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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.
You're like, look, I used it.
Here are the limitations in
the current architecture.
It doesn't scale in the way that
it's built, but, but we could, right?
And I've got four different clients who
ran four totally different campaigns
and four totally different industries.
It's about getting four that look
completely different and solving
four completely different problems
that all feel like personalization
ought to have an impact.
Hello and welcome to the 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, and
in today's episode, we are talking to
Nick Zeckets, founder and CEO of Air
Traffic Control, an AI platform that
helps you use your existing content
inside of your marketing automation
platform, instead of creating new
assets to hyper target your audience.
We talk about Nick's journey
to being an AI founder.
How he finds the signal through the
noise and how GTM leaders can do the
same, how he's seeing his customers
leverage Air Traffic Control and other
AI tools in their go to market motion,
and how ATC itself and Nick's team use
AI tools to superpower their GTM motion.
Let's get started.
Nick, hello and welcome to the show.
Well, I'm, I'm pleased to be here, man.
Thank you very much for having me.
I am so excited to learn all of the
things about Air Traffic Control, but I
think, or I like to start with people and
think people's past informs their future.
And I think for founders, that's like,
especially true, and so let's maybe start
with how did you find yourself building
and running an AI startup, especially now.
And then we'll kind of get into what Air
Traffic Control is and why it's awesome.
And maybe some of what you guys
are doing also, but how on earth
did you find yourself here?
Yeah, I appreciate the question.
It's circuitous eh.
I'm, I'm like, I'm old.
I've been running it, you know, revenue.
You don't look old.
I talked to some old guys.
You don't seem like an old guy.
Dude, I get this, I get
this like reasonably often.
I sleep in Tupperware.
But I am, I'm having a birthday
on, in two days from now and I will
officially being in my mid forties.
Oh, so I'm catching you like, like
mid, mid existential midlife crisis,
like might have a Ferrari this weekend.
Like that's
where you're at.
Looking at, looking at car ads that
I can't afford and thinking about all
the terrible things and decisions that
I want to make you know, before I'm
unable to physically make them anymore.
I, no man, I, you know
it's, it's funny so,
I started out my career as a sales guy,
inside sales, hammering phones and then
managed to get to carry a bag on behalf
of some really interesting places.
And then carrying a bag ended up
being really cool and gave me an
opportunity to start to really find more
energy for the marketing and product
side of what was happening, right?
You know, there's salespeople who will
sit there and kind of like, bitch that
my product sucks and that's why we're
not able to sell, and I always kind of
found that the frontline information
was actually some of the most useful
stuff in order to kind of solve
those marketing and product problems.
Started a first startup 2011, it was a
MarTech for higher ed called Quadrangle.
We got acquired in 2018, but the seed.
You, I did, I did higher ed, ed
tech stuff for a while as well.
What were you doing?
So,
Yeah.
I mean, that's how I feel.
I would never do it again.
Sorry higher ed folks
who may be listening in.
I love you.
You're all passionate and wonderful,
phenomenal, fun, enjoyable people.
You guys take 3 years to buy anything.
Worst, worst deal cycles of all time.
Is there an RFP for anything over $12?
Like guys, I'm going to need, I need
an army of humans to manage this.
I've lost money the minute I
try to sell something here.
No, you know, it was interesting.
We, we were selling it to like the
alumni and fundraising side of the house,
and there was some entrenched vendors.
But the deal with Quadrangle was,
you know, recognizing that these
were effectively marketing, big
marketing operations that had no
people and have really limited
functionality in their tools.
Like Salesforce just kind of started
talking to higher ed and it was
way too complex for most of the
teams in higher ed to do much.
HubSpot hadn't talked
to anybody yet, right?
This is, you know, again, too
early for any of those guys to
have started talking to them.
And so we built a marketing automation
platform, which meant, you know, we were
in feature parody hell for the entire
seven years that we ran that business.
But our theory was that personalization.
Like selling
into the, like the annual gifting group?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So you'd go into.
I raised, I raised a lot of dollars
my first, my first, I don't know.
Not my first sales job because I was
selling stuff at a young age, but
in college, I like did the annual
gifting thing and, and called, called
a lot of people, raised a lot of
money for, you know, building some
sports center or something, who knows.
But I did a lot of that.
And so I, I was very curious and
you were like, oh, yeah, we did this
software for that and then I sold them.
Did you know Top Hat does that
name mean anything to you?
Sure did.
So I, I was at Top Hat from like, I
don't know, 15 employees to like 200
or something and an SDR, was an AE, ren
marketing ops, did a bunch of stuff.
But,
like built and did a whole GTM
org around selling entire ed at a
high velocity and it was terrible.
And I don't recommend anyone do it.
It's it, you know, the thing that
I always found remarkable is I
mean, look, you can't be in that
space without deeply believing in
what it is that you're working on.
And, and in that way, it was an industry
full of largely really passionate people
who, who deeply cared about the mission.
It just the number of barriers
and guardrails and rules and
regulations around how those
organizations were allowed
to work, right?
It's not that the person buying
what we had wanted to do an RFP.
They had no choice, right?
It didn't, it didn't matter.
And, um.
And then when they're like,
"Oh yeah, we want this.
We're really excited about it.
We've added it to the
budget three years from now.
And at that point in time, we're totally
going to buy it from you and pay for it."
And you're like, "What?
Like, I need I need deals now!
" They're like, "You have one!
We were buying."
It's great.
I just spent $15,000 on this pursuit.
This doesn't work for me,
Exactly.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm getting, I'm getting us derailed.
I want to talk about so many other things,
but inadvertently found yourself building
a marketing automation product in one of
the hardest industries to build and sell
stuff in and then exited that business.
Yeah, we ended up getting bought for
a Big Mac and a high five and and
then I took a little corporate therapy
time on somebody else's payroll.
But coming out of that, we had done
this cool thing there around content
and appeal personalization, right?
So, like, a school would have all
these departments and all this content
all over campus and super distributed
nobody knew anything about any of it.
We figured out how to, like,
centralize it all and then create
recommendations for people, right?
And so we would make it really much, much
easier for an alumni association actually
look like they cared about the humans that
they were writing to and had capacity.
And what we realized when we got out of
that, we said, "Well, geez, you know what?
That that engine was
actually pretty cool."
Right?
Our mistake was building 1000 features
on top of it and trying to do anything
in higher ed is we just jokingly and
lovingly went down painful memory lane.
So, so we, we got to the other side
and we just kind of toyed with it.
We, we left it alone for a little while.
And then started to explore what the API's
at, like a MailChimp or a HubSpot or a
Marketo, like what do they let you do?
And we kind of looked at each other
after exploring for, you know, a few
weeks and we said, "Oh my God, we could
actually do this through other stuff
that's already in people's hands."
That would be so much cooler and the
problem is so pervasive across B2B
loads of content, big distro problem.
Like this is, it makes a lot of sense.
So we, so really, you know, kind
of, as I think a lot of second
time founders will find themselves
having significantly more success
than in their first run at the game.
The first run taught me a ton and I got
to learn something that informed deeply,
I think a way better business that's
way more interesting and fun to run.
So anyway, that's, that's how we
got our start.
I don't, I don't do a ton of investing.
But I'll say that like the things that
for me, if I was doing a lot of investing.
The things that would check off all
boxes for me is like any founder with a
sales background is instantly like, cool
like, you've been on the front lines.
You actually know how to do this.
Like, when you build a feature,
you're like, "Yeah, but, but
are they going to like care?"
And you're like, "Users
are going to love it."
And you're like, "Yeah, maybe,
but, but like, can I demo it?"
And they'll be like, "Whoa and
if not, why are we building it So
that checks off some boxes for me.
I think that being the end user and
sort of seeing that problem before is
also super, super valuable and you sort
of understand that piece of it and you
maybe built a little bit of it before.
And so where, where did, where did Air
Traffic Control maybe start and, and,
and sort of where was the product and
then tell, tell me about what is it now?
Yeah, actually, I again
painful lessons learned.
This time around, you know, look like
no one, no truly passionate founder is
ever happy with where their products at.
It's always, "Shit man there's
like three more features.
I swear to God, that's a total unlock."
And it's always feeling like that.
But early, early, early on, we were so
far away from something that someone
could walk into and use on their
own, but the actual algorithm, the
recommendation engine, we actually
had that working pretty early.
Not in a way that would work at
massive scale and over and over again.
We could ingest a whole bunch of
engagement data from a customer's
major marketing automation platform.
We could create an interest graph
for the people that we were able
to ingest all that data from.
So, you open up an email about
giraffes and we're like, yo,
giraffes are maybe interesting.
Then there's a link in there about
a hippopotamus and you click the
hippopotamus link and we're like,
oh, giraffes and hippopotamuses
and in fact, more hippos than
giraffes, because that link click is
way more interesting than an open.
So like on and on and on, and
we started to really kind of
clean it up and figure it out.
And once we knew that the API's were there
for us to get that data, and once we knew
that we could make those recommendations,
at least by pushing some buttons in the
back end and get all the customer content
and like, create these connections.
We, we actually went out and
sold like services deals, right?
And they were super tight.
We said, look, we want you to do a
personalization centric campaign.
If that's not something that you want
to do, then we're not for you, right?
We're not a catch all agency.
What we are is just we're a tech enabled,
very specific kind of packaged service.
And here's the crux of it, we want
to try to really take advantage of
the content that you've produced
and try to deploy it against a
particular problem in your funnel.
Early stage, mid-funnel,
late funnel, you tell us.
But that takes that stuff and
starts to do something about it
and we'd wrap our arms around it.
What was so awesome is we were
building the front end of the product
in response to our own experience,
trying to get it to work and solve
these business problems for customers.
Which was the sickest aspect of
building this business and I'll
never do it any other way ever again.
And I wouldn't back anybody
to your point about investing.
I wouldn't back anybody who didn't.
If you haven't wrapped your arms around
the customer's problem and been like,
swimming in their tears, you should
definitely get out of the kitchen because
you don't deserve to be there and you're
missing out on all the good shit, right?
Which is.
Something that like, I don't know.
I, I, I talked to lots of I
talked to lots of founders.
I, I read a lot of Reddit and, and acts of
people trying to do stuff and everyone's
like, how do I find this problem?
And like, how do I, and I'm just like, I
don't think like the product market fit
and the problem to solve, problem should
just be, you should be so intimately
familiar with exactly what it is
and I think not dissimilar
from what you're describing.
Like, everything and that will change,
I think we have more mature products,
but everything that we build on the
Hapily side is just us being like, no,
no, no, we've we've been the end user.
We know the problem.
We know exactly how this should work
and that is what we are going to build.
And I think to your point, the speed
with which you build things of value
is just so much faster when you are,
not only are you that end user, but you
actually understand how somebody using
that solution would want it to work.
Dude, a hundred percent you build
for yourself first is really the
best place you can come from.
It's like, this solves a problem
that I am deeply aware of and I don't
think I'm the only person who had it.
And sure, I mean, you're going to
have a few phone calls and be like,
alright before I spend 4 months on an
MBP
Yeah, maybe I am the only guy who
wants to do this, like validate that
for
For
I wonder, does this work for you too?
And you're like, "Yeah, dude, that sucks."
And you're like, oh,
well, that's 2, right?
And then you get to like, 10 out of 12
phone calls all kind of go the same way.
And you go, well, alright
well, I'll build it for myself.
And then let's see if we can use it with
some people and wrap ourselves around it.
Which not for nothing is a pretty good
way to avoid, you know, needing to
raise money early, early on, which is
just a brutal time to try to get money.
It's like, "I got an idea, do you
got $500K to like, see whether
or not I'm bat shit crazy?"
And then, you know, you, you kind of
get to a place where you're informed.
You're like, look, I used it.
Here are the limitations in
the current architecture.
It doesn't scale in the way that
it's built, but, but we could, right?
And I've got four different clients who
ran four totally different campaigns
and four totally different industries.
So I'm actually not looking to
build an, a classic kind of like,
hey, we're the agency for, I don't
know construction companies, right?
I'm actually trying to be a little
bit inefficient in my go to market
motion cause this isn't about
getting 50 of these services clients.
It's about getting four that look
completely different and solving
four completely different problems
that all feel like personalization
ought to have an impact.
And oh my God, it worked, right?
We had to make some changes here, learn
some stuff here, other impacts here,
but like, I've got a pretty solid idea.
And then let's try to sell more of
it, build, iterate, sell, build,
iterate and then finally in November
of last year, so this is now being
recorded at the end of February 2024.
So November 2023, we finally had
an interface where a customer could
like, walk into the product, use it.
We had 15 sales calls, closed
6 of them in a couple of weeks
and we're like, oh that's like.
That's interesting.
And felt really.
Help me understand, so if I,
I'm, I come into the product.
I'm a HubSpot user.
What, what do I, what do I do?
And then what are you doing on my behalf?
And then how does that actually
like manifest into, into
some sort of value for me?
Yeah, man, just.
It's, we've tried to make
it as elegant as possible.
So you come in you connect
your HubSpot account.
We have HubSpot in part out right now.
Marketo is next on the list, but super
focused on the HubSpot ecosystem.
You just hit connect.
There's no like setup.
There's, there's not like
an integration process.
You don't need to talk to anybody
in order to get it set up.
It's dead simple.
It takes about 90 seconds.
At that point, what happens is we go
and get, basically everything that
lives inside your HubSpot instance,
but what we're really focused on
is, alright here's this record
that comes over and it's Connor.
All right.
I got this record, show me every email
open, every click, every site visit.
Are there notes following sales calls?
Give me everything.
And what we do is we use all
that to build an interest graph.
And for anybody who's been to some
degree engaged with you, your customers,
certainly people who are mid-funnel and
down, people who have been like long
time newsletter subscribers, we end up
picking up, you know, 50 to 150 insights
per person.
So we build this really
interesting interest graph.
There's a secondary piece of the
proposition where for people that
you maybe don't know very well,
maybe they're totally disengaged
or they're brand new prospects.
We do have a LinkedIn data enrichment
package that's inside the product.
So these are people I don't know
much about, go get their full
profile in their last 90 days of
post behavior and then, right.
So you can kind of go from cold to hot.
pretty
Dude, I don't think that's like a sub
bullet that that's a, that is very cool.
Yeah, look, I mean, it's, it's you
just got 5,000 SDRs kind right?
Like, that's, that's the rip and and
that's not my line so I'll give credence
to our advisor Mike Weir, who just
recently is the CRO over at G2 and the
dude, like, is so good at packaging up
what it is that we do and saying it to
other people, so thank God he's around.
So thank you, Mike.
But, but that data
all ends up coming back and creating
this really interesting interest
graph and then we automatically
suck in all the customer's content.
So blogs, case studies,
podcasts, webinars, white papers,
whatever they have, right?
We go grab it all, the system reads it.
So I don't care what you want to use as
like a tag taxonomy which is so limiting.
We're using machine learning in order
to drive all the subject matter.
And we go, well, I, I saw
what Connor was engaged with.
I know what we've got
and that he hasn't seen.
And so we connect the dots, and then
we make recommendations three of every
type of content that you have for every
single person that you have in your
system, and we stick it back into HubSpot.
We automatically create new properties.
And we populate them every
night for every person.
So you get a headline, a link
and an image property for each
of those recommended items.
So for us, we have blog posts, we
have podcasts here too at ATC, and we
actually also have a syndicated feed.
So we have a syndicated news
service that comes into the backend.
So there's ATC blog headline one, ATC
blog image one, ATC blog link one.
So when I go and I write like
an email template or a landing
page or a chat bot response.
The same way that you're used to
using like, you know, hey, first name.
There's now alright we've got
this really cool stuff, I was
thinking a little bit about where
you are in the business right now,
I thought this might be useful to you:
blog headline one, blog link one, blog
image one, maybe a podcast, maybe a
webinar, maybe a case study depending upon
kind like who you're talking to and when.
But that template could go out to 10,000
people and you could end up sending
10,000 completely different emails.
You could have a, an ABM style
landing page that's actually
unique to the individual who's
going there every day, right?
So it's like, there's a bunch of
really interesting use cases and our
customers keep sharing them with us.
And what's really cool is, you know,
we got a pressure test, you know,
God, it was like November-ish, right
when we went out and somebody
said, "Can I actually create a
list of everybody for whom a piece
of content has been recommended?"
I was like, "So you got to say more,
what would you do "Well, I want
to take the audience and I want
to boost the content on LinkedIn."
We're like, "Oh, right."
That's so cool!
Oh yeah.
Perfect!
And then, so we put a little button on
every content item in your entire, you
know, repo that lets you export the
content audience in a LinkedIn CSV format.
And our customers have been uploading
those CSVs, promoting content, and their
CPCs are 90 percent lower, literally 90.
They're getting clicks for $0.50 on
LinkedIn, which is freaking unheard of
so.
And over and over again and across
industries and content types,
it's just, it keeps working.
So that's a lot of where we're
at right now is our customers
really showing us the use cases.
And us thinking a lot about, all
right, how do we make it easier and
easier and easier for more and more
people to take advantage of those use
cases and deploy more of them more
often
Are you guys sending, is the
email going out from ATC?
Or is the email from the mousetrap?
No, it's going out from HubSpot.
This is so incredibly important.
We are not a better mousetrap.
We are improving the mousetrap you have.
HubSpot is great at sending emails.
They don't have an email
sending capacity problem.
They're great at it, right?
Pardot sends lots of great emails,
can be tough to build one in there,
but they're great at sending them.
Marketo does everything.
They have landing pages.
They're great at hosting websites.
Like, we shouldn't do that.
These recommendations live in HubSpot
because that's where you do your job.
Now we have some really cool
insights that live in our product.
We'll tell you how relevant you are,
what topics you need to write about in
order to stay competitive and relevant
within the audience that you have.
We'll tell you whether or not there's
certain content that you really ought
to go out there and like boost on
LinkedIn because it's got massive
audience of super interested people.
Well, you, you guys can also, I mean,
what's super interesting, right?
Like is one, so I'll, I'll tell a
story and then I'll link it back
to what I'm actually saying to you.
But I think one of the things that
I found really compelling on like
HubSpot's roadmap, for instance, is
the idea of they have all this service
conversations and they know
all the content that you have
both in your knowledge base and
your blogs and everything else.
As they just basically look at every
conversation you're having on the
service side and be like, "Hey, by the
way, you have tons of people who have
a lot of questions about like your
Stripe integration and you don't have
that much content that answers this.
Like you should go create
content that is about this."
And I think very similarly.
You guys can look at this and say,
here are all the types of things that
your audience is really interested
in, and we don't have the inventory of
the type of content that matters and
I think what's really interesting that
I think ties to sort of like a macro
thesis about what I think a lot of
people are doing in this arena versus
what actually drives value is using
the AI to create that content is
not super interesting and the value
of the content you're going to make
is just not going to be very high.
But the AI can absolutely help
you figure out what should you
create and what should it look like
and that is super compelling.
Yeah, dude, I, I mean you're
preaching to the choir.
Every day you're like, oh, now
this is the generative AI tool
that's going to actually deliver
me stuff that doesn't suck.
And you get into it and you're
like, oh, man, that sucks too.
Right?
And you're like, and I just,
and I think, and I think it's
really an interesting period.
And I, and one of the things that I
feel really good about with ATC is if
you're a reasonably mature marketing
team, you've been around, you've
got six, seven, eight, nine people.
You've created a few hundred pieces
of content across your website.
It is highly unlikely you have
a content production problem.
Highly unlikely, right?
But like all the hype is around the
generative stuff and it's gotten so
easy to produce more, not produce
more good stuff, but produce more.
Yeah.
So we kind of like get, get
wooed in that direction.
We're like, that's so cool.
And dude, sorry, it's a freaking
parlor trick and that content's
going to do jack squat for you.
Right?
And, and I, and I think what is
really, really compelling here,
is getting to say to a marketing
team, you've written awesome stuff.
If you think the stuff from three
years ago is kind of like, you
know, crusty and not so great.
I don't know what to tell you
other than take it off your
website or update it", right?
That's an update problem or I'm
embarrassed by a problem and we
weren't, we aren't the same business.
You should think about, you know,
how you're managing the content
that's on your site for sure.
But if it's out there and
representing you, in all
likelihood, we find this all the time.
Something a company wrote a year and a
half ago is like exactly what somebody
is going to find compelling right now.
But there is no marketing operation
on the planet that has any kind
of repeatable way to do that.
None whatsoever.
It doesn't exist.
And we're coming in and saying,
guys, you spent the time.
You kicked ass.
You did the human driven stuff.
It's real good.
Let's squeeze all the blood out of
that rock and then by letting you
know topically what you're missing,
you know, in order to retain and
maintain that level of relevancy.
Virtuous cycle, right?
Now you can actually, to your
point, sit down and spend the time.
Now we do a bunch of reporting
on those topics, right?
So if you have written, hey,
here's the stuff that you do have.
We also tell you what is ranking.
We tell you what your competitors have
written about that subject matter.
We tell you what that topic level
audience is also interested in.
So like your header twos.
So we have one in ours that I'm
getting after right now that's, we
haven't written about social media
and it's really compelling to a lot
of our audience for obvious reasons.
They're also interested in analytics.
They're also interested
in marketing automation.
They're like, so like having a,
a, a cluster of content about
social and this, this, this, and
this, and these secondary topics.
I know it's worth the time to sit
down and do it because I literally
have 879 people who need me to.
Right?
That's 879 people I'm writing
for rather than an SDR.
I'm going to go write something
and I hope somebody cares.
I hope somebody cares.
I know they care.
In fact, I can guarantee you that if
you're leveraging ATC recommendations
through your marketing efforts.
That content will get activated for any
one of these 879 people pretty soon.
Right?
So like, it just, it really, it really, I
think unshackles people from feeling like
they've got a volume production problem.
And lets them get back to writing
for relevancy and quality.
And I think that's, that's something
that, that marketers are kind of thinking.
Like, dude, I don't want
to do this LLM stuff.
Like I don't like the output.
They don't like it either.
But they're searching because they
feel like what the problem is, is
production and it's not, it just.
And I think they're also getting like,
and I think something I'm curious
about is I think everyone's getting
immense, what we see, right, is
everyone's getting immense pressure.
And when I tell all the analysts
who are like, "Oh, is the AI
stuff like making a difference in
what people are doing and hubs?"
I'm like everyone shows up and says,
"AI is really important to us."
And then they're like,
"Oh, we have the AI stuff."
And they're like, "Oh, that's great.
AI is really important to us."
And then everyone moves on.
No one has like, no
one knows the use case.
No one knows what they're doing.
It's all window dressing and
sort of boondoggles nothing
that actually moves the needle.
What, what are you seeing from
like folks that you're talking to?
As you were describing this, it
was like a lot of customers saying,
"Oh, I have a lot of fatigue,
I'm doing a lot of this stuff."
Like, what are you hearing is either
these are the biggest obstacles,
here's why I'm not investing.
I don't know that there it's
objections are where people come from
and then they're interested in you.
Or like how to sort of phrase that.
But, but what are you hearing from like
being in market and talking to people
who are at minimum evaluating this stuff?
Yeah.
I think it's a really
interesting question to answer.
There are, I believe, a few things
that are going on vis-a-vis, you know,
AI within the go to market space.
So, one, I think there's a
pretty strong consensus that
there's a there, there, right?
But I, I think you've made a really
astute observation that people
really struggle to kind of talk about
what their, use cases have been.
And I think the other thing is that really
feels I think kind of problematic about
AI is that it's, it's so nebulous, right?
And you're like, oh, better words, right?
Like I can produce more and better words.
But if we're all being honest
as businesses, until somebody's
in product, everything is words.
Right?
The whole business is words, which, by
the way, everybody should be hiring more,
you know, I don't know, English majors
or what have you, or former journalists,
like, that's what they should be hiring.
But, but they're, they're
looking at these LLM's and they
feel like, this should help me.
But it's just not concrete.
It's not coming from a place
of, "Hey I have a, like a social
media distribution problem.
So I'm going to evaluate, you know, the
six or seven tools that are out there
that helped to push social out there
because I know that my HubSpot social
tools are like, they're not bad, but
we're kind of like, we've outgrown
them and we the next generation of."
That's so clear and they know how to
then approach that problem and buy it.
But when they go and they start to
evaluate the AI stuff, it all kind of
feels like I'm learning about what I might
buy and do by taking the sales pitches.
Right?
And from our perspective, one of the
things that we've really been trying
to focus on over the course of the
last couple of months, frankly, is
like, what's the problem that you've
named as a business that we solve for?
Because buying AI, look, it's
accelerating because people have
these like weird fungible budgets
that have the word AI attached
to
Yeah.
So it's actually
Someone said, go, go buy half
a million dollars of AI tech
this year and no one knows what
that
actually means.
I mean, and it, and it's
it's actually happening.
Like, in particularly mid-market and
larger businesses actually have those,
like, I don't know, whatever AI budgets.
And then the marketing budget itself is
like, you do not check all 74 checkboxes
I have on exactly what it is that I need.
You're like, come on, man.
And so, so there's this for us, we
have to be a little opportunistic in
terms of how we talk about what we do,
but I do think that it's problematic
on some level that those
budgets are so flimsy.
And I think the other thing that's
really interesting is there are
so few, like AI operations people
that live inside these businesses.
And it's, you know, it's like,
it's the same thing with no code.
Look, anybody really can
kind of learn Zapier.
But if you're really going to get
the value out of a tool like that,
you should have somebody who's
like your Zapier stud internally.
Like really grocks
how that thing works and
how it needs to work.
And so, it just feels like a
lot of exploration right now.
And so, for us in our conversations,
we really try to, frankly,
not really talk about the AI.
We talk about, you've got a content
repository, you're doing a lot of
complex workflows with a boatload
of segments and like tags and
all this kind of insane stuff.
You're pulling your hair out,
you're exhausted and you're getting
like a modicum of improvement
in your marketing performance.
You're at that tipping point
where you're starting to think,
do I lean more into brand?
Which is extensible and a
human can control and push out.
Or do I hire a ton more people and try
to increase my operational capacity?
And we come in and we go, I can help
you get more time for the brand work.
And help you actually do better
on the thing that you think is
a million more people, right?
And then they go, "Oh, great."
Right?
It's like, that's the moment where it
feels like, we really kind of like, strike
a chord and people go, okay, let me get
my credit card out and start this out.
So, so not only, not only are you
leading an AI organization, you are
heavily leveraging AI stuff in, in your
GTM journey, whether it is with Air
Traffic Control or whether it's with
other sorts of things in the stack.
Tell me about what you guys are doing
that's like cool, exciting, interesting.
And something I saw behind you is this
fun little diagram that for anyone that's
just audio, has sort of like site map, how
to find it, if yes, go to this direction.
And this looks like a GTM journey to me.
And I am eager to understand it.
Yeah you should see how it's translated
now over into a big gigantic confluence
board and a lot of people poking
at it and doing their various jobs
and tasks is related to it now.
So, you know, it's really cool.
So, so
first there are two tools that I'm
wicked excited about right now.
One is Clay and the
other one is is Copy.ai.
So, here's my jam with Clay.
For those who don't know, I'll
start with the basics and then I'll
talk about our use case for it.
So, so Clay is.
For anyone interested,
C L A Y just dot com.
They, they
Dot com.
Yep.
So things are going well.
If they decided to do that.
Yes.
They they got that website and which
is remarkable and, and like super
nice, smart people running that thing.
Like it's, it's dope.
So the way that Clay works and any person
who's been in rev ops or marketing ops
has kind of had this experience where it's
like, we now have our seventh data vendor
to help us qualify accounts, people,
find them enriched with information.
And only in the most advanced well
run, you know, operational, you
know, GTM operational organizations
have I ever seen this kind of work.
But they enrich with this and then the
next source and then the next source
and the next source, but I got to tell
you, if you're mid-market and down
the vast majority of people are like,
I have Apollo and that's it, right?
And there's nothing wrong with Apollo.
Apollo's great at what Apollo does, but
what if you need awesome technographics?
What if you need to do research
on what's on the website of
the prospective customer?
What if you need to get a super strong
resolution on particular attributes about
somebody's professional profile to qualify
them as the right human to talk to?
These are all different data sets.
And so you don't want to move on
to the second enrichment until you
know that the first one is right.
So you go, all right, I want to find
businesses that have this much revenue,
this much headcount, these industries.
And now I want to enrich with
technographic data from BuiltWith.
Now I want to enrich with site data.
So for us, BuiltWith is part of
what we use in Clay and Clay brings
all these API providers together.
And so then you pay them with credits.
So, rather than me having 8 or
9 different data relationships.
I have 1 with Clay.
I pay them, they pay these guys on
API consumption model fees, and I get
everything in a waterfall kind of,
you know, just spreadsheet, right?
Is what it looks like, right?
It's just a table.
And so, you know, column one is
I could create with an open AI
search of the internet and be
like, find all the companies that
you know, were on the SAAS 100.
Okay, and it goes and
finds all their URLs.
Alright, now I want you to tell me which
of these URLs also includes HubSpot.
Okay, if they have HubSpot, I want you
to go and index their sitemap and tell me
how many links they have in their sitemap.
Now tell me if any of those links have
the terms blog or podcast or webinar,
I need to do this because we
have a, we an event application.
And the main thing that we're looking
at is like, if your site map has an
events tab and you use HubSpot, like
we probably want to talk to you.
Dude, it is so freaking awesome.
It's so awesome.
And then by the time it's over,
and then you go, now I want
to find the people, right?
And they've got all these email
vendors and so on and so forth.
And you can bring in your own, you
know, API keys if you, you know, have
high volume use of certain things, it's
actually cheaper to be a direct customer
of Apollo and then plug it into here.
Which
it's happening more and more, but as a
centralization tool, it's phenomenal.
And so, you know, that has
given us a really remarkable
ability to hyper qualify.
We know if a company has at least
300 pages, they have more than.
Are you doing this from like, an outbound
segmentation, like informing that?
Or are you doing this from a, hey,
we're generating leads and then
we're figuring out, do we care?
No.
So we've been really quiet, frankly, at
ATC in terms of our content volume is low.
We haven't been out there trying
to like do a bunch of SEO.
We haven't launched a lead magnet.
Our first big lead magnet
goes live next week.
We're super excited about it.
Basically we have a content utilization
metric and our product that tells
you how much of your content you've
actually leveraged in your marketing
efforts in the last three months.
The number is not great
for anybody, right?
Which is part and parcel as to why we
exist is to actually change that, but
we're giving it away for free and there's
just an easy signup page now for it, which
is really cool or there will be next week.
So, super excited about that.
For us, we've been prepping and building
this massive audience, and we've
got 17, 000 people who have HubSpot.
They have a sitemap, which indicates that
they have content marketing maturity.
They have at least 300 content
items on their website.
They've got more than one kind
of marketing content types.
They've got at least a blog and
white papers or case studies
or podcasts or whatever.
All these things tell us that they're
really investing in and care about
their content marketing efforts, and
it's all waterfall through and then
we use that company list in order
to go and find the right people.
Right?
Tell me who owns content marketing.
Tell me who's running
demand generation, right?
And then what we're doing is taking that
audience and we'll start to put them
into, you know, a rotational flow of, of
various kinds of content items on LinkedIn
for a couple of weeks and warm them up.
And then we'll start to
hit them in the inbox.
But because we've done all this
preliminary analytical work,
we've also been able to push a
lot of it into our own product.
And so we can say, "Hey, by the way,
this blog post that you wrote on this
date is about these topics and that's
how we know what people care about is
because we're watching that behavior
out of your HubSpot instance", right?
So come connect HubSpot.
We'll give you a whole
bunch of analytics for free.
I'll let you test flight the entire
product for a couple of weeks.
At the end of that, let me know if
you want to keep using it, right?
That would be great.
And so that's kind of the flow that's
coming up, but that, that super crystal
clear understanding of not just who the
right people are, but what to say to them
when we do go out and hit their inboxes.
It completely changes the game.
Now, there are some people who are
using the open AI integration in
there to actually like draft the
email or create the opening line.
And if it's just one line and you've
got inputs from, you know, columns B,
you know, D and Q, and you're telling
it exactly how to model that opening
line, it does a phenomenal job.
What I don't like is this nonsense that
spin taxes the bullshit opener email, the
whole thing is written and it's like that
and
sucks.
Everyone has an immediate, like, I
think, especially with, with emails.
I, I always cringe because I feel like
the LinkedIn bots have gotten really
prolific and you can just like, you
can instantly tell, like, it's just
like, and it's just so obvious that
you're just like, nah, this is this is
totally automated and it, and it sort
of uncanny valleys and self immediately.
Yeah, I can't.
Yeah, I get, I, I mean, for if anybody
follows me on LinkedIn, they see me do
this all the time, actually take the
garbage emails and LinkedIn invites
that I get and I repost on LinkedIn.
And I take the person's name
out Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
like this.
Hey Nick, I saw that you were interested
in AI technology and I would love to
learn more with innovators like you.
You're just like, oh my
god.
Or my favorite, Nick, I can see that
you run Air Traffic Control, personalize
any marketing, which is like our
tagline.
Yeah, yeah, yeah the tagline.
On LinkedIn and you
live in Lexington, Mass.
It's like, bro, I...
I love Lexington, Mass.
Knowing all that.
We should, we should talk.
It's God, man, you
really did your homework.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's so, I don't know.
I think that's part of it too, is
it's like the thing that I love about Clay
and that I think is wicked important.
Look, regardless of the volume of, if
you're mid-funnel, Air Traffic Control
can do remarkable things for you.
If you're top of funnel.
In particular, if you're doing
any cold or outbound work, and you
don't have a massively data enriched
comprehensive understanding of your ICP
you are going to get fractional
results to what you should be.
But when you know a lot about people
at scale, and for the first time
ever, even smaller teams like us at
Air Traffic Control can use something
like a Clay and actually know a ton.
And then start to make sense
of, what's our pitch here?
Why do we matter?
What's the cool thing that I can say?
And the cool thing I can say is
not, "I did an analysis on your
website, let me know if you want it."
Oh, say that to me one more
time and I will find you and
hurt you, like cut it out.
If it's so great, just
send the damn thing.
I'll let you know if it's
worth talking about again.
Like just everybody's
got to cut it out, right?
Add value, do something cool.
But the only way that happens,
you got to know a ton.
And that's tough to do with
skill until, frankly, until Clay.
A we're going to have to get the Clay
guys and we'll have them on the show.
I think that their another HubSpot
ventures portfolio company, so we
can probably make something happen
there.
I believe that's
right.
And B, I'm going to go send you and
Clay to our GTM team and be like, "Hey,
remember that thing we talked about?
I talked to this guy today and
he's doing it and it's pretty sick.
And we should check it out.
And I'll be the obnoxious,
the obnoxious CEO slack.
Someone should make it like a
Twitter handle, it's just like
CEO slacks of like, heard about
Clay on podcast, please look like.
Like, tag 11:57 PM, like, whatever it is.
I ping our product team all the
time and I'm like, what about this
really cool LLM management platform?
They're like, dude, just.
stop
Just stop.
Just.
Do your job.
It isn't this, right?
You're like, sorry, I'll go back.
Amazing.
CEO woes, man.
Well, Nick, thank you so,
so much for coming on.
At minimum, I've learned that I want
to take a look at Air Traffic Control
and Clay for all of these things.
And I would say if you are a, if
you're a marketing automation customer
anywhere and you have a lot of
content and you're trying to figure
out how to use it with your audience.
Like, ergo, like you have a
marketing department you should
give Air Traffic Control a peek, but
thank you for coming on the show.
And I, we'll have to set up a demo or
something, I'm definitely interested.
My man, thank you so much.
I was happy to be here.
This was fun.
Absolutely.
I'll catch up with you soon.
Cheers.