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Documenting the stories of tech founders turning ideas into thriving businesses.
Marcus Papin (00:00)
Welcome to the Tech Founders Podcast. I'm your host, Marcus Papen. Today I'm super excited to be talking to Jean from NIAC. Gene, welcome to the show.
Jean From Nayak (00:09)
Thank
you. Hi. Thank you. Nice to be here.
Marcus Papin (00:11)
Yeah, I'm excited to chat to you today. So let's get started with a quick introduction, Jean, on yourself and your company, NIAC.
Jean From Nayak (00:17)
Sure. So I'm Jean Templin. I've been kind of living or trying to solve this problem for a long time. And really it started back in 2016 and it was about civil discourse and how we as a country in the United States were kind of pulling apart and not able to talk to each other. And so we kind of started a movement that was called the Bridge Movement to bring people back together and communicate.
but this was before AI and conversational intelligence and all this great stuff that was happening. And we were really trying to understand the psychology around why things were happening. And that brings me to where we, to starting NIAC and kind of, I was involved with a company that was doing, facial recognition and eye tracking software. built one of the first eye gazing models in the world to bring it from hardware to software.
And we were using some of this neuroscience to really understand memories being built in the brain. And as all these models started to evolve on facial expressions and body language, eye gazing and conversation, it became ripe with Gen. AI to kind of bring this back all together. And I never stopped trying to solve the problem is how do you really help people have better discourse, right? How do you help them build a relationship? How would do you help, especially the younger generation who grew up behind digital screens?
And reading the room was not something that they learned as, you know, in person, they're learning it behind screens and all these subtle expressions and changes that to read somebody's real intent. So that's kind of where it started back in 2016, and it's kind of all came back together to form NIAC when GenAI really took off and you were able to scale things at scale, right? So you now have the ability to do
all these calculations have the conversational intelligence coming off of calls and start to scale things and not only, and also all these other models started to scale and get better, get better, right? So that's kind of my journey. It's my passion. I've been working on it for years now to really understand how do we do this? And so really when I talk about NIAC and all these sciences and all this, it's really to help people build relationships, right?
So we are a real time AI relationship coach. And what we do different than others, we kind of call ourselves the psychologists in many ways, or we know what's happening, the vibe of the call, right? And others are more like analysts or assistants. And we're really that AI person who's really kind of co-selling with you and really helping you understand what's going on and nudging you slightly left or right.
because the world is inscripted, people are different and every conversation is dynamic, right? And you have to respond in real time.
Marcus Papin (03:05)
Awesome. And what's the current state of the business with any metrics that you're comfortable sharing?
Jean From Nayak (03:10)
Sure,
yeah, we're growing pretty fast and we kind of just launched what we'll call, so we've been doing POCs and we have quite a few ⁓ larger companies in our POCs. And we are launching a product-led growth initiative, which is relatively new and it's on our website, nyoc.ai and you can try it out for free and really understand how our coaching is real time. And it's not just here, here's an answer to this question.
it's understanding a lot more of the signals, not just from the call, but also from the people who are in the call and all the context around it so that it can properly help guide you, right? It's not telling you always what the next answer is because the answer might be exactly what's scripted, right? So that's kind of where we're kind of carving out and being something different.
Marcus Papin (03:57)
Awesome. And so can we dive into who exactly NIAC is built for and what sort of results people are seeing as they use NIAC?
Jean From Nayak (04:06)
Sure.
So, Nyack, sorry, I have a dog if you heard a puppy. Nyack is actually built for a lot of use cases, right? And so anybody that's looking to build better relationships and what we started out with our first use case that we're really going after is on the revenue side of the house and really helping salespeople because we've sat, me and my co-founders have sat in.
Marcus Papin (04:09)
Yeah.
Jean From Nayak (04:29)
Thousands of sales calls and have seen them fall apart not because of the product not it. Maybe they
it built for? It's built for, it actually has a lot of use cases and we are actually starting with what we'll call the sales use case, right? Because that's really, really important in the beginning of a sales cycle when you don't know a lot about them. haven't purchased yet. You really have to establish that trust. And so we're starting really right there. When they come in, they raise their hand and they say, I want to talk to you.
right? So sales qualified, whatever you may call it. But it's that point where they've a book, booked a demo with you. They're willing to take their time. And if you know, I don't know how much you study, go to market funnels.
But AI is really changing the way we look at go-to-market funnels, right? And by the time somebody comes on your call and actually raises their hand and say, I want to sit down and talk to you, they've done a lot of research. They know a lot about who you are because of AI. A research agent is a lot of different things that they're using on their side. And when they come into the call now, it's no longer the first time that they're talking to somebody. They've probably read a white paper. They've probably looked at your website. They've talked, gone to
review site. that's really where we see the first trust coming in, or the ability to build that human to human connection. And we see that as a differentiator in the future that is going to be your different.
Marcus Papin (05:54)
Okay. And I know there's a few tools right now in the market that do similar things. I'm interested to hear how NIAC is different from those tools and then how your AI gives feedback that yeah, really differentiates you guys from other tools out there.
Jean From Nayak (06:08)
So let's say one, we're real time. So a lot of tools will do a scorecard in their post sales and you've lost that lead. So you burn through your leads and leads are getting harder and harder to come by. So you definitely don't want to burn through any more leads, right? You want to try to move it while moving it to the left as much as possible, right? So at NIAC, we not only help prepare you for the calls because we have something called a cheat sheet. So if you have not,
done all your go-to-market engineering or have built all your agents, we can come in and help you. And we use very clean data so that that can be done for you. So think of a small medium-sized business that doesn't have this all yet, right? So we're kind of a one-shot. So we do, so first of all, we do all the go-to-market prep, right? Which not a lot of people are doing. They just want to plug into tools. And if you've been around AI enough, you know that you need clean data for it to work properly or it's junk in, junk out, right? Which is why a lot of these first rounds of
So we understood that problem and we kind of configured this so that you have clean data if you don't have it. If you have it, we'll use it, right? It's not a big deal. And then we, so we prepare you for a call. do a lot of, we have agents that go out and do deal research. We have agents that do meeting research. We pull personality profiles. We see what happens common. We do, not only is it what is the type of role that you're talking to, technical or non-technical.
We go all the way to the disc profiles, which are important in what we call emotional intelligence, right? Which is the core basis of what our solution is built on.
So the second thing that I think we're really different is exactly that. We have been working with some of top psychologists in the world on emotional intelligence. And so we have a research group that helps us analyze our algorithms. So we are actually a proprietary algorithm that's rolling up signals that are important.
Again, not all signals are important in the idea of emotional intelligence. So we roll it up to three scores. It's called rapport, credibility, and confidence that is happening with the buyer. And then we score you on a trust index.
So that is something that's been around, but not at scale. If you look at some of these other trust index out there, they haven't been at scale, or if they are, they're using a survey like an NPS at the end of things. This is real time signals coming off the call. And so we roll it up to those three schedules, and then we give you hints. And let's say your credibility is dropping because you're not able to speak confidently about the product.
We'll pull up some product information for you. Let's say now you're in a pricing conversation and maybe the person sitting like this could mean that they're...
they're concerned and will have you kind of iterate certain things. So we're looking at verbal, nonverbal cues. We look at other intent indicators plus other data about the people who are entering in the call and bringing that on to context, rolling it up into these scores. if you worked on conversational intelligence at all, it will have all these individual scores like talking time or filler words or this or that. We give you
we synthesize the data for you already in real time and we put it up there. And so our goal is to guide it. And so why do people love it? Because sales reps love it because it helps them course correct in call, right? And so they're able to get coached in real time. And you know, they're not getting screamed and yelled at at their pipeline reviews at the end of the week. And it really helps them meet their quotas, right?
Managers love us because we're able to help them scale that soft skills, which was something that was not measurable before, right? And we're able to understand.
what they might need help with in certain trusts without them having to listen to all the calls, right? We give them a summary of things. And then CROs love us because it's kind of a new metric that they've always wanted to understand is how well is my company doing or my sales organization doing, right? And one thing we're working on is trust. ⁓ The trust is a predictor for deal out, right? So if you get more trust, you get more deals.
And there's kind of two levels. I don't know how deep you want to go in this, but there's two levels in the call. There's typically, ⁓ my product fit what you're looking for, right? And then you go into the commercial fit. And the motivation of the buyer is extremely different in each one of these takes, right? And that's the psychology piece that we put in here. So when I say we're like the psychologist in your calls, because that's where we see ourselves different than anybody else out there in building it that way.
Marcus Papin (10:45)
Interesting. I would love to dive into the psychology a bit more, because one of the things I know is each person has a different personality type. We all have different ways of communicating and that could work better for some people or other people depending on their natural inclinations, how they speak, how they communicate. How does a tool like NIAC take that into account when giving feedback to a salesperson or somebody using the tool?
Jean From Nayak (11:11)
So yes, you're right. Our personalities are all different. What we do is we expose the personalities, your common interests, your common grounds before you get on the call. So you know what to expect. And I'm sure you've been on a call before and you come in and their personality overwhelms you at some point, right? I've been on a lot of them that way and you're kind of taking back. So if that's the first thing you come in and you're confident, right? So we have this thing called a cheat sheet and the cheat sheet is exactly that. It is about
preparing you to get ready. It's your three by three. It gives you information to get ready for that call. And then as you're in the call, it's evaluating how you're performing and helping you.
become that chameleon as much as you can and giving you guiding points, right? And again, like I said, it's looking at all those minute signals that you might miss because you're up here looking at the camera or over here looking at your Slack or God knows what you're looking at, right? But it's kind of reading that for you. honestly, everybody does it. Everybody misses it. Everybody misses signals. It's much, much, much harder in a digital format than it is in person, right?
Marcus Papin (12:17)
it.
Jean From Nayak (12:19)
the hints and then we're not requiring you to do it. We're not taking over. We're just helping the human, right? We're not ever looking to become fully automated AI SDRs or anything like that. think until the other side of the house becomes fully automated, people don't want to always talk to bot. They want to talk to people. And especially when you're trying to sell really high trustworthy
Marcus Papin (12:41)
Yeah.
Jean From Nayak (12:46)
products such as security, compliance, anything where you're, because think about the decision you're making for the company. You're making a decision to either rip replace, change management, some kind of change management is happening on the other side when you install a new tool, right? You have to tell somebody how to use it. You have to say, is your decision you made and that is more like your
You have to run the gauntlet and it could be your job. So the motivation is inherently different when you go through these processes.
Marcus Papin (13:12)
you
And what sort of results are people seeing as they switch to NIAC and they start using that too before using it.
Jean From Nayak (13:27)
Well, at least twice as much and as we continue to turn like twice as much running through like first we it's really heavily used in the discovery piece and then in the commercial pieces, right? So those are seeing twice as much throughput in the the in the funnel. So think twice as many people are making it through the funnel.
That is what we're seeing at this point. And we believe it will go higher as it gets tuned more and more. And again, this was not, think of it this way. It was something that was not measurable at scale. And for now we're giving you a new measurement. And I think once people understand we have a sales coaching tool and by the end of next year, we're going to allow people to take the trust index and do whatever they want with it. That means developers of all over the world can think of cool use spaces that little old me can't think of, right? And different ways to use
that will benefit your companies above and beyond like in the rev-op side of the house or something else. Maybe it's the CRO wants to know how this entire organization is working, not just sales, but everyone within the organization. So there's some, because trust is built not only in the sales cycle with customers, but internally through organizations too.
Marcus Papin (14:35)
Have there been any, so I imagine with these tools, when you're adding AI into the mix, where there's lots of different variables that the AI is summarizing, giving back to the user. Sometimes use cases that are unexpected can come out of these tools. Is there any use cases that you have seen from people using NIAC that you didn't expect, but people are grabbing a lot of benefit from?
Jean From Nayak (14:57)
We got
asked a couple of times and because we don't have our index completely opened yet as a, as an API, but like to be put into the HR side of the house, like people want to be able to understand if that person that they're interviewing is trustworthy, right? They're flipping, flipping it around the other way, right? Like, or maybe it's the interviewee and the interview, like, does the company see that the person who's doing the interviewing, are they showing it very well?
for their company. And another place that we got it was ⁓ in matchmaking, like in a bubble or something of that sort, like being able to use this. And you can see the different use cases. are just starting to, we're at the tip of a very big iceberg here, right? We put it in a place that we are all familiar with. And I think once we unleash it, people are gonna have a lot more use. But those are two that already came up, yeah.
Marcus Papin (15:46)
It's very interesting, yes. The core thing that the tool is understanding is human communication and psychology, which applies to all domains of life. It's very interesting from the HR side, especially nowadays. I know a lot of people are having a tough time hiring.
and that is because they put a post on LinkedIn or somewhere and they get flooded with applicants. A lot of people are changing the information on their resumes so that they can get these interviews, but it can be very hard to validate someone's skillset. And oftentimes I've heard from a lot of people, it's vibes. If they have a good vibe with somebody and a good connection and you want to work with that person, yeah, that's who you're going to choose. But oftentimes, even understanding that can be hard to build in a remote environment.
environment.
Jean From Nayak (16:32)
Yeah, I think you know that like vibes, that's why we say we're the psychologists. We understand the vibe, right? It's that human to human connection, right? And it's never going to go away unless we are no longer in the circle of anything, right? Which maybe 50, 75 years. But I think what companies are starting to realize, and there's some new CRO trend data out there that says relationship selling is back because it is the human to human connection.
as product information keeps pushing out and getting, know, buyers can get more and more of this data in the web from AEO, from search engines, from Chetchi PT, from wherever they're going, right? Then when they come to the call, they're really looking for that human to human connection, right? And we feel that's going to be your competitive edge. And that is the one thing that you can't outsource to AI right now, human to human connections.
Even, you people say it gets better. You always know. I always know when the bots on the other, like, this is like you say one thing that doesn't fit in their script and they're, they're gone. Right. And I think, and I think we as a, as a world should get better at this stuff too. Right. I think we have got polarized and don't want to listen. And this is really where it goes full 360 back to where I started this thing in 2016. It's kind of like, I want to.
people to be able to build healthy relationships, right? And that is in everything that you do, everything, internally in your family, at your work, amongst colleagues at work, as best as you can, right? Like there's no perfect system, but if you could understand the other person and their perspective just slightly, then maybe you would be able to adjust somewhat, right? And like you said,
There's personality types and some people are just gonna steamroll our other ones. But maybe there's a way we can help those people communicate a little bit better to say, okay, let's take us, let's pause for a moment or something. You know, all the skills that you're taught but don't always remember in moments.
Marcus Papin (18:33)
One interesting thing, macro trend I'm seeing with lot of software tools that I personally use and then software tools that I'm building at work is that AI and the rate that people can create software, let's actually take a step back. What's the purpose of software? Software helps us automate a lot of processes. Then with AI, the ability to create software and then also use it is increasing. So for example, in the production of a podcast, I recently found some new tools that allowed me to speed up probably 75 %
I could probably produce a podcast three times as fast as I could when I first started the podcast. What does that mean? There'll be a lot more podcasts in the market because the tools can go edit and release them. what the tools cannot replace is the actual content, which comes from having the conversations, that human connection. And I see that over and over again. Even the tools that I'm building within work is we're automating a lot of the processes. for the audience, work,
software for accountants and what we're doing is automating a lot of the processes that it takes to actually go and do someone's tax return, which puts the emphasis on the human to human relationship there. So I see that macro trend just growing as time goes on and these tools get better is that the real differentiator is being able to communicate well and as you said, build those relationships.
Jean From Nayak (19:50)
We kind
of, we see the same thing. We see three levels of readiness, right? And where you're talking about is the second. The first is, you know, people use AI to write content. Pretty much everybody does that, right? Then there's this concept of productivity. And then there's the next one is you're not just producing, but you're actually becoming more efficient. And when you become more effective and efficient, effective is typically something different, right? It's not just automating a process.
But it's thinking of different ways either to do the process or to use AI in a different way to surface data points that don't exist today. And that's where we see ourselves at, right? We're giving you and synthesizing this data in real time so that you have these data points where you can really use them to guide you differently like a psychologist would, right? Like the vibe, right? What's the vibe?
and changing outcomes, not because you're gonna say these four words next, but because you know how to rephrase and redirect and do other things that you typically do when you read the room, right? And of course it also has the ability to answer questions. The answer question one is way easier to solve, and that's just getting your agents to be able to hear and answer a question quicker.
I mean, there's a lot of AI tools and I think you've mentioned one before that you said you interviewed. That's what they're doing. We're doing, we're going the next level, right? We're at the next level. We're synthesizing and we're saying, it's not just what you answer, you know, it's how you re-communicate and you redirect because there's a lot more in communications and you can imagine how difficult it gets when there's three people, five people, seven people on the call, right? Those dynamics change completely.
You talk about a lot more different fields in psychology, like bringing in things to say, how does this work? It's not perfect science for sure, but it's getting, you we're looking to just help and guide and get better. It's those soft skills that were typically like.
Well, my gut tells me, you know, but yeah, you're absolutely right. So we kind of see it as like the productivity basis. People are, that is what has been exploding and has been exploding. The next gen of stuff is the one that's going to make you more, not only efficient, but effective, right? In many, many ways. It's not just, it's rethinking processes. It's rethinking, how can I use AI to solve this problem differently?
I think you're starting to see it like I'll give my example clay clay made it really easy to pull leaves everybody pulls leads and what happens now you get bazillions of freaking inbounds like nobody's changed the process but everybody can pull leads and it's really cool and you can get more signals and whatnot but it doesn't change now you're just got this influx of crap and you're like I don't know what to do
So that, all they did is made that really noisy and nobody knows what to do now, right? So it's very similar to what you were saying, I think. But that's kind of how we look at it too. There's kind of the evolution of AI is at the very beginnings. And we're really focused on how to use it to make ourselves more productive. And the next phase will be like, how do we even get smarter with it? Which is kind of where we're
Marcus Papin (22:57)
I want to talk a bit about, so you guys are at the cutting edge of this new technology, building a company around it. What are some of the technical hurdles that you've run into while building out NIAC?
Jean From Nayak (23:08)
Of course, we're tackling the hard, two hard problems, Real time.
and then all these minute signals. So like I said, we have a group of research, a research committee made up of some of the best professors in the world. So they're doing more of the practical layers of it, excuse me, the theoretical layers from the universities. And then we have some clinicians and then we're having to test it out and market, right? So again, we are learning and it will continually learn as we move forward. And it's not as psychology evolves and they understand
understand more about emotional intelligence because psychology and neuroscience are kind of mixing together in many different ways. that being the first is not always the easiest because you're trying to figure out how to get it all real time. So real time is much harder than post sales, but we really wanted to push left and not be post and others post sales work hard, right?
even with the additional stuff. that is one thing, I think. And then carving and explaining our message has been the challenge because there's a lot of noise, right? And there's a lot of people who are like, it's Gong, it's Reed, it's Fathom, it's this. I'm like, it is none of those. So carving that and making people understand it is the second challenge. think the biggest challenge. The technology is
Solvable right because it's like a gamers they they can do stuff so fast where your eye in your hand and that's all I hand coordination with visuals, right? Same thing. We look at the UI, right? but Yeah, the carve out and getting people to understand the difference Is how would you describe it? Like if you were to pitch me like you were the CEO of this company and I think we you know and again
when you do it and you're in it and you want, I understand what the difference is, but how would you kind of position it?
Marcus Papin (24:56)
Yeah, it's a tough one because usually it always goes back to, so if you're building out something and somebody doesn't know that there's a potential problem there, you kind of have to solve two problems. You have to one, show them that there's a potential problem. And then the second part is actually get them to adopt the solution instead of addressing a business where there's a clear problem and then getting them to adopt the solution.
Jean From Nayak (25:16)
But they know there's
a problem because everyone knows, well, it's my gut feeling. That's how they're solving it today.
Now we're saying there's a measurement for that gut feeling, right? And if they could solve that gut feeling better, then they would be and measure it across all of their deals, across all of the calls. And that's basically what we're giving them, right? So, but how do you translate gut feeling into something, you know, that's kind of anyways, anyone's got ideas, please email me. I love it. We're going to be looking for some answers to help us bring this to market on the product led growth side, because I do think it's there. I just haven't figured it out in my head, right?
Marcus Papin (25:42)
Yeah.
Jean From Nayak (25:51)
To me it's the, my god's telling me that it should be this. And now I'm gonna have a data point and the CRO is gonna be able to go, no this is where it's at, right? And so you're gonna be able to forecast so much better. And they already know that there's bleed or there's loss in the funnel, we hear it all the time. It's all these variables that are not measurable and now we're getting one of the ones that was not measurable as a measurable. Right?
And we also want to build it for salespeople because they should love it. This is helping that everyday person who is struggling to make quotas, which they're even getting worse in this last year. It's getting harder and harder. And how do you do it in this virtual world? It's not simple. It's not simple.
Marcus Papin (26:35)
It's a tough question with the messaging. The first thing that comes to mind is really speaking to the results and showing the change that happens once people adopt the In terms of the...
Jean From Nayak (26:46)
Like everyone else, two extra
sales funnel. Like I can do that, but it doesn't, again, it doesn't mean anything to people. Like, again, that's, I see these, we've done it and it didn't work, I'll tell you that. You see it and I don't know if C.R.s are going, ⁓ two X, I think.
There's another level, right? There's another layer that needs to be there. And that's why we're doing our POCs and soon the big names will be out there to know exactly who's been testing this because this is not new. The idea of emotional intelligence, eye contact, different things. mean, there is, you know, Starbucks trains their people on. Look the customer in the eye, you know, this is again,
It's all very normal things that we've been told, but now it measures it and gives you feedback.
Marcus Papin (27:34)
I would ask how, from what you've seen from working with salespeople for a long time, is this something that you found like psychology and really diving into that? Do a lot of salespeople dive into really understanding psychology, reading books about it, reading publications constantly, or is it something that maybe some do but still kind of on the fringes of what a normal average salesperson would do?
Jean From Nayak (27:55)
I think some do and some don't. think, again, a lot of them understand personality profiles, this profiles, right? That's nothing new, again, either. A lot of them use it, some of them don't. But it's this consistent way of doing it in all your calls. And I don't think anybody doesn't understand the Lord vibe and understand read the room, right?
And they look to better those skills with their managers, but their managers can't scale. We can't scale because they have to sit on every call with them. So that's what we're kind of helping the managers do, right? So every sales rep I've ever talked to says, of course I want this. And they understand reading the room. There's no confusion in that.
but I don't think that they understand that it can be done in real time and what that means, right? so that's, know, maybe it's more of us, me, it's like, I need just the right words, like lovable's vibe coding, right? Like maybe Niax, the vibe, we're the vibe or something like that. So, okay.
Marcus Papin (28:58)
Yeah, is there?
Jean From Nayak (29:00)
We're like I said, we just let our product our product live growth strategy requires all these little terms that we're still figuring out But the POCs are much easier because you can you can explain all this right? Whereas product growth is somewhat different, but we're looking for and any ideas come my way
Marcus Papin (29:12)
Is there a...
I hope you get some ideas here. there any, I'm wondering, Gene, with a lot of these AI tools that are meant to help, obviously it's very focused on virtual connections, which for a lot of people is a lot of the sales they do, but also too, there's still a lot of companies that work.
with face-to-face sales, they work together in offices, et cetera. What do you think the effect of these virtual tools could have on face-to-face relationships? Could we run into a place where people become very dependent on an AI giving us real-time feedback and they kind of forget how to act in the situation when they don't have that available to them?
Jean From Nayak (29:52)
to say yes, look at Meta's glasses, isn't that what it's supposed to do? I mean, in many ways. I would hope that like, I think you're seeing two streets here, you're seeing like the backlash of people who don't want any of that tool, whether in face to face, right? They're like, none of that. And then other ones who will embrace it. I think you can learn post call with some of that stuff. We were looking at a way to show hints in real time in person.
Maybe on a phone or on a watch or something and you can decide and again these things are all Remember, I'm not forcing you to use it So it's not like you have to write and it's supposed to be your companion your help And it gives you the confidence to be running there now. You don't have to take the hint
You don't even have to say the hint I give you, right? It's not automated, so it's not going down that path. It still has the human in the loop to make those decisions. And that's what makes it so unique and allows you to customize it to you.
Right. And, and the more it's there, the more it learns, the better it gets. So, like any AI, right. But yeah, I think there's times, I'm sure you are, I'm screen off because like I build this stuff. I play around with hundreds of tools. And if anybody ever wants to know, go to market stacks that we're looking at and cool AI tools that we've trying, cause we're AI first company, right? We're, we're sub 20 people and we're growing really fast. means everything is thought.
through differently, right? It's what can I do with AI first before I actually embark on trying to do it myself? So, yeah, I mean, I don't know what's your take on it. I think there's going to be a break and people are going to be like, you know, I'm gonna try out my cool new skills I just learned at NIAC without them helping me.
Marcus Papin (31:31)
Yeah, I think definitely one someone has to kind of build that balance in I know for myself
Shift a lot of things through chat GPT because it has the it knows me it has the memories with a lot of Context so I do funnel things through that but then sometimes I think okay What would I think without this tool there and just trying to create that balance? Or even using I try to use these tools in a way to where I could present it with a problem and then I could present it with ideas on why this problem wouldn't work and then it will kind of brainstorm and
give me feedback there and I can go through those individual, it goes back to this Charlie Munger idea where he tries to plan for the negatives and what could happen and then address those to the beginning. So that's one way I use those tools to be able to think like that. But I think it's definitely carving out that time for myself and really stepping back sometimes.
Jean From Nayak (32:23)
Yep.
Yeah, I mean, I do the
same. like look at, I mean, one of the ways that I'm always looking at how to make our website better is I create like two personalities and say, argue with each other in AI and tell them, tell me why you would buy and why you wouldn't. And, you know, they kind of reason through it. Sometimes it's crap. Sometimes it's not, but it's all interesting to take these tools because you're thinking differently. Now you're not just, you're not just, you know, you're looking at how can I use this differently to make
Marcus Papin (32:39)
Yeah.
Jean From Nayak (32:53)
to come up with answers that I'm not thinking about, But I always turn off my stuff on Saturday and walk in the mountains because I live near the mountains and to me it's needed, right? To me it's needed just to hear everything. I don't even walk with headphones. Like I have started to just do, I do use my watch though.
I just tell you how long I go, but pretty much everything else is turned off and it allows me to think and breathe. And what comes out of that with the help of AI is I'm 20 times steps ahead of where I would have probably been before because that clarity in my brain and that ability to rethink and rethink and hear what the, know, and take all those ideas in and, and see if they're even valid, right? You still have to have that. It's not, it doesn't work perfect. It doesn't even reason perfect half the time.
and it tells you lies still, it still hallucinates. So you can't take everything for what it's worth, right? But I think it allows you different perspectives and it can make you go somewhere faster, right?
Marcus Papin (33:52)
Jane, I'd love to hear about your go-to-market stock and what kind of tools you're trying out within NIAC to make you guys more effective.
Jean From Nayak (33:59)
Everything and anything. ⁓ Jesus. Automating websites from, you know, from Figma all the way into Webflow, looking, prototyping, hooking web, sticking them in. ⁓ I want to know who comes in and when I'm looking at my creations, I will run them through AI. What would somebody who is my ICP think of the messages that I'm...
Marcus Papin (34:01)
Yeah.
you ⁓
Jean From Nayak (34:25)
that I'm looking at, right? It hasn't given me that magical message yet though. I'm trying. So we use a lot of that. use, of course, to drive leads in. I use clay. When they come to the site, I'm using R, B, B. And normally, I'm looking at things like this to say, how can I fully automate it? To me, my CRM is cold storage. I don't use it too often. I just build agents on top of it. Because it's there. I use the $15 HubSpot. I don't pay anything more.
NIAX on top of it, I have everything else. I probably could do it with a database, but I just don't have it yet. But like those are kind of the stacks are like, I do video creation, I'm using Goop Gemini, and I'm using Kling AI for my contents into social. And we're scaling that up. There are some weird crap still going on with video create text to video creation.
weird stuff. It's fun to watch that. But it's getting good. It's getting really good. What other tools am I using on the front end? Those are some of the of course, clay to push pull emails. But I like I said, I can write really good content now, I get people to open up, but they're very noisy. The world's noisy out there. I'm thinking through another layer on the top of that. Before you go that way.
and really rethinking of it as there's only X amount of people who would use my product. How do I get to reach each and every single one of them and not thinking a channel yet, but thinking sort of differently and reengineering as if I can today versus what was before like write an email, send it in your HubSpot, like come over here, you know, check your campaign. And yeah, those are some of the ones that
I like there's also with some of our clients, they're AISDR coaching tool, a different coaching tool where they just kind of try to prep them. They're usually earlier in the earlier in their life cycle of salespeople, right? I've seen that being used. People are pushing things more to the edge in sales, IE slack. Again, CRMs are warm, cold, cold sore. It's like.
Pushing everything to the edges of where people are interacting, which is where Artful is, right? We're in your email, we're in your calendar. We don't require, we wedge in so you don't, I'm not looking for you to use my crappy portal or anything else. I don't want you to go do another portal. I want you to be able to use it where I'm at. And we're thinking of the Slack integration and also possibly ⁓ more voice commands so you can just alter things as you need them.
But those are pushing everything to the edge as quickly as possible. Yeah, and then I don't like outbound AI SDRs. I used to work at Twilio. So apparently the age of voice is that there's a renaissance in voice where people actually want to hear your voice, hear you call them again versus an AI bot because people don't want to talk to AI. So those are some of the cool things we're hearing and seeing.
in the tech stack, but it changes every, it changes so fast, right? And as we continue to talk to some of the top CROs across the industry, we see new tools that they're starting to implement. So, I don't know, it's fascinating, right? And we're kind of, I kind of see it like there's going to be a live tooling piece. And if you have like for us, it's like, we can give you a product expert in the call.
Marcus Papin (37:33)
It's a very fast moving space. ⁓
Jean From Nayak (37:46)
Right? Because we build that for you if you don't have it. But if you have one, we'll plug it in. Right? We are only looking to be that, that psychologist, that emotional intelligence, that, that relationship piece at the top. And if you have, uh, I've heard of a sales engineering, um, uh, experts that come into the call. Fine. We'll put them in. Right? Cause it's not, we're not giving you that information per se. Um, we are giving you the relationship piece, right? Which is completely different.
So you asked me about civil data. We're very different because that's not what they're doing, right? They're doing more of the very specific product information or sales engineering information. And I see it, a live person will think of it, I'm a human, I'm gonna have a bot in my call or I'm gonna do it without the bot there, whatever way, it doesn't matter. I'm gonna have hints showing up and I'm gonna mean before the call, I'm probably gonna invite four or five different experts to the call.
and they'll all be AI bots, right? The relationship expert will be NIAC, the product expert, I don't know, maybe it's gone, I don't know. The sales engineering expert will be somebody else. You plug them all in, it works, and it's beautiful and it helps you. That's how I kind of vision it in the future, right? And it will be ⁓ something that helps the human to connect better, right? And yeah, that's how I see it. I don't know what you see, but that's what I see in my vision.
⁓ of how I see the world with this real time sales coaching. ⁓
Marcus Papin (39:13)
It's interesting.
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, it's interesting how you see it as very specific tools for certain things in the call in terms of the experts. hadn't thought about that before.
Jean From Nayak (39:15)
No, that's
Marcus Papin (39:26)
But I do like the idea of that as well. And then also integrating that with the existing tools. One of the big problems I've found as I've working on a podcast, I've been doing out bounds or working with my jobs. look at the software list that I have for everything that I do and there's 10 or 12 softwares as one person, a one person team doing all of this stuff. sometimes you think, wow, this is a lot to manage. And I don't know how it gets so big for one person.
So I've seen a pattern with a lot of tools where they'll either integrate or they become all-in-one platforms to where one tool can handle sort of end-to-end what people need. And it's been really relieving to see that shift with a lot of software products.
Jean From Nayak (40:09)
There is, and all they're doing is buying these experts, right? Because what happens is when you buy it, build a horizontal tool, which you're developer, you know, you build a horizontal tool. I'm a product person by nature, right? So I can build the horizontal, but it will get me 70 to 80%. And when the difference between you and everybody else is that last 20 % and you have to go vertical on it, right? And so when you look at a sales tool and you look at something, everyone's like, well, I do believe call recorders are going to sit in the call recording systems, whether it's...
you know, ⁓ Google or Microsoft or I think Zoom has.
will be interesting to see their play in it or WebEx, right? But like the recordings will lay there. Google and Microsoft have the AI to do the horizontal stuff on top of it, right? But they're not specific. They're not going go down those verticals into the extreme that these little startups are. And that's why what Shadow IT or whatever else is happening, it's all happening now and people are already using it, right? And so it's kind of like they're plugging it in anyways, because anyone on the sales team, if you can get a lift in your revenue, you're going to use a tool.
right, because you're trying to beat out your competitors. And if your competitors are using it, then they have that advantage, right? So to get very, very, very specific in what you're doing and be able to dream that I want this to really help me, it has to get verticalized, right? It can't be.
Tell me the answer to this question for the, like, it's not enough, right? It's just not enough. So it has to get verticalized and it has to get that last 20%, 30 to 20 % specialized there. And yeah, I think, you know, the horizontal plays are great for corporate-wide things, but as you know, your tech stack, especially like back of office, you do accounting, there's a whole tech stack around accounting because it's so special.
Marcus Papin (41:54)
you
Jean From Nayak (41:55)
It's Italian.
Marcus Papin (41:55)
Yeah, I'm getting very familiar
with those tools. It's very interesting in learning about it, but also seeing how deep they go. Because we've been able to build tools where we get 70, 80 % there. But then that last 20, it goes back to the 80-20 rule, where the last 20 % takes up a large amount of your time to get that right.
Jean From Nayak (42:12)
Yeah. And a little startup can
come in and specialize and go really deep in that, right? Which is kind of where we are. We're saying that's exactly what we're going to give you that relationship piece. We're going to go deep in it. We're going to keep the model update up to date, the algorithm up to date with all the new stuff that's happening in psychology. You don't have to worry about, oh, wait, you want to bring a group of psychologists into your company and figure this out yourself? Go ahead. I don't think it's probably worth it, right? So you would just put us in there. That's kind of how I look at that.
Yeah, it's hard to get that last piece. I've been doing product for years. And the bigger your platform is, the harder it is to get verticalized, right? And so you need, and as soon as you get it, then it's something changes too. And to keep it updated is really hard. So, yeah.
Marcus Papin (42:59)
Jean, as we start to wind down here, I'd to go back and reflect on your entrepreneurial journey up to this point. So let's do that with a question where if you had to go back to the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey and you had one piece of advice to give to yourself, what would that be?
Jean From Nayak (43:13)
Yeah, just continue to believe in what you're
solving for, right? Look at mine. It's, started in 2016. I knew civil discourse was happening, right? We were breaking apart and I thought it was, didn't bring into the psychology piece of it so much later, but understood that there was something there that really needed attention. And we were, it was breaking down with inherently the same tech that I built, right? Like these social networks that
were putting us into these bubbles to talk and we were losing this connection, right? And I think don't ever give up. That's what I would tell myself. think I kind of went in and out, you know, it's hard, it's hard, right? And technology will come and sometimes you're a little too early. And I think that was the hardest thing for me to learn on my first journey into this space was I was too early, right? The idea was there to solve, but the technology wasn't there yet.
And it took Gen. AI to come out for the technology to really be there to do what I thought was really needed. And then layering on a lot of the conversational intelligence that came out of it and the psychology around it. Right. So yeah, don't give up and think it's not you can still have a good idea, but the technology is not there. That's what remind myself of that a lot, actually, until other entrepreneurs that too. Don't give up.
Marcus Papin (44:39)
Awesome. And Gene, where can people go to learn more about you and Naya?
Jean From Nayak (44:43)
Sure, you can learn about me. You can follow me on LinkedIn, Jean Templin. And then at NIAC, you can come to our site. NIAC is N-A-Y-A-K dot A-I, NIAC, which means hero in Sanskrit. So it is actually your hero helping you.
Marcus Papin (44:57)
Awesome. Gene, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Jean From Nayak (44:59)
Thank you. Have a wonderful day.