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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)
How could we have a 97 % customer satisfaction on our program, but only have 15 % of people doing what we told them to do? Either you lied to us or something else was missing. So I went back and I started asking thousands of people, did you lie to me? So from January of 2022 to February of 2024, a message as a text expander typed, oh.
1.1 billion characters. Fantastic, pretty cool. From March of 2024 to December of 2024, just 10 months, iMessage combined with Fly Engage Flypost typed another 1.1 billion characters. So it took us 25 months to be able to type the first 1.1 and only 10 months to type the next 1.1 billion characters. Wanna hear something funny? So I've been playing around with our fly role play and
it's really kind of pissing me off, I'll tell you that much. And that is because I, as a sales thought leader, top sales influencer, a leader over the largest sales prospecting training company globally, I can't beat the AI over 80%. And it's really ticking me off, man.
Speaker 2 (01:13)
Hey everyone, welcome to Beyond the Prompt and I'm your host, Sunny. This is the show where we go deeper than the hype, where we go beyond just the prompt. This podcast is where I'm talking 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 who's doing it at the frontier, then you're in the right place. And if you're interested in coming onto the podcast or just want to chat with me on the cool things you're doing with AI,
then check out the link in the description to get in touch. Today's guest is Mario Martinez Jr. A leader who hasn't just adopted AI, but has fundamentally reshaped his company around it. He's the CEO and founder of Vingresso, the creators of the AI-driven sales tool FlyMessage. And it's used by sales and business development professionals from companies like Netflix, TikTok, and Lyft. What makes Mario's story compelling is Vingresso's origin. Vingresso grew to become the largest sales prospecting training company in the world,
and have won numerous Gold Stevie Awards. It's basically the Oscars of the sales and marketing industry. And Mario shares the pivotal moments and tough decisions that led to transforming into a SaaS business, driven by the potential to embed their training know-how directly into an AI tool. We explore how FlyMessage evolved from a single text expander to an AI assistant that helps salespeople write better and faster. Tackling everything from social engagement on LinkedIn
crafting follow-up emails, all informed by Vangresso's proven methodologies. Mario even gives us a sneak peek into upcoming features like AI-powered grammar correction and sales role-playing. This episode is packed with insights on pivoting from a service company to SaaS, leveraging proprietary knowledge to train AI, building an integrated product suite, and the realities of product-led growth versus enterprise sales. Let's get into it. Mario, thank you so much for joining me.
⁓ I would love to learn a little bit more about Vangresso, your role at Vangresso and kind of just like a backstory of, of how you started it too.
Speaker 1 (03:12)
Sonny, I'm so excited to be here with you. Actually, I have a small little story and secret. that is, did you know that my family nickname is Sonny?
Speaker 2 (03:24)
No, I did not know that. Wow.
Speaker 1 (03:28)
was saving it to get that exact reaction in a real time fashion. Yeah, it actually is. We spelt it S O N N Y. Yeah, and it was named I was nicknamed after my dad's best friend. ⁓ everybody in my family and all my old ⁓ friends from
⁓ as early as I can remember till 18 years old before I left and went off to Cal Berkeley, everybody calls me sunny. And the funny part is, is anybody, anytime someone calls me Mario from back in the day, I look at them. I'm like, that doesn't sound right, but anybody that calls me sunny now, I look at them and I'm like, no, that's not, I got, so I got two identities.
Speaker 2 (04:05)
Gotcha.
Gotcha. I did not know that. Would you want to be called Mario today or do you also want to be called Sunny today?
Speaker 1 (04:11)
Hey man, I can be called whatever you want, whatever you want to call me. Mario's fine, that's how everybody knows me. I'm Mario Martinez Jr. and I am the CEO of Vingresso, the creators of Fly Message. And Fly Message is a SaaS sales productivity and engagement tool. But interestingly enough, it's not just for sellers, although that is our largest user community, is sellers and customer success and that actually represents 50%.
of our user community is comes out of salespeople, customer success, then customer support is a really big strong third. HR and recruiters is the fourth business owners, by the way, I put right into that category of sellers. Interestingly enough, many business owners don't look at themselves as a seller, but you actually are. We can talk all about that. And then the other 40%. So it's about 60 % represents those.
categories right there and the other 40 % is literally every other Tom, Dick and Harry you could possibly think of from accounts payable to lawyers to doctors to ⁓ plumbers to stay at home moms ⁓ who are doing homeschooling, college professors. We've got digital pharmacists that utilize FlyMessage because in its original form when we created FlyMessage it was a text expander and that's how we actually went to market as a productivity tool doing text expansion. And to be very clear, what is text expansion?
Many of us have snippets of text that we store on a Google Doc, Word Doc, OneNote, Evernote, Notepad, Notebook, Draft email, or worse yet, we hunt and peck for it in our sent folder. And so what you could do is you could take all these little snippets of messages, put them into the cloud, and then with a few short keystrokes, you can build out that message. So that was the original form of the product. And ⁓ as a text expander, it was a pretty powerful tool to utilize that.
But then what we really were applying it towards was the sales line of business and the sales motion in B2B selling. So we actually started Vingresso about nine years ago. And that was through a seven-way company merger. Yes, I used to have black hair and my hairline started right about there. And then I ⁓ did a seven-way company merger. It all went gray from there.
and the receding hairline started and then two years ago I converted from a service company into a SaaS company, Software as a Service. For those of you that are listening and they're wondering what SaaS is, just in case. And at that time, that's when I started getting my balding spot right back over there. ⁓ So nonetheless, ⁓ we've been having lots of fun with FlyMessage and that is our flagship product. We serve both the individual, knowledge worker, as well as the sales line of business.
⁓ very specifically doing enterprise sales prospecting training along with tools and technology through Fly Message that helps to scale all of those engagement activities and we can talk all about that later on.
Speaker 2 (07:06)
Gotcha. Gotcha. That's a, that's a great intro. did not know Vingressa came from a seven way merger. That's super interesting. ⁓ and so, ⁓ it started as a service company two years ago, you created this product, ⁓ tell me a little bit more about this, transition from like being a service company to like a product company. Not many companies are like that. Some often companies are like only that and stick service or only technology and software and only do technology and software.
So share a little bit about like that transition and also why as well.
Speaker 1 (07:38)
Yeah, great question. So we actually grew the brand to become the world's largest sales prospecting training company globally. ⁓ In fact, our claim to fame was when the company Miller Hyman Sales Training Company, which is the world's largest sales training company, they hired for the first time in their 43 year history and outside sales training company. And that was us, Vingresso. ⁓ they utilized actually FlyMessage. We built the product a little over four years ago. So December 2020 was when we launched the
product and brought it to market, but we actually only had it for the first 2 years of its life in free status. So everybody got to use it for free and we were actually utilizing as part of our sales training program. Why? Because in our sales training program, we had over 60 different types of sales scripts that we would give out, sellers, everything from how to wish someone a happy work anniversary to ⁓ a cold email outreach message.
We built that to support that training program because we would hand out a 27 page playbook and they would go through and they would save this document and then they had our playbook plus a playbook from their manager plus a playbook from their enablement team if they were large enough. And then they each individual seller like a business owner has their own set of greatest hits that they have stored on a Google Doc, Word doc, OneNote, Evernote, Notepad, Notebook, Draft email or they hunt and pecked for it. So we thought, well, why were we contributing to
⁓ productivity loss for salespeople, let's build our own text expander and that's how we actually created it. So it ran for about two years, but we never sold it. It was always just bundled in as part of our training program as the lead service that we offered. And then one day I woke up and I had 35 digital pharmacists, online digital pharmacists that had onboarded themselves to Fly Message. And that to me was
eerily crazy, weird, what were digital pharmacists doing and using on Fly Message, of which I thought was a sales productivity tool. Well, it turns out that digital pharmacists also have repeatable messages that they use over and over and over again. We received your prescription, Sonny. Your prescription couldn't be processed. Your insurance didn't go through. And they were utilizing these messages over and over and over again.
And subsequently, what ended up happening was is they were utilizing Fly Message to help them to build out these messages to customers. And I thought, my God, that's amazing. I had no idea that there was this alternate use case for non-sellers. So I looked a little more deeply into that and subsequently figured out, wow, we had thousands of non-sellers that were on the platform.
So I went out to start talking to investors and spoke to a good solid 30 or 40 investors and said, hey, I'd love to blow this up and build this product out. And every investor said to me, there is no way that you're getting funding if you have a service based company. You must be either service, in which case you would never get funding or SaaS, in which case you might get funding.
And so with that in mind, that was a major, major, major ⁓ consideration for us to look at, well, what do we do with this service-based business? Interestingly enough, this service-based business, while very popular ⁓ training, unfortunately, sales training is the last thing that people want to invest in when times are rough. inside of COVID, everybody was investing into
trying to get everybody up and running new infrastructure, how to help them be able to be remote sellers. So we started to see revenues decline and that was consistent across all sales training companies. And so the big challenge was how do we continue to grow revenues? What was our next thing? And that's where Fly Message was sitting there on this bubble and we were like, I think this is our next thing.
And so I went out and put a 12 month long strategy, which took us 13 months to execute on to transition the company from service to SaaS. And I went out there and started raising funding. It was probably the toughest thing I ever did. It spoke to 340 some odd investors and got four major investors to land us about almost a million dollars in funding. And that was about two years ago. And we've been going solid ever since.
still plenty, plenty, plenty for us to do and much that we need to do to be able to create success. And so what we realized though was when we wanted to go to market ⁓ back in two years ago was that we were going after a product led growth space, PLG as it's called. And PLG is just simply for those listening in who don't understand PLG. It's like similar to Calendly or Dropbox or LinkedIn.
as an example, where individuals go out and try to find a solution to their problem and you market to all the individuals and individuals then start signing up for services. What I didn't realize was that I had the corporate marketing skills for corporate, but I didn't have the marketing skills for product-led growth. And I was extremely deficient in that particular area. Unfortunately, I invested a little over a year in trying to drive product-led growth, but I couldn't make it work.
In the meantime, also what happened was is ⁓ we went through two technology teams. I started the company and the SAS transition without a technology co-founder of which I'll never do again. And as a result, burned through a lot of technology resources and individuals who couldn't necessarily keep up with what we needed and where we needed to go. Nonetheless, there was a lot of bumps in the road and
At some point we were going to run out of money and one of our investors said, hey listen, you need to rethink what you're doing. ⁓ Why did you create Fly Message? What was the original reason for that? And I said, well, it was to be able to help support salespeople in our sales training program to allow them to quickly build out messages everywhere online. And they said, okay, where's that sales training at? And I said, we still have all that training. We have customers that are utilizing it. And they said,
How do you integrate that into FlyMessage? And I was like, well, that's pretty easy to do. We have a platform called FlyLearning. We'll integrate that into FlyMessage. But—but I'm trying to figure out why. And then they—they said, well, think about this. The training without the—the technology, they—they go hand in hand together. You're teaching sellers how to prospect. You're teaching them how to engage through learning plot—I'm sorry, through digital platforms. And you're teaching them how to message and you're teaching them how to do video prospecting.
But now you give them this tool fly message to take all those messaging templates and quickly deploy them with a shortcut, a keyboard shortcut that they can type out, know, dash refer and it builds out the referral message, right? Or dash email and it builds out the email message or dash follow up one and it builds out your follow up sales prospecting message. And I was like, my God, yes, you're right. And so we started ⁓ adding that now into the mix. And then we realized there was something else that was broken and we had trained
tens of thousands of reps across the globe. What we realized is that when we were teaching them how to utilize platforms like LinkedIn for social media, that most of these sellers, 85 % to be exact, were not utilizing the platform. But what didn't match was the fact that we had an NPS score across thousands of individuals who filled out our forms, thousands of individuals. We had an NPS score of 97%.
met exceeded or far exceeded, which is unheard of in the training industry, unheard of. So I was perplexed. How could we have a 97 % customer satisfaction on our program, but only have 15 % of people doing what we told them to do? Either you lied to us or something else was missing. So I went back and I started asking thousands of people, did you lie to me?
Because if you lied to me, I really want to know the real answer of how was our training across the last X number of years. Yeah. And the funny part was, is nobody lied to us. We discovered something that was undiscoverable and not really understandable until we started asking the right questions. And that was, here was the problem. It took too long for a seller to write a comment on LinkedIn to a buyer's post. It took way too long.
to write a social media post on LinkedIn to create visibility inside your network. In fact, we did a time motion study and that time motion study showed us that on average it would take 6 to 12 minutes for a seller to write a LinkedIn ⁓ comment. So example, Sunny, if I was prospecting to you, I'd go to your LinkedIn profile, I'd then click on your view all posts, I'd then go to read all your posts, I'd then read all your posts, I'd then make a decision. Which one am I gonna write a comment on? I then stare at a comment, a blank comment screen and I'm like,
What do I say? I really don't know. That process was six to 12 minutes or we were teaching sellers how to go about creating content. Wonderful. I click on start a post on LinkedIn and I stare at a white blank area and we were like, hmm, that's a problem. How do we fix that? Well, what we realized was that that average timeframe for to write a social media post took 32 minutes and no seller, no seller.
no sales leader wants anyone spending 30 anything minutes on anything but closing the deal. So we decided that we were gonna build additional components to Fly Message called Fly Engage and Fly Post. These are add-on products. And Fly Post was the ability to be able to write a topic, any topic, how to, when to, why should you, or even just a couple keywords.
and we would write an entire social media post using the formula that we taught in our social selling training program for sales and with sales prospecting. Yeah. Pardon me.
Speaker 2 (18:13)
No worries.
Speaker 1 (18:15)
And that was the launch of FlyPost. And then for FlyEngage, it was, I'm going to your post, I'm supposed to, as a seller, write a comment back to a CIO, a CISO, a CHRO, a Phil on the C-suite, and I'm supposed to be able to talk about, on your level, what it is that you're talking about. But I don't have that capability and expertise. So we built FlyEngage to read the post and then write a comment for you.
so that you could as an individual have some sense of individual thought leadership. And I was like, I could build this. And that's exactly what we did with AI. And we modeled the AI using our training program so that we could reply and respond in an appropriate way. And to give you an illustration of what that looked like, ⁓ when we launched Fly Message in January of 2021,
we launched the ability to track how many characters. This is how much I wasn't even watching the application for a year and one month. I was not even tracking how many characters we actually typed out. So from January of 2022 to February of 2024, my message as a text expander typed 1.1 billion characters. Fantastic, pretty cool. From March of 2024 to December of 2024, just 10 months.
I message combined with flying gauge flypost typed another 1.1 billion characters. So it took us 25 months to be able to type the first 1.1 and only 10 months to type the next 1.1 billion characters. And at this point in the last three months alone, we've typed a little under a half a billion characters. So what you can see is massive, massive and dramatic growth.
in the idea that people are needing help with writing out content. And so that's where we started to see the growth at. And with sales teams, we still brought to market our sales prospecting training. We still taught you how to engage. We still taught you how to be able to build content on LinkedIn as an example, how to write messaging, how to do video sales prospecting. Now I gave you Fly Message as a text expander to...
build out those messages anywhere online, ubiquitously, saving you time. Ultimately, across all of our tools, the average user saves 21 hours, a sales user saves 30 hours a month by helping us, by us helping them type that content out. all of that to have been said, the idea was centered around, we had a problem, we identified,
⁓ a solution and then we brought that to market. And so that's what the discovery process looked like in terms of converting. So that was a long winded answer to be able to tell you the whole history of Ingressive Fly Message and how we brought new products to market.
Speaker 2 (21:20)
was an incredible story. you for telling that whole story. think, yeah, just like your background and knowledge and all the content that you've created in teaching sales has led to and like being very in deep in the problem, like know the problem very, very intimately to know like what's the right thing to go build. But then additionally, you've already created all this content.
to teach people how to write and respond and sell that you leverage that content that you created to then guide the AI that you have in fly message to write and respond in a way that is in accordance to how you're teaching how you should reply. And not just like you go to chat GPT and say, should I respond to this thing? Because chat GPT is referencing the entire world of text, but it has
All of the text and a lot of the texts on the internet are junk, but all of yours is like high quality. Like this is what actually is useful and usable. And so you're like, Oh no, like we're training our AI to like focus in on this high quality content. That is also a priority to you guys that I'm sure chapter sheet doesn't have access to unless you like publicly share it, um, to then, uh, be able to generate and help salespeople like write their messages, LinkedIn messages, comments, emails, so on and so forth. Right. Yeah.
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (22:44)
So interesting that you mentioned that ⁓ what I would say is, is actually we utilize the public LLMs. Yeah. But we prompt engineer the crap out of them. all of our secret sauce is in the prompt engineering, right? But furthermore, could someone go and build a competitive tool like we have? Absolutely. And in fact, most of the products that we've done and we've created,
We're as a result of somebody else's great idea. I'm okay with that. But here's the difference. The difference is, is I'm building it in one contiguous workflow. Example, if you look at our competitors and you were to put them onto a competitive chart, every competitor is in one individual box. Whereas Fly Message is focused on not just a
a single product focus, it is an X in one strategy. Think about the great sales technology companies, Gong, billion dollar unicorn, ⁓ Apollo, billion dollar unicorn, Zoom Info, billion dollar public company, Seismic, billion dollar unicorn. If you think about all of these great sales technology companies, what is the one thing that they have in common? The one thing they have in common is that they had an X in one product strategy.
six and one, seven and one, ⁓ five and one, ten and one, whatever the number is. And what they did was they built the technology around a user's workflow. That's the difference. And so to your point, what we have is all of that innate knowledge. For example, some of our text expander competitors have built out all these really cool formulaic-like components inside the text expander that
You know, you can put all these formulas in and this coding in that allows you to, you know, if you're a mathematician or a scientist to build, but the population of that group is like, this is a big, what is really big is the knowledge worker. What is really big is the salesperson. And that's where we're dominating the market at in this particular space. In fact, it's funny because I actually went to chat GPT four, and I said, Hey, chat GPT, ⁓ which product is better?
Fly message and I'm using just text expander by the way fly message or Whatever are the competitors text blaze or text expander chat cbt wrote back Well, it depends if you're in sales and marketing hands down fly message beats at all But if you're just any Joe blows college student or student go get these products, which is perfectly fine for me I don't care if you are anybody else because guess what?
All of those companies are having a problem converting users to paying users because let's face it, it's the cheap guys, right? It's the folks that aren't highly compensated individuals. No offense to anybody who's listening that is not a sales person, but salespeople get paid handsomely because they are the ones that are willing to live their whole life, put their whole entire mortgage, their whole entire family livelihood off of hitting a quota. And that's why they're paid.
handsomely. So with that in mind, our focus is all around sales and marketing. Now, am I stopping the knowledge worker, which is the non-seller from utilizing our products? No, not at all. Go for it. You can do that too. And we have no problem with you doing that. But we're very much focused on a specific niche. And what we went to market as with the strategy is centered around, ⁓ have I built a moat? No, I would argue that I haven't built a moat around the individual technology.
But what I have built is a moat around the entire workflow. I am ingrained in the workflow of a particular seller that is utilizing us for learning, for writing messaging, for engaging on LinkedIn, for commenting and engaging with social posts. guess what else is coming down the pipe? We're getting ready to release Fly Grammar. Fly Grammar is a competitive product against Grammarly.
All day long, I want to eat your lunch, Grammarly. Why? Because you do one thing. One thing. Auto-correct. ⁓ Does a business want to buy that? No, that's why you have 40 million customers and only 100,000, only 100,000 business customers. Because no leader wakes up and says, gosh, I wish I could have everybody in my company auto-correct all their writing. No.
Speaker 2 (27:06)
correct.
Speaker 1 (27:26)
But a business leader does say, God, I wish I could fill the funnel. God, I wish I could book more meetings. Gosh, I wish I could help my sellers have the right message at the right time for the right opportunity. Guess what? We'll solve that problem. And I want to teach my sellers how to go about doing this. And that's where Fly Learning comes in. And we just made our first acquisition. And that first acquisition is centered around ⁓ AI sales role play. You mentioned VAPI ⁓ earlier.
And that's actually utilizing that technology right inside of what's called fly role play and that's coming out as to a theater near you as well and that's the ability for an individual seller to create a persona of the target buyer that they're going after. And then they go in and they start having a conversation with this AI bot, this persona and you got 15 different types of personalities, the friendly, the pessimist, the obvious, right? And you can go in and practice this. This is the one thing that Bengresso did not have
prior to ⁓ this acquisition. We did everything digital. Now we're sales prospecting. We teach you how to do LinkedIn. We teach you how to write messaging. We teach you how to do video. And now you can practice on cold calling. Why? Because most sellers make a hundred dials to talk to five people. And unfortunately, they're practicing on those five prospects. That's the problem that we're going to solve. So our strategy has been centered around our moat, if you would, is an X in one.
product strategy. Is that a strong enough moat? Meaning will individuals or what companies buy that? ⁓ Or could somebody else copy us? By all means, keep up. But here's what we have and that nobody else has. Vangresso has trained the world's largest sales training company. And by the way, one week ago and one day, we just brought in one of the other top 20 sales training companies.
underneath our enterprise platform for FlyMassage. And it's the first time in history they've hired an outside sales training company. And so what we know is prospecting. Nobody else can touch us in that segment and that area. And when you put all of this together on one workflow, that's how you build a moat around a niche. And that's our focus.
Speaker 2 (29:39)
Yeah, that is incredible and awesome to hear the next kind of a product and feature that you're going to be launching with Vangresso. And, ⁓ that takes exactly things that I have seen people do, like do sales training by creating a persona to then like, try out like, how would I go handle this objection with like the different personas, like you said, and then I'm sure you're doing things such as like, ⁓ giving feedback to the user around.
⁓ like you could have handled this objection better. Right. And like, it'll be tailored to that person because you can use an LLM to give that personalized feedback to that seller for that specific instance as well.
Speaker 1 (30:20)
You wanna hear something funny? So I've been playing around with our fly roleplay and it's really kinda pissing me off, I'll tell you that much. And that is because I, as a sales thought leader, top sales influencer, a leader over the largest sales prospecting training company globally.
I can't beat the AI over 80%. And it's really ticking me off, man. Like I am like, come on, I think I'm a good code caller, but it's kind of funny. And it really makes you go like, wait a minute, let me dial this message in. Let me quickly get to the point. Let me capture this person's attention in the first 15 seconds, because that's all I've got when I'm trying to capture that individual attention. So it's actually kind of fun and is actually kind of a ⁓ great internal competition. When you're like, what? I got an 80 % score? That's outrageous.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:10)
You like you show it to you have like a leaderboard internally in the company, for example, like I was able to get 85%. I think like I'm actually super excited to like see that. yeah, fly role play fly message. Is it all like under I assume they're all just like add ons to fly message and fly message is like the main one.
Speaker 1 (31:28)
Exactly
right. Yeah, so this is actually came from we've got some great advisors that we had joined up in the in the organization and one of them is from seismic as well. Toby Carrington. He's an amazing friend of mine and a great ⁓ advisor just absolutely phenomenal advisor to us. And ⁓ it was his real real focus was, you know, you look you pick the brand name. It's fly message. But underneath that brand name, while fly message does represent the core product to everything.
And by the way, is the text expander, right? Because that's how it started. You want to be thinking about creating these different brands, fly posts, fly engage, fly little play, fly grammar. And then you do bolt-ons or every plan gets all of these features, but you throttle it in every single plan, right? And that's exactly what we went to market with is every plan gets access to all of the features. We'll let you play with it, but we're gonna throttle you back. And by the way, there are some customers that we've released
uh—the new version of FlyPost which basically allows you to grab any blog, we'll read the blog, any YouTube video, we'll watch the YouTube video and we'll write a social post on it. And some of our customers are saying, hey, that's not fair, I don't get access to that. Uh—it costs money. Guess what? You want it? Upgrade. so now you start adding in these features to force upgrades, um—or you throttle individuals back. Or now, what we've also added in is the ability to write in sunnies.
⁓ writing style. Mario Martinez's writing style. And so we created something called persona and we've throttled people back. So what we started seeing is people started to upgrade as a result of being throttled back.
Speaker 2 (33:08)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said you were bad at PLG. It sounds like you're getting real good at PLG if you're giving free trials to then be like, here's a little bit of what you would want, but up to a certain amount. And then you're like, well, you got to pay for it to use it more. So that's very PLG.
Speaker 1 (33:23)
It is very PLG. ⁓ So we serve two audiences. 80 % of our revenue comes from sales led growth, which is selling to the enterprise, 20 % to the PLG. We definitely need to improve on the PLG. We have built the product. We know that there's teeth there. And one of the key elements with FlyMassage is getting someone to use the product every day. So if you think about it as a text expander, I may not have to build out a snippet of text every single day. I may not use that.
On fly posts, I may not post something every single day on social media. On fly engage, I may not comment every single day. And so the idea behind product led growth is how do you get daily usage up ⁓ on a consistent basis? If you can drive that daily usage up, you drive extreme amount of product value. And that's where ⁓ solutions like fly grammar comes into play, which no matter where you go, wherever you write,
we are going to correct your grammar or AI sentence rewrite. No matter what you write, even if it's a predefined template or even if it's something that we wrote for you, you're gonna use AI again to modify and change content and tones where we'll automatically read that content for you. And that's where the power comes into play is really figuring out how to drive ⁓ daily usage. So I appreciate your compliment, but no, I haven't figured out yet PLG.
getting better at it. We're on the cusp, on the cusp of it. But our big focus is centered around making sure our user knows how to use the platform, onboard them correctly. And I could tell you all the stories about onboarding and all the iterations that we've done up until the very last one. But also now is we want you to use it every single day. And that's what we're going after.
Speaker 2 (35:11)
Gotcha. So then, you know, Vangresso and Flymessage has done incredible the last couple of years and it has a bright future ahead of it. Where do you kind of see Vangresso and Flymessage the next 12 months and then maybe next five years?
Speaker 1 (35:29)
Great question. to be honest with you, over the next 12 months, it's cracking the code on PLG. ⁓ in fact, it's funny, our product development leader came to me and he said, goes, hey, know, if you look at our grammar solution versus Grammarly, you know, Grammarly is actually better. And let's face it, it's slightly better. mean, they've got, first off, we're a small little ricky-dicky company and they've been around for how many years. so you better, of course, their grammar punctuation is gonna be better. But is it?
enough for someone to say that I must have Grammarly versus utilizing good enough and I've got eight other products now that I can use. That's the key. so I said, I said, look, we don't need to be competitive to Grammarly. We just need to be good enough because it's all the other solutions, fly role play, fly posts, fly engage, fly message, fly learning, right? All the other solutions that come into play.
So for us, it's really centered on our core message for the sales led growth, which is tapping into the enterprise sales organizations. And that is, what is going on in your workflow? What is happening and what's breaking, what's slowing you down? How can we improve that workflow? How can we help you write those messages better? How can we help you deliver the message audibly better to a target customer? Thus the fly role play.
⁓ And so for us, it's really focused around ⁓ making sure that we're inside the workflow of an individual seller. In addition to that, some things that are coming down the pipe is customers are saying, hey, if you're doing all this social media engagement, can you kind of give me some roll up of impressions, clicks, engagement stats, and then synchronize that back into my CRM because LinkedIn blocks that and I can't get it from Facebook and da, da, da, da,
And the answer was, yes, yes we can. And then one more level beyond that, it's, hey, you just helped me write this cool looking message and you corrected all my spelling and punctuation and grammar. But you know, should this message change based upon Sunny's individual personality profile? For example, maybe I wrote a message that says, hey, Sunny exclamation point. But you know what? Sunny is kind of an old school type of guy.
And that's way too casual and he prefers based upon personality insights, he prefers, hello, sunny, comma, because he's more of a calm, subdued, relaxed kind of kind of guy. So adding in personality insights that allows us to be able to help you rewrite content based upon the individual personality, that's what's forthcoming inside of fly message and synchronizing all of that activity on on ⁓ social media, where you engage, what you did.
all the way back into the CRM. That's what we're going to next. So you gotta be thinking about, again, the total organized picture of the workflow of a seller. And if you can solve those pain points and you become an overlay on top of, and still teach them, because a fool with a tool is still a fool. And so that's where we're gonna be really focused at. That's the next 12 months, the next five years. I'm positive that we'll be acquired by somebody who says, oh my God.
They just built something that's really cool and we should have this as part of our portfolio because we'd love to have all of the product-led growth salespeople because if you have, I don't know, 100 salespeople at a company that has 500 sellers, guess what? You could probably sell them an enterprise solution. And that's how Grammarly has tried to go to market. That's how Dropbox went to market for the sales-led growth. That's how LinkedIn went to market for their sales-led growth.
And so that's what our mission is as well.
Speaker 2 (39:22)
Gotcha, gotcha. And then if there was, if you could like wave a magic wand and you have one challenge or major roadblock in doing that, what would it be?
Speaker 1 (39:32)
more
money. There's not enough technology developers.
Speaker 2 (39:39)
did the
funding enable you to do then?
Speaker 1 (39:41)
we would go hog wild with building out our technology team to be able to scale these items quicker, faster, better. And more specifically, we'd also ⁓ really focus in on the advertising that you need for the product-led growth. With product-led growth, you need a strong amount of advertising to be able to hit the marks that you're looking for. But with that having been said,
You gotta slug it out when you're in founder mode. gotta slug it out every small hit you gotta take and you gotta get him to be able to get those deals in.
Speaker 2 (40:13)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm really, I'm really definitely excited to see where fly message goes. Definitely. Um, want to play around with it more because like you've definitely sold me on the product. And so I got to play around with it more. So when you're like, Oh, like copied, pasting it from your scent fold, your scent messages. I was like, I've been doing that a lot the last couple of days. Uh, so I definitely want to play around with it more to, get that value. So I'm not copying pasting from my set.
Speaker 1 (40:39)
No more copy paste, no more copy paste, just use Fly Message and by the way, you know if you're on LinkedIn, it definitely will help you there and if you're learning, if you're to learn how to engage with target buyers to prospect, you've got Fly Learning as well and to your point, we do offer a free 14-day unlimited trial. You get access to all the products.
for 14 days and no credit card collected and at the end if you haven't been proven value then no problem and once we release fly grammar that's going to be I think a big curve for us because people will immediately see everywhere you go that will start correcting your grammar and spelling.
Speaker 2 (41:11)
grow.
Yeah. All right. I have two more short questions and then that'll be the end of it. ⁓ What are you most proud of and why? And it can be personal or professional.
Speaker 1 (41:28)
most proud of? I would probably say I'm a very, very, very engaged father to my two boys. I have a 14 going on 15 and an 11 year old. I don't miss a beat with them. Somebody once told me before that if you're going to go out and do something crazy, like what I've done for the last nine years, building my own company, have a lot of a lot of pain associated with that. Never take it from your family. Always take it away from your sleep.
And this is an interesting piece of advice because if you think about it, you take away from your sleep at some point that you don't like something, you stop doing it. And the only person that it impacts when you take it away from your sleep is you. Yeah. So if you don't love it, then you'll stop doing it at some point. Yeah. And the only person that was impacted and affected would be you. So maybe perhaps that's why I started losing the hair. Maybe that's why I started, you know, getting the receding hairline. Maybe that's why I started, you know, graying early. Maybe that's why
Speaker 2 (42:15)
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:26)
fill in the blank, right? Uhm—is because of that. So, you know, I tend to, uhm—after work hours is done, about 5.30, 6 o'clock at the very latest, then it's all around family time, hanging out with the boys and my wife, and then right after that, when everybody goes to bed, which good news is, is they all go to bed early, you know, no later than 9 o'clock, I'm back at it till like 2 o'clock in the morning and then I start all over again at 6.30, right? And I've been doing that. is it healthy? No. Is it the right thing to do? No.
But again, if you don't love something, if it hurts, it only impacts you, it doesn't take away. So I'm most proud of the fact that I'm a very, very, very engaged and active father and doing everything with my voice.
Speaker 2 (43:05)
That is incredible advice. That is really, really incredible advice. I appreciate you sharing that. Okay, last question. Where can people find you online and how can listeners be useful to you? ⁓
Speaker 1 (43:20)
Well, thanks for asking that question. ⁓ You can find me on LinkedIn, Mario Martinez Jr. And if you are reaching out and finding me for the first time, make sure you tell me that you heard me on Sonny's ⁓ Sonny's podcast. So that's very important. Send me a personalized connection request. And then fly msg.ai fly msg.io you put it in whatever you want. And I'll get you to the same exact spot.
Vangresso is the creators of FlyMessage. It's like Meta and Facebook, right? Meta is the creators of Facebook and that's the product name is Facebook, our product name is FlyMessage. ⁓ So feel free to go after and try it out and that's the best way you can help me is download it, install it, try it out, play with it and let me know your results.
Speaker 2 (44:07)
Awesome. All right, Mario. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (44:10)
Thank you for having me, Sunny.
Speaker 2 (44:12)
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