Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Bright Signal Podcast. My name is Bart. I'm joined by my friend and co host, Raphaelle. And we just had the pleasure of interviewing Gilles from Visiblie.

Gilles is one of the co founder of Visiblie, a young Belgian company, and they are building the platform that is helping brands to become visible in the AI era. So let's get to the interview.

Let's get to the interview. Hi,

Gilles. Thank you for joining us. We are really glad to have you on. Can you maybe start by introducing yourself?

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me actually, Rapha and Bart. Great to see you again. So my name is Gilles. I'm one of the founders at Visiblie.

I'm originally from Belgium. I spent majority of my career actually in The Middle East. So I started my career in Brussels after uni into audit, and then I realized there is a little of traffic, so then I decided to move to the Middle East office when I went to an audit, and that's actually how I started my career then further on as well.

So you you spent a few years in audit, as you just mentioned. So you went to Dubai as well. What was the moment you decided that you wanted to be like an entrepreneur?

Yeah. Well, at PWC, I already realized that I like different things, not audit. It was just a great environment to be like all all credits to PwC because it's a young dynamic team, but I realized that I'm not like fitting in a box. I also early on, I realized that I was quite good at sales and relationship building. So the longer I was at PwC, I realized that I wanted to be where the partners were, but I knew that it was going to take me a lot of years to be talking to the C level.

So then when COVID hit actually, I was going back to Belgium, and then I was still looking at other opportunities where I could actually explore my sales skills. And there was one company, Sentience, that was hiring a GM in Asia, in Singapore. So I applied to that position, but then I spoke directly to the founder CEO, and he told me directly of we were looking for someone in The Middle East, you spent years there, don't you want to go back to The Middle East? And with little hesitation I actually said, yeah, that sounds like a quite interesting journey. And I just went almost straight back.

So I only spent a few months then in an older consulting company before I really went into sales and business development. So that was the first part in my entrepreneurship journey. And then quickly after that, really wanted when I got used to sales, I realized that I like it a lot. I was comfortable in doing it end to end. And then the entrepreneurship, it was already a bit there because I was the first one in in a new market, scaling the business from zero, talking to these big companies.

And then only afterwards, when I had the right opportunity, I went into the entrepreneurship journey.

How's life in The Middle East?

I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. It's very central, so it's a hub that you can meet so many people easily. It also gives a lot of opportunities actually, I would say, to companies. And of course, because I was working for a Belgian company, it gave me also the opportunity to grow myself much more than I would have stayed in in Belgium where it would have taken a bit more more time. But I really like the international environment over there.

And then you you founded Visiblie around a year ago. What is Visiblie and what what made you see this this opportunity?

Yeah. So Visiblie, we are now the the AI visibility company, and so we make brands visible wherever your future customer is searching for you. Today, that's AI search engines, but it can also be social media search. And it was Domin, my technical co founder, who actually came to me around a year ago. We know each other from university, so we studied together in Ghent.

So he actually, when I was in a metro, he called me like a quick catch up, and he mentioned me about his ID. And he said, are you interested or not? But he was really taking his time to find his co founder. So before jumping into it, I actually went to a conference two days after in The Middle East, and there I was pitching the idea to a few companies. After that fair or that conference, three of them were able to I was able to sign a contract with them.

And me coming from, like, B2B SaaS, like very long sales cycles, of course, ticket size was also much higher. It took me six months, a year for a first deal to close. Now it took me one conference. I realized there is something. So we started to explore it more seriously, really investing.

Are we fitting together? Because I tried previously as well, a startup, but then I was never all in. It was just like an ideation there. So I I knew that if I do it again, I should be, like, 100% convinced about the cofounder and really know that we're not we're 100% complementary and we don't have much overlap. And with Domin, I really felt it from the beginning, it was almost like a goosebumps moment of, okay, with him, I can really kick off this journey.

Yeah. Yeah. So So a very complementary team, and Domin then takes on the more tactical side of the business. He has a CTO title?

Yeah. He he takes indeed the the technical side of the business. So for him, it's yeah, he has a data experience there. So what he did is he was working in a trend prediction company where he saw, was analyzing a lot of data actually for big beauty brands. And in that data he saw that it was not coming from Google anymore, it was coming from the iSearch engines, at that time ChatGPT, and he was doing that for companies as L'Oreal, so really building that foundation of data, and then he really knew, okay, if I can already analyze this big data, then the next step is, okay, can I do it for the AI search engines?

Which wasn't for him a big shift because he was already used to work with this much of data.

Yeah. And you and you already explained a bit like you're you're visibly focusing on AI visibility for brands. Can can you make a bit concrete for, like, what does that mean? You already mentioned AI search engine. Is that, like, being findable through something like ChatGPT or Claude?

Or, like, what does it mean to be visible in an AI native world?

Yeah, yeah, very good question there. So for a good example would be you are a B2B software company or your CRM. Someone is asking every day a few times, Okay, I'm looking for a CRM to manage my customer database. They will ask these questions on ChatGPT, on Cloud, Gemini, Perplexity, or they will still do this on Google as well. And if you know Google, now you also have AI overviews there.

I think even France, they launched it only last week or the week before someone told me, AI overviews as the last one. So now the traditional Googling is not there anymore. So what you see is that list and the answer that the AI engine will give you, it's based on you, but the final decision is based on the large language model, of course. So to be there, it's not the same playbook anymore as before. You really need to make sure that you are ready for this new wave of searching.

The behavior of people completely changed as well. I think it's twofold. The behavior of people change and also these AI models, they became much more powerful because like you guys probably know as two years ago when you were searching something, it was completely different than than today.

That's true. Yeah.

That's true. Can you maybe explain how it works? Does the client's marketing team has to has to operate something on their side, or they just, like, pay for, like, a result or an outcome on your side?

That's actually an interesting point because we repositioned, I think, around one month or two months from just being a SaaS dashboard to an AI visibility company, which means that we just don't give a dashboard where you show a lot and you give analytics, you show prompts and questions that people are asking, you give recommendations, you give a lot of analytics, integrations, even an AI agent that does things. But what we realized is these clients, they are not satisfied 100% because you don't solve their problem, and their problem is I'm not visible, I'm losing customers. They also don't have that time to figure it out themselves or spend a bit time left and right. And they don't have this geo expertise or this really deep SEO expertise from before in house. So that's why we said, okay, we got good results with a few clients in the beginning.

We didn't market this, but we were working very closely with them on getting these results, and then we realized, okay, we should actually market it that way. If companies still want to use our platform, it's fine, but we see that's not the optimal way there. But with that repositioning, it also made sure that we can now be much clearer compared to competition because there are other players in the market, but especially in the SaaS and in the dashboard world, we saw a lot of companies raising a lot, so for us it was much more difficult to catch up, and also on the contrary, we couldn't solve the problem for our clients, and that was in the beginning, Domin and I, we said we really want to solve the problem, and that's the most important for us.

Right now you solve a problem, which is good. Often say that I'm working also on the commercial side. We often say that good salespeople are the ones selling features. Really good salespeople are the ones selling outcome solutions.

Exactly.

And then top notch salespeople are the ones sending feelings.

It's the the storytelling part that is super important. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

Mhmm. So your next step is selling feelings maybe.

Exactly. Yeah. We we trying to get there indeed.

Just maybe just to double down on what you were saying, like, you're you're pivoting a little bit to become an AI visibility company, and you have this this product that helps customers become more visible. Maybe we'll deep dive a little bit later on how that exactly works. But if I understand correctly, like next to that product, you're also like helping your customer hands on to get to the best results. And that's that's the that's the extra service that you're offering versus just a technical product that a lot of your competitors do. Am I understanding it correctly?

Yeah. Yeah. That's actually 100% there. So we call it now the Visiblie OS, our operating system, and it's modular. So which means that we can plug it in into their workflow.

If they don't have a workflow, it's fine. We can actually run it completely for you. And over there we actually focus on two parts, it's the B2B SaaS companies directly, where we work with their teams, or they just hand over everything to us, or also the marketing teams. What we see is we can also make marketing teams AI native in a way, because they don't have this skill set or engineering background to maintain the systems and big data models on their own side. Everyone is familiar with clouds, but cloud has its limitations, we can actually give superpowers to their own clouds if they are already a bit technical.

And you see a lot of people are indeed coding themselves, but the modular thing is super important for us. That's now something that we And for me it's also, as a salesperson, sometimes difficult to, okay, how do you market sell this part? Because it's not so visual in a way, it's a lot of, in the back end, a lot of AI agents that actually we trained based on our work that we've done with our first clients actually. Now we're productizing these agents, thanks to our first hire was actually a domain expert, very deep in SEO, now geo, within the semantics of SEO. So he indeed trained his own skills and his own skills that we then of course now can deploy in companies at workflow, or if they are not technical, we can really keep that on us.

What's also interesting, we go from leads to results and outcome, so if we can actually run a report for their leads of a company, and that's more than on the marketing agency side, but then we go into audit phase and if they need to do an audit, we can do an audit for a direct client or for an agency client, we can run that as well end to end. Then the third step is of course you will have the workflows and then you go into the work to solve the problem, go into schemas, you go into briefs, drafts, citations, off-site work, and these modules, depending on the skills they have, we can also deploy one by one, and then of course you go into the last phase which is retesting and showing actually outcomes, Because with some clients we do even performance projects as well. That's something that we did recently because we are quite confident on our way of working. And you also want to reduce the friction of starting with this because it's still new, people need to build this trust, then we come in this trust because if you're not a SaaS anymore, your productized service, your rates caught is higher, but then you need to build that trust, and now that's the most important, that trust level that you want to create, of course.

Interesting. You mentioned already a bit like a distinction between agencies that you work with and clients, like, and in terms of end clients, like, what what what type of companies are these? Like, what is it? What is what is your ideal customer?

Yeah. Today, we focus on these b to b SaaS companies because we feel there that they feel the problem the most, because they were relying a lot on organic traffic and the SEO traditional way of leads coming to their website and converting. Of course, that's completely shifted, so they now need to have a way of, okay, how can I get these leads back? On the other hand, they also want to grow very fast because these companies are funded, so they need to get their numbers right for their next funding round from their board, so they also don't want to wait, so if you give them just a dashboard, and they know with this dashboard someone needs to take care of, they of course are gonna be more willingness and to go faster with us for example, that we take care of them and we just get the results much faster. On the other hand, we also went quite early to insurance companies, because my background was in insurance, I was selling SaaS to insurance, so I had the network there, but also people from nature, they look on ChatGPT, on Cloat for financial advice actually on this search engine.

So that's also why for them it's quite important. Of course, an insurance company is a bit more robust in a way, they feel it that much because they're quite standard in a way. But there we saw with one of our clients quite good results because we could indeed make sure that they were not only visible, but also ranking higher. So there are actually two things, you can be visible, but you can also be ranking like five or six in these engines, and that means page two or again invisible in a way. Yeah,

And so I'm a bit, a little bit familiar with like SEO practices and best practices to be findable, like in this AI native era. This maybe interested you to drill down a bit, like, do you guys actually do? Like, what should people do to be visible? Like, what do you change using your product or your service to actually make them more visible from day one to day two? Yeah.

How does it work?

It's a good question. So how it always works, and that's a bit what we do with the clients, we start always with the audit, because in the audit, we will actually know, okay, these are all the questions that people are asking about your business, and that we usually validate because they know their business better, but it doesn't matter much if these questions are quite accurate, because if it's slightly different, the most important is that we know are you visible or are you not visible, variation don't matter much, it's more about do you have authority in this AI model. Then we run them through our six phase framework of AI visibility, we actually developed this in house, because we realised a lot of companies, they're blind or it's a black box for them, so we want to give them a bit of guidance, okay, today you're in phase two, you're 0% in phase two, this is what we need to do to bring you to phase three. And phase two we call, for example, the category formation, where people or the AI understands exactly what industry you're in, what industry you're not in. That's quite important.

Imagine you're a B2B SaaS CRM, it doesn't mean the AI cannot understand that you're just generic B2B, for example, or another software company. And through these phases, we take them. And then of course, you come up with everything that you can fix on-site, like the traditional SEO. So you go to content piece that you can write, you can go to the money pages, your life, your money pages, or you can also go to the technical fix, because you need to speak the same language as not only Google today, but you need to speak the same language as Clothes, Gemini, LGBT, DeepSeek, Croc, for example. And that's how you see it on the website.

But then you have a very big part off-site, which then you come into third party reviews, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, PR. So we bring that also into the picture and that's then through our models that we do that. But a very interesting one is actually, so if you would see, okay, some people will say, okay, I will write my blog myself or I will do it as I do before. What we see is that the performance of a self written text or hours is between 50% and hours go to 90% in terms of performance. And why is that?

Because of course our agents that we have internally, they've been trained for seven, ten months by very deep people that know a lot about geo and SEO. And these do keyword research, comparative analysis, they are 20 fourseven on, they can jump in onto trends. If normal people would do this now, it would take them six, nine months, just full time of work, to build that kind of skill or do it manually, so it's almost not possible. So you're competing against something totally different that manually is is very hard to do. And you see it.

A lot of companies, they they did it. They did, like, blog posting at mass and True. Trying with AI. Then you saw indeed a peaking in Precious, but then they get penalized after because, of course, you're not building authority, and that's quite important. So that authority building, that's like throughout our whole journey of process that we're doing in all our models that, okay, your company needs to be seen as an authority in your space.

Yeah. That's very interesting.

That's very interesting. You mentioned Reddit. So one thing that I didn't know before this interview is that, of course, when someone wants his company to be more visible on on tools, my first thinking was, okay, have a website which is machine readable, have a lot of blog posts, etcetera. But then I was okay. But, like, tools like to refer to human, like, have a human bias.

Like, they like to refer to a human opinion on on blog, etcetera. And then there is this Reddit thing where AI tools, I think, rely heavily on on Reddit posts. Is that an important thing for a company to be to be referred on Reddit? Yeah. Is it part of your advice?

Yeah. It's a very good point, actually. And how we came to this understanding is, of course, we analyze a lot of data and with all our clients we see okay what is the most or the top citation for example. Hopefully and normally with the clients we work with it's their own website because that's what you want and because that's what you can control and of course if there are third party websites we try to push them down and take more content from your own. But what we realized with, I think, 80 or 90% of our clients is that Reddit was top two.

So number two after our So own of course, if you manage everything on your own website, the next thing that you need to go to is of course, Reddit. And that's when we then went into this solution of building Reddit, but the problem became quite fast on scaling that Reddit service, so we realized that we need to do it managed with a small scale today with our existing clients before we really want to push it out. That's something on the technical side that we're trying to fix because it's not an easy thing. As you know, Reddit, they they guardrail this as well so you cannot easily influence it, of course.

That's interesting.

Yeah. And maybe on this, like, there there is maybe a self defeating loop. Like, if more and more messages posted on Reddit are, like, commercial posting, I would say, like, sponsors posting.

Exactly.

Maybe model providers can, like, discount the weight of Reddit in in their thinking and then, like, destroy destroy, like, the channel of I base my thinking on Reddit, then so there will be no Reddit post, sponsored post anymore.

Yeah, that's a very good point indeed, and I think the market might evolve there because now we see a lot of clients asking for it, okay, make us visible on Reddit, for example, take care of that part, So we have a service, of course, but we need to be mindful as well that we don't make or abuse what Reddit is known for. So of course, the first thing you can do is showing them, okay, these are all the threats, the conversations that are important for your AI visibility, we need to do something about it, we have a solution already for it, but it's not that we're gonna and it's a bit the same as the block that you mentioned, just doing blocks at mass, you really need to be careful about the right threats, the right wording, the expert view, finding experts, and that kind of way to scale that, that we see is the most difficult from a technical perspective, managed, slow scale today, it's working. So that's our biggest challenge actually, we would like to offer this to all our clients at mass, that's something we're trying to figuring out as we speak now.

And do you know if like, like video platforms, shorts, like YouTube shorts, Instagram, TikTok, do they already influence authority of brands?

Yes, definitely.

Also in search, in AI search. Okay, interesting.

So for some companies indeed, and that's again, the audit will show this, but if we see, for example, citations are top three or top four in YouTube, the first advice we will give, okay, need to look at YouTube. We have an easy fix as well for YouTube, we will for example transcribe or take a transcription from a YouTube video, turn that into a blog post and that will give us well citations because then you're speaking about a viral video for example, the same way it's spoken there. But of course, to go to the next phase, you need to have videos, shorts, and then you come into another play that's also not our strength. So then you need to work with, of course, third parties that can offer that.

And do you already pardon because I can imagine like these, these third party sources that you call them off-site sources, like brands? Off-site. Choop, whatever. I think it's very strong issue for other people talking about you as a brand. Right?

And then you very quickly get into the domain of influencers these days. Like, do you also partner with, let's say, influencer networks or these type of things to to help brands stand out more on these off-site platforms?

Yeah. We don't have active partnerships with with them yet, but of course, we look at it and see what are the the best people that can partner with us to get again the best results for our clients, because what we want is happy clients and solve their problem. If we need to partner with XYZ, of course, we will be more than happy to do that, but that's still work in progress because the Reddit part, we only noticed it in our data, of course, analyzing a lot of data, and then you see patterns and then you know, okay, now we need to go look for something into this.

It's very interesting to, of course, very least have insights on how you're doing on-site and off-site. Right? Because I think, like you said earlier, like, it's often like for people, it's a black box. Right?

Exactly.

It's a very, very, very much of a niche domain. Like, everybody knows it's important, but it's hard to have an influence on it if you're not really nitty gritty deep down into it.

Yeah. And an interesting part there is as well, if you will go to LinkedIn, you will have the gurus, for example, and they will say, okay, need to focus on this or this or that. Mhmm. But usually, to build authority, you cannot neglect one or the other channel. It's like the whole authority building.

So you need to be good on your own website. You also need to have the trust signals. You need to also have the off-site people or the citations that are talking about you. So it's a combination of a lot and that some people try to forget and they think, there are quick wins. Of course, there are quick wins.

We we've seen them as well. But to have, like, a reputational brand over time, of course, that also takes time. Mhmm. And you need to make people aware of that there are no shortcuts quite often.

But also models are updating really fast. I guess that what works today can not work anymore tomorrow. And maybe you had the case. Maybe you just, like Monday, finalized something like for a client and then the week after, like a new model was released on an AI tools and then it didn't work anymore or not really?

Usually, we're quite agnostic of the model updates. We always flag them in our platform. We had it even before too, when we were just focusing on the dashboard and analytics. So that's not much impacting us. What is more interesting is, and maybe we touch that on later, is on the partnership that we're working on with PwC, is around regulated product actually.

So where we are looking really at mass of what are all the questions that people are asking around investment advice, and all the results are coming back. And over there we see a lot of differences between models of course, and that's quite interesting. If a new model comes out, we can actually quite well see what is the difference, what is the impact on the questions, on the results, what is coming back, and that's something that we then monitor, flag to companies but also to regulators. That's that's a bit the the way that we're working on.

To circle back a bit to the the brand visibility parts, I think when you started 2025, I know that this was a very hot topic. Right? Like, everybody was talking about it. Geo is a new thing. This is what everybody should focus on.

So it's very hyped. I think the hype has has died down a little bit. It'd be Mhmm. Probably similar to what Azure did, but I can imagine that the hype, like, also triggered a lot of new startups. How does the competitive space look like for you?

Yeah. That's also why we repositioned, I feel, because in the beginning when we started in last summer, I think we really said, okay, let's go then. We started only raising around this time. We saw a lot of, only a few companies were there, some of them already raised, but you couldn't see many companies. And at that time it was indeed all dashboards, SaaS, analytics, but we were the first one to have recommendations early on.

The only thing we didn't have was capital to really go hard and go there. So it took a bit more time to raise because indeed we started only in the summer and it was a timing thing. Of And course, you already had these older players, so people were already aware of it. But what you see So from that perspective, dashboarding and analytics, that space was like very overcrowded and becoming red ocean. We already early saw, okay, we don't solve the problem with our dashboard, we don't want to compete with other companies, that's why we went into the AI Visibilty company, we do it end to end, and over there we see that there's not much competition, especially in Europe, you have a few companies in The US already doing it, AI native, they call them AI native companies, AI native service companies, it came from Y Combinator actually, if you talk to investors, they understand that normal people, AI native, they will think still that you're an agency, then it's clear to define you're not an agency, marketing company, you're not a dashboard, SaaS, you're really in between, you're a company that does it end to end, a tech company that solves the problem for you much faster and more efficient than before.

And to be an AI native company, it's quite interesting because we had to go through that, You see it's not only delivery that's AI native, you also see the sales team needs to look at their whole processes, see how we can automate it, how we can improve it. So the good thing is we had a lot of engineers in the team and most of them that already were on this AI train. So for me and for other marketing people, we were the hardest and we are still indeed being educated the whole time by engineering. So it's a whole team effort. If you've done traditional service, yeah, that's much harder to then transform into an AI native company, of course, because your processes are just totally different and it's a lot of change management for people as well.

That's the hardest part I actually feel there.

How many FTE?

Sorry. We are now at nine. Nine. In total, we are at nine.

You mentioned fundraising. So you raised 500 k in July, if I'm not mistaken, in a pre seed phase, if we can call that a pre seed phase.

Correct.

Yeah. It was led by the angels and, Cedar Funds, which are both connected in in Belgium, and I think plus a number of of angels.

Yes. Mhmm.

So the the the funding round was mainly done with convertible loans. Can you maybe explain first to our listeners what convertible loans are and why did you choose these fundraising methods for your priest phase?

Yeah. No. Very good question. So a convertible loan, as it says, gives you a loan that you either pay back or they convert it into equity at the company at the future financing moment. And the financing moment you define in the agreement of, if you raise this much money, then it's a trigger moment that everyone that has a convertible note at that moment becomes a shareholder in equity.

If you don't qualify that option, you have the opportunity to pay back or you need to of course start paying off the loan, so that's the modality. What is interesting there is that you don't need to go to the notary and it's super fast to get the cash flow. Our main reason was okay, because this space is so hot, we really want to get started, if we miss this train, we miss it forever, so we really need to do it now. And the good part is that we got one investor that actually unlocked us with a fund, they believed in us first, so still very grateful for that, and they gave us part of the convertible note before already, to make sure we could hire our first engineers to build a platform already and to get that head start. That was an amazing moment, if we would have gone to the notary to do equity rounds, I think we would have spent months not doing anything.

I think that timing, that's the most important and crucial. So everyone should indeed be mindful of this. If you don't have time, you don't want to wait, convertible is the way to go. It's also very famous in Belgium, of course. In the rest of Europe, outside of Europe, US, it's a safe.

Maybe that's even much more easier because there's less legal work to do there.

Yeah. Maybe for the the non Belgian listeners.

Yes.

Why a safe is not used here? So a safe is a bit of a, like, a contract that says you have a future right to a part of a company while while a convertible loan is basically a debt. The save concept doesn't really exist in Belgium. Either you're an owner or you have a debt against the company. There's nothing in between, which is safe basically is.

Right? And so simply because the category doesn't exist in Belgium, there's not really a legal grounding for it. That's why it doesn't exist here.

You have much experience there, Bart. Much more than we with this kind of

No, but I think for people not accustomed to Belgian's legal systems, it's always a question why it comes back, like what's the difference between a convertible loan and a safe and why is a safe not being used here?

Exactly.

Also convertible loans from what I see in the market are often an indicator for a follow-up front of fundraising in equities this time. Did you plan that? Do you have something in mind?

Yeah, it's a good question. It's actually quite actual. So for us, it's very important for us to have the growth because we spend a lot of times into building, repositioning. Now everything goes into sales. And if we have our metrics right, in my mind, it's growing still three, four times.

I'm quite comfortable to go for our next round, our seed round. And hopefully, can already start that quite soon, and that by the end of the next year or early next year, when the numbers are, of course, okay, we can have this next round because that will allow us to, first of all, get more capital for the next step, which is then full into sales and business development, of course, because today that's only with me, which is quite thin and stretched. But then we can also look at the winter seatpost for our HQ because I know they have a lot of applicants. You need to be quite lucky to have space there. And I feel that's also very important for us to have that HQ in the winter seat cruise because today we're a full remote team, but at least then we can have our people in Belgium going to the office as well.

And it's an amazing ecosystem. So I quite often go there, you meet always amazing people, you can exchange IDs, and it's just very nice to have this on the agenda.

You were mentioning business development. How do you how do you sell mainly? What is your, like, biggest stream of prospect or pipeline?

I'm also interested in that in the sense that you're, say, you're an AI native company. Like, you go, you help your customers a to z. You have this this technical IP, but you also provide AI native hands on support. Right? That's part of that is automated.

Like, how do you price something like this? Like, it's not like a monthly license and then your customer can log into a platform. That's easy to price, but how do you price something like this?

Yeah. On the pricing side, we actually have quite custom tiers. So it goes from just an audit or it goes like into monthly retainers, and we just have like two tiers there. And we still price as a tech company. If I compare that with a marketing company, we're very fairly priced, I would say there.

And there are some example tiers on on the website, of course. But every case that we see we have quite some standard ones and we see that for companies we want to gain their trust quite early, so we sometimes let them start smaller and then we scale from there because we see that once they have the results and the trust, and that's again the most important is trust. So what I also realized is these service clients, why could I close them is because I met them at a conference for example, through warm network, through a friend that did the referral. So all these signals also made it okay, if I'm able to close clients because of that channel, and my previous job was also when I was still an employee in sales, I was also doing mainly networking events and building long time relationship before you could close a contract, of course. But that's why sales events is very important there.

But I see that it's also limiting, of course, on my time. So we also have other channels and we see that LinkedIn is quite a good channel. So founder led sales that we deploy both our profiles now with a bit more educational content, but also case studies that we share. We of course have some ads as well working that we recently tried out. Our own, eat your own dog food like they will say, the experts.

So we get these leads in as well. So one of our Japanese clients, they found us on cloud, looking for a solution like us, so that was amazing. Some marketing agencies also found us like this, that of course we want to do more. Now with the repositioning, we got hurt a bit in our own geo, but now we're picking this up because of course we repositioned, and now Google needs to know and all the AI models, they need to know what Visiblie is now and what the AI Visiblie company actually does compared to just a dashboard there. Then of course the other channels that I'm heavily invested in is everything of the email marketing and the nurturing because that's still a very important one to nurture from a cold lead and make them warm.

So if you make them warm, you can get them on a call, and then you can start talking and and making them a proposal for the service.

Do you use this, like, this really American American that this is way of selling to provide a sample of your product even if the prospect didn't ask for it. Like, for example, you just increase the visibility of the company, and then you just outreach to to to the guy in marketing saying, okay, did your did your pipeline increased from last week to today? And then if he or she says yes, you just say, that's because of me. That's that's maybe an interesting selling channel.

You know, I like the idea what we do today is a lot sending them a report, and that's also white label for agency we give, and in the report, it's quite extensive. It sometimes runs 100 prompts across the six phases, so you will immediately see where the problem is and how much visible you you only are, and that's also an eye opener. But then of course, we thought about this, something similar, that actually what we could do for brands is, if they don't wanna work with us, we actually set up a website, like we make a clone, a website that we own, and we call it another brand, but it's in the same industry. We get all the leads there, and then we could ask them, okay, are you now interested? We have actually 500 leads.

They booked a call with us, but we cannot serve them. Do you want to take the call or

not? That's interesting. That's smart. Yes.

In in terms of positioning, a lot of, I think AI native companies, they focus on providing a solution or a service where it tries to automate or make an existing process way more efficient for a customer. That for a customer, like, it's an easy sell in a sense. Like, if you if you buy this of us for price X, save amount Y.

Mhmm.

Right? Like, it's it's it's a bit like the the ROI for a customer is easy to measure. I can imagine like ROI for geo type of of of optimization is harder to measure. Like, it's harder to make this argument. If you use us, this is gonna happen.

Yeah. Do you notice this in your conversations with with customers?

It's a quite hard one. Recently I actually started to do something new because with most of the SaaS companies, I have an idea of their range of how much they sell their products or it's publicly, or they will tell me during the first conversations, and then I try to make these ROI tables for them. And so I say, okay, because I have access to your Google Analytics and Search Console, I can say today your traffic is this, base case I can say I will make your traffic X, conservative I make it this, and in exceptional way I will make your traffic this, This amounts to X amount of leads, just do an easy calculation, you say okay, 1%, 3%, we'll book a demo, and from these demos that you close maybe 10% depending on who they are, some of them will close 70, and then you can easily say, okay, you paid this today for us, but we will bring you this amount of leads. If they only stay for a year, this is the ROI. Imagine they stay for three years or five years.

A company last week told me their clients stay for ten years. So if then I make a ROI case from a client that I bring in today, they stay for ten years, then for them, it's you you want to make it as easy, of course, for them to say yes, and I feel the trust is is very important. So and that's a bit the difference between meeting them at the conference or meeting them through inbound, so that trust level, the AI search engine will do for me a bit, because they're chatting, you talk every day to your close, so if they tell you these guys are the right ones, you will trust it in a way, and so that can help, But for example, LinkedIn, someone sees an ad or a Google ad, meta ad, you feel you don't have that trust level, they jump on a call, that's easy, but then to believe you that you are going to be the one to solve them this because they had bad experience with marketing people, agencies, or they had other providers telling them something and didn't deliver, and that's the hard part. The other part, of course, which we have in Europe and in Belgium, you might know, is that it's a lot of relationship already existing.

So they work with someone, even they are not 100% confident all the time, it's still a much bigger risk for them to choose for something else they don't know And even we can be cheaper, but for them it's then it's still a risk and yeah. And we don't want to disappoint anyone, our boss not, I don't want to disappoint my friend or connection. And moving or breaking that part is super hard, I feel. And my idea would be, okay, I can do that with trust, more trust, more authority in the but, yeah, I'm also looking at you guys how you can support there, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting. I think trust part is, I think is in a lot of cases when you're talking to a potential leader at a company, it's not even about trust that you can do the right thing for the company.

It's about trust in you being able to further this person's career in that company, because if you're successful for this person, this person shines and they can move and move up the ladder. And I think that is often way more important that this person can say, I made a success by using Visiblie as a platform or as a service than, than that there is an overall return. Right? I think the small scale successes lead to bigger ripples across

Yeah, I agree. But finding that superstar, that's the most important. Really know it from my previous role. I found a superstar. We made a superstar, and you can see, like, how successful the deal is was then, and it's still up to today even this but that's sometimes hard even so with this ROI case, I'm trying to tell them, okay, you will be the superstar at the end of the day because this is only the start.

I think ROI case is an interesting one in the sense that it's it's recognizable because you see it a lot in in a somewhat adjacent terrain where you've ad spent. Right? A of companies know ad spent and a very important metric there is a return on ad spent for every dollar I spend on ads. How much dollar do I get back in revenue? And you're may basically making a bit of a parallel to that, but then, like, by investing in my SEO geo, like, how many new revenue do I get if I convert these leads?

Right? I get

so Yeah. Correct. And what what you will say is, in paid media, if you stop today, hey, you don't get leads anymore. With SEO geo, if you stop today, you still will benefit from results you

need to do, of course,

things, but it's not that it's gonna go to zero. That's for sure not.

No. Interesting. But what I wonder, and I mentioned already a bit, the influencer space, how much bigger the influencer space will become for brands? Like where we spent today a lot on Indeed's company of brand driven ads and driven visibility. Influencer space is picking up a lot of this market, like creating visibility for brands, and I think it's only growing.

Yeah. Do you think it's as much growing as for B2B as for B2C or B2C is just another thing?

Well, it's definitely more visible for B2C. I think that is but I think for even for B2B, have a lot of, especially, of course, much bit biased and become very, very deep into the tech space, but also in the tech space, you have a lot of these type of influencers that are that are doing some some quote unquote paid the Mhmm. Paid paid bits. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

So I do think it's growing. I think it will only keep continue growing. I think the interesting thing is there is also that you have these new concepts of brands where we have big influencers creating a company and the brand doesn't, they don't really need to create visibility on the brand because they already have the visibility. Like, the brand starts from a completely different position. I think that's also an interesting dynamic that we're seeing.

Bart, you should have been an influencer before launching Bright Signal.

Well, you guys aren't becoming influencers. No. It was just

very small scale. Very small. Very humble scale.

Maybe you guys can support us as our first influencer.

And we can work on them. We can test visibly for the the visibility of our brand, right, of

Bright Signal? Exactly. There's something interesting there.

Gilles, one one thing I was wondering is The US market. Do you want to go in or do you want to stay like this, as you mentioned, niche player in in Europe and in the EMEA?

Yeah. It's a very timely question actually, because we did our first team building in Indonesia last month, and there we actually discussed, okay, where do we see the company going? And I was always thinking, okay, from our next round, if we raise that money, we will go to The US because it's the biggest market and we really need to have foot on the ground there. But then I made me realize, okay, if you raise that much amount of money, if you want to make it in The US, you really need to go big. And if you have just a few million, I don't think you can have such a big impact.

Salaries there, offices there, really building that, you need to have the time as well to build that trust in The US. So then my idea was actually, you know, I want to first prove ourselves, and there's still a lot to do in Europe, of course, an established player in Europe before you have the means to make it really big in The US. And you have some examples of companies from Gend, of course, that they do that when they have their further racing rounds, really already have an established product here in Belgium and Europe, where they now say, okay, now we are ready for that. And in my mind it was always something like, okay, want to go to The US, it's also my dream to live in New York and Manhattan, but I think I need to we need to be patient for that. We need to wait, first prove ourselves before we really invest into it.

Because if you don't have the the right amount of funds, I don't think you will make it there easily. And correct me if I'm wrong, guys, because you've you have more experience there with US probably.

That's interesting because there are two ways of seeing that. We interviewed some company that's at the beginning of their products are in The US because for them, The US is, like, the biggest market, so why not being there? And then there is the other way of thinking, which is yours, which is also right, to to be patient, to to be in this niche market. And then once you have the funds and and get the background experience, you get to The US because you need to be prepared. Think these are two ways of of thinking, but it can work that way.

Yeah. I think the this is a very interesting discussion. I think the the one of the biggest arguments is always that even though the European market as such is almost as big as the Europe as The US market, like, it's very fragmented. Right? Like and I think that is true.

Like like, if you even, like, companies that are next to each other, let's take a Belgium, Germany, France, The Netherlands, like, the way that you do business there, like it's completely different cultures. And that's something you need to adjust to. Versus if you go to The US, even though there is some differences between states, it's culture is more or less the same when it comes to doing business. I think that is a big argument why why a lot of people or a lot of companies go to The States because it's just a bigger, big, huge market that opens up for them. But I do think that it's that is also has a lot to do with, what are your objectives?

And I think that incentives created by VCs are not always the healthiest incentives. Like a VC tries to push you to go times 1,000, right? So because they need a few a few companies that need they go times 1,000 to be successful because a lot of them will fail. And if you want to go times 1,000, you need to go to The US, right? Like, if you want to be valued at some point at 1,000,000,000, you need to go to The US.

Think that that's that's that's fair. If your ambition is to be at one point be valued at a €100,000,000, That's very doable in Europe, right? But that does not always align with incentives of investors. I think that is also like something that doesn't get spoken about a lot, but that's also important in the reasoning process. Like where do you want to end up at some point?

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. But your argument makes me rethink it again now. Should we already go see, evaluate it? So what we will do is for sure, Domingo and I will go to San Francisco because we've never been. We want to be there.

I already explored New York, so we'll go together there and we'll see what happens, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think there is like from any culture you can learn a lot, right? Like from the vibe, ambiance, the people, I think the the that cross pollination is is is whatever you do is always valuable.

Yeah. Exactly.

Right. So I think we touched to to the end of the podcast. Unless, Bart, you want to add something else?

No. But I think it's interesting to maybe offline to to have a discussion on what Visiblie can can mean for our brand, Rapha, on the Bright Signal brand.

Exactly.

Maybe be a good a good experiment. That was very nice very interesting talking with you, Angel.

Maybe, Gilles, if people are interested to to know about Visiblie and and yourself, how can they stay up to date and maybe reach out to you?

Yeah. I think the best way today is connect with me on LinkedIn. There most of the information is coming. Also, yeah, just reach out on a DM, a message. If they are really interested and already want to have a conversation with me, they can always book a meeting on the website.

My calendar link is there. I'm always happy to just exchange notes as well, especially on the partnership side, just to learn older founders, understanding what they are going through. If they experience The US as well, I would also be interested. But yeah, I'm always happy to learn more people. Think that's my really, what I learned now is that networking relationship is becoming much more important even with AI, and that's something will be never replaced.

And I'm super happy to meet always people at conferences. That's why I do it a lot. Even some people said to me, you're wasting time. You can do all the sales from behind your desk. I think it's not true.

It's the relationship would be it's much more important. And with you guys here, if next time we do a podcast in person, I would also love it as well. I do take two in Brussels with a bit more air conditioning then.

That's a good idea. Right. Thank you, Gilles.

Thank you, Gilles. Thanks everybody for listening.

And hope to connect soon again with you guys.

Let's stay in touch. Bye everyone.