Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This is the show where we go deeper than the hype. Where we go beyond just the prompt. On the podcast, we talk with product, engineering, and GTM leaders who are building AI-native products and using AI to supercharge how their teams operate.
If you’re looking to scale your business with AI or want to learn from those doing it at the frontier, then you’re in the right place.
Speaker 1 (00:00)
Took some time off, got on my wife's nose, she kicked me out, I came back. I've been telling a lot of folks, don't call it bootstrap, don't call it anything. Fund it, that's what it means.
Speaker 2 (00:09)
Yeah.
Hey everyone, welcome to Beyond the Prompt and I'm your host Sani This is a show where we go deeper than the hype, where we go beyond just the prompt. And on the podcast, I talk with product engineering and go to market leaders who are building AI native products and using AI to supercharge how their teams operate. If you're looking to scale your business with AI or want to learn from those doing at the frontier, then you're at the right place. Be sure to stick around for this great conversation with Jeff.
And if you're interested in a free consultation on how to maximize the usage of AI for your teams, then click on the link in the description to schedule a time of day. All right, Jeff, thank you so much for joining me. I'd love to just start by having you tell us a bit about Hushly and what it does.
Speaker 1 (00:55)
Sure, thanks, Sani, for having me. ⁓ In terms of Hushly, we are an all-in-one personalization software company. So B2B marketers use us to educate buyers faster through personalized experiences.
Speaker 2 (01:13)
Gotcha, gotcha. And then what's your role at Hushly?
Speaker 1 (01:17)
⁓ I'm the co-founder of Hushly. I'm a serial martech entrepreneur. Yeah, in ⁓ my previous venture, ⁓ were like the OGs in marketing automation in the cloud prior to Marketo and HubSpot, cetera. So Oracle acquired ⁓ Market to Lead, which was the business that I founded. Took some time off, ⁓ got on my wife's nerves. She kicked me out. I came back with a...
So HushBeef has been around for about eight years now. And we have evolved over this period of time. We've been big proponents of AI. We've been using AI for about seven years right now. And we continue to learn ⁓ and code about and co-invent with our customers on this front.
Speaker 2 (02:08)
Got it. Got it. Is there anything you can share about like who some of your customers are or like give us a sense of scale of Hushley?
Speaker 1 (02:16)
Sure. Most of our customers are mid to large enterprises. They have a lot of traffic. They have a lot of content. And they're trying to make the traffic that they're ⁓ driving to these digital experiences effective and also in a more efficient way. Once you become effective, it's like, how do I do that scale?
⁓ They used to do it through ⁓ automation, manual automation, and now they're using agent-take interfaces to even take that automation to the next level.
Speaker 2 (02:56)
Got it. it. ⁓ what about like, ⁓ are you able to share any of those brands or no?
Speaker 1 (03:02)
Sure. I mean, it's on our website. So when it comes to AI, the biggest brand in AI, at least everybody knows is Nvidia. ⁓ And they are a customer of ours, been a customer for about five years now. ⁓ So most of our customers are made to large technology companies like Motorola, Nutanix, mostly are tech-
What's the other one? There's a lot of customers on our websites on the logos are all there. Most of them can you can recognize most of those brands.
Speaker 2 (03:42)
Gotcha. And, and remind us again, like what are the kinds of things that you're providing them?
Speaker 1 (03:49)
Sure, we provide them digital personalized experiences. What that would mean is for different touch points. So we can personalize the website, for example, or web pages of the website based on the audience that's visiting the website. We can change ⁓ different variations we can offer. Maybe change the logos, maybe change banners, maybe change messaging, et cetera. That's kind of website personalization. Another big portion of the website is a resource center or a content hub where you
have rich media content like e-books, white papers, webinars, et cetera. So we create adaptive content hubs. And we transition them from a browse-first interface where users browsing, searching, navigating, finding content, which is kind of tedious, to an AI-first interface where the agent is doing everything on the behalf of the user and educating those buyers faster. That's second.
⁓ When it comes to an account-based go-to-market motion, which is more outbound, say they're going after 50 different accounts and they want tailored microsites for those accounts. Now you're talking to different members of the buying team. So say if you're going after Coca-Cola versus if you're going after Clorox, they're separate industries, but you need to position your products or services very focused on those particular accounts. So we create account-focused microsites. There we support both the
⁓ manual way of creating this, but more importantly, the agentic way of where AI automatically generates microsites for those accounts, doing deep research on those accounts. ⁓ We also create what are called self-nurturing landing pages, which is different from traditional landing pages where you lead with a form and you try to get a user to complete a registration form in exchange for like a free book, etc.
We're not big proponents of leading with a form, we're big proponents of leading with value, kind of like the Netflix binge experience. ⁓ We also do personalization in terms of display ads, content-based display ads on websites, and also personalization for visitors who are abandoning the website and walking away. Think of shopping cart abandonment for B2B.
All of these kind of touch points is all powered by a single platform, which is Hushly. And from visitor to close to upsell and cross-sell in terms of repeat buying experiences. So that's what we do in a nutshell.
Speaker 2 (06:20)
Gotcha. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of interesting things there of like, know, you are able to identify who's visiting the site to then serve the right kind of personalization and content. you talk a little bit about like account-based marketing as well, where you can tailor the information that that account is seeing is different from like a different account. that's tailored to like that one, to that specific account, right. And that specific business, ⁓ I'm curious around like, ⁓
how you are kind of like sourcing that information if you're able to share some of that information.
Speaker 1 (06:57)
⁓ It varies based on the different go-to-market motion, whether it's inbound, outbound, partner-led, event-led, product-led motion. So let's take one, for example, which is more of maybe an outbound-based motion. You're going after 50 different accounts, right? ⁓ And you want to create microsites for these 50 accounts, ⁓ kind of tailored for those accounts.
⁓ The way we would get that information is most organizations will say, this is in Salesforce, right? These are the list of accounts I want to go after. This is who's my account rep associated with a particular account. So there's internal account intelligence. What was the type of sales conversation that the salesperson had with the account? So think of that as ⁓ internal account intelligence. We couple that with public account intelligence such as
⁓ you know, 10Q filings, press releases ⁓ in the news type of public account intelligence, right? So our deep research agent goes off and gets that information. And then we overlay that with marketing playbooks, like how do you sell to different personas or how do you sell to different industries or how do you sell to different pain points? Once we have the triangulated those three vectors together, right?
Then AI goes to work and says, okay, if I'm going after Coca-Cola, how do I auto-generate the microsite for Coca-Cola versus how do I do that? And that's a very tedious job. A lot of research to create that copy for those particular accounts is very, very tedious. So we co-develop these solutions with our customers, trying to figure out, you know, how can we make this easier for ⁓ our customers, but more importantly,
⁓ what is that best ⁓ buying experience that we can offer these accounts to get educated faster, right? So that's an example of how we take the data, how we present the experience and the insight ⁓ associated with users engaging with those microsites. So it's based on zero-party data as well as first-party data because these are users actually telling you what they're looking for as opposed to
you know, searching and finding and really making inferences in terms of what they're looking for. So hopefully that helps you and the user in finding how do we source this data and how do we provide those experiences.
Speaker 2 (09:31)
Yeah, and you're sourcing that information, but you're also building the websites for your customers as well. I assume ⁓ your customers can also take that draft that your AI agent has created to modify and make adjustments as they set fit as well.
Speaker 1 (09:53)
Yeah, it's always going to be a jumpstart and the human in the middle type of... So we pre-create this, which is a very, very tedious task because marketers will go to the web developers and also they have to go do a lot of research. We automated a lot of that stuff. So it's kind of a jumpstart. It's right there. If they want to go make modifications, if it's one-to-one or one-to-few, whatever modification they want to make, and then they click the publish button and then they are movable.
Then gets distributed to outreach such as sales, email outreach or sales outreach or like display ads driving traffic to those destination experiences.
Speaker 2 (10:34)
Got it. Got it. So yeah, lots of lots of great stuff that you guys are doing. You're doing it from the sourcing side. You're able to generate it. And then of course, there might be refinements and things. It's like you have a good solid draft from from AI. And then, you know, as a human, you can use your own judgment and taste to figure out like, this is not quite right. Like, let's refine it. But at least you've done a lot of the heavy lifting of the original, like first draft, which is super.
super hard especially at scale if you're doing it for like tons of accounts but it sounds like you're primarily focused on b2b not necessarily like b2c is that right for
Speaker 1 (11:13)
You're only there only B2B. Okay. Don't do anything in B2C. The reason is when you're talking to B2B, you're talking to different members of a buying team. Everybody's kind of had their own role in the B2B buying process, long sales cycles. There's a lot of other dynamics that happen in B2B, which you don't see that in B2C. So you have to build the module, which is kind of special purpose in terms of a B2B sales motion. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:43)
Yeah. Yeah. So then it sounds like you're probably likely using your own platform for your own sales and marketing as well. Is that right?
Speaker 1 (11:53)
Yeah, I mean, we consume our own champagne for all our go-to-market activities, if we go to, ⁓ even if it's an event-led go-to-market motion, how do you warm up users pre-event, during the event, and post-event? Those require personalized experiences. If you go to our website and you're kind of trying to figure out, to a resource center, for example, we got hundreds, maybe thousands of articles out there.
So we've transformed our website to be an AI first resource center, as opposed to a browser first resource center. So there's a lot of things that we use with our own technology to create better experiences for our buyers.
Speaker 2 (12:40)
I'm curious ⁓ what has been your experiences and also any kind of feedback from the customers around like the output of AI. ⁓ Yeah, like how have you seen and kind of like taken the kind of like feedback or what you've seen for your own kind of sales and marketing of like, yeah, I don't have to change this too much. Like I trust the AI versus like, I don't know if I trust that information that's being here.
Speaker 1 (13:07)
It's actually a good point. In terms of adoption of AI, we see friction. And you would think that lot of this stuff is ready to be used and can be used. But you also see within, least in the B2B ecosystem, you'll see AI ⁓ policy ⁓ groups, et cetera, coming up. So we would have to somehow ⁓ navigate some of these. Because we are in marketing, it's a little easier.
⁓ when marketing the content that we're dealing with is not confidential data or not personal data. So it's slightly easier, but you still have to go through that education cycle when you're talking to ⁓ attorneys out there, other legal guys in terms of the privacy and security. You have to say, okay, yeah, that's fine. We can at least experiment. And to ease this experimentation, also ⁓
allowed, say for example, a content hub, we say, all right, why don't you try the AI first approach for maybe 10 % of your traffic and still 90 % goes to your classical browse first experience, right? And once you start to see that, users are getting educated faster, then maybe you can turn that volume knob. So we're definitely seeing that there's huge advantages, but we're also seeing some friction, and we're trying to build in
some of the stepping stones to get marketers to adopt some of these new advances in EA.
Speaker 2 (14:39)
For the for the content hub is it primarily like blogs and PDFs and things like that or what have people been using the content hub for?
Speaker 1 (14:47)
So Content Hub's a variety of media, like videos, ebooks, white papers, analyst reports, product documents, like pretty much every single thing. So Hushley has a centralized content library, which will pull in centralized and organized all of the marketing assets. ⁓ And we auto tag all of these assets with
the topics we think that the assets are covering. So as users start to engage with those topics or with those assets, we tag the user as well as we tag the account. So that's how we get to produce what's called first-party intent, right? These are visitors on our customers' websites or landing pages, et cetera, engaging with these accounts. So now we can produce what we believe is kind of an inference signal. ⁓
which is first party intent. So yeah, you can get second party and third party intent from other vendors, but since we are sitting there on a customer's property. So in addition to that, we have an ability for users to actually converse with the content. So for example, listening to a video, a 30 minute video on a webinar or a visuals case study, whatever.
We don't believe users have the patience to sit down and listen to 20 or 30 minutes of video or read a 20 page ebook or an analyst report. They can actually ask questions of that video, right, or the content that they're... And now what they're doing that they're producing what's first party intent. you're no longer making an inference on what we think that they may be interested in, which is kind of old school now.
⁓ and over how much of time they spend on my content was kind of vanity metrics. What are the questions they're asking of that content, what type of content gaps we have, et cetera. So richer, deeper insight, as well as getting the users educated a lot faster. So it works well for both sides.
Speaker 2 (16:50)
Yeah, that's, that's super interesting. made me think of like, yeah, if I'm watching a YouTube video, sometimes it's like a 40 minute video. And I'm like, those are too long. go to Gemini, paste the video into, into Gemini. It's like, give me a summary of this video. And then I can like ask additional questions if there's like a topic that I want to dive deeper in, or maybe I'm like, okay, I'm actually going to watch this section of the video and not the full video kind of thing. But, but what you're saying though, is like, you give that ability within.
your content hub and as a person who is serving the content, you get to see the questions that me as a user is asking to then figure out like what, like exactly what you said, what, what content may be missing. ⁓ and like this, this first party intense that you're talking about that, like you as a marketer, ⁓ can figure out like what else you could do with, with information or what information you might be missing is what you're saying.
Speaker 1 (17:46)
Yeah, I mean, you're right. mean, if you look at the way all of us, right, the way we are getting educated is we probably using some of these newer technologies to get educated faster. The challenge, that's what marketers want to do. They want to influence the buying decision. They want to educate you faster. The challenge marketers have is if you take it off to Gemini or offline and you do that, they have no visibility into what it is. So we are offering like
both sides of this coin, if it's like, you don't have to extract it, push it out into another thing. You can ask questions, et cetera. And you can also save a lot of the stuff, and it has memory of you, right? There's what you did, and you can have similar to it, like chat, GPD, et cetera. So when you come to a content hub, it's really personalized one-to-one based on the history or the memory it has about you, right? So...
And when they're that, when they're asking a question, what we're doing is we are scanning hundreds of thousands of these content articles, right? So the user doesn't have to search, navigate, find, read, view, and get to that insight. It's doing it for them. And when it's coming back, it's kind of a composite document, right? It's taking a snippet from a blog. It's taking a snippet from your ebook. It's taking a snippet from a video. And it's truly
personalized generative AI. It's not like ⁓ you're doing generative AI in the sense of, yeah, I can go generate content for particular, but it's not real time and it's not one-to-one and it's not based on the question being asked, right? So that is where we're pushing the boundaries in terms of personalized generative AI in real time. So that's what we're doing.
Speaker 2 (19:34)
Yeah. Yeah. That kind of reminds me of like how I sometimes use chat juby T where I'll be the book that I have read in the past. And I need like a, like a recap or review of the book. And then, you know, lot of like non-fiction books is like, here's a concept with some examples, but instead I'm able to be like, all right, well apply it to my example. And then generative AI is able to take the concept, apply it to my example and like give like how I would approach that thing. And so you're, you're talking about it in a similar way where it's like as a marketer.
Speaker 1 (19:39)
the
Speaker 2 (20:03)
I have this content and then the user comes to this content and can figure out how to use this content in my use case as a user. ⁓ but then that, that information is super valuable, both on the user side of on the marketer side of like, what else could I figure out what to do with this content? What content should I go make things like that?
Speaker 1 (20:23)
Yeah, in the user side, yes, you're right, right? In the user side, we're laser focused on how do you educate those buyers faster, right? And so by surfacing up what they're looking for through agentic stuff, ⁓ they don't have to. And they get to the point, and to your point, it has memory. So the next time you come there,
you're not starting from level zero, you're starting from where you left off and it progressively give you whatever you're looking for.
Speaker 2 (20:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love to go back to that topic of this self-nurturing landing page. I'd like to better understand your thoughts around that. like, ⁓ you know, you talked about how like, you know, a lot of like marketing is like, here's a PDF that I dangle in front of you, but you need to give me your information so that I can sell to you later. ⁓ and like, so you put in the information you put in, like your phone number, your work email, and then you get the PDF, but then you just get like emails because they now have your contact information.
Right. So like, I'd love to hear a little bit more of what, how you guys approach self-advertising landing pages.
Speaker 1 (21:34)
So we, again, there also we're flipping the interaction model. The traditional model, like you said, is lead with a form, right? We are leading with value. So what we do is there is we give the user the content that they came for without having to complete a registration form, right? So you will see a lot of at least 300 or 400 % increase in content engagement. And content is meant to influence the buying decisions. So the more the content they read, the better it is.
Surrounding that primary asset, we saw offer related pieces of content or recommended piece of content. So we have different models running, like for example, content similarity models. If you like this piece of content, what other content is similar to this piece of content? Or they could be a part traversal model. People who viewed this content also viewed X, Y, or Z. Or people clicked here, there's about 12 different models running as part of our AI engine, which will surface up that content.
And we're not big proponents of email nurture, which is kind of old school. You get one piece of content, you have to wait for two or three weeks for the next piece of content, whatever that cadence is. We're a little more like the Netflix binging model, right? So I watch an episode today, I don't have to wait two weeks to watch the episode two.
So if you have a sequence of content that you want the user to consume, that is also presented to the user that the user can self-nurture as opposed to email-nurture. What we're seeing is a few things. The primary asset that you get the user to is not the sole driver of leads. The secondary or related pieces of content significantly produces at least what you think is about 33 % lift. So it's significant.
And what we are also seeing is if the content is valuable, the human tendency to your part is I want to save it. And at that point of time, they made incremental commitments. they're willing to. So we then lower the threshold. only ask, we'll say, we'll send it to your business email. We don't ask for first name, last name, job role, titles. Typical thing that a ⁓ traditional registration form will collect.
We'll send it to your business email and Hushley has its own first party database as well as we data chain all the data service providers like ClearBid, ZoomInfo, et cetera. We machine enrich this data ⁓ automatically with the user's consent depending on GDPR, whichever geolocation regulations are. But we don't trust the machine enriched data, neither our first party database or anyone of the data service partners that we have.
The reason being the database decays at about 2.1 % every month. So what we do is once it's machine enriched, we validate it against the prospect's LinkedIn profile, which is our golden record. And once it's validated, then we publish that API back into the marketing automation platform. So our brand promise for self-nurturing landing page is pretty lofty. Same traffic, same content, right? You will see at least a 300 % content engagement lift.
our customers will see at least a 51 % lead lift and they will never get a junk or a Mickey Mouse lead and every single is compliant with all the geolocation. But that requires thinking differently. You can't say, ⁓ I'm going to reduce my farm or change my colors or place it there. That doesn't work. It's like actually figuring out how buyers want to buy and then say, OK, this is how we're going to do this.
Speaker 2 (25:11)
Yeah. Yeah. It kind of, ⁓ it's kind of like how people like, ⁓ YouTube channels are operate, right? Like you just give out a lot of good content, but there are some things that are like, if you want more, ⁓ like there's more behind it, but it's not like you need to give me your email to watch my YouTube video. Like the YouTube video is public. Right. And so it's like that same kind of like idea and thought process of like, just, just lead with a lot of value. ⁓ and, ⁓ then the.
If you give or you're giving enough value, then you get like the high quality leads that really like your content. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:46)
Exactly. mean, if you just put your CT out there without establishing credibility, nobody's going to click it, right? So we have some of the analysts, industry analysts using Hushley as well. And what they do is, they try to get people to book meetings with the analysts, right? They have a lot of research articles, et cetera, that they started offering up the Hushley way, right?
What they've found is when they embed their CTA ⁓ with all of these research articles that they have, they started to build credibility. And at some point of time, they're saying, OK, I want a meeting with the analysts. So in that case, you'll see a significant uplift in meeting bookings when you establish authority or subject matter experts, then you become the thought leader, et cetera, there.
that definitely what's happening in the B2C world transcends into the B2B world as well. And that's how we're doing that in getting more meetings both.
Speaker 2 (26:54)
Got it, got it, and higher quality meetings.
Speaker 1 (26:56)
Definitely, because they trust you more as opposed to, you know, I gave you something, I don't know what it is, it's kind of, I don't even know whether the content is valuable to me and then I get a call in the end. Here is like, I like what you said and I'm willing to, you know, it's more inbound, right? So as opposed to an outbound reach out. So definitely more valuable engagements.
Speaker 2 (27:25)
Got it. Cool. Cool. Cool. Well, so I've a, I have a few last couple of questions for you, before we close. you know, it sounds like Hushley's, you know, been doing really awesome stuff for the last eight years. It seems like you guys have definitely shifted well and really like adopted all things. Generative AI and agentic AI. I'm curious. Like, where do you think Hushley will be in the next like six to 12 months?
Speaker 1 (27:50)
Interesting. mean, we co-develop and co-invent with our customers. So our customers come to us and say, hey, we're doing this right now. Yes, this helps, but there are gaps, right? In terms of, so for example, an example would be we transformed the content hub to be AI first, right?
And then we built, we call that content Sherpa. We didn't want to use Copilot. Overuse. With the Sherpa theme. we have the Sherpa and then we have account Sherpa. are kind of, so now some of our customers, if we would like that account content Sherpa to be embedded in account Sherpa, right? So yes, you can go create these.
Speaker 2 (28:25)
Yeah, totally overused, I agree.
Speaker 1 (28:43)
Microsize personalized microsize and yes, you can think that you're personalizing but what if they have questions that are not covered? We have which we have in our knowledge. So There there's some integrations out there, right? So there's a lot of stuff that we have in our ⁓ In our roadmap that we but we prioritize based on you know, what our customers we are a customer first company
And by that, we mean that ⁓ we do not accept investor capital. So we have no investor pressures to hit some revenue numbers or anything. It's like we are always being driven throughout the journey in terms of what the customer wants. And they will be those early adopted customers or even the innovators and customers who come to us and saying, hey, can we do X, Y, Z? For example, can I automatically generate
know, banners or very specific to a particular customer, etc. Can I do the repurposing of content, lots of other stuff that AI can do that we are prioritizing based on, you know, what our customers require. That's awesome.
Speaker 2 (29:54)
That's awesome. What do you think is your biggest challenge right now in making Hushley better and grow? mean, you don't have investor pressure, right? So you can grow.
Speaker 1 (30:06)
Yeah,
that's a pro and a con, right? The con is being extremely resourceful because we compete with several different vendors, right? So if you look at just one space, which is the website personalization space, we're competing with, in the enterprise, compete with Adobe Target, Optimize, all billion dollar brands, or in the mid-market, maybe Mutiny, VWO.
So, and then if you go to the content experience platform, we'll have a whole bunch of folks. So we're competing with a lot of companies or when the customer competitors will raise billions of dollars. So we have to be extremely resourceful. So yes, our differentiation is we're an all-in-one personalization platform. So you don't have to duct tape multiple technologies to get that together.
And we also lean on the fact that we are customer first. We take pride in the fact that we do not take investor capital, which we don't have to be under investor pressures, et cetera. But on the flip side of that, we have to be extremely resourceful to get our fair share. So that's been a problem. It will be a problem. We just have to continue to operate to be extremely more resourceful, build on our strengths. So we go small when they have, I guess, big stuff.
So yeah, that will continue to be a challenge.
Speaker 2 (31:31)
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that may end up being an advantage because, ⁓ you don't need to move a giant ship of people to adopt and change how they work. Whereas a lot of larger corporations, ⁓ you know, there, there is definitely people starting to lean more and more into using AI tools, but there's definitely some fear around people adopting AI tools. But if you're already kind of a lean team.
then that team is like, I'm always looking to be more, be able to do more with a small team and like more willing to ⁓ adopt and figure out like what are the right set of AI tools ⁓ that you don't necessarily are building, but like to do everything else in your, to like be able to continuously compete in the market.
Speaker 1 (32:20)
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, it's we have our own SWAT and we just figure out, know, what can we lean on in terms of our strengths and what are the opportunities and threats that we have to be aware of and monetize.
Speaker 2 (32:35)
Yeah, that's awesome. Awesome.
Cool. mean, definitely sounds like an exciting feature is going be an interesting feature for, you and your company and the markets. Um, but you know, being a, a lean team that doesn't have investor pressure, but also like hyper-focused on being very resourceful and very focused on your customer sounds, uh, like in a good spot, like second, a good spot.
Speaker 1 (32:57)
Yeah, absolutely. I've always done this. Even in my previous venture, I've always been self-employed. would say customer funded. As opposed to being It actually puts you in the right frame of mind. Yeah. ⁓
Speaker 2 (33:05)
Yeah, it's a very fun day.
Cyberfunded
is
Speaker 1 (33:16)
I've been telling a lot of folks, don't call it bootstrap, don't call it hands. It's funded, that's what it means. And it's so much more powerful and much more meaningful. Happy to be customer funded. So as much as you can use that term, please do.
Speaker 2 (33:36)
Yeah, I love it. I love that term. It's a way better term than goosetrap. Yeah. All right. ⁓ last two questions. ⁓ this is one of my favorite ones, which is what are you most proud of and why? And it can be personal or professional.
Speaker 1 (33:53)
I'm most proud of...
I'm most proud of the team. The team has been with me over ventures. Some of the guys have been with me for over like 20 years.
Speaker 2 (34:06)
from your previous ventures.
Speaker 1 (34:07)
Jesus,
I mean, so in fact, my co-founder just last couple of weeks ago posted something on LinkedIn and said, hey, we've been working together for 23 years. And yes, so we have a lot of fun. It's very difficult to draw a line where work and personal stuff because they're like brothers. Like we're working together, so there's a lot of
⁓ dark times as opposed to bright times where, especially you're being an entrepreneur and you can, you can lean on that, ⁓ and say, okay, no matter what. So we went through, ⁓ COVID together. went through the economic downtimes together. Now we're going through the tariffs and certainties together, et cetera. But all the lines we say, Hey, we're not alone. And when we do that, it's not just us, it's also customers who are repeat buyers who, you know, been there. So I'm most proud about building that.
system together where almost everybody at Hushley, we have not really lost anybody over the years. I'm super proud of that. And to do that over a period of decades, ⁓ it's special. And in that way, you don't have to complete each other's sentence. They know what your strengths are. So when I talk to my product, I'm like, XYZ. And that translates into several different things. But since we've been working together, that's a really
Beautiful for us. What was the other question or was there another question?
Speaker 2 (35:39)
So, well, I do want to follow up on that though. Do you have any like quick advice on how you've been able to successfully have like the strong team over the same, over the past two decades, a little bit over?
Speaker 1 (35:51)
Yeah, I mean, can definitely and another couple of other core part is a similar question. I have a lot of experience building customer funded companies, right? And there's I can I can spend hours and share my knowledge, right? I don't think I'll be as knowledgeable in terms of building venture funded companies. I just don't have the experience doing that.
But if somebody is looking to say, I want to go down the customer funded route, I would say start off with something really, really small. It doesn't matter what. You don't have to think big and say, I'm going to change the world or conquer the world. Start with something very small in your domain that you have. And do it while working. But always have some co-founder with you, because you're going to see a lot more dot-tems.
Once you have something, like it could be a small feature within a specific domain, right? You build it because if you have ideas and thoughts of them, there's nobody cares, honestly, nobody cares. But once you have something which is you can touch your field and then you go out to one particular customer and you know you have something when they write you a check, ⁓ it doesn't matter what the dollar amount is, it would be 10 bucks.
But it's a huge monumental mindstorm from an idea and to get somebody to pay you that. And then you figure out, OK, if I got $10, who else can I sell this? Which is a company that I think. And that's how you progressively go. And then there's a lot of other stuff that we can spend hours on. But start small. Make small incremental investments. Reach those small micro milestones.
And from there, you will surprise yourself in terms of what you can do, right? Because once you have that, become a magnet and you start to attract a lot of folks saying, hey, I want to be part of this movement, right? And that's what, if it's helpful for, I'm happy to advise on, I mean, there's a hundred other data points.
Speaker 2 (38:06)
Yeah. Yeah. Lots of many topics you could go down.
Speaker 1 (38:09)
how to compete with the large enterprises, with the big elephants, with how to go to market with partners, and how to... There's a lot of things that you can do that when you have too much money, common sense goes out the door. So some of these things that when you're placing these necessities of kind of mother-in-match type of environment, you come out building the right products. you create long lasting relationship both with your...
colleagues as well as with your customers etc.
Speaker 2 (38:41)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, maybe a topic for another time. think there's a lot we could explore there that we could, we could spend time on. ⁓ all right. Last question for me is where can people find you online if they want to learn more about you or Hushley and how can listeners be useful to you?
Speaker 1 (39:00)
Absolutely, I need all the help that I can get so I can take any advice, any and all advices. I always listen. Just because something did not work in the past doesn't mean it's not going to work in the future. Because there may be some twinkle or wrinkle or something like that. So I'm always yes, even though I've been in this space for like 20 odd years. I always so.
To learn about Hushley, it's on hushley.com. It keeps changing very fast based on the technology and it's hard to keep up there. But I'm also very, very active on LinkedIn. ⁓ share my thoughts on LinkedIn on a variety of topics. So reach out on LinkedIn, the traditional channels too. And if you want to find out more about Hushley, it's on hushley.com.
Speaker 2 (39:51)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Geoff.
Speaker 1 (39:53)
Hey, Sani, very nice. Thank you for having me and hopefully it was helpful for your audience.
Speaker 2 (39:59)
I so. think it definitely was.