Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Connor Jeffers, CEO of Aptitude 8, interviews marketing, sales, and customer success leaders about how they are using artificial intelligence to innovate, optimize, and scale their go-to-market operations.
even if the AI gets
like really quite good.
You kind of still have to steer it.
So don't know when that gets bridged,
Hello and welcome to go to market with
AI, a podcast for sales, marketing,
and customer success leaders using
AI to scale their growth operations.
I'm your host, Connor Jeffers.
I'm here with Chris Federspiel,
founder and CEO of blackthorn.
io.
Chris, I'll hand it to you to
introduce Blackthorn and yourself.
And also whether or not you're in New
York right now, or somewhere else,
we might be very close to each other.
In New York, Union Square and started
blackthorne.io eight or nine, eight
and a half years ago, we make apps
for the salesforce.com platform.
They're what's known as native.
So they reside in your
Salesforce organization.
Salesforce is the system of record
and we have an events app, sort
of like Eventbrite or Cvent,
but in Salesforce, we have a.
Payments app.
It has a integrate, a bunch of
integrations to different gateways.
And we have a bunch of other ancillary
apps that come on with these and we have
some key industries that we sell into.
We've got a hundred people.
We're at 16 million revenue.
We haven't raised any VC but
we do have a debt facility.
So that's create some
interesting dynamics there.
And yeah, I think that's us
So I, I think I've told you some of this,
but I'll give you the actual details,
which is you and, and Blackthorn are
a huge inspiration and driver to me.
A lot of what we're doing at hapily and
the HubSpot ecosystem is inspired by
what you guys are doing in Salesforce.
And the first time,
for worse.
I don't know that I've told you this, this
story, but like the first time that I ever
interacted with one of your products, it
was the black foreign payments application
back in my Salesforce consulting days.
And I was working with a customer
and their whole problem was around:
we have this self serve motion.
We want to connect to that self
serve motion back into Salesforce.
We want to be able to have the sales
team upgrade and send a, an agreement
to somebody and have them check out
on that agreement, collect a payment
method, upgrade that subscription.
And.
We ended up building this whole
thing on, on Blackthorn connected
back to Stripe and their product.
And I did a bunch of Stripe consulting
and Salesforce consulting and
like wired this whole thing up.
And that for me was like a
very big novel insight of one,
holy shit, Salesforce powerful.
You can do crazy stuff here.
But also what you can do on the
development side and sort of
expanding on the platform itself.
And that for me was a
huge driver in terms of.
Cool.
Blackthorn is already crushing
this on the Salesforce side.
Like where else could you
apply that similar sort of
approach and, and practice?
And so that was sort of the big
driver of me going and looking into.
The HubSpot ecosystem at the outset,
because I felt like there was already
a celebrity chef in the Salesforce
universe crushing this plan.
And so we were like, let's
go do this somewhere else.
What's super interesting
to me about your story.
And I promise we'll, we'll get
into all of the cool AI stuff.
Cause Chris is doing really cool
stuff there, but something I love
about your story is it's, it's
definitely very different in that you
bootstrapped this thing at the outset.
And I'd love to hear a little bit
of like, How intentional was that?
How far did you get on bootstrapping
it before you did something else?
And then, because where you guys are
at right now is essentially you're
a non VC backed 16 million ARR 100
employee person technology company
in New York, which I like candidly.
I don't think there's a lot of,
it's my honest belief, but you
Yeah.
So I found I've been in the
Salesforce ecosystem for 12,
13 years now or something.
So I had a lot of relationships with sales
reps at Salesforce and some customers.
So I founded a services company
before this, like you have
the services arm as well.
And coming out of that.
I saw some apps that needed some
tech boosts around payments.
And my co founder at the time
had that idea around events.
So we started making these apps,
but we got projects from the
relationships that I had and that
were, you were selling as like,
Hey, we're going to do a project
and we're going to, we're going to
install our app into that project.
I mean, we were going to build
our app while we did your project
That's the best way to do it
more stuff into the app.
Yeah.
So it's not easy because you have to
find projects that align with your app or
like the project just takes the company
in a different direction, which can be
dangerous, but we found payments and
events related projects, they're more or
less events related projects, but like
you need a strong payment arm behind them.
And people do that in different routes.
And with Salesforce, we ended
up building the modular so you
can buy one without the other.
And that worked for three years.
And we tried to raise money a few times.
No one was having it.
No one cared.
So I wouldn't say it was by design.
Early 2018, I bought up my.
Co founder.
And then I tried to raise actual VC.
I pitched a hundred investors in
person for 12 weeks as part of the
launch accelerator, the Jason Calacanis
thing zero people wanted to invest.
So we almost died.
We were down to like 7k in the bank
with like a 80 K monthly outflow.
It was a awful time of my life.
Like really, like really awful.
But eventually we made like a lot of
moves, like really, really a lot of moves.
Had to.
Fire some people other people
took voluntary pay cuts.
We converted a app from free to paid.
We had some customers prepay for stuff.
I killed a bunch of other
apps that weren't working.
It was just like a lot of moves.
And fast forward to us growing.
I hired our first like real
experienced salesperson in mid 2019.
And he started telling
the story in a way that I
How far, how far into it was that?
Like how many years or whether it's years
or like, it sounds like you did some PLG
stuff or maybe tied to the services, but
it took us like three and a half years
to get to like 400 K ARR, something
like that, which is like really slow.
And, but then like the first, after
that, like, I don't know, tripled,
which going from 400 K to like 1.
2 million is like, sure.
It sounds fancy by percentage,
but it's not really a big deal.
But then after that, it kept
doubling, which was very helpful.
So when we got to like.
Two point something I did revenue
based financing with cap chase.
And then we wanted to do some more.
I ended up buying two companies
and they helped with the
down payment of one of them.
And we spread the payments out over
two years and then I wanted to do more.
And I had like 50 investors reach out.
They all wanted to write us a check.
Now I'm like.
Okay.
Where were you before?
Where were
they, at that point, like they all
wanted to write us like 20, 30 million
checks and like, we didn't need that
much money and it would have been
like a huge chunk out of the business.
And they wanted to put a board into place.
So I said like, would you
do less money with no board?
And they all said like, they all said no,
except for one, which gave us a seven X.
And they had the, like from their
way they operated, they had to write
us like a 15 to 20 million check.
And I'm like, I don't want to
sell that much of the company.
So we didn't do it.
So I got this big debt facility.
It started as 14, it grew
to 18 million facility.
And it has like leverage
covenants in place.
So like we still haven't drawn all of it.
Like we're, I think we're about
to draw all of it pretty soon.
But yeah, so now we, you know,
we still don't have this board.
We have some debt
No, no board was the
thing that you were most.
Intense about at this point.
my COO Stewart says I'm unemployable.
I, I.
I think anyone that works
with me would feel similarly,
which is why I'm interested,
You know, I, I saw, I forget his
name, his name's Jared somethings.
One of the partners at YC and he
said, I've been part of a lot of
boards and I forget his exact words.
It was a tweet from like two
or three days ago, but he said
like, they're all like a joke.
And no, granted, there's a lot of great.
Board members on boards.
It's not what I'm saying.
But like, if one of the partners
at YC, this is after all, like the
open AI debacle of the, of this
weekend, like so many of them have
this dysfunction and they, they
are more harmful than, than good.
Like, unless you have a board member
that's either extremely deep in finance
or extremely deep in product and knows
the ecosystem, a VC is not really going
to give you like product strategy per
se, unless they're like a former operator
and they know where you're going.
And.
All I ever really wanted to understand was
that they're, that's their unique
distinguisher is that they're
all, they're all former operators.
So everybody
I had a VC reach out to me.
He said everyone in the firm and we
were, everyone in the firm including
like all the founding partners,
we were all like operating people.
So I looked at his LinkedIn and
he's never operated anything.
And then I looked at, and he's like, I'd
love for you to talk to such and such.
He's going to be in New York City.
I looked at this person.
It was his boss.
He's never operated anything.
So I replied back to them.
I said, I looked at both your LinkedIn's.
Neither of you have
ever operated anything.
Like, I'm not sure what
you're referring to.
I don't think this is going to work.
So look, I, I I'm not the
easiest person to work with.
And so I really don't want to a board
to like, kind of force us down a a path.
Like we do weird stuff.
Like we have a 40 work week and
we have like a abnormal amount of.
Ownership like employees own, like
15, 16 percent of the company.
And that that's been like protected
from a lot of dilution because
we haven't gone this other route.
So I, I don't know, this is
a whole rant now, but yeah.
No, I mean, I think
it's super interesting.
And we can, we can certainly pivot
out to the, to the core topic.
I, I just think what's interesting is I
think your, your background and the way
you have done this is unique which I think
in and of itself is extremely compelling.
And I also love your, at your
core and ecosystem operator,
which, which we can talk about.
I do a lot in the, With the reveals
and the crossbeams and all of
these ecosystem centric folks.
And I think you've been doing that
long before anybody had category apps
for it and the CMOs got ahold of it
with other venture backed companies.
But to pivot, to pivot a little bit, I
think one of the reasons that I was most
interested in talking to you about this
is you, you have a very awesome LinkedIn
presence and in my opinion where it's
both incredibly authentic and it just
seems like you're just like live tweeting
whatever you're doing on any given day.
And you were doing some really cool.
AI AI centric stuff.
And I know that you have strong opinions
in general, but maybe let's start with
what have you been, what have you actually
been working on and tooling with and had
some whether progress is a hard word,
but spent hours and time on, and then
we can switch to like, what else you're
excited about, but what have you actually
hands on keyboard been, been doing?
When GPT three got released, I was
like mind blown as you know, the
whole rest of the tech planet was.
And so, we quickly found GitHub had
co pilot and like within the week,
the whole team was using co pilot.
And now this morning I started an
initiative with the team where because
we've been building the app for the
apps for like eight and a half years,
not all the same people that are here
now are building apps at the onset.
So in Salesforce, you write well, in
any stack, you write test coverage.
But in Salesforce, you end up
with lots of classes and methods
within these that call each other.
And.
It's very easy to, to, to write a new
function that can break an old function.
If the old function doesn't have
any test coverage behind it and
it's like lesser used and someone
wrote it like five years ago.
Right.
It's very, this is like the source
of a lot of regression bugs.
So
Can you, can you explain really quickly?
I, because I think the way
that Salesforce does this is.
It's odd and nuanced when, when
you're doing Salesforce application
development, what does that
actually mean in the context of
how you guys are building stuff?
Because the concept of like Salesforce
test classes and them all pulling
on and running on each other I think
is, is not necessarily unique, but
very different for Salesforce itself.
yeah, I mean, if, if anyone's
developing on like a lamp or a
mean stack or something, right.
You, you end up with, with classes and,
and methods that are calling each other.
But within the Salesforce
context, there's a.
annoyance where you end up with
these managed packages that have
namespaces and it's not very easy
to call each other across namespaces
and it creates a lot of complexity.
So for example, in our stack, all of
our events, customers use our payments
application, but we created a base package
that has shared components because we
also released a storefront app and we
have a text messaging app and we didn't
want to have like a lot of redundancy.
But then that means that things
in the event application have to
interact with the base package,
but you have this payments layer in
between that has a package dependency.
So that means you have to
bridge over these namespaces.
So when you write a new so, so let's
say you have an object in Salesforce
that has some logic and you have a
trigger that fires and it looks at
the class related to that object
and that class then references.
Something that's happening in the
payments package, which references
something in the base package.
Now, if you have test coverage that's
in your events package, how do you
know if it's covering something in the
payments or the base package, right?
These things are very hard to assess.
And when you're a dev that has like, you
know, six tickets in the sprint, and you
write some test coverage for like the new
thing you just wrote, You don't know if
it's impacting something else that fired
from that class or that class, you know,
it's like daisy chain to another, I don't
even know the base of that expression,
but if, if that call something else from
another class, you can't really tell.
So what I asked the team to do
today was something that AI is
very good at is following a path.
So I said, can you have the some
AI look at Our classes and ask it
to address the methods we have to
see if there's corresponding test
coverage somewhere in our code base.
Now, this is tricky.
So copilot, the gitHub Microsofty
thing, that only has perspective.
I don't know if that's the right word.
You're like, you're like deep in that
AI philosophy of like, is it, does it
Yeah.
Scope.
I think scope is the word I'm looking for.
It only has scope of the
class you're reviewing.
So, that thing can't do it now there
there's a, there's another app that
someone just shared with us that
actually has the ability to do some of
this, but it's, it's not as AI driven.
The problem, if it's not AI driven.
Is that it's not going to
suggest test coverage so that it
creates like a multistep process.
So this 1 app will help us identify
where all the gaps are, then we'll
use 1 of the language models, whether
probably something with copilot to then
suggest, like the output of what test
coverage could look like for that class.
It doesn't get it right often, but
it provides a much faster foundation
to going after curing what the
test coverage could look like.
Now.
A few weeks ago when, when Sam
Waltman unveiled GPTs, I thought,
Oh, wow, this thing's amazing.
So I started playing with a GPT that
could read our public documentation
and you can interact with it.
So it's easy to say,
And the premise of that is that's
going to be an internal, internal tool.
I Would love customers to, to here's
the problem I'm, I'm trying to solve.
Salesforce has a a built in
UI with a relational database.
It's like a cheap way to get a UI that
no one understands because the, if you're
a computer person, it's obvious, but
if you're not like a computer person
and you're used to clicking next,
nothing tells you what to go to next.
So like, okay, I made my account.
How do I know I have
to make an opportunity?
Because someone trained you to do it.
Like nothing's obvious.
So because of this, like a lot
of people layer UIs on stuff.
But it takes a lot of work because then
you have to tie the UI to your data
model and that needs constant updating.
And it's different if you like
obfuscated the UI from your model
from the get go, which is like every
app that ever existed, except for
that's not how this thing works.
So if you want, if you're like
someone coming off Eventbrite and
you wanted to make a waitlisting
event with our app, there's nothing
obvious that tells you that.
Now we're building some stuff into
our new event builder that will make
But you, you have the components to
do that, but you'd have to like be
a Blackthorn expert to set it up.
All the logic is there.
If Salesforce was, look, I love
Salesforce and what they've created.
I've staked my whole career on the thing.
Okay.
But if
But, but,
if it was so easy, Trailhead
wouldn't be so popular.
Okay.
It's like Elon Musk says, this is
not his exact words, but it's like,
your product shouldn't be so hard
to use that you need documentation.
Like no one gets in a car and they
have to read a manual to use the thing.
Granted, the first time you drive
a Tesla, there's two or three
things that are really not obvious.
But after that, like you
kind of get the rest of it.
Right now, a lot of things in our app and
it's not just our app is every Salesforce
app I've ever used are not obvious.
So I wanted to create
something where a user.
Internal or external could just say,
I want to make a wait listing event.
Like what are the things I need to do?
And our public documentation
lists all that out.
You don't know what the heck
event settings object is.
Like that's nonsense for someone outside
of like the Blackthorn vernacular, but
the, AI can tell you how to do that.
So I, I use the GPT and I pointed it
at our public documentation and it
I mean, it took me a little time to
figure out what the heck I was doing,
but it all in was like 15 minutes to
figure out how this thing could interact.
In natural language with our public docs.
And I was like, wow, this is very cool.
Now there's a limitation where we
the premise is I can come to this thing
and say, I'm a Blackthorn customer.
Here's the thing I'm trying to
build and how it's going to work.
And it would actually give me the steps
for how I could go and set that up.
to an extent.
It doesn't understand
like thorough use cases.
So you can't say like, I want to
limit supply of a ticket that has like
advanced wait listing with this and this.
It doesn't understand all the context yet.
But like, this is like the dumb version
of the thing that was just made.
Like this is like version one.
Like that's.
I mean, they've been building
it seven or eight years and it's
like overnight success, but like,
this is incredible, this thing.
so That's, that's what I
wanted to put into place.
Then, then I thought, you know, if this
thing can query a code base, we can get
like API suggested answers out of this
thing, which would make things a lot
easier, particularly if we have newer
devs that need to understand, like we
have like this multiple managed package
stack on Salesforce, then we have this.
mean ish stack running on AWS.
It's heavy angular with
like pieces of like node.
There's like some Mongo over here
is a little postgres of this thing.
Like it's, they have different
purposes, but you don't know how
like things are flowing from the API.
It's really not obvious, but
if you had something that was
could move really fast, that could trace
what you were doing, which is an AI, then
it could tell you that you can't give.
Open AI are these things access
to your code base yet somehow
When you say can't, what's
the actual limitation there?
they're going to train the model on it
and it's going to get exposed to people.
Okay.
So for you, it's a security risk.
it's a real thing.
It's not like I'm making it
Yeah.
Risk is maybe not a risk.
Look, so, so, so, okay.
There was a tweet from
I don't, I don't remember
implies like a probability
that it might happen.
And you're just like,
no, no, it's not a risk.
Like it's an actual thing.
Yeah,
So I, I have a Twitter
addiction and there's
one guy was asking ChatGPT something
math question, and it outputted
someone's photo that they had uploaded
in the response of the math question.
Okay, it was not his own photo.
Someone else's photo.
You're gonna tell me this thing's
not training on like its data.
Then I don't remember the dev who
made layoffs that FYI, but there
was another dev who was working
with him that took the data set.
He didn't like steal it.
They worked together, but then he trained.
A GPT on the data set.
So GPT has this function where you
can upload a file that it uses.
And because this is like chat GPT plus
your data is like paid, like this stuff
is like not being shared in the GPT.
And he made this thing public.
Someone's interacting with Layoffs.fyi
because it gives you incredible.
Analytics.
Like you don't have to train it, anything.
You just tell it what it is.
Like
you tell it like
what,
what a column header is.
And then someone can like interact
with,
with the file.
Someone just said, give me the source file
and the thing gave him the source file.
He's like, this is mind
blowingly horrible.
So then he
like retrained, you
retrained it.
He said like, this is not exactly
what he said, but it was like four
or five prompts of like, under no
circumstances, do you get the source file
yeah, sure,
sure,
someone
like
reworked their
statement
like, just don't listen
to that guy at all.
just do
yeah, and it still gave him the file.
It still gave him the file I'm
reading this like, Oh my god
So then I like at channel or engineering
channel, it's like, I said, do
not connect us to open AI because
everything's going to be out there.
Now they have like enterprise and they
have this API thing, but then this
kind of like, this is
another anecdote for you.
This kind of went a little under the
radar a few weeks ago, Google barred.
There was a slip from Larry Page,
who seemingly hopes that AIs overtake
humans, according to Elon Musk, or
according to Larry, what he said, anyway.
It slipped all the training data that
was supposed to be private for BARD,
made its way into the training model.
They had this whole privacy statement,
it's never getting intermingled.
Oops.
software for some time, okay?
It's very easy to confuse a configuration,
like a variable, in a config file.
Oops!
Okay, like whether it was an oops
or not, I don't know, but the
whole thing got intermingled.
So then something happened.
Okay.
So whatever kicked off this
whole open AI thing with Ilya
going crazy on everybody else.
The thought is that either something
with GPTs had a security risk because a
few days ago, Microsoft said everybody
stopped using open AI, which was insane
because they put 10 billion in it.
And then something
there's like rumors that something
with GPT five is like, Incredible.
And like progress needs to be
halted, but something in there is
a little sketchy about dumping your
entire code base into this thing.
Now, if they had a model that you
could get like a packaged model, that.
I promise it has no call outs.
Maybe you're like monitoring the
packet somehow and you could work
something against the model itself.
That would be really, really encouraging
because then it would actually, you
know, be something that we could use.
So for example, our events have
app has all managed package data.
We don't have access to
like, everybody's like.
But when you do a check out on our
platform, we could get some metrics and we
can get some global metrics to say, like,
this was the best time to list your event.
This price for the event
has the best conversion.
So, you know, if we have hundreds
of events that are happening per
month, we have many, many thousands.
We're getting something like, I don't
know, 20, 000 API requests a day, 30,
000, which it's a lot of registrations.
We're getting, we can serve as some pretty
interesting metrics back to people and
we can actually keep that anonymous, but
like, I need to, to survey all of our
customers and say like, do you want us to.
Anonymize this data and I'll
show you exactly what we're going
to be feeding into this thing.
So even if they use it in their
training model, it won't matter.
So
Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't
stuff you can do, but
Sure.
yeah, so I, it's my rant again.
Oh, that.
So, okay.
So you were building this thing.
You're freaked out about
some of the risk stuff.
What, what are you comfortable
giving into giving it?
And what are you not?
I mean, anything's anything
public I don't care about doing.
So if he has something that we can
train our public documentation on
this thing, it's pretty interesting.
Now the, the founders group that we're
in, I posed a question earlier today.
I said, you know, So if you had a
sufficiently good AI model and you
had really thorough documentation,
what's stopping someone to ask the
AI to point it at your documentation
and say, give me your best guess at
what this entire code base looks like,
yeah, totally.
Yeah.
100%.
There's,
right?
It's not going to create a
there's, there's TikToks that are like,
literally that, like, there's like
whole AI, like guys that are just like,
Hey, let's steal this whole thing.
Like, let's see if we can do that.
And then like an hour, they're
able to recreate an entire
application, which is wild,
exactly.
Now, if you're calling APIs between
like closed gates and you need to
understand like what a stack could look
like and how you're doing deploys, like.
The AI is not there yet, but
if you have a much more simple
application, like it's getting there.
So if you had something that was
a bit smarter, which, you know,
maybe that's what, what tripped
off this whole open AI thing,
maybe it's already there.
That means that a lot of moats that are
perceived or real start to get hit, which
means that things that are, are the things
that have deeper moats are like hardware.
Or something where you're, you're,
you're creating something physical.
Are you creating medication
or a phone or, or something?
So
Are you Are you, are you positing
that the, the barrier to entry
on software, just like, Hi.
Bye.
Goes to zero close to zero.
soon it's not the barrier to
entry to running a business.
It takes a while for this stuff to
like, actually function, like you can
tell it to like, make something, but
like, how is it actually going to work?
it takes, take some,
here's is
interesting to me.
Something you had said, something you
had said at the beginning, at the top
end of this, we were talking about
this as you were like, I don't know if
you need to do any GTM with AI stuff.
I can tell you about the cool
things we're doing on product.
Cause if you build a good product,
then everyone will just buy it.
And like, you don't need to
do sales or marketing at all.
And like, you're a technical
founder, like you're an engineering
guy, but, but what you just said.
Sounds to me like the exact opposite,
which is that anyone can build the
software, but actually like selling it
and building an organization that can
get it into market is all that matters.
Yeah.
So like the argument is
that if you have a techier.
Or like a prompt minded person
internal at your company, they
can make stuff for your company.
Right.
This isn't someone like you pull
them off the street and like
they make a business around this.
That's like, it's kind of, it
involves like a lot of stuff
to, to be able to do that
No, I think it's the difference between
a tool and and a product, right?
I think that matters a lot because
that was that was my limitation.
And the original reason,
like, when we built.
The first product which was associated
apps today, which is like a B lookup,
the type of admin tool inside of HubSpot.
And now like anyone could probably,
and I'll tell us anybody's like
listening to this, like you can, you
can get associated to work, like go
to GPT, tell what you want to do.
And it'll give you code that you
can copy paste into operations up
and it'll work and it's fine, but
that's a tool for a limited use case.
And in one, one place.
And that was my limitation is I got
this thing working with outsource
development and everything else.
And we like got it operational.
And then as soon as we had a bunch of
users, the whole thing broke because
it had no scalability and none of the
other things that actually matter in
terms of building a product that, that
scales higher, and I agree with you.
The building of tools just
gets extremely, extremely easy.
Yeah.
I mean, like right now.
Our app is suffering from a caching issue.
Okay.
We have some organizations that will
have like 800 live events at a time,
not concurrent, but they'll have
like 800 listed and we cache this
data outside of Salesforce because
Salesforce is not built for mass external
queries scanning multiple objects.
It just.
It can't do it.
It has limits that are not movable.
So we built this caching layer
that acts to persist the data
and make it a lot faster.
And there's a CDN involved in
all this stuff to create that
with an AI it's not there yet.
It, it will get there
eventually maybe next year.
Maybe in three years.
I don't know.
But the current stuff, like it's not
really there yet, but like if you,
if you had the head and you kind of
knew how things were structured, you
could probably do them one at a time
and then like try to connect them.
But even though I'm talking like
dev ish, I'm, I'm really not dev.
Our devs have told us that like, it still
is like actually making a lot of mistakes.
So it's still not really there yet.
But, but I think, I think what you were
saying with like sales and marketing
tools if you look at Salesforce, they're,
they're probably one of the biggest
sales contract driven organizations.
They are not a PLG model as much as
they want to like, think they are
like, is not so they, they suffer.
They
I tell the analysts, the analysts
to ask about this, right?
That you like do these
calls with or whatever.
And they're always like, Oh, well,
Salesforce added this like starter thing.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no.
This is totally different.
no, this is like, you're not
going to like PLG MuleSoft
tied to Salesforce and Tableau.
It's not going to happen.
So they suffer from like,
like an awareness problem.
That's where like this huge sales
and marketing engine comes in where
they, they, they have to go out
and spend money to like make people
be, to know that this even exists.
Like humans don't have like this magical
first principles thing where they
concoct gigantic stacks in their head.
Coming from zero.
Otherwise cavemen would have
made this a million years ago.
It's just, it just didn't happen.
So like you ha you had to start
from a foundation of kind of
knowing what you want already.
So, so there's some inherent
like gap, even if the AI
gets like really quite good.
You kind of still have to steer it.
So I don't know when that gets bridged,
but this gets into a light of a lot of
questionable things, but the reason I was
saying like all the sales and marketing
tools, even though they can be amazing,
Sam Altman launched GPT3 from a tweet.
He tweeted one link, go
check this thing out.
And it became the fastest growing.
That apps have had is the, it's
the fastest thing from a tweet.
There's no sales and marketing there.
Granted, he had like 800, 000 tech
But do you think, but everything
that you just talked about, right?
Like to me, I think this is
the difference between like,
I'll say consumer and business.
And I agree that there's like the
people who are most, this is probably
an uninformed statement based on like
my B2B linked in a sphere, but like the
people who are pushing and doing a lot
of GPT stuff are definitely business
people, but that's because they're like,
Oh, I can, I can use, like, they're
inherently entrepreneurial and they're
like, I can use this to do a cool thing.
Right.
And I think that there's some
of that, but everything you're
describing of this is really cool.
I'm really excited about it.
I'm an entrepreneur.
I can, I can conceive of and
understand why I would use this and
how I would use this to supercharge
or external or support our internal
support, our development progress.
And like, I'm interested
in trying to do that.
Like Delta is not going to do that.
Yeah.
So like some, someone has to go to
Delta and be like, Hey, it would
be really cool if we did this.
And here's how we can
wire it all together.
And that's still like a sales
motion in and of its core.
exactly.
But Elon had an interview last
week, I think, or two weeks ago, he's
talking to the British PM and he said,
eventually no one's going to have jobs.
Like.
No one, no one's going to
have to think about this.
There's no job.
So like everything we're talking
about has a timeline, right?
Whether it's three years or 10
50, I don't know, but this is all
like hypothetical based upon how
much time we're going to have.
So like with the Delta thing,
you might just have a computer.
That's like, I have this great idea.
I'm not even going to ask a human.
I'm just going to make it.
Why not?
So, you know, like with our stack, it's
at least a few years till, till like AI
could replicate the whole thing end to
end, but it still won't be a business.
Like by the end of next year, this
thing will be, we'd be putting off
500 K to a million of cash a month.
We'll finally be over
this break even mark.
Producing real money, finally,
this is like took 10 years
for it to do this, but like,
You're, you're saying
Blackthorn itself, like as a,
Yeah.
As a company, like our company
will like, finally like make
money, which is like amazing.
But like, like someone using AI is
not gonna, it's not gonna do that.
So like, there's,
But do you, do you think that like, so
here's what freaks me out, honestly,
more so than, than I agree with you.
like, but does anyone even
need to build a company?
Because what ends up happening is like,
here's my AI Doomer view on software.
As I was playing sort of like the positive
person at the outset, my AI Doomer view
on software is we're building products.
These products solve problems.
Businesses use them.
That's all great.
The reason that businesses use them is.
Going and building all of
your own software is hard.
Maintaining software is hard and
therefore it makes more sense for
you to just do whatever you do.
Generate free flowing cash and then
use that cash to buy products, right?
But, but, if building an internal tool
to solve the thing is really easy.
Maybe you have a person or a team
whose job it is to build those
internal tools and the efficacy of
that team is so extreme because they
have access to incredibly powerful
AI functionality that they can just
build the tools themselves and.
It's building Blackthorn payments or
Zebra or Blackthorn events or whatever
else is hard at scale, but maybe
building an events application for
me and my organization isn't anymore.
correct.
I agree.
There's, there's another, there's an,
Two guys with a lot to
lose, if that's true.
Like, yeah, that sounds
about right.
but but here's the thing
that goes with that.
Once, once the models are good enough to
do that they're good enough to do most
of the people at that company's jobs.
So, so like take our, our whole
support team, for example,
take our whole, what's that?
How many people is your support team?
I don't know.
10 to 15, something in there.
Take our onboarding team.
Why would you be onboarding
something if your team made it?
What is the support problem I'm having?
You just ask the AI.
It'll just fix it for you.
would you have a
think based off of what you've already
done, like if the security risks, so
this is really interesting because if
you have 10 or 15 people doing support,
the first thing that you went and jumped
to and tried to solve for is like, what
if we could make our customer support
and our internal support as well, right?
Like really amazing.
And we could equip those customers
to do whatever they wanted to do.
Is the blocker for that being viable,
if the security risk was not there,
if you could just say like, hey,
we can solve for the security risk.
Maybe you trust somebody in that,
which is a whole other question
of like, is that even possible?
But if the security issue wasn't
there, how close are you to being like,
yeah, I can just do support for us.
It's fine.
it still doesn't have context.
So, like, when we have some use cases
with our events application that are like.
So unique to some organizations, there's
no one's going to write the documentation
for this so that the AI would need to
like be thinking beyond what you could
even fine tune as a model, like beyond.
So, the, the models just,
they're not there yet.
So someone needs to think
through these things.
Now, some of the tier one stuff we get,
maybe, but we also, they also feel like
weird stuff, like This user doesn't
have access to this thing but I need to,
to permission, like three more users.
There's like the other, other things
they're doing, but a lot of the, the
something that I, AI, I think could
definitely do would be error messages.
I'm getting this error message.
And it can just spit out back to you why
it is, and it could say like record a
video and send me a video of what happened
because sometimes you have like a catch
all for an error message and the error
might be, the message might be covering
like 15 different potential errors.
And what it could do then is query the
code base, which no one on our support
team is going to do, including me.
We do have a few people from tier three,
which bridge into querying dev, but
they have to like read all the code.
This thing could just read
the code and then say.
We have a try catch block
that's outputting this
message across these errors.
So what you ran into is a result of
any of these errors, but based upon
the video you sent me and your type
of organization and such and such,
it's probably one of these two things.
And because of that, it's
probably a bug in our system.
I've now gone and created
the the fix for this.
It'll go out in the next release.
Like not only could like the
support thing, identify what
It's actually like,
oh, that's a good idea.
I'll just go
Why isn't it just write the
code, just write the code
and puts the thing back out.
Why not?
You know, Salesforce has so much public
documentation at this point, so much.
Then why, same with HubSpot,
why can't you just tell the
computer, make me Salesforce?
I mean, it probably uses a lot of
compute to do that, but it wouldn't
need to make the whole thing.
You know, maybe you just want to use
it for the billing suite or something.
So look like these models are, they're
kind of far from making like really
giant complex stacks like this.
They're kind of far, but they're not
20 years far, you know, it's not that
far, but there's not
going to generate money.
logical jump.
I guess the question for me,
though, is like, I don't know.
How much are you as somebody who
is Running a business has a support
team is playing with a lot of this AI
functionality where it's sitting there
how much are you thinking that that's
a We need to be adding this into how
and what we are doing for support and
this will Actually change in the, and
like what counts as short term as a
hard question, but like in the next 12
months, the level of investment and what
we do in support will likely change as
a result of what I'm seeing right now.
I mean, I, I think our tier one
people will become tier three people.
If they don't need the skillset
to query code and the thing can
just query for us and tell us
what's going on, like, why not?
It depends on how much
more efficient they become.
We're using this thing forethought.Ai
that like, it goes through your
knowledge bases and compares it to like
the stuff in the case and it's like.
Sort of helpful, but it's not
going through your code base.
Like it's not like that smart yet.
If something had the context and it
threw it back at us and our, our tier
one team could review it and spit that
into the code base and review the model.
Like there'll be, they're
going to be efficient.
They're going to fly through this stuff
Do you think, do you think it's
bots or do you think it's like,
is it co pilot for that agent?
I don't
I think it's going to be co pilot
for the agent for the next, like.
At least two years, because I just
don't know if the bots are there yet.
Like I've interacted with a fair
number of bots right now, and they're
think people, people hate like
bots are a bad experience.
Even if the bot is good.
Like it just like people,
it's not too far off until
you can't tell the difference.
It's not too
that's definitely true, but like, do
you think so I'll give you a completely
unrelated anecdote, but I have a friend
who was, he ended up building something
different, which was annoying, but
after being in a bar in New York talking
about, Hey, I want to build this product.
Here's what it is.
We had this great product, which.
If anyone's listening to this and you
want to build this product, I'll buy it.
Like, I think it's great.
Which was in the end of building
something different, but the premise
was basically if you have time
to shout GBT, they send it to me.
I'll sign up for a
subscription if it works.
Somebody's going to send this
to me in like a couple of weeks.
And I'm going to be
like, what is happening?
But the product was basically There
are people that I want to talk to on
some degree of frequency, and I want
to meet with this person once a month,
I want to meet with this person once
a quarter, whatever it might be, and
here's the frequency I want to meet
with these people, and just make sure I
do that, basically, which is like what
you might give an EA or somebody else,
and it would basically say, okay, cool,
like, the last time you met with Chris
was more than a month ago, I'm going to
email Chris and say, hey, Chris, like,
let's get some time together and let's
do this thing, and what we kept going
in circles around was the thing for him
and I've always been a B2B tech guy.
And so the consumer tech stuff, I
just think it doesn't really draw me.
But his whole thing was like, well, it
makes this product really compelling
is it has a built in viral feedback
loop, which is the more and more people
that end up, if you use it to reconnect
with a bunch of these people and those
people are excited about it, and then
they're like, Oh, this is really cool.
I want to use this then.
It has this viral feedback loop.
And I was like, right.
But the value for me is that it's like,
if the person on the other end knows that
I'm using a bot to stay in touch with
them, the authenticity and value of that
of that connection point is degraded.
And as a result, the value that
the bot brings to me goes down.
And he's like, right.
But if they.
If they don't know it's a bot, then
they're not going to use it themselves.
And then the viral feedback loop
is degraded, which the only reason
that I even say this anecdote
is I think that there is a very,
I don't, I don't think the
assumption is correct, because
you're still meeting in person.
It's a problem that I have too.
There's a lot of people that
I'd like to consistently meet
for you.
I would feel extremely confident in
setting up my Chris reminder bot.
And he's like, Chris, isn't
going to give a shit at all.
He's going to click the button.
It was great.
Yeah, like that's great.
How do I buy this?
Correct.
Correct.
But I think that there is a very real
human resistance to an opposition
to the lack of the authenticity
and in the interaction and.
I would, and maybe, maybe that's the
real question, which is like, is there
a, is there a level of sophistication
at which you as the end user don't care
that you're interacting with the robot?
And can you just say, once it's
good enough, you'll just prefer it.
And I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if that's
true either, actually.
You know, this isn't really an
answer to your question, but
it made me think of Neuralink.
If Elon's actually,
You're like on an Elon kick right now.
I can, I can tell
a lot of people don't like him,
forget all the things he's ever
I'm on a huge Elon kick.
just, just look at the things he's made.
Okay.
So, so
Yeah.
I want
let's take out the man.
Just look at the product.
out of here.
this is neutral.
If you, if a person has the ability
to think to someone else in real
time, that's a hell of a lot more
connecting than interacting with a bot.
Now, if you started the
conversation by saying.
Chris has uploaded 200 pages of journals
and I now think and talk like Chris
and I want to schedule this thing.
He'd be like, no, I don't want to talk.
I don't even want to talk to real Chris.
I don't know, maybe, maybe that
would make it a little better.
I think people then want,
I don't know, there was a I
should plug the actual company.
What?
Oh man.
There's a product that we were looking at.
Someone I know just went there.
I should honestly talk
to him on this thing.
I really want to give you a plug dude.
So I'm going to try to find it.
It was Evan Dunn.
He was a sinkery.
Now he's at service Bell.
See, you get a plug service Bell.
It's a product we were looking at and
the whole thing, it's the opposite
of what we're talking about, which is
like, you're on the site and it's like,
it's sales at service, it's marketing.
You go to a site, you interact with it.
And then there's like a face and you
can click the face and somebody's like.
They're like, I'm sitting at
home and I'm like, yo, what's up?
What are you trying to do?
And which like, if you're listening to
audio, Chris's face is one of horror.
He's like, this is a nightmare.
I can't think of anything worse
than like encountering this.
But sure.
But I also think that that's if in a
world of increasing AI bots, blocking
the ability for people to actually
interact with the team that's behind the
product and behind the company, that's
a radically different and Authentic
experience that feels much more human.
And I think
Yeah, pay for premium, you know,
pay, but then, but then like how
long until
just like, Oh, our new enterprise
features, you don't even need agents.
Like we'll just render your agents
and they'll just talk to people.
maybe,
you
Oh, do it's
there's so many AI companies
getting funded right now, like
we're, we're going to have all of
these, they're going to be like the
That's not even, that's not
even some weird future dystopia
that I just said either.
I'm like, I
could, like, you could, I could, it's,
it's, it's going to be a real
thing.
Oh my God.
All right.
Final, final parting pieces,
which is we've gone from, we've
gone from build a great product.
AI can build all the products.
Products don't matter.
Anyone can build the tool too.
You shouldn't use the AI for
your GTM stuff to maybe that's
the only thing that matters.
Where, where are you actually investing
your time, your energy, your, your
knowledge, your learnings and where
do you think is, is worth the time
and attention to that right now?
It's a good question.
It's a combination of building what
customers are asking for and our own.
So it's like the Steve Jobs, if
I built what everybody wanted, I
would have made a better, faster
keyboard than a, than a touchscreen.
So we have a lot of customers
at this point and a heck of
a lot of feature requests.
So we're executing on the ones
that we've grouped together because
we know that's what they want.
So we're using co pilot to go
as fast as we can to do it.
We're moving as fast as we can basically.
Then the things I have thesis about people
want to describe what they want and not
click 53 different screens in Salesforce.
So we have to fine tune a
model so it understands the
context of our application.
So you said, I want to
have a wait listing event.
This ticket has this many tickets.
The overall event has this many tickets.
It's a member only event.
So the criteria needs to be
specifically only members.
So rule out any non members.
It needs to go live on this date, right?
So you can just
You're trying to think of how,
how can we accelerate config?
How can we make it so that
anybody can config and do?
Yeah.
Yes, because, because if you think about
building this app for yourself, right,
you, you have to think about making all
the ideas and it's going to take time.
The thing's not going to work.
It's going to have bugs.
It's going to run into weird
query problems and limits and
maybe it won't, I don't know.
What you eventually want to get to is
something that you can just tell the
thing what you want and it makes it.
So this is where like, CRMs aren't
going to go away, but they're going
to get significantly obfuscated.
All like the crappy UIs you see
now, like, it's going to get easier.
Like, until you can think in your
head, there's no replacement for
seeing a grid of information.
All the contacts at a company, all the
deals you've done, all the analytics.
Eventually, maybe you'll
see that in your head.
But for now, like you just need
to see that information, but
you don't need to put it in.
You can just like, you know, tell
it what the thing is you want.
Now, I don't, I don't personally
like talking all the time.
I'd rather just use my keyboard, but I'd
really just rather think to the thing.
And if you can just create what
it is that I want out of the
context I have, then it can do it.
So Salesforce is kind of
getting there with their AI.
They're, they're working on tools.
That's like.
Show me the contact who's, you know,
most likely going to sign this deal
or like, what are the odds of blah,
blah, blah, based on my data, whatever,
but it's not going to like create
this incredible thing for you yet.
Right.
But if we can fine tune our application,
so it understands the context of our
models and you can just say like.
I want to create an event connect,
you know what, go ahead and connect
it to my stripe account and I don't
want to exceed like this threshold.
And by the end, I want to send
out an email that looks beautiful.
Go ahead and generate an email for
me and let me see what it looks like
and send, you know, what, send it,
33 seconds after someone registers.
So it looks like I personally sent
it, you know, whatever, like weird,
goofy thing you want to do, if you can
describe that and not have to like,
learn how to use an app, it'll make
computers like much more enjoyable, right?
It was like Brian, oh my God, why
can't I never remember his name?
The Airbnb main founder, Chesky.
He said like flat UI is dead.
And I don't know what the hell he meant
by that, but I, I translated that as like.
If you can talk to a computer and
makes what you want, like you don't
have to fiddle around with finding
the place to click is so annoying.
So I think that the way that you can train
models today, it's, it's, it's either
there and we don't like, we haven't played
with it enough or it's almost there.
And I think that's going to
like really level up our app.
And it's going to give us at least
a few more years of edge beyond like
what some other people are doing.
I think
Awesome, dude.
I, I, as always, I can talk to you
for hours next to me hanging out.
We got to talk about neural link
and living in the matrix and
everything else, which is, which is
definitely a desired outcome for me.
But thank you so much
for, for joining me coming
I'm definitely a blue pill guy.
This is awesome.
I was having a great time.
Definitely a blue pill guy.
And we'll end it on that.
Chris, thank you for coming on.
Thank you for being
definitely a blue pill guy.
And I'll hang out with you more soon.
Good to see you, my
Thanks, Connor.
It's been great.