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Always Be Testing explores the experiments, insights, and growth stories shaping the future of affiliate and partner marketing in B2B SaaS. Hosted by industry veterans, the show dives deep into real-world lessons from the people driving measurable impact at companies like Google, HubSpot, Ramp, Webflow, G2, and beyond.
Each episode uncovers what happens when today's most innovative marketers challenge assumptions, run smarter experiments, and build programs that scale revenue through meaningful partnerships. If you’re in affiliate, partnerships, or SaaS growth — this is your front-row seat to how the best do it (and what they’ve learned along the way
Tye DeGrange (00:00.834)
Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing Podcast. I'm your host, Ty Degrange, and I'm really excited to have Danielle Saker today. Danielle, how you doing?
Dannielle (00:11.999)
Hi Ty, I'm doing great, how are you?
Tye DeGrange (00:15.04)
I'm doing well. It's great to see you again. It's been a moment.
Dannielle (00:19.096)
Likewise, so good to see you and thanks so much for having me.
Tye DeGrange (00:22.936)
Glad to have you. I think everybody today is in for a treat. Danielle is leading go to market for Remy, part of Mind Studio, one of the great AI builder tools out there, which he's going to tell you all about. So lots to learn, lots to talk about in the AI world and the growth world and go to market. So it's going to be a great, great episode. Danielle, maybe give us a little background on what exactly it is you're you're building so we could get into, you know, what you're being tasked there and how you're approaching it.
Dannielle (00:52.376)
Yeah, will do. Happy to. So we are building Remy. REMI is the platform for organizations to build their software instead of buying their software. So it is a platform where you can build full stack applications for your team, your department, your organization, without having to stitch together different services for hosting or auth or databases. everything happens all in one place and makes it really easy for
non-technical users as well as developers to build build all in one platform so really excited about the brand new launch we are just past our alpha stage and i can talk a little bit about more about how that went and what's ahead in beta and yeah just just really excited about what's ahead.
Tye DeGrange (01:37.868)
Yeah, very cool. What
Tye DeGrange (01:44.866)
I love that. And what what are some of those use cases? You kind of alluded to it a like you're kind of in this interesting in in-between layer of like not super like heavy power user, but not the beginner vibe coder. What does that look like and what are you finding the use cases are?
Dannielle (01:49.071)
Yeah.
Dannielle (01:56.098)
Mm, mm. Yeah.
Yeah, and actually you've you put it almost perfectly there, right? Is there's these this category out there in the market of tools for professional, coders for developers, the anti-gravities, the cursors, codecs, cloud code. then there's by coding tools that are really easy to use, but are more amateur or you know, hobbyist tools, the levelables, the replet, the bolts. Remy's right in the middle and really designed for enterprises, organizations,
Of you know, small for sure, but definitely in that medium to large sweet spot that need more observability on what's going on within their organization, who's building what, need more security controls. There's a lot that when Remy's building an app, it's going to do and it's going to output that you're not gonna get
you're not gonna get from some of these other, you know, these vibe coding tools that are out there in the market and can talk a little bit more about that as we get along here. But that's at a high level, what the market's looking like right now and where we are in it.
Tye DeGrange (02:58.221)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (03:02.038)
Yeah. It it's crazy 'cause there's such an explosion right now of talk about Claude, adoption of Claude, talk about lovable replit, and you know, you've you've got a like big names and competition and this this is exciting times in this world that you're in. Are you I am curious about the kind of professional level
Dannielle (03:11.951)
Yeah.
Dannielle (03:21.507)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (03:27.608)
How is that, how do you, how do you define that kind of being, like why are those products at and then there's probably a simple answer, like how do you kind of define those levels for for people in those different use cases?
Dannielle (03:36.772)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think like maybe it's best articulated with a story, like a conversation I had recently with one of our our customers or one of our users. she's she's a partner at a PE firm. they're you know a small to medium-sized firm. They've got about six assets under management. the companies that they acquire are around like five to fifty million in revenue a year. So they've got some interesting port codes that they work with.
And she's been she was building out with Claude Code a tool that would help the portcodes just like up-level their competitive intelligence, their biz dev activities, without kind of having to adopt a bunch of different tools and and figure out how to use them, it would be something that is plug-and-play and all in one place. So she had bet spent about a month trying to build this out with Claude Code, going back and forth and she mentioned.
Tye DeGrange (04:31.116)
Yes, it's
Dannielle (04:36.416)
you fift fifty to a hundred times different iterations. And I was like, hey, you know, like try like you've already tried this with Cloud Code. Amazing. Why don't you give Remy a go? Remy got to where Cloud Code got in a day. and you can imagine with like more iterations, you know, it'd get it'd get somewhere even even better if you just spent a little bit more more time with it. So that was really exciting to see from just like the the the speed and this that's kind of by design like Remy has
Tye DeGrange (04:53.198)
Wow.
Dannielle (05:06.098)
has design principles and architectural principles and integrations that it's leveraging that that really produce more high quality, more production grade products right off the off the bat. and what she's also gonna get, you know, she's in financial services, right? Highly regulated industry. Remy is going to output for every app at per at the state of publishing, it's gonna put out audit logs.
It's gonna give you a cybersecurity schema framework for for each application. you're gonna have that level of observability of who's using this app. you'll have security and governance audits on the app itself. It'll tell you how it was built and what data it's leveraging and not leveraging and all the details that you know ITU is surely gonna be asking about in in a short order for any tool that that your team's using. you'll have like a cake at attestation, like
So many different things that are pumped out at the bat because it knows what it know like we know that the that for organizations right now that's like it's like a nightmare, right? People are adopting all these different AI tools. they're maybe using personal accounts or or not. Maybe they are piping, you know, sensitive data in there. And it's just a it it's a really difficult management and oversight issue right now. And what what we've designed REMI to do is be that solution for organizations who need that.
observability and need that level of control, which means we've I mean we've we're horizontal, but we're seeing a lot of a lot of really great traction with fine financial services, with like nonprofits who deal with sensitive information, governments as well. So it's been exciting to to see so far.
Tye DeGrange (06:41.868)
Yeah. I
Tye DeGrange (06:49.612)
I've got it gotta give you props. I don't think cake attestation is the first time that's been dropped on the pod. So you get extra bonus points for that. What what what was it in that use case you in that use case you described for that PE firm, like what do you think and in others as well, like what do you think is that?
Dannielle (06:58.782)
really? Hopefully hopefully the last. I'm like, this is like the anyway. Not not my area of of interest. Sorry.
Dannielle (07:13.966)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (07:16.546)
You don't have to obviously give the the whole secret sauce, nor is it possible. But like what's the what's the thing that you think led to that better outcome if you could probably assert you know, guesstimate or or try to share a little bit more with behind the curtain with the audience?
Dannielle (07:19.886)
Yeah.
Dannielle (07:30.706)
Yeah, yeah. And Ty, do we have is this an audio pod or is this this video as well? Both. Okay, amazing. So am I able to show some stuff as well? Okay, amazing. maybe I will. I will just need a a moment to to pull it up. Is that okay? Can we pause for like a half half a beat here?
Tye DeGrange (07:35.49)
Both, both.
Tye DeGrange (07:40.908)
Yeah, if you'd like. Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (07:47.424)
No worries, yeah. It's kind of a similar like a Zoom or Google Meet. We can we can talk and meant we can talk without it feeling like it's live, if you will. or editor can take out, but basically the bottom middle button share and share away and chat.
Dannielle (07:52.526)
Amazing.
Dannielle (08:03.268)
I see it there. Amazing. Okay, you can give me a second here and I'm going to just pull up a couple things just because it's a little not doing a full demo by any means, but just because it's hard to articulate these things and easier to show it sometimes. So it's gonna just take a few more seconds here.
Tye DeGrange (08:25.442)
No problem.
Dannielle (08:27.524)
Thank you so much.
Dannielle (08:50.488)
Okay, Ty. So your question was why does Remy push such a better output than some of the more hobbyist vibe coding tools that are out there? So I just pulled up, I just pulled
Tye DeGrange (09:02.028)
Well yeah, well also with the PE firm you mentioned like the Cloud Code example. So just I'm very curious about that.
Dannielle (09:10.618)
Yeah, absolutely. So this is an app that I built actually. This is because I've been on a total like FIFA craze and you know live near a host city. I was like where all the watch parties I like wanna be with all the crowds and all the good vibes. So I built like a watch party finder for Toronto. so if anyone wants a link for that, I can share that. We've only got a couple days left here, but in a in any case.
Tye DeGrange (09:19.863)
Love it.
Tye DeGrange (09:26.242)
Love it.
Tye DeGrange (09:31.266)
Amazing.
Tye DeGrange (09:35.584)
Yes. I love that.
Dannielle (09:40.518)
thank you. So what what Remy did is is consult so many different agents as it was going through the build of this, right? So it's it and I'll just go a little bit backwards here. but you can see all the different and where are we here? all the different commands it took to Yeah, you can see the live code if yeah totally so
Tye DeGrange (10:02.122)
So you can see the live code. You can see the process it was built. You can select agents.
Dannielle (10:10.678)
And this was like this was like a fix that I asked it for like as as it got along. and it put together even just for one fix, it put together a spec that I could annotate, that I could comment on, that I could refine before it actually went to build it. So so that no assumptions are being made right and we don't have to go back and forth, you know, a dozen times to articulate the right thing. so lots of and here's here's my yeah, all the different agents that it's consulting, it's it's done like
Tye DeGrange (10:30.125)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (10:33.687)
Very cool.
Dannielle (10:38.166)
has an entire design agent that goes and puts together branding and different different notes. it also shows off where's my product roadmap agent and thinks about different things it should build later on and puts actually a full roadmap together. So it's just doing a lot more up front and it's thinking like a PM instead of thinking like an engineer or a coder.
Tye DeGrange (10:44.226)
Very cool. Very cool. Yep.
Tye DeGrange (10:55.8)
Very cool.
Tye DeGrange (11:00.62)
That's that's huge. I really I find that interesting. I like the building block. I like the kind of logical flow and I like the that you can see different aspects of it. I think the thinking like a PM hits. So that's super helpful. You know, one of the things that you said in the in the con you know, we kind of joked about the nomenclature, you the technical stuff that s you know, some of the audience is gonna go, what the heck is that? But it's it's obviously, you know, germane because you're talking about technology, you're talking about building technology.
Dannielle (11:07.716)
Yeah.
Dannielle (11:15.417)
Yeah.
Dannielle (11:24.674)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (11:30.424)
Which can get pretty complex and some of these, you know, vibe coding entry level things we're not gonna cut it. I don't know, there's a little stretch because it's like off script, but like when it the the was it Alex Carp and I think some of the hype that's being created right now around, you know, what are you giving to the L LMs, right? And and I we don't need to go into all the details of that, but
Is there some aspects of what you guys are doing in terms of enabling control and privacy? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is there how does that like con you know controversial or great take, wherever you want to land on it, relate or not relate to what you guys are building? Because I think it's pretty topical right now with regard to AI tooling and and the the feedback loops that these people are these builders are giving to these tools.
Dannielle (12:18.394)
Mm.
Dannielle (12:23.226)
Mm.
Tye DeGrange (12:23.397)
and if that's a one you want to pass on, I also understand.
Dannielle (12:27.298)
Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. Like we we meet the organization where they're at, right? We have some orgs that we work with that are super AI friendly and understand that, you know, there's kind of more to gain from the LLMs going and doing their thing and running different processes or building applications versus like okay, like the competitive, like you know, there's the c usually the competitive threat that you're scared that.
Tye DeGrange (12:48.237)
Yeah.
Dannielle (12:55.534)
Giving your data to these models is gonna somehow lead to some competitive threat down the line, with trade secrets or or whatnot. or there's the threat that, you know, a competitor is gonna just do it and be ahead of you. so it it's there there's it's a you know, there's two two sides of the same coin there, I think. I think like obviously, you know, there are certainly, you know, regulated industries. this is not
Tye DeGrange (13:08.94)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dannielle (13:24.234)
This is not legal advice. right. Like you you gotta make sure that you you're in compliance with whatever your organization guidelines are or your industry's guidelines are. But I think for the for the most part, we're seeing a lot like the organizations we work with are really excited about the different capabilities that are are are possible with our platform, with with models more broadly. and I think too that that there's a lot that you can do without touching any of your data, right? Like
Tye DeGrange (13:24.556)
Yeah. N of course not.
Tye DeGrange (13:33.164)
Yeah. Yep.
Tye DeGrange (13:45.378)
Yeah.
Dannielle (13:54.466)
you can like we've built tools that like an example like we have a tool to find different influencers and and and content creators that we might want to work with and might want to partner with the only information we've really given that app is just like who it is we are and then it's going and doing the work of like scraping the web and and whatever else to find
that might be a good fit. And any information that we've given it is just public domain anyway. So there's a lot of things that you can build without relinquishing that level of control and that level of of you know, maybe sensitive data that that our organizations might be concerned about.
Tye DeGrange (14:30.902)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm very fascinated by the concept. I think there's the movement is gonna continue to be topical and be important where, you know, companies are gonna demand or or aim for levels of privacy and and protection. And I think I think you're offering some pretty exciting things there.
Dannielle (14:48.665)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (14:52.928)
What one of the things you talked about a little bit, you know, we we talked a lot about like costs and this has been a huge pain point in conversation, even for our team of like for us it hasn't we've kept it manageable, but I know a lot of people have you know, there's a lot of no news around it. as token usage goes up, as price goes up, and some of the flavors of my gosh, it's you're back to almost wanting more to hire more people as opposed to more AI you know compute.
Dannielle (15:00.696)
Mm-hmm.
Dannielle (15:05.507)
Yeah.
Dannielle (15:10.958)
Yeah.
Dannielle (15:17.762)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (15:22.146)
W how do you guys think about that and and how are you sort of think supporting it?
Dannielle (15:25.08)
Yeah.
Totally. And and candidly I I I don't know that we've figured it out in terms of like a pricing and packaging conversation. Like I think that in general SAS is having a bit of a weird moment right now. And that's cool. We'll figure it out. we'll make mistakes along the way and that's fine. how are like there there's so many different models out there. There's like companies that are creating whole like credit economies and you know, different
Tye DeGrange (15:34.893)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (15:41.164)
Yep. Yeah.
Dannielle (15:57.39)
Things that are so d so difficult to understand and are are not standardized. And I I I don't know how I feel about all all that stuff. but but all all that to say, I think like now with AI, there are things that are possible that were never possible to certain segments of the market, right? Like building an application was not accessible to like the solopreneur in in very recent history, right? Like someone who like you'd need to raise money.
Or you need to be individually wealthy, or you know, be willing to take on a bunch of credit card debt to to to to build an application if you were a solo printer, right? So what that means now, like with AI now, you can build an app, you know, you can build a kind of maybe a a lander with a a Replit or a lovable for a few bucks. you can use Remy and build a a production grade application for, you know, fifty, a hundred, maybe two hundred bucks.
Tye DeGrange (16:34.477)
Yeah.
Dannielle (16:55.96)
That's you know, that's a price point that didn't exist in this market before. Like that just wasn't possible. That's like a that would maybe get you like 200 bucks would maybe be one hour of like a dev's time to like look at your spec or like talk to you and like even consider taking on your project. So so it's like, you know, it it it makes the cost sensitivity totally and it makes the cost sensitivity question like really just like a weird equation now because like we're comparing
Tye DeGrange (17:01.443)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (17:11.618)
Crazy.
Tye DeGrange (17:15.542)
I'm building so much. Yeah.
Dannielle (17:25.804)
like maybe two hundred bucks to five bucks when like we're really should be comparing like you know a few like a few dollar bills to like the tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars that it would have taken to build like like think of like an enterprise who'd want to build a legacy tool like a internal tool or legacy tool, how much that would have cost like would have c these legacy tools would have costed them, right? Like whether it's man people power or
to hire an agency, a dev shop or you know, what have you. we're you know, we're talking millions, right? So it's it's it's a totally different equation now and and it begs a lot of questions of like, you know, who who are you for and then therefore, you know, how do you how do you cost this out given what level of service you need to offer?
Tye DeGrange (17:57.804)
Yeah, totally.
Tye DeGrange (18:07.949)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (18:11.448)
What when you think about like the ideal customers and we kind of you know, we kinda started a little bit with this in terms of the segments of where it's at and you know, I I'm curious to know where your thoughts are, especially as it's you know, the the market and the tech is moving so quickly. How do you how do you and the team think about that and when you're leading go to market?
Dannielle (18:19.45)
Mm-hmm.
Dannielle (18:32.404)
Yeah, things are moving so quickly and you know there's all this different h like new tools that come out every week. There's hype hype around certain tools. there's a lot of pivoting that we need to do as well in terms of like who are we for. So it it's it it it's a lot. it's a lot to manage. We've had different people show up as we've launched different iterations of our product.
some of those people are enterprises. we've had New York Times Upwork. We have a lot of really great enterprises that we partner with. Some of them are governments. We've been working really closely with the UK government over the years. some are like enterprise professionals trying to like launch a side hustle. some are agencies, consultants, like full-time entrepreneurs, like
it it it's it's really tricky and and you wanna we can be for everyone but it's also really hard to be for everyone because of everything we just talked about whether it's pricing, whether it's service level, whether it's you know the types of features that are you know the coming back to to to to to cake right like like an like a solo doesn't care about that or doesn't need to care about that for a very long time. so
Tye DeGrange (19:37.677)
Yeah.
Dannielle (19:45.29)
It's it it it's we're right in the middle of it. I I think of like try like we we know that we're we're building an enterprise product, we know that there are like enterprises have showed up and gotten a lot of value out of it. and it's kind of on our team to make sure that we are not getting distracted by other segments of the market that are loving our tool, want to use us, are asking for more, giving us feature requests.
We we love all that. We have such a strong community, but we also can't let that distract us because ultimately, you know, no matter how AI enabled we are and how many amazing applications are helping us in our work, like everyone has limited resources. So we just really have to stay focused and not get overly excited by positive signals that are from the wrong people.
Tye DeGrange (20:28.686)
Totally.
Yeah. Well, what what I appreciate, Danielle, is like I think you have there's a level at which you've clearly kind of done the thoughtfulness and done the research and talked to the customers. And I think that's that's where the magic lies with with being a PM and being a go to market and and also, you know, that's that's what you're touting you're doing, which is huge. So I I'm I'm I'm appreciative of that and can tell that you've done your homework there.
Dannielle (21:03.758)
As much as we can.
Tye DeGrange (21:05.314)
We've we've talked a lot about exactly budget there's always more to do. It's never done. speaking of growth, never done. Growth cycles have been collapsing, right? We've got, you know, we've talked about this a little bit. how do you get efficient ROAS? How do you grow as you know, you think about distribution, you think about go to market. And as I alluded to at the beginning, I mean, you're you're going up against like crazy heavy hitters here that that are getting a lot of distribution out there. You know, as a as a growth leader, like
Dannielle (21:11.204)
Totally, totally.
Dannielle (21:20.41)
Mm-hmm.
Tye DeGrange (21:34.53)
How do you tackle that?
Dannielle (21:36.718)
Yeah, we kind of like if you don't if you can't beat join in a way. so there's all these different all these different tools out there. each one kind of has their there there's a lot that are getting their 15 minutes of of fame, so to speak. And it's kind of our job to have a perspective on on these things and know how these things work, know how they can complement our platform, know how they are different from our platform, and like
to for us to to be able to communicate that. and we gotta do that anyway. So we might as well share and educate folks because the demand for AI education right now is is like I don't know, you might you might argue it's it's more than than the demand even for like the software and the and the tech, right? Because if you don't know what this stuff is then how how are you gonna be able to make a a buying decision? so in any case, what sorry. no please
Tye DeGrange (22:26.924)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I was just go ahead. No, that was just gonna say, like you when you were talking earlier, it was very paramount, became very apparent rather that you know you you you can kinda make a killing and be very useful by just helping organizations navigate this situation and and and letting them know which tooling they need to use when.
how like your specific tool literally is part of that decisioning and it's it's wildly under under utilized at this time in my opinion.
Dannielle (22:55.13)
Mm.
Dannielle (23:05.242)
Totally, totally. I I'll I'll finish the point I was making early in a second here, but to to that point, we have at some our at some points our go-to-market motion has looked like very much like like a an agency or like a pro serve motion. And not because we wanna be a pro serve business or that we really want to do a ton of professional services, but almost because it was required to even j j just to kind of mask.
all of the things that are confusing right now to organizations and or we're overwhelming really smart people and really smart professionals who just can't make sense of of everything that's going on just because of the speed and and and how quickly everything's moving. so we almost had to like just not even sell the tech or even mention the tech at times of just like leading with with our expertise and that we're building the space and that we and that we've got you. We'll figure it out. we'll use our technology. but you know
rest assured you guys don't need to to worry about hiring someone to figure out how to use this stuff or and and not that not that it's not that it's really hard, but almost it's like it's almost just there's what is it? Like you get so overwhelmed by the level of information. not necessarily coming from us, but just coming from socials or from the news or, you know, whatever from conversations with with with colleagues that you you almost can't
Tye DeGrange (24:17.58)
Yeah. Yep.
Dannielle (24:29.668)
can't even make make room for even an understanding how to use like very simple and basic tools.
Tye DeGrange (24:31.894)
Yeah. I I think you're not alone in that. There's so much data to ingest and so much priorities and change that it's very it there's a reasonable amount of overwhelm and and just paradox of choice, which I agree with. We talked a little bit about how much go go ahead.
Dannielle (24:39.631)
Yeah.
Dannielle (24:46.412)
Mm-hmm. Totally. So to so sorry, Ty, can I can I can sorry just to just to finish this this the conversation on this piece, something that has worked really well for us is actually hosting like free webinars, free talks, on like making sense of the overwhelm, making sense of the chaos, states of the unions on AI. we did this when OpenClaw was released, we did this when Cloud Code was released.
Tye DeGrange (25:04.792)
Love that.
Dannielle (25:13.228)
we are now in the middle of doing a bunch of Hermes sessions. where I think we're we've got like our third one coming out in in I think just in a couple days now. and that has one, like helped us gain authority and get our people out there, get our name out there, and be associated with like, hey, like these are folks who are gonna help me and and help me make sense of these things and and almost to you know to even get
credibility and have people listen to us, we kind of have to talk about what we're building with Remy and and and and everything we're doing here. So it also elicits a little bit of curiosity with folks and you know leads to MQLs and and and things that we we want to get out of these sessions as well, even though we're not even talking about Remy at the session itself, right? It's like on a totally different topic. So so we we are not afraid of like other tools getting their
their moment in the spotlight. It's an opportunity for us to talk about how they're complimentary or how they can work together with Remy or just like help people make sense of them because this is what we do. And it's led to a lot of really great leads for us. We've got like with these Hermes sessions, we've got like over a thousand people registered for each of them so far. And it's and and like
Did it did help like even just us posting the recording on our YouTube has helped our YouTube do so many numbers. so it's it's it's great and we'll we'll continue to do that.
Tye DeGrange (26:41.506)
Is there a specific hook or something that you think they're getting either pre or during webinar that's leading to such great aside from, hey, this topic has a need? Like it's I think it's super t topical.
Dannielle (26:54.872)
Yeah, I think like for folks, they they'll see like for myself, right? I'll see something in the news headline after headline after headline. but it's also surface level, right? You're not actually getting into like, well, what is this is and what does this mean for me? the ability to like sit down and have someone who has expertise and has played with the tool. whether like expertise is debatable, right? Because all this is so new. Like who who's really an expert, right? if you've played around with it for like a day, you're like you're
now in the top one percentile. so but having someone sit you down for an hour, two hours and just like talk you through what's going on and how what's important, what's not important is so immensely valuable for for for people. And that's really the hook is like, hey, show up. All you need to do is show up, we'll talk you through it for an hour. And don't take notes, like we'll take notes for you. We'll send you all the stuff after. You'll you'll get what you need instead of spending like
Tye DeGrange (27:26.09)
Yeah, yeah.
Dannielle (27:51.588)
two, three hours watching a bunch of different videos, reading articles, maybe trying to install this thing on your own, failing, going back to it. Like, just don't don't do any of that. You can do that if you want, but start start by letting us talk you through it and then you can go and do that experimentation if you want to later.
Tye DeGrange (28:09.134)
I love it. I love it. in thinking about go to market growth, obviously SEO, AEO or GEO, depending on how you want to describe it, is really critical right now from what we've talked about. What what are the types of experiments that you what are some of the learnings you've had in that arena? What are some of the experiments you've done there? And how are you thinking about those those levers?
Dannielle (28:16.442)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Dannielle (28:32.132)
We've done a lot of experimentation in the last few months around SEO AEO. It is really important to like really important go to market angle for us right now. we have you know, it it's tricky, right? Because I think like there when you let AI talk about your product, there's like inherent risks, right? Like there's there's gonna be things that it gets wrong from time to time. and I think that
you know, in the past has made us scared for lack of better word, to really like turn on the machine, like turn on the the the SEO monster that we knew we could build. and I think like as our messaging got crisper, we got less and less scared to to do that. And yeah, like we knew what needed to be built. It just had to get turned on. and what it was that needed to be built is
is like an application that would look at what the top YouTubers in the space AI YouTubers, tech YouTubers, prof professional, anyone with kind of like that professional angle that are speaking to knowledge workers and professionals, because these guys have done the work of knowing what is trending and what audiences want to learn about and hear about. So it would look at what they're talking about, tweeting about, making videos about, and create
articles around those topics that sometimes we'll talk about Remy, sometimes they won't. If it's relevant it will. If it's rele if it's not relevant it won't, but there'll still be like interstitials through at the kind of like ads throughout the article that would link back and mention, you know, who's who's who's behind the the this blog. and this has just like like truly like overnight the like our black like our our if you look at like our our website traffic
It was just like a hockey s like it was just it was here and then now it's here and it's stayed here since doing this vlog. And we have we'll have like really interesting, like we've got some listening tools that will find us when people are talking about us or talking about our our blog and whatnot. And like really interesting people are reading our blog and posting about it and saying, Hey, like these are like this has replaced like doom scrolling for me. so like people are getting value out of it too. It's not just like AEO for the sake of AEO. I think that's like
Tye DeGrange (30:53.418)
Love that. That's
Dannielle (31:01.24)
the raw like that can that works for some people, but I feel like that's not really what we're trying to do here. Like we are trying to put out stuff that's that's valuable and topical and and interesting for for for folks. At the same time of of course like, you know, the traffic is really important and being mentioned in in chat tools are really really important. That's where a lot of people are doing their research now. So that's we we we keep an eye on this like every day. we tweak it like almost every week.
one time we tweaked it and it like tanked our traffic and we have to like rolled back and that was the whole thing. so it's it's something that is like really top of mind for us and something we're investing in on on a daily basis.
Tye DeGrange (31:42.574)
Placing your doom scrolling is going to be the title of the podcast. So I love that. It's important, important work. You're doing God's work, as they say. so we talked a little bit about partner marketing, but like I'd I'm excited to get your perspective on it, giving your knowledge of what we do and giving your knowledge of the space, and just understand kind of how some of the mechanics around it and how you might think about that that lover being such a critical piece for SAS and just what.
Dannielle (31:45.21)
I know, right? man. Yeah.
Dannielle (31:58.86)
Mm. Mm-hmm.
Dannielle (32:09.85)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (32:12.878)
How are you thinking about it?
Dannielle (32:14.626)
Yeah, I mean like I've you know I I've worked at some really amazing companies. You know, I I have taken partnership roles at at Shopify and Grammarly and and Zapier before spending my time here with the the Remy team. And you know, in those roles, like I remember I used to spend a lot of time trying to get buy-in from like my dream partner, right? Like this was my dream partner. I'm gonna try like I'm gonna find a way to get that in. And it might take me
Three months it might take me, six months, might take me a year, but like I'm gonna be that like nagging force. And like I you know, there's still a little bit of that in in this role now. But the nice thing about the the the time and space we're in right now is that there's like a lot of new opp opportunities, and a lot of like new problems that potential partners are are looking to solve. and I I just can't wait two years for a partnership announcement anymore, right? Like that that's like
you know, the it's just not haul like this is like not the cycle that that we're in. So I spend a lot less time trying to get buy-in and more time working with partners that where that buy-in is already there or close to to to being there. not because I'm lazy, maybe a little bit, but because we we this the spade of speed of things demands it. the the pace of things demanded right now. So what I do and I kinda have like a little, you know
Matrix matrices can help people sometimes, framers can help people sometimes. So it's like, do you are you solving a problem together, yes or no? And does the partner have a high urgency to solve that problem, yes or no? So I'm looking for the partners that where we can solve a problem and there's high urgency for that problem to be solved. So a couple of maybe a couple examples I'll share of partnerships we've
launched in the last few months and or have been, you know, continue to work in the last few months where that was the case. we have been working really closely with the team at Upwork. Upwork is is like the largest freelance talent marketplace out there. they had a really growing demand for like vibe coding projects, quote unquote, application building projects. It's like they're one of their fastest growing categories. Like we're talking upwards of a billion dollars in volume per year.
Dannielle (34:32.468)
amazing demand, but on the supply side, like no real objective way to show freelancer competency in that space. so we what we've done together is we've gotten a bunch of their freelancers certified in in AI develop AI product development. and they are certified by us. so they're
It's one, do they know how to use our platform? are they good at it? have they shown a number of of different projects that they've worked on and then they get that certification and now people who are browsing up work and they've got you know over 700,000 clients on there who are always looking for for for freelance talent, they can filter by folks who have that level of certification that is you know outside and and and and certified. That's like one example. I'll share maybe one more.
Tye DeGrange (35:22.413)
Love that.
Dannielle (35:26.854)
of a partner who had a problem that we were able to solve really quickly. one is is was was with HubSpot. HubSpot you know, kind of existed as this like mid-market tool for a while, right? but given, you know, I guess maybe with AI or, you know, I think a number of factors, there's so many more like smaller, more entry level teams who now might be ready for something like like a like a HubSpot, whether it's because of
the demand like how important email marketing is now or you know what what have you so they've been working with a lot of founders s and startups and the problem for these that demographic is like empty state CRM right if you you spend all these you know hundreds thousands of dollars for the CRM and you've never used a CRM before and it's empty you're gonna churn right you you're you're not gonna be getting any value out of any of their great powerful features. So we built
Tye DeGrange (36:21.645)
Yeah.
Dannielle (36:26.086)
an application with them that would let founders in like one click based off their ICP import a bunch of contacts that can fit that ICP to their to their HubSpot instance directly, right? So that solves the problem of empty state CRM and greatly greatly improves the the stickiness of of of that HubSpot user.
so they were willing to the the two examples of companies who were willing to one had had a had a big problem that was affecting business outcomes, and then two had a really strong urgency to solve that problem. We were able to come in, build something really cool together, get it out there and pr pretty quickly. Always always can go faster, but pretty quickly.
Tye DeGrange (37:11.438)
That's amazing. I I that's very interesting. It's good to hear that. It's the I love the specific examples and like knowing, I think some of those tech integrations, you know, there's so many cool things you do with partners.
get into that, but the technical integrations and those similar use cases. And I really appreciate the matrix. gives me it reminds me of the Eisenhower matrix, which is a great one and very, very good work there. The kind of coming down the home stretch here, we we obviously the pod being always be testing, you know, we talk about real-time experimentation and I I'm wondering like what how are you thinking about that and what what are some of the big
Dannielle (37:43.002)
Thank you.
Tye DeGrange (37:56.472)
maybe aha's or surprises you've had, maybe over the last month of like experimentation and and what you've seen.
Dannielle (38:03.694)
Yeah, absolutely. I think like this Remy Alpha in itself is like, you know, you could you could argue it's one big experiment, right? we we're really surprised and you know, we're yeah, I I think we discussed this a little bit in the pod, but Remy is brought to you by the folks who built Mind Studio. we've been in the AI automation, workflow automation space for upwards of three years now. And to me it was really surprising just like how quickly
People got it. Like we're out there launching this, you know, yeah, there's like, you know, we're we're all we're still in the AI space, like we're we're still doing similar things, but this is like a totally new product, right? and I was really surprised how quickly people got it and how much demand there was, even for like an alpha stage product, especially with all the noise that's out there. we just wrapped up our alpha, had a thousand users in the alpha.
And these users collectively spent over $300,000 in tokens, in in compute and inference to build their applications, right? Like that's that's a lot of skin in the game from a wide variety of of individuals. These range from like organizations and teams to to to founders who are are trying to get a new new product off the ground. And it's it's really cool. And I'll I'll flip you just like really quickly.
one of our internal dashboards just so that you can get a get a visual here. this is all like unidentifiable c customer data, but you can see here like we have users, like these are like individual user accounts like might re might represent you know larger teams, but who are spending you know tens of thousands of dollars in some instances really just debil whether it's on one app and they're going really deep with it, or
Tye DeGrange (39:40.13)
Yes.
Dannielle (39:54.008)
developing apps across their organization for a malt multitude of use cases. So this is so, so I mean, I don't know if surprising is the right word, but really validating for us as we're in this alpha stage and I think will set us up well for for what's ahead in beta.
Tye DeGrange (39:56.279)
Love that.
Tye DeGrange (40:06.701)
Yes.
Tye DeGrange (40:14.726)
I love that. It's it's so cool to see. And I I love I love seeing the visuals and I love seeing real time and to be able to say, hey, this is this is a test that we we've got some learnings on is extremely appreciated and powerful. so bringing it all together, it's just been it's been great. There's been a lot of things talked about in terms of like beta and and and all the testing and
Data driven thinking and talking to customers. it if there's some things that you kind of think about that maybe didn't go so good in the in the data, but you're kind of like, okay, how do I make sense of this? How does what did it teach us about our audiences? What are some of those, right? Maybe your favorite failure.
Dannielle (40:54.841)
Mm-hmm.
Dannielle (41:01.796)
Mm-hmm.
Dannielle (41:05.39)
Yeah, totally. And Ty, I don't know if you're gonna like this one, so we can we can cut it or go in a different direction as we go along here. but I I'll I'll say this, right? Like I think like something that we did too early was spending b yeah, spending big money on some big influencers. and I think like it was, you know, maybe we thought it'd be like a a surefire win, right? Like we would
Tye DeGrange (41:21.321)
influencers.
Tye DeGrange (41:28.749)
Yeah.
Dannielle (41:34.414)
drop a bunch of money, we'd go viral, right? and then and then we can kind of sit back and and and relax and and let that that hype take us take us away. we've had really great success with in influencers and content creators in the past. YouTube specifically has been a fantastic like YouTubers have been a great channel for us. specifically like dedicated content, not so much not so much ads and and and and mid-roll and that kind of thing, but dedicated videos have been
Tye DeGrange (41:34.946)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (41:46.125)
Yeah.
Dannielle (42:03.448)
really fantastic for us. but I think might maybe it was a little bit too early with with with Remy. I think like investing more of our time early on in n like nurturing that that alpha audience, bringing on like like hand holding bait like and which is what we're doing now is is really hand holding organizations to join our beta as like as like our like founding pilot partners and really
really hand holding them, giving them a lot of support and preferential treatment, helping them really find all those different use cases. I think that would have been a better use of our our time and resources versus trying to to jump on the hype change for a product that was still an alpha, still had you know, still had but like it was we and we communicated, it still had it was still bumpy at times, wasn't perfect. I think I think that that dollar value could have spent out been spent elsewhere.
Tye DeGrange (42:38.615)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (42:56.044)
Yeah. I
Tye DeGrange (43:01.658)
yeah, I I love the example because it's like the we're of the mindset of like look things work and things don't. We want to compete with the best of the marketing levers and and I think it's it's healthy healthy and effective to obviously, you know, share openly those. And I think as you alluded to, right, sometimes some things are slightly earlier, but sometimes maybe
bigger on on those tests can sometimes not always be better in the influencer game specifically. So I have no doubt that when you know we talk we get into details of influencer and reviews and partners, like we're we'll we'll find a way, we'll find a methodology, we'll find a a valuable piece that that wins and works. So but it but it's not for every business. It's not for every stage. And I think you're
Dannielle (43:53.945)
Mm-hmm.
Tye DeGrange (43:54.542)
Appreciate the transparency and I think that's that's our game too, to be like, let's let those cards land as they do. You would rather compete in, you know, the hardest of MMN models to make sure that things are working and as efficient as once you get sophisticated enough to even get there. And so that's all good. More to come. yeah.
Dannielle (44:07.802)
Totally.
Dannielle (44:11.63)
Yeah. Totally. And I like I think like and I think like actually and I actually think working with professionals on this are really important because they can help let you know when when is the right or wrong time and and maybe help you avoid some of these these failures or some of these iterations. and or if if if you know depending on like maybe there are certain things that you can do at one stage that
actually is effective, right? So I think like we kind of threw a bunch of money at at some at some big names that or so or that we thought were big names too. I think so much of what's out there now is is gamified and it's really actually hard to like even with a discerning eye, it's really hard to be able to make sense of what's what engagement is real and what's and what's not. and you see these big numbers and your eyes light up and you're like, wow, like this could be really great for us.
and then it's not. You like spend ten thousand dollars and you get like six new users out of it, like true true story. so it's like not not always it's like not always the best going in blind and it is actually really helpful I think to have a bit of guidance in in in navigating this space for sure.
Tye DeGrange (45:19.104)
Yeah. No, to totally. Appreciate it.
Tye DeGrange (45:32.546)
I love it. I love it. let's just going down the home stretch, get some personal to get to know Dan Danielle a bit. gonna cut through some of it, but the the the trip stuff was awesome. Like love to hear your perspective on those, the dream trip or the recommendation.
Dannielle (45:37.529)
Okay.
Okay, sounds good.
Dannielle (45:49.388)
Yeah. Yeah, my dream trip is Egypt for sure. It's been on the list for a while. I just think like the level of history and just like the pyramids, man. Like, do I need to do I need to elaborate? it's it's so so cool. and then for folks I recommend this was it was so beautiful, right? the for folks I who haven't been to Mexico City yet, I think it is such a great spot.
Tye DeGrange (46:03.31)
Yeah, beautiful.
Dannielle (46:16.824)
whether it's for just pure vacation or digital nomad or some combination of the two. such such a rich and vibrant city, so much to do there, from nature to city life to food and everything. So I really, really recommend it and and go go for a while. Don't don't skimp out on on that one.
Tye DeGrange (46:23.67)
Love it.
Tye DeGrange (46:33.058)
Yeah.
Tye DeGrange (46:38.03)
It's hot it's high up on my list. Danielle, you've been amazing. It's been a pleasure. you covered a ton and I just want to thank you for coming on. I'll talk to you all soon and until next time. Thanks, Danielle. Bye.
Dannielle (46:41.644)
Yeah.
Dannielle (46:45.882)
God. My pleasure.
Thanks everybody. Thanks Ty. See you next time. Bye.