficiencies you get with the AI are solving inefficiencies that were created by the AI.
Jim Zarkadas (53:27)
Exactly. ⁓
Mmm.
Yeah, exactly.
Anthony Pierri (53:50)
in the first place, you know what mean? That you're like, now we have to do these things, create these things and like, we have to spend all this time in these skills files and stuff. It's like, well, why do we have to do that? It's like, well, because we're using the AI now. And it's like, it's not all just everything is an efficiency gain. Like some of it's worse and then you have to recompensate.
Jim Zarkadas (53:59)
Mmm. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And we haven't even touched the topic of cost of tokens and all these things, which is entirely different topic. And if it's actually worth it at the end of the day, yeah, sure. You can create something more complicated and spend thousands of dollars on that, which is wild. Yeah. Pretty crazy times. mean, there is a fun part into it and very interesting, but I feel like the skill with AI is not how to use AI, it's how to create signal versus noise. Like how to redefine what is the truth and the...
Anthony Pierri (54:14)
yeah, the-
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (54:35)
true value versus what is just a noise and these influencers are just right bullshit mostly on LinkedIn. Cool. I know we're over time. So I'm going to ask if you have like four or five more minutes, I can go to the last question. Otherwise, I can wrap it up here. However, if you like. So the question that I always ask the every guest, the last question is what is your favorite SaaS at the moment?
Anthony Pierri (54:40)
Yeah, 100%.
Sure, yeah that's probably fine.
Jim Zarkadas (54:58)
or maybe app, it doesn't have to be like a B2B SaaS per se. And why? What is top of mind for you? What are some one or more tools that come that you're like, yeah, like this is something I actually love using.
Anthony Pierri (55:09)
Yeah, I mean, I think I would say my current one that I'm, you know, maybe contradicting sort of what I was just saying. And, you know, it shouldn't be, but, you know, I do love lovable. Like I love being able to create this stuff myself. So as much as I'm like, there are certain people who will not do this. I'm like, I am someone who has wanted to build software for years and never had the technical jobs to do it. And now being able to launch stuff and like, like, so for example, you know, with this app where when companies work with us, they have these, they book basically two week sprints.
Jim Zarkadas (55:22)
Ha ha ha ha.
Mmm.
Anthony Pierri (55:39)
and which include multiple Zoom calls, right? So in the old days, it would be like, ⁓ what days do you want to do the sprints and what days do you want to do the workshops? And then we'd have to manually add it all and stuff like that. Then I had created my own kind of spaghetti version using Airtable and Zapier where someone could select a selection of dates and then it would create the Google Calendar. But then was like, anytime we onboarded a new person, it was like multiple hours to get it up and running. So then when Loveable came out, I was like, I thought we could just make this.
Jim Zarkadas (55:59)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Anthony Pierri (56:08)
So then we made the scheduling app and it's very smart and robust and it's able to add new people in. can create like certain sprints. Let's say if a sprint is on a holiday week, we normally have the first session on a Monday. Well, if Monday's a holiday, it should be Tuesday. So we're able to like input all that stuff in. And when the customers are trying to select a date, they can see it. Oh, it's on a holiday. They can see the different people that they can book the sprint with, whether it's me, my co-founder, some of the people on our team. And so all this type of stuff, like it's all such a real pain point and it's become a core operating part of our business.
Jim Zarkadas (56:08)
Mmm.
Got it.
Anthony Pierri (56:38)
And we have a set of these apps that we've created and they're all in loveable. And it's just a blast. ⁓ So I would say that's like my number one that I'm having a lot of fun with. And the second one that I'm just such a diehard fan of is Figma. I'm in Figma all day. In the hilariousness, we run all of our workshops in Figma, which is very silly. Not FigJam, true Figma design Figma. we're.
Jim Zarkadas (56:38)
Hmm.
That's cool.
Okay.
nice.
Okay,
I assume that you meant also like the figs and with with figma, okay
Anthony Pierri (57:02)
No, we don't even
use, we don't even use FigJam at all. We're just hardcore in the Figma side. And it's very silly. It's like, you know, if a company told you they're running live workshops in Photoshop, you'd be like, what? Like, that seems like not the right tool for that. But we've just been so embedded in that way. So we're in it every day. I make all my LinkedIn graphics in Figma. I run all the workshops in Figma. We make all of our slide decks in Figma. We do all of our brainstorming in there and stuff. So it's just a great app. And so I always joke around. like, you know,
Jim Zarkadas (57:04)
Okay. Nice.
Hmm.
Nice.
Anthony Pierri (57:29)
what an improvement it's going to be when we just are all in the terminal, you know, and we can ask it to describe what the brainstorm would have looked like, you know, rather than, you know, because I'm making a joke, obviously, because like, it's just so much easier to see it on this giant canvas than typing in a terminal, know, which is a lot of people are saying all the UI is going away. And I'm like, what if I what if I want the UI? What if I like looking at a visual representation and not a little black screen with text, you know?
Jim Zarkadas (57:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, true. Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Fully, fully agree. That's a very interesting one. And that's ⁓ the beauty of AI that I've seen as well is like what you described. would...
I'm not sure what are the exact terms, feeling liberated and feeling that you can get really creative without being restricted, actually. I feel that's the core value that I experienced there. And it's a beauty also for us with product design that we can code now, that we can actually build the solutions we have in mind and not wait for engineering. And it's not about replacing engineering, but actually about using the idea and being able to tell ourselves, does this feel right or not? Because in Figma, you cannot really make robust prototypes. ⁓ Cool. Okay. Really.
Anthony Pierri (58:13)
Totally.
Jim Zarkadas (58:32)
really interesting stuff. yeah, the vibe that the thing that I didn't know about you and now the vibe that I get is like you're a marketer with the heart of a product person in a way I could describe you this way. You're a product maker in deep in you, which is something that I, yeah, I truly enjoy it because many people that are into marketing, they're really into like sales. And that's why maybe I feel like you're into like simplifying. I feel like that's one of your parts of your core business is actually simplify marketing for founders and help them take decisions essentially.
Anthony Pierri (58:44)
I like that, I'll take it. Yeah.
Cooling.
Jim Zarkadas (59:01)
which
is really kind of a UX and product thing in there. But yeah, cool stuff. Thanks a lot for your time today. That was a really nice, really nice episode. Yeah, anytime.
Anthony Pierri (59:10)
Thanks for having me. ⁓