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The Factory Floor is hosted by the three co-founders of Conversion Factory, the marketing agency at the forefront of SaaS growth, marketing, and tech trends. Episodes are released on Twitter one day early, @coreyhainesco.
Every other week Corey, Zach, and Nick break down what’s working right now in SaaS marketing, share real-world lessons from the field, and give you the strategies you need to outpace the competition.
You can also find us on YouTube, X, and everywhere you listen to podcasts!
Don't fall behind. Subscribe. Like. Drop a comment. Or not. The ball is in your court.
Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, geeks, welcome to the factory floor. I am Nick Loudon, your host. I'm joined with by Corey Haynes and Zach Stevens. Corey Haynes is our resident marketer, Zach, our resident designer.
Nick:I'm your resident web flow head, and we are gonna be talking about my absolute favorite topic. Gentlemen, are you ready? We're talking about and no one else is talking about this. Okay? No one.
Nick:AI. Have you heard of this?
Corey:What what does this stand for?
Zach:I've heard of IA, but is it any any relation?
Nick:I have no idea.
Zach:Okay. Just
Nick:making a Artificial choice because intelligence. You've heard of this.
Corey:Well, you know, we know basketball. Zach doesn't really know who Allen Iverson is, but we could talk we can talk AI.
Nick:AI, Andre Gonzalez. So we're gonna talk about AI, which is do you guys know I have like a little a soft spot for hating AI? I guess it's not really a soft spot.
Corey:With AI.
Nick:Yeah. I have a Why
Corey:don't you tell us what your hate with AI is? Mhmm.
Nick:Okay. So that that will be the launching point for what I think we should talk about. I it's not that I don't like what AI is. I don't like how much people talk about it, if that makes sense. Like, there's I feel like I can't go into any, like, conversation or read anything on Twitter or go to any, like, sales call without hearing something about AI, whether it's their entire business or some new features.
Nick:Like, all new features must have AI. And if they don't, your business is irrelevant. And it's like it's like when COVID was happening, and it was, like, maybe, like, November 2020. So we're, like, six months in. And I was like, just we can talk about what's happening with COVID, but don't say the word COVID.
Nick:I don't want you to say the word. Like, I that word hurts to hear. That's how I feel about AI. And it's because a lot honestly, a lot of the stuff, I don't even know, like, what the business is. Like, if I'm reading a tweet about AI, like, this new company is doing this with AI, like, I'm, like, this is just it might as well just be gibberish or Wingdings, my favorite font.
Nick:I have no idea what they're talking about. So could you explain to me why I feel this way?
Corey:Mhmm.
Zach:No. Well, I mean, you're not wrong. I think that one of the one of the core things that is that's a problem with AI is, I mean, you could title not everyone, but there are some who definitely hold the position of like everything, everywhere, all at once for anybody at any time at any place. And it's like, it it's too much. You can't there's no specificity to it, so it's impossible to understand its relevance to you.
Zach:It's almost like it it become when people talk about AI, specifically within the realm of their product, becomes so ethereal and nebulous that you have no idea, like, what's the concrete benefit and action that I have to take that this enables me to do. That's not always the case, but that is it's a big problem that I think we've seen, particularly with some of the larger AI companies, or at least the ones that have tried to, like, you know, more just play the hype game, and throw the jargon out there with the hopes of getting like a lot of fundraising money, and they'll probably pump and dump, and they're out.
Corey:Yeah. Well, Nick, I think your perspective is interesting, because I think that what you're feeling is actually what like 90% of everybody else is feeling, which is you don't really know what AI means, and it's being, like, hyped and overused so much that becomes meaningless. And basically, just this, like, this talking point where everybody is saying AI because they're expected to say AI and expected to work on something related to AI, and and everybody knows everything about AI, so that makes you cool and relevant and and and on trend.
Nick:Can I color my thought more? Sure. It's like it's like if I was a dairy farmer, and I discovered milk, and everyone's, like, hearing about milk, and I'm, like, listen, man. You gotta use the milk, and you'll get milk to have milk. And everyone's like, oh, it's just like this circular, like, like, it's just one word, and like the same word points to the same thing and goes in a big circle.
Nick:Sorry. I cut you off. But I just I never get to like the meat of it. Sorry. I cut rated your the middle of your thought.
Nick:I just like couldn't keep that in my brain any longer.
Corey:No. Yeah. I think I think you have a good point because a lot of people well, it's so funny because I was just snowboarding with my brother, and my my nephew is with us. He's, I think, 14 or 15 now. A super super smart kid.
Corey:And now AI has has has entered into the mainstream awareness and vernacular. But the problem is that they have no idea what it is or how it works. So he was like, AI is so stupid because it can't do math and it gets math wrong. And I was like, yeah, that's a really good observation. Like, you're totally right.
Corey:And I was like, do you know why? And he's like, it's AI. Isn't it supposed to just like know everything and be like smarter than us? I was like, well, yeah, kind of, but actually what we say is AI is machine learning, which is essentially like pattern recognition applied to LLMs, large language models, which is really like a giant corpus of text and information that something is uploaded as context. And then we've created a technology that makes use of LLMs to predictively generate text off of those LLMs.
Corey:And so it's not trained on math. It's not trained to do math really well. Math is already a solved problem anyways. Like, have calculators that get the answer right every single time no matter how complex the problem is. What we haven't solved is text generation, and image generation, and video generation, you know, media generation as a whole.
Corey:And that's what AI really excels at. And the applications are really far reaching because this is something we've never been able to crack. But it really has the same story and life cycle as math and calculators. Where I was like, as soon as we had this amazing technology to run all these complex equations, Then we started sending people to space and we started, you know, solving all these things that made physics and simulations for airplanes and, you know, really really fine cut metals and predicting the weather and and and, you know, knowing about space and the aerodynamics, and that's all the application of math. So the application of AI is going to be, I think, kind of a similar revolution, but people don't realize the kind
Zach:of level of breakthrough and and what it really means. Yeah. I think more they don't understand what problems it could potentially solve for them. I think that that's the the main issue. And that's the problem that we see with a lot of the companies that are marketing it, is that they aren't able to attribute the cool features and solutions that their AI is capable of to that it problems that people actually wanna solve.
Zach:We've seen we've seen a couple use cases of it, like I mean, one of our long time clients, Sensible, I thought that was a really good use case for AI, which was the extraction of uploaded printed like, print documents, and then transposing that into segmented data. So, like, JSON files or Python files, where it was doing optical character recognition and then pulling all the data from it, and then making it something that a developer could actually use. You know, like, that's that's a real problem. Like, a developer having to go through and manually pull all of that data from, like, a a PDF and have to guess like somebody's handwriting. Where if they saved 90% of their man hours trying to do that, that's a a very useful problem to solve.
Zach:Hyperspecific. But again, like putting putting a solution to a problem as opposed to, like, just the thing itself, like AI. So
Nick:I guess the question is like, why how come, you know, 95% of all the marketing around AI companies that I see, whether it's someone tweeting about it or someone's website or whatever it is, is all, like, this circular pattern? Like, how why are they not, like, figuring out like, hey, how do we like market this product? Like, why aren't they able to do that?
Corey:The AI is cool. Answer that question yet.
Nick:You don't even know.
Corey:No. No. Seriously.
Nick:Dude, I don't wanna know either.
Corey:I don't know if you guys saw, but YC just put out Y Combinator just put out a request for startups, and they do this every year. So back in, you know, 2020 through 2022 is a lot of it was like blockchain and crypto and web three related. Mhmm. And they're always gonna be on trend. Right?
Corey:And so this year, their request for startups were all AI related. And so they had all these specific I think they had like 15 different startup ideas that were all incorporating AI. And this is what people do. This is what a lot of founders do, is they start with sort of an application or a business problem, And then they say, how can we apply AI to this to disrupt this industry, to do things better, faster, quicker, or cheaper? But they don't know exactly what that looks like.
Corey:And so the best that they can come up with is, we're a AI CRM. We're an AI website builder. We're a AI x y and z. But they don't know the implications of what that's gonna do for people, why people should care about that, let alone how to communicate those things. So what do they slap on their website?
Corey:We're the AI CRM. Well, what does that actually mean for people? Why would I care about an AI CRM? How is a AI CRM better than a non AI CRM? They're still trying to answer that question.
Corey:Now, we'll get there, but we're so early in the life cycle still that people aren't starting with the, okay, here's what the end goal that I want to achieve because we don't really know. Well, we do. People are figuring it out. I'm just saying, especially very early stage startups, they don't know what the what the the purpose of their startup is yet. They just know that maybe there's something to be had here with applying AI to whatever business application they're they're trying to apply it to.
Nick:I I were you gonna say something, Zach?
Zach:No. Go for it.
Nick:I was gonna say, like, I would like to put the disclaimer out. I am not anti AI. I think
Corey:Yes, you are. It's okay to be.
Nick:No. No. No. No. No.
Nick:That's not true.
Zach:He's He uses I
Nick:am not anti AI. I'm just I'm just tired. Like, I'm just tired of, like, the way it's being marketed and how much it's being talked about. Like, I like the products. Some of well, I like some of the products that are coming out that are surrounding AI.
Nick:Like, I think when, like, from the a like, what was it? Like, almost two years ago that, like, ChatGPT was, like, released or whatever to the for all of everyone could just use. And I remember, like, seeing, like, just a video. So I mean, like, check this out. Like, I'm talking to Abraham Lincoln.
Nick:And that was, like, the cool thing you could do on chat GBT. But, like and I was like, you know, this is great. And I'm I'm fine with what AI does and how it's been changing the tech industry. I'm just like, I'm just getting like burnt out from Right. The excess and the amount that's going on.
Zach:I think we saw a similar problem. And I mean, it it I feel like people should just look back four years ago, like to what YC was doing in 2020 with all the blockchain and web three stuff. Because the same problems are surfacing, which is they're putting so much emphasis on this feature and the mechanism rather than the benefit of it. And the benefits are really cool, but the problem is that when you put so much focus on it, then you actually lose sight of those benefits. And then people become skeptical of like, oh, that's just like a a Ponzi scheme, you know, people trying to get in and raise a bunch of money and or, you know, go public without having a product, and then dump their stock and and leave.
Zach:And then you get weird things as well, like, that have legit application, like, with NFTs. There's a 100% legitimate application for non fungible tokens of, like, proof of of of certification of proof, of transfer of ownership, of all those other things that are highly valuable, but then we got it being used to buy Bored eight JPEGs. That's an art. This isn't a bad thing either. You know, there's there's good reason to have that kind of application and ownership and be record of it.
Zach:But that's what the general public ends up seeing. And then they become skeptical, like, well, this just sounds stupid. It's like a a circle jerk for everybody who's inside of this nebulous of blockchain. And now it's happening with AI. It's like AI, it seems like AI is only relevant to people who are doing something with AI.
Zach:People don't understand the applications for themselves.
Nick:The sense that I get is like people are just like, oh, I need to build an AI company because the wave is starting. And then, like, in a year, I'll have something that's, like, it works, and I could sell it to some bigger corporation and just cash out. Like, I could just basically cash in on the wave is what it feels like to me with the amount of companies that there are.
Corey:Mhmm. That's only part of it. I think there's a tension too where, yeah, AI shouldn't be, like AI is the equivalent of talking about what database you use, or what front end framework you use, or what CSS framework you use, or that like, it doesn't really matter. What what people care about is what it helps them do. They care about the benefit.
Corey:They care about the outcome. They care about the money they save, the things they couldn't do before, the transformation of their business, so on and so forth. But when you're marketing a product, and especially when your product is a new product that's supposed to have something unique to offer to the world, then yeah, talk about AI. Because that's one of the first ways you can start to communicate why you're different and how you're unique is now I'm not just any old CRM, I'm an AI CRM. So people's ears perk up and they're like, oh, it's interesting.
Corey:What does that mean for me? And so it it definitely works. It's a hook talking about AI. But the problem is that when you don't back up why someone should be interested, and when there's no substance to when people's ears perk up, and then there's just a bunch of gobbledygook that comes out of your mouth because you don't really know what the applications are of AI within a CRM and why people should care about it. Then they lose interests, and they start to become skeptical of the next AI thing that they look as.
Corey:Then they're looking at an AI website builder, and now they're like, okay. Is this any different than our regular website builder? And then the next time they feel like it's not really that different, then the next time they go and they see, you know, AI accounting tool, they're like, okay. This probably not gonna have anything new or different or interesting. So I'm not even gonna give this a time of day.
Corey:Right?
Nick:That's where I am. There we go.
Corey:That's where Nick is at today. Exactly. Yeah.
Zach:Well Go ahead. And it's like, you're not sure if it will work. I think it's the big problem. It's like you're seeing and in most cases, it's like, it's a very surface level application. Like, we can speak highly in-depth about the AI website builders out there.
Zach:And I can tell you that 99 of the stuff that they put out is not really usable, at least if you're a professional. Like, there are some things that it can do to help you, like Relooms site builder and site map generator and site map pulling systems. Fantastic. Those are AI tools. Or if you didn't have a query in your quiver and you needed to write copy for a website for, like, a client that can't write copy, then their tool's fantastic.
Zach:But if you're somebody who is trying to create like a conversion rate optimized website and you have these very specific flows that you want people to be able to walk through, and then you need to be able to go in and tweak and refine some of the mistakes that AI has made, a lot of these tools aren't doing it. And I feel like the same kind of missing the mark in so many small ways across the, like, the result that they give you, it almost makes it a moot point to try and use it because you're gonna just have to go in and fix it anyway yourself. I haven't found applications yet, and I'm sure there are some where this totally takes it off your plate. I'm sorry. That's not true.
Zach:Image generation image generation is one of those places where I'm like, wow. This is really powerful. The fact that I just created a stock image with, like, using text as a reference. And that then I can then carry it over stylistically and create branded photos that didn't exist before.
Nick:And you have a tool that you like what's the what's the Image one tool that you like?
Zach:Visual Electric.
Nick:Visual Electric. Yeah. I've seen a bunch of those images. They're great.
Zach:But that's a good that's a really good example of a problem that somebody wanted to solve, which is I need to create a image generation tool for designers who have very specific taste, who need things to be on brand, who have some semblance of art history, and know how to use a camera, can talk to the or understand the vernacular of like, I need this to have a a low depth of field, or I need this to be fully in focus. I need this to have very warm or cool tints. So they they nailed the like their ICP very well, and then created a an AI tool that was specifically for them, even though OpenAI and Midjourney already had image generators that were out there. But Visual Electric, far and away, is a better tool than than those two. Well, there's there's an
Corey:even better value proposition there, which is if you're if you have used a stock image library or or site like Unsplash or any of
Zach:the other ones like that,
Corey:What if you can create your own stock images? That's the whole value prop right there is Exactly.
Zach:You don't
Corey:have to license it. You don't have to get They're Exactly. No one else can use them. Like, it it boosts the value prop in every single way from an unsplash because of AI. And you really don't even have to talk about AI.
Corey:It's just the value prop insinuates that this is possible because of AI. Can explain that, right, in in in that. But it doesn't take long before people start to realize, oh, this is not possible in an Unsplash or any other stock image library that I'm gonna find. This is only possible using an AI stock image website. Right?
Corey:And now that value proposition and that promise has some substance versus being like, well, how does this help me? And like, what what does make this different? Mhmm. And and so that's that's the thing I think people really need to realize is that, what is AI good at? Well, AI is really really good at remixing things.
Corey:AI is really really good at distilling large amounts of information. AI is really good at organizing information. I mean, you think about how ubiquitous AI transcripts are now. You can take any video from anywhere in any tool and you can generate a transcript within like five seconds. That's like even more accurate than what a human could do.
Corey:Right? That's pretty incredible. The image generation, way better than than it was before. Even a lot of the text generation, it's really good at generating texts. I use it for copywriting all the time.
Corey:Yeah. There's gonna be some things that it's not good at. But again, it's like using a calculator to try to to try to write a novel. Just don't use it for that. That's not what it's strong at.
Corey:Use it what it's actually good for.
Zach:You can write hello in a calculator. Yeah. Or boobs. Or boobs. Yeah.
Nick:That was the joke when we were in middle school.
Corey:Yeah. Look at this.
Nick:Okay. Well, then here's what I would like to ask. I need you guys to do your job. K? Go to work.
Nick:I need you to revamp the entire AI industry and how they market to me. And how do they fix all this stuff that we've been talking about? And how do they, like, I guess, reposition their whole thing. Obviously, like, different tools, different things, whatever. But, like, the broader idea of, like, how they're talking to their customers and to the general public.
Nick:Like, how does that how do they fix the problem that we're talking about?
Zach:Couple things I could think of, at least from a branding perspective. And they're all more high level. So first one is I think that they all need to drop AI from their naming conventions and specifically their top level brand efforts. There's two reasons for this. One is that if you're in a competitive space and then all of you have AI attached to your name, it's gonna be really difficult to remember you just from a word-of-mouth perspective.
Zach:And talking about it, it doesn't really create a differentiator if everybody else is doing it. And then two, you will be antiquated with the next tech wave. Like, whatever's coming after this, if you have AI attached to your name, they're like, that's so 2024 and 2025. Like, so you're setting yourself up to look like a like, it's just an old company, you know, like, AI has become so embedded into all of these tools that you no longer have to communicate yourself, like, in your name as AI. Especially because it's not like it's a totally new sector.
Zach:Like, you know, Apple was Apple Computer before they jumped into smartphones. But AI is gonna be so entrenched, like, really soon that it doesn't really matter. You just have to communicate your features and then focus on building your brand instead of tying your tethering your brand to a feature, which is AI. I had two. I had two.
Zach:But Go for it. Okay.
Nick:Yeah. What's your other one?
Zach:Well, the second one is around image imagery and just brand distinction. So a lot of these AI companies and it's a problem with not having your ICP nailed is that you have zero visual influence on the way that you show and visualize your product. And so a lot of these AI companies look homogenous. I mean, can even see things like the amount of company logos that look exactly like OpenAI's is ridiculous. And they all follow the same shape.
Zach:They all have this, like, amorphous gradient, like, moldable abstract feel to them. And I think that you could mitigate that if you instead focus on an ICP. And imagine if you were doing AI tools for, you know, the construction industry, you would look different than an aicom or a a tool that has AI features that was doing stuff for people in sports. You know, like, all of those have very distinct visuals to them that you could then apply, but it comes down to you having a very focused specialization and a use case for your tools and the way that AI is gonna help those people.
Nick:Totally agree. I love that. Okay. One quick question about the removing the AI. Is Open a better company name than OpenAI?
Zach:Well, they might get a they might get a They might get a pass.
Nick:I was kinda like, maybe it is. Maybe that's kinda cool. I don't know.
Zach:But it's also like I mean, I think that you can discount first mover advantage on that. Yeah. Because it's like, you know, they brought it onto the scene. And they probably will they're also like they're AI is not a feature of OpenAI. Like, they are building the things that other companies are using to then power their AI features.
Zach:So it makes sense for them to do it because it's like, well, dude, like, we made artificial intelligence the thing.
Nick:My point was purely speculation. It had nothing to do with your actual point of, like, dropping. I was just like, maybe that is a better name. I don't know. That kinda sounds cool.
Nick:Anyway
Zach:Yeah. Well, I I mean Those are great. It leads to so many other like, people trying to incorporate AI at the end of their name, and then like cutting off part of their name. Like, we are, like, Rapture AI or something like that. Or just let you know.
Nick:We're all getting rapture.
Zach:Or like, you know, cutting cutting their names and have like, I I forget. I think there was somebody who was like, elevate I or something like you mean like elevate? But with AI? How? Yeah.
Zach:And so you but that I mean, that's a trope among many industries. Not just AI specific, but, you know, trying to merge their name with something else. Totally.
Corey:Yeah. That I mean, that that really segues into what I think the the core fundamental issue, which is that companies who call themselves AI companies need to stop calling themselves AI companies if they don't make AI. You make a CRM, not AI. Just because you're AI CRM doesn't mean you're AI company. You use AI to make your CRM better.
Corey:And I think that's part of where the skepticism comes is that everyone realizes that all these companies are just g p t wrappers. And I actually don't think that's a bad thing, because now there are so many different models that you can pull from that it actually like, the moat is in the application layer, not in the model layer. So it's fine to be a GPT wrapper. It's fine to be an AI wrapper. It's fine to be a CRM that incorporates AI because now you get to choose multiple AI models that you that you pull from and incorporate.
Corey:But don't call yourself an AI company if what you're building is not proprietary AI, which almost no one is building proprietary AI. There's like, you know, 10 or less companies that are actually building unique differentiated, like innovative AI products that you can incorporate. OpenAI's big innovation actually was just making AI an API call away. That's the whole thing. It was just a it's an API that allows you to use AI to augment whatever it is, your data, your feature, the output of something, whatever it is.
Corey:Right? But I think that, like you said, if companies were more honest about how they're using AI, then they would have to do a better job of communicating how AI helps their customers beefing up the features that they're already providing. Right? And if they stop doing that, then I think people will give them more credit.
Zach:Yep. I mean, it's like if someone was trying to talk to you, a copywriter, and like, well, we're a copy tool for AI. Or like, we're an AI copy tool. It's like, well, you're just a copywriting tool then. Mhmm.
Zach:The same thing with design. And they can show you a lot more easily how things benefit you, especially in the way that they talk about it. Like, hey, writing a blog post takes you two hours if you're really, really fast. What if we could cut that time down by 75% and still get you something that sounded really good, that was on brand, that communicated valuable information, and then all you had to do was edit it. You know, those are the kind of instances where it's really valuable.
Zach:I think they're they're trying to hype it up so much that they're overlooking really simple ways to communicate about themselves that are right in front of their face. Like, hit the that takes you a long time? Okay. We can make it not take a long time. Is that cool?
Corey:Yeah. Yeah. From from a product marketing perspective, I think a lot of companies have made a mistake in calling like their company, let's just say Notion for example. We can pick on them because we actually love Notion, use them a ton. But I think that they've kinda made a mistake in a way by calling a new feature Notion AI.
Corey:And you have this little guy with a face. I'm looking at him right here down in the corner. I don't know if you guys have used him before or you know
Zach:what it
Nick:is. I avoid that button like the plague. You know me.
Zach:I've used it I've used it for very simple stupid things. And actually only for personal stuff.
Corey:But Right. So so a lot of companies, especially initially, they they were like, oh, we have an AI feature now. And it's this little like clippy assistant guy where you can chat with him, he can do things for you, yada yada yada. I don't think anyone really wants that. No one asked for Clippy.
Corey:No one asked for Notion AI. I don't know very many like use cases of, you know, imagine like Salesforce AI or Stripe AI. It's like, I don't really want to interact with AI. I just want all the things that I'm doing within this product already to be done better, quicker, faster, cheaper with AI. And we see that now with where where AI becomes embedded in all these different features.
Corey:I don't care that it's AI. I want AI in every one of the features. I don't want a feature that is AI. I just want everything to be better because of AI that's happening in the background. And that to me is kind of the product marketing crux of companies using AI and and AI companies, is they're making the whole feature AI instead of talking about how these features are better with AI.
Zach:I wonder if they just called it Notion Assistant instead. If that would Right.
Corey:That could be interesting. Be more helpful. That's what it is. It's an assistant. Mhmm.
Corey:An assistant powered by AI.
Zach:Well, listen, I'm thinking of my my use case for it, which was I had a a huge grocery list that was on my personal Notion board. And I was like, sort all of these by where I would find them in a grocery store.
Corey:That's such a a male problem. I love that.
Zach:And and so it was like, okay. Here's produce, dairy, meat, and seafood, canned goods, packages. Like, perfect.
Nick:Thank you. I was like, I was thinking like about when you said Salesforce, it's like, we don't need necessarily, like, a little chat bubble that's like, okay. Let me see if I can ask this thing to take all leads that come in from this source to go into this, like, campaign. Like, let me just have, like, the feature that does the thing where it's like, oh, I just go here and I say, hey. Need lead source that comes in here that goes in here and does this.
Nick:Like, it should just be a feature. Like, how about you maybe you use a little, like, help question, and then you realize, hey. 90% of the questions that are being asked right here could just be feature that is in the software, and we don't even need this bubble here that's costing us money and all this extra time and effort to, like, figure out what's wrong with it. Why is it broken here? Why is it working here?
Nick:Like, let's just take the data it's bringing in and, like, make it into the product.
Corey:Yeah. You know what's really interesting? I I went into Zapier the other day to fix one of our automations that was related to when someone books a sales call, and then we automatically create a little Notion card and pipe in some information there. So I went in to rejigger it, and then I saw that on the sidebar, because you you know how Zapier has, they kind of created this like visual automation builder Mhmm. UI that everyone kind of copied where it's like, you know, action trigger and there's little plus buttons in between Yeah.
Corey:And so on and so forth.
Nick:Great.
Corey:And then I saw on the left hand side that there was like a it was a little chat bubble, little text box, and it was like, describe what you wanna do and then like, we'll do it with AI. So I was just like, okay, me just describe what I'm trying to do here. And so I just typed in like two sentences and then it remade the the automation and and like did it perfectly. And I was like, this is actually awesome because that it just saves me clicking like a 100 times. You know what I mean?
Corey:And that's really a pretty trivial thing. I just needed to like update a couple fields and add a step and and move a couple things around. And I was like, this this is how every product should be incorporating AI and talking about it is, now you don't have to do the thing. You just tell the product what you want and it does it for you. That to me, I was like, why isn't Zapier talking about this more?
Corey:Like their product marketing should be like, you don't have to build automations anymore. All you have to do is tell it what you want and then it will build the automation for you.
Zach:Yeah. I mean, and that's honestly, I feel like the assistant area there is really cool too. Because with Zapier, you could say or you could it could ask you, like, just a couple prompted questions, like, what softwares do you use? And you could list them out, and then it could return to you thousands of different combinations that you could have between all of those different programs. Things that you might not have even thought of before.
Zach:So Right. Yeah. But that should be something like, I wouldn't need to know that this is an AI assistant that's gonna help me with it. It could just be a prompt. A a pop up modal.
Zach:It's like, softwares are you using? Boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. Great. We can create 30 different automations for you right now. Would you like that?
Nick:It's a messaging problem. Because I guarantee, like, Corey, if you click that thing and it was like, try to wrap your AI. Like, type in what you want. Right? Like, you would've kinda been like, just start at close close close close it.
Nick:Like, but because it was like, just tell us what you need and we'll do it. That was basically all it said. You were like, oh, let me just see what it does. You know? But if it was like all, you know, bright flashing, you know, Vegas lights, we are AI now, like, you would have been like, screw you.
Nick:I'm done. You know?
Zach:Be a little so I think that one of the big things is maybe being a little bit more subtle with the AI. And this was because this was the problem that blockchain had. If blockchain had just been done under the hood, and behind the scenes, like, one needs to know how it works. Just, like, give them the freaking result that they're after.
Nick:That's exactly The the website builder is interesting. Same problem with messaging. Like, I if I landed on a landing page that was like, we are the AI website builder, I would immediately close it. But if I landed on a page that was like, we'll help you build websites faster, be like, what? How?
Nick:Like, I would immediately say, how? Like, let me see what what do you how does that actually work? And like, I wanna see a demo of like how this actually takes place. But like
Zach:That's a
Nick:just using the different phrasing is like, ruins it.
Zach:That's another thing too, is there's a lot of there's a substantial lack of proof by form of case studies of, you know, consumer reviews, and then, like, and real consumer reviews, not ones that are made by AI, like actual use cases for how this thing works. Because that's one of the main things with the product marketing is that people don't they can't see themselves getting benefit from the product, mainly because they don't show substantial proof of, well, this is how this company saved twenty thousand hours a week across their their entire workforce by using our platform. Like, those are sizable numbers that people should be focusing on, and the the way to demonstrate them. It's not new tactics. It's just actually showing people the results that they could expect to see from this.
Zach:So they could then understand how it might be transposed to to their situation.
Corey:Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's kinda sad, but I also feel like it's a huge opportunity. Because I feel like most companies are fumbling the bag on how to market their AI capabilities really really well.
Corey:You take a company like Visual Electric, for example, I haven't actually looked at their homepage, but if they took the approach of most startups today, their headline would be like, the visual AI image automation platform or something like that. And you'd be like, I don't know what that means at all. And then the whole rest of the page would just be like, look at this cool thing. Look at this cool thing. Look at this cool thing.
Corey:All they need to say is like, remember when you used to look through stock photos for hours and then have to pay a dollar every time someone viewed that stock image? Like, those days are gone. Now, make your own stock images perfectly tailored for you for free.
Nick:Is that true? It's a
Zach:camera for your mind. Oh. What? But the funny thing is the funny thing is, I feel like when I signed up for it last year, that's not what it said. I think it was something else.
Nick:Camera for your mind. Who did they hire?
Corey:Yeah. The
Zach:the thing is is that the their subhead is perfect, which is bring your vision to life with VisualElectric, the first image generator built for designers.
Corey:Not bad. Great. Yeah. Not bad.
Zach:Yeah. And well, I mean, they're missing a couple other things. Like, you know, it'd be cool if they had some objection busters. And, I mean, with this use case in particular, they'd benefit from a little bit more of a shift in layout from being centered to having a left right alignment. Because if I could just see, like, what the project was doing, that'd be fantastic.
Zach:Right. Granted, I'll scroll. But their h two is never used on their stock photo. So like they're immediately getting into the problem, which which are great. Yeah.
Zach:A little bit more features, but highly specific ones. So things like never use another stock photo, create realistic mock ups, that's a cool thing that this really powerful for designers. Style library, they're hitting you with really really good features, which again, this is why this is a good use case for AI in a very very very specific sector and hitting on specific problems. Because every single thing that they are mentioning is a problem that designers have. Specific even within other comparing it to other image generators is that I didn't have all these other things like their art director, where you have the ability to change the way a photo looks.
Zach:Collaboration, another big deal. Yeah. So I mean, they could have done a little bit more. And but this also it's also really cool because then it opened up into a bunch of other integrations streams that were really effective for them. Like, they have a Figma plugin, they have a Framer plugin, and they have a Webflow plugin.
Zach:All of which, like, the very very narrow focus instead of like, it plugs into whatever you want. It's like Yeah. You're not gonna need a Visual Electric tie in to Gmail.
Corey:Yeah. Right. But my point too is that, if you're incorporating AI into your into your product, there's such an amazing opportunity right now to be like, hey, remember this thing that you've doing for the last ten years this way? Now, you can do it in a completely different way that's 10 times easier, faster, cheaper, and better. And here's how.
Corey:Like that window is closing. We're probably gonna have that window for the next couple of years ish, and then it's gonna be incorporated into every startup and every product ever, because that's what everyone's working right now is incorporating AI. And then that's gonna become the new normal. And then everyone's just gonna be used to like, oh, okay. Yeah.
Corey:So like, how is your AI CRM different than this other AI CRM different from this other AI And that but we're not even gonna be calling them AI CRMs by then. There's just gonna be, how is your CRM better than your CRM better than your CRM? And right now, there's such an amazing opportunity to say, hey, we're incorporating AI in very very specific ways that allow you to go from this to this, before and after. You used to do it this way, now you can do it that way. And if they just paint that picture with the before and after, and you used to do it this way, now you can do it this way, that's better.
Corey:It would click in people's minds so much faster. But instead, all the emphasis is just on this like gobbledygook jargon, talking about the technology and all the different possibilities and synergies and meaningless words.
Nick:I have bad news, Zach. I know you love Visual Electric, but their site is built on Framer. And like many sites built on Framer, they actually have five h ones. So the h two you mentioned is actually a h one. It's their second h one.
Nick:Mhmm. Whoops. Yeah. A camera for your mind I don't know. I Sorry.
Nick:I had to cut you off. I was like just waiting for the spot to tell you that your H 2 is actually at H 1.
Zach:Well, I mean, I didn't inspect any elements on here. I was just Yeah.
Nick:What they That's the the web head in me. I just can't help it. Okay. We've we've beat the horse as about as much as I think we should for now. So if there's no final thoughts, I will end with my last my last little baby question, which is what are the odds that the .com domains are overtaken by something like a .ai or a dot something else?
Nick:Will .com ever be dethroned?
Zach:I think .com Ever? Is well, I think .com is useless right now. Because what it stood for was .commerce. And this is when the like, know, with the .com boom, it was all about, know, oh, you can just, you know, you buy shit online or you conduct business online and commerce online. But now, it like, the the domain that you use doesn't really matter with the exception of certain use cases like if you have a .gov or a .us.
Zach:So I don't think that .coms matter anymore. I would not use a .ai unless you were, like, unless you were doing something cool where that played into your your brand name. Like, if your brand name ended in ai, that could be the only instance I would think of where it's like, that's highly relevant. Because again, it you're going to look antiquated, you know, like, moving forward. And no one really cares like what your domain value.
Nick:Like the domain cost. Like the king willalwaysbe.com.
Corey:Yes. Well, of course, it says yes. Yeah. I think so. I don't see the Internet moving away from from from those types, like, we have to use these TLDs, these top level domains, these little, you know, extensions of the names.
Corey:And it'll always be like the first thing in people's mind that are like, oh, conversionfactory, is it conversionfactory.com? And they're like, oh, it's conversionfactory.co.co.
Nick:Yeah. I I hate that.
Corey:It'll always be .com is the first thing people come to mind, and as long as it's the first thing that comes to mind, it'll always be the most coveted TLD. And I think and I think dot AI is gonna look integrated, you know, sooner rather than later. We saw the same thing with .io, and what was the popular crypto one? It was like wasn't .xyz.
Zach:Was No. Well, it wasn't .xyz. I thought I feel like crypto had the dot Like, they that was really popular with dot before.
Corey:That was like the first wave of startups in like the February. A lot of them were dot or started as io. And then eventually moved to .com. I actually think that like brandable.coms and brandable names in general are like kind of the final frontier. Like people are realizing that that's there it's just so scarce.
Corey:There's only so many words and domains that are good. And so, everyone wants the best of the best.
Nick:True. It's a whole another topic.
Zach:Yeah. A whole another topic.
Nick:I was just it was a simple question. Okay. To be fair. No. That was great.
Nick:Thank you, guys. We solved the problem of AI. It's done. I'll never be bothered by it again. Okay.
Nick:Thank you guys for listening to the factory floor. We will see you next time.
Zach:Later. Bye.