Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.

Jim Zarkadas (00:25)
So yeah, thank you a lot for joining me today and making the time to discuss. ⁓ We always start the podcast episodes with a quick intro ⁓ of your story actually. So not just what you're doing right now, but actually where you started from and kind of the journey that you had and how you ended up here. So yeah, I'll pass the mic to you like on this one. ⁓

Talia Wolf (00:47)
So I'm Talia Wolff and I started out in a marketing agency doing social media and running paid campaigns and mostly thinking about, yeah, social. Back in the day where what people really cared about was mostly likes and comments. It's interesting because I think it's coming around again to that. ⁓ But...

When I first started out, I would run all these campaigns for our clients. And I always wondered, you know, are they actually having any impact on sales or leads? And our clients didn't really know, because back then, not everyone tracked stuff as well as they could. So ⁓ I started getting really interested in tracking and then also how can I increase conversions? So I started playing around with stuff.

Jim Zarkadas (01:28)
.

Talia Wolf (01:40)
like changing call to action buttons, changing headlines, changing images to see, okay, does this increase clicks? Does this increase sales? Does this get more engagement? ⁓ And slowly I learned that this is an actual role that you can do. ⁓ It's called conversion optimization. And there weren't a lot of people back then. were two agencies in the world that did that by then. ⁓

And I fell in love with it. I loved it. I was reading about it. then I decided to, along with two other friends, we opened an agency, conversion optimization agency, and we started working on conversion optimization and running tests and really trying to figure out, you know, what will help our clients increase conversions. And I started writing blog posts about our case studies and how we're doing it. ⁓ And that was fun. And then I really,

kind of realized that the way we were approaching it didn't make a lot of sense and that it wasn't getting the results that we wanted. So we built a new framework and it's called the emotional targeting methodology. I've been using it for over 10 years now. When we sold that agency, I started my own agency called GetUplift about nine years ago now when I think about it. So I've been using emotional targeting for almost 13 or 14 years.

Jim Zarkadas (03:03)
That's really cool.

Talia Wolf (03:04)
yeah, and it's, developed a lot. It's changed a ton, but the essence of it has always been the same. If you understand the real reason behind people's buying decisions, their emotional intent, you can increase conversions. You can create a better experience for them. That really speaks to them and their psychology and their emotion and what they're looking for. ⁓ and that's kind of how I built my agency nine years now. ⁓

And that's what we do.

Jim Zarkadas (03:33)
That's very cool. So yeah, you have a marketing background, then you kind of specialize into that. That's very cool. So you've been in marketing for like, dozens of years. it's...

Talia Wolf (03:44)
I've been in marketing, I feel like a dinosaur, but yes, I've been

in marketing for a minimum of like, I would, yeah, I don't want to say for many years. I feel old.

Jim Zarkadas (03:55)
No, that's really cool actually. on this one, I was looking for the video before our call today. ⁓ So I think you know Chris Silvestri. Yeah, so you had also a podcast episode from what I saw with him. So I know Chris from a conference we met and we've been hanged out since then and helping each other. And ⁓ he was also on my podcast and...

Talia Wolf (04:06)
Yeah, of course.

Jim Zarkadas (04:18)
one like actually stories that we met at SAS talk at a SAS conference in Dublin and then I started working with Chris and asked him, Hey man, I met UX designer. want to ⁓

to get better at CRO and co-prop writing, I would love if you can do some mentoring to me. So I can pay you for some hours and then we can do some sessions together. And we actually did that. And one of the first things that I learned from Chris was the concept of voice of customer. And he was using tutorials of yours on YouTube. It was, I don't remember which one is exactly, it's from seven years ago, that it was about how to go from a survey to a landing page. And for me, the eye-opening experience with Chris was that...

Talia Wolf (04:48)
Wow.

Jim Zarkadas (04:54)
He told me that you shouldn't write the copy, the customers should write a copy through surveys, ⁓ which is...

things like one of the topics is gonna go deeper into today with emotional targeting. And it was very eye-opening for me. was like, oh, okay, now I get it. That's how you actually come up with copy that is unique and makes sense is that you don't try to be smart. You actually look at the people. It's not that you have like some secret marketing skill that others don't have. So yeah, and it's fun because we were using also your survey. We built one of the surveys in knowledge on one of the teams we're working with. We have a survey for new customers.

Talia Wolf (05:18)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (05:28)
based on one of the templates that you've made on this one. So yeah, yeah, you've been helping the industry for a long time. So thank you. It's very cool. Yeah. And for me, just like a side note, I come from an engineering background. I started as a full stack developer, got into front end and then evolved into product design because that was kind ⁓ of my dream. It's fine to start as a technical guy, but you know, one thing now as a founder, I have to do more and more marketing.

Talia Wolf (05:31)
Okay, good. That's my favorite feedback. Yes.

Wow.

Jim Zarkadas (05:57)
and being, having been an engineer is cool and not cool at the same time because in engineering, everything is, I think deterministic is the right words, like it's either zero one, let's say. So it either works or doesn't work. With marketing, it's psychology. There is not like, you cannot rationalize things as much and make them as predictable. And that's why for example, marketing has been giving me anxiety for long time now when I have to do it for my own business where I'm like.

Talia Wolf (06:07)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (06:24)
We're going to do this. We're going to put some money. We're going to spend like six, seven months. Let's hope this is going to work. And the only way to get confidence is pretty much what you've been talking about to understand more your audience because then you're like, okay, I have empathy. I know these people. This has to work because it just makes sense because you understand who you're selling and where they are, how they feel, what are the reasons to reject you, like the objections they have and so on. So that's another thing that I love about your concept of emotional targeting is

It helps you build a lot of confidence as well when you invest ⁓ money into marketing ideas. That could be like product related or a campaign and so.

Talia Wolf (07:02)
Yeah, I agree. think, especially when you're...

It feels like guesswork, right? Like you want to do a marketing campaign or you want to succeed in something, whether if it's a new landing page that you're launching or an email sequence that you're sending out, what matters to you is, I want to hit this right. And I want to get the great results. But a lot of the time it does. It feels like guesswork. You're just kind of, you're seeing what other people are doing. You're trying to like figure out what makes sense. And sometimes you stare in front of an empty Google doc, hoping words will just appear in your brain. ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (07:07)
Mm-hmm.

Talia Wolf (07:34)
And the thing that I love about emotional targeting and why we've stuck to it for so many years is because it gives us the confidence that we basically feel a lot more confident in the way that we do things. Because every change that we make is based on research. It's based on a hypothesis. It's based on trying to solve a problem. So instead of saying, well,

Jim Zarkadas (07:54)
Mm-hmm.

Talia Wolf (08:02)
best practices say that you should only have one call to action button, our hypotheses are more, we're seeing that there is a big problem. For example, people cannot easily see that this product was created for them. And when you have that hypothesis, you can make many changes and you can try different things until people can clearly see themselves on the page.

Jim Zarkadas (08:26)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (08:30)
So you can change the call to action, you can change the headline, you can change the image, you can change the whole story until you reach that point where, okay, now when someone lands on the page, they clearly can see that this solution was made for them and that they're in the right place. And that gives a lot of confidence because you're not trying to change an element on the page, you're trying to solve a problem. And that's a lot easier.

Jim Zarkadas (08:55)
Yeah, exactly what you said. And on this one, I wanted to ask you also about emotional targeting.

What is an example of like a company not following that framework and a company following that framework? Let's say to write the hero section of the home page. ⁓ I was reading about it online and you mentioned like people doing random experiments and I'm curious like what you've seen from your experience, like how companies behave when they don't have this whole idea in mind of understanding the emotional context and state of other buyers.

Talia Wolf (09:23)
Yeah, that's a great question.

I would say that companies that aren't taking emotional resonance into consideration and aren't actually, you know, doing the research that they need to understand their customers are what I would call ⁓ data driven, but not like real data driven. So we've been told for years to follow the data and the metrics and the KPIs. And we all know that our customers are

Jim Zarkadas (09:42)
Mmm. Yeah.

Talia Wolf (09:51)
what age they are, what role they have, their geographical location, their gender, the devices that they're using. And what ends up happening is because we don't know much about our customers. ⁓ We spend a lot of time talking about us, our features, our technology, our pricing, how we work, what we do, who's doing it. And that is a result of not knowing who you're actually speaking to, not

Jim Zarkadas (10:06)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (10:18)
knowing why people really buy from you, like what is the real pain that you've sold for, not knowing what outcome people are really looking for. And I'm not talking about they can do X. An outcome is something that people feel about themselves or an achievement that they've been able to achieve or if they now feel something or they want other people to feel about them. So there's a value there behind the

I can now create automatic reports or I can now create an ad in two minutes or I can now whatever. So companies that aren't using emotional targeting that aren't ⁓ really ⁓ invested in understanding their customers on an emotional level are companies that are very oriented towards themselves. And you can clearly see that on the page.

Jim Zarkadas (11:12)
Mmm.

Talia Wolf (11:12)
The companies that

are using emotional targeting, so the companies that we work with, are companies that we've spent a lot of time doing research for, which we can get into. It's part of it is voice of customer, as you mentioned. ⁓ But what you see is the entire ⁓ customer journey is customer first, meaning any claim, any promise, anything they talk about,

is in the lens of the customer. Great. You have this feature, you have this technology, you have an integration. What does that mean for the customer? Why should they care? How does that help them in life? So everything is focused on who your customer is and how we want them to feel and helping them understand that this solution is right for their particular case.

Jim Zarkadas (12:04)
Yeah. Yeah. I, it's also very interesting what you're saying with the data treatment. It's like one of the main issues that I always have, like I love data because they can show you where you're failing sometimes. Like they can show you, it's like a symptom in a way, but not the cause. like, you see, I have a drop off, but I'm like, yeah, but why? Why do people drop off? What's going on there? That's always the big question. And where everything that you're saying is a,

Talia Wolf (12:08)
You

Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (12:29)
comes into. On this one, there is one example that I wanted to share on the emotional targeting that I always, it's one of the landing pages I was like, they really get it. So it's called prompt cowboy. So it's a page where you paste your prompt and then you get a better prompt. And the headline is so on point. When I was like, I read it, was like, this is for me. The headline is turn your lazy prompts into great ones. I was like, this is exactly my case. I'm too lazy.

to, I was feeling guilty because I know that in order to get proper results in AI, you need to spend hours to craft a prompt, right? You need to give it context, understanding, explain how it's gonna behave and so on. And I'm like, I don't have the time for that. I just want some quick feedback for this design that I'm working on, let's say. And I had this kind of a guilt. I was feeling lazy. And the cool thing with this headline, it really captured how I feel.

That's why it really stood out to me. And then they explain kind of the benefit where they say idea to prompt in seconds, get better, much better results from Tadgpt. ⁓ So yeah, I feel like, yeah.

Talia Wolf (13:31)
I love this. I'm looking at it right now. I like it

mostly also because it's not just when you're feeling lazy. think it's also like the internet as a whole likes to make you feel in general, like you're not doing enough or that whatever you do isn't good enough. Like we should all be doing more all the time. Everyone's posting, everyone's living their best life. Everyone's making bazillions of dollars. Everyone's cracked AI and they now have, you know, their own personal

Jim Zarkadas (13:46)
So true.

Yeah.

Talia Wolf (13:58)
AI tool that does everything for them, including the dishes. But most, most of us like just are like, what? I don't know what's going on. ⁓ so I love the idea of like, turn your lazy prompt into great ones because a lot of times you're like just writing the stuff in, like, I think that's what AI has trained us to do now is like in, as opposed to Google keywords where you're just like accounting software here, you're

Jim Zarkadas (14:02)
Exactly.

Talia Wolf (14:24)
really putting in like, need this and I need this and I'm sad about this and this is annoying me and how do I do this and how do I explain it? So it always feels kind of more emotion driven or problem driven. But when you look at people's prompts that they share, it's usually very like, enter this, add this, do this. And you're like, that's not how I prompt. So it's kind of cool. You're like, I just can like throw in all my thoughts and then it will organize it for me. And I'm like,

Jim Zarkadas (14:34)
Hmm.

You

Talia Wolf (14:50)
Yeah, that's cool. That's great. Like I'm going to use this tool now to make my prompts better because I prompt as Talia. I'm a person and I put my brain out into chat GPT or perplexity and I hope it knows what I want.

Jim Zarkadas (14:55)
Thanks.

it understands what I'm about. exactly. So yeah, this is one of my favorite examples of like where the headline really resonated. And on this, I wanted to ask you a question from your experience, which is struct that I also have at this point. So I'm always for the questions, I'm always thinking about projects that I'm working so that I can make like deeper questions as well on your frameworks and everything. So one of the components we're working with is KnowledgeOut. So it's a knowledge-based software.

It's like a software we can create internal knowledge bases like help centers to document your processes or like a customer support site where people can self-serve and One of the challenges is that it's a horizontal SAS. So we have two examples The one is knowledge old and horizontal SAS across many industries. You have a university using knowledge old government organizations Software companies and more and then you have Zen made another team that we're working with which is a clinic

scheduling software. It's a scheduling software for clinic businesses in United States. And it's very nice, it's pretty cool. Like one thing side note that I really love with B2B SaaS is that you have all these crazy niches. For example, we have another client, Allpose, from the MicroConf community, which is scheduling software for pet care businesses and specialized and single location pet care. And like so many industries I had no idea about ⁓ that are actually million dollar industries. And

Talia Wolf (16:22)
amazing.

Jim Zarkadas (16:25)
On this one, one thing that I've seen is that it's much easier to do emotional targeting for ZenMate where you have a very specific ICP, which is a clinic business owner, usually 40 years old, ⁓ 90 % of the times it's a woman building a business. So you have mainly female audience, you know the location and you know the journey they're going through. Like I had an interview with one of the customers and I went deeper into the why's, like why did you start the business to understand like more the journey? And this applies to most of the people.

⁓ So it was easy to go deep into their soul and understand what they are mentally and the transformation they're going through and how the product fits into the journey. But in knowledge all it's been more challenging because you have people across many different industries ⁓ trying though to solve a similar problem. So I'm curious about the emotional targeting. Do you see any challenge when you have ICPs from different industries and departments? Because also the job title for knowledge all is not the same.

Talia Wolf (16:54)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (17:21)
support people using it, PMs, CPOs, ⁓ like people that don't even remember their title because it was too complicated for multi-corporate companies. ⁓ So you have many different roles and I've seen that with KnowlJo we've been struggling way more to articulate ⁓ what we do and for who, for example. I kind of feel that process is wrong since I digging deeper into your stuff, but I'm curious how do you see like horizontal versus vertical, like a single audience versus multi-audience products.

Talia Wolf (17:30)
Ha ha ha.

Jim Zarkadas (17:50)
and what are the talents you see there.

Talia Wolf (17:50)
Yeah.

Good question. ⁓ We do a lot of work with companies that have multiple types of ICPs and within those there's different roles, different goals, people are trying to achieve different things. And what we found is that this is what makes the emotional targeting framework probably better because

were not focused on just the job that they're trying to get done or just the specific task they're trying to achieve, but the overall emotional goal and the overall feeling of success.

that will happen for multiple people. And what we found is that A, we definitely do address different people on a page. So if you think about a homepage, which is a catch-all, if you think about a pricing page or even feature pages, different people are reading that page and they all read it for their own things. You have the CFO who's reading it for...

Jim Zarkadas (18:36)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (18:48)
you know, to understand the money. We've got the person who's going to be actually using the product. we're, we're talking, you know, we need to speak to them and how they're going to use the product. We have the person who just wants to know, the, you know, the, the report, like, I just want to have the reports and I want to see the overall. So the idea with emotional targeting is that you're not speaking to everyone in the same place. You are creating content that resonates for people in where they need it. So the,

Jim Zarkadas (18:50)
Yeah.

Mm.

Talia Wolf (19:18)
homepage

is a hard example because it's a catch-all and because everyone goes to it. But what we like to do is usually use the homepage as more like a springboard. So people come to it and they can easily see where their next step is. They can choose their own destination and journey, especially in SaaS, ⁓ where you've got the people that have to go and look at the features and pricing, the people that want to read more case studies. So people need different stuff.

Jim Zarkadas (19:21)
Mm-hmm, exactly.

Hmm.

Talia Wolf (19:45)
And we address that on every page and we write for that type of person. But at the end of the day, we definitely do a lot of research into each of these ICPs to understand what they're trying to achieve. And what we found and what we found many times is that it often is very similar. It often is even though the actual role that this person might

Jim Zarkadas (20:09)
Mm-hmm.

Talia Wolf (20:13)
⁓ take within the actual product will be different. What everyone's trying to achieve is pretty similar. People want to feel more confident. People want to feel like they know what's going on. People want to feel like people can see their work. It all kind of stems from the same emotional reason at the end. And so multiple ICPs ⁓ require different content, different customer journeys, or addressing them in different ways. But the ultimate promise

Jim Zarkadas (20:19)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (20:41)
works well for them.

Jim Zarkadas (20:42)
⁓ Yeah, that's a good one actually. And that's why I said like when I started researching more your stuff realized, ⁓ actually I should go deeper into like, want to also buy the book after they call and go deeper into the frameworks and everything. Because with Knowledge All, for example, the strike that most people have is that they want a single place where they can gather all the knowledge, right? So they have scattered documents, emails, like things documented in random places, and they want to bring everything in one place.

And that applies for a university that wants to document all the technical operations that they have, for example, for a SaaS company looking to build a help center. So it's always kind of the same idea that you want to build a central place of knowledge for your customers and teams and internal teams to find answers ⁓ into in a way. So yeah, it's even if the audience is different, kind of the motivation, the transformation they're looking for is almost the same. So in that case,

Yeah, makes sense to also like, yeah, in that case, you focus more on that as well. Because for ZenMate, for example, we saw cleaners, like there was very interesting for the branding, that was when we started doing the brand research to evolve the brand of ZenMate. ⁓ We would see that a big part of the audience is pretty much women that used to be cleaners, and they found faith to believe in to themselves and build a business. They're like, you know what, I'm gonna do it. I believe in to myself.

and now I'm gonna build a million dollar clinic business. And you have beautiful case studies like Stephanie, one of our partners that built like a one and a half million dollar business ⁓ in United States, for example. And it was very interesting, the whole empowerment thing. So empowerment became one of the brand values that we empower them to go into that new phase of their life. And we support them in many ways, like with the software, with the conference that GenMate has, the content and so on. Whereas for KnowledgeHole, it's kind of a different one. ⁓

Talia Wolf (22:34)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (22:35)
it's not like that big of a transformation. So it's very interesting to just kind of look into different products and what is the angle you should focus on and the impact that your product has because it's different to have a knowledge base. Also like now that I'm out loud while we're discussing is one of the things that I observed here is that not every SaaS product has the same kind of impact. So sure ZenMate, it seems like a big transformation, but knowledge-al, you just build a knowledge base center. So it's not that...

we empower you to go into the next phase of your life, we help you solve a very specific problem and we can be more focused on that. So different products have different kind of impact and you can adjust the whole kind of a copy around that as well.

Talia Wolf (23:18)
I do think it's interesting what you're saying

because we've actually worked with a brand that does similar work, adjacent work to creating a, you know, a knowledge base for a company. And when we did all research, one of the things that kept coming up clearly is that there were a few things. One was people felt like they were doing repetitive work and that was so annoying because then, you know, they'd work on something and then find out three months later that someone had already done that.

⁓ and it didn't work or it did work and we could have just taken it from them. Also, a lot of the times it feels like we're wasting time. It feels like we've done something really cool and great and now no one knows about it in the team. So there are a lot of emotional triggers in there when you're thinking about a knowledge base. Yes, it is a place where you can store all the information of everything that you did.

but there's a power there to A, shining a light on the work that you've done so you can get recognition, reducing time and stress and frustration of doing the same thing over and over again, just to find out that someone else tested it it didn't work, why are there so many silos in our company? So those two things are emotional triggers that really mattered when we were helping this knowledge-based company.

And when we highlighted that in our messaging and our design and in all of our A-B tests, we saw a huge impact there. We weren't just focusing on the fact that yes, you can build this knowledge base from multiple different sources and you can get all this information from everywhere and it will all be in one place. It was more than that. It was that emotional toll of those things of people not recognizing my job and the work that I do. And also people who are like sick of

Jim Zarkadas (25:04)
Mm.

Talia Wolf (25:06)
doing stuff over and over again or trying things or just missing stuff and not knowing what everyone else is doing.

Jim Zarkadas (25:12)
Yeah, it's very, yeah, it fully makes sense. I don't really have any comments on that. Like now that I'm thinking about it, for some reason, it's so easy to focus on the product. Like it's something that, yeah, I can help it sometimes. And like one of the things that I was thinking while you were describing this, that there is a big impact on the question that you asked. So if you ask, what are the pains that they have versus how do they feel?

it's kind of a different. So for me, I always think about one of the pains and the benefits for some reason, but when you focus on the question, how do they feel? Like what is happening? The trigger points, like what triggered them to look for a tool? ⁓ Then you get kind of a way deeper answer. So I feel like protecting the question and keeping it the same has a big impact itself because it's easy to kind of start from the how do they feel and then end up answering about benefits and pains. That's something that I've seen with teams and something that I've done myself as well is that

it's yeah, it's that they don't really answer the right questions to get that kind of insights because I remember this from one of your surveys, for example, that we use that the ⁓ for new customers at KnowledgeHole, one of the questions that we have there.

and if I remember correctly, it was from your survey, this one was what happened in your life and you decided to switch to knowledge tool, for example. And the what happened in your life is very specific. People could say that it's the same to ask what problems do you have? Why are you switching to knowledge tool? But if you say what happened in your life, people give you different answers. through that was one of my first projects where I realized asking questions is kind of an art. Like you really need to know the exact words you're gonna use to get the right answers.

Talia Wolf (26:39)
Yep.

yes. yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (26:51)
We even added a few more details on that one, like looking for a new tool costs you time and money, for example. So what was the thing that happened in your life that made you decide to invest time and money? It's like, what is the thing that was so annoying that you were like, now I'm gonna spend time and money to look for a different tool. And that's entirely different to asking like, what problem do you have? Like, why are you signing up for knowledge tool? Which people are gonna give you just kind of the surface. So yeah, that was one of the examples of.

Talia Wolf (27:01)
Yep.

You

Jim Zarkadas (27:17)
that I wanted to share like of what you said before, like how do they feel versus like what problem do they have, which is more kind of operational, let's say, and not so emotional.

Talia Wolf (27:24)
Yeah, we often, I think,

yeah, I think we often kind of focus on, what made you sign up for this product? What, you know, the question is usually, why did you sign up? Why did you choose this? But that, that really prompts people to just say pricing, I had to switch, I had to change. ⁓ It wasn't working or something. But when you ask,

Jim Zarkadas (27:45)
hopefully.

Talia Wolf (27:50)
what happened or what was going on today that made you look for a solution like this. You're essentially saying like, Hey, think back a moment. Like what was the trigger? What was the one thing that happened? And it's great for multiple reasons. A is because you're really getting the story of what triggered that. So you know the actual pain that happens and B you're getting so much content.

Jim Zarkadas (28:02)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (28:16)
from people, how they describe their day, how do they describe their role, how do they describe their pains, how they describe you and what they feel about you. So there's just a world of golden insights when you ask very, very good questions. ⁓ One of my favorite questions I learned from a really cool team in Belgium called AG Consult. ⁓ And they asked, ⁓

Jim Zarkadas (28:26)
Mm.

Talia Wolf (28:43)
If you could no longer use this product tomorrow, what would you miss the most? It is probably my favorite question of all times because it's instead of saying, Hey, what do you love the most about us? Or like, what do you like most about tool? When you say, I'm about to take this away from you now, what will you miss? What's one thing that you will regret or will be frustrated by or not like that is a

Jim Zarkadas (28:48)
Mm.

Hmm.

Talia Wolf (29:11)
Very different question, very different answers. like, no, don't like, we've literally, when we've asked that, we always get like that one person that's like, please don't take this away. Like, no, it's just a question. ⁓ But it's so cool because then people are like, well, ugh, doing this will be so hard now because I'll have to deal with A, B, and C, or I will have to go back to doing things in this way and it will be really frustrating and so on. asking questions is an art.

Jim Zarkadas (29:12)
Mmm.

Mm-hmm.

Talia Wolf (29:40)
And it's also very different than when you run interviews, right? Like when you're running interviews, people get really worried about that because they don't want to annoy their customers or whatever. And then like you get on the call and you blabber nonstop and you're like, just 10 minutes. And you miss so many things. When on the phone, your entire role is to just say one word. Hmm.

Jim Zarkadas (29:45)
Mm-hmm.

Customers. Yeah. classic one

Talia Wolf (30:07)
Hmm, like that's what you're supposed to say like the entire your entire role is you either say hmm or you say why why why X why what you know? ⁓ So there's an art in asking questions and there's an art in knowing how to pull information that matters from your customers

Jim Zarkadas (30:16)
Yeah.

Mm.

Yes, also the second one. one, yeah, I fully agree on this one. One of the topics that I want to go deeper today is practical ways. So in the podcast, I like to say that we come up with practical tips for SaaS founders to kind of improve their SaaS products and make them stickier and more unforgettable, let's say. And I'm always curious and excited to go from like high level framework and idea to practical things that I can do today, let's say like, so.

I'll give you an example. So I'll bring a real project that I'm actually going through and I'm going to explain why I was like, yeah, you're really right. Like on the second part, you said especially about the how to extract the right piece of information. So the project is the following. At Zenmade, we found out that, ⁓ let's say around 50 % of users turn after the first three months. So that's a number we've seen that ⁓ like on the retention. And that's one of the key metrics we're to be focused on improving for the last.

three, four months. That's one of the strategic focus points we came up with at ZenMate. And now we're doing the research to understand why, what's happening and they're turning. Maybe they're not ready yet. Maybe they're closing their business. Maybe they're just messing around with testing tools, maybe something else. So now we're in the process of figuring out the why part and the whole project is activation onboarding. That's the term that you'd categorize it under based on the industry terms.

It involves like marketing activities, but also a lot of product work, which is on my side, how to improve the onboarding flow, the first time user experience, what we should show first, what are the how moments, like all these kind of a classic topics on activation. And now that I'm digging into the why part, I was looking based on what we have, what is the best place to find ⁓ knowledge for that? So based on the feedback streams that we have, we have support tickets, customer reviews, and one of the best places was the demo calls we do. So ZenMade offers free.

optimization calls and the team records all the calls and they also write summaries. So I took an export of the last 10 months. I it inside GBT and I tried to go deeper, understand what's going on there. And that's one of the times where I experienced that it's not as simple to just get the data set and then come up with insights. I was like, man, like I'm not.

Talia Wolf (32:32)
Hmm.

You

Jim Zarkadas (32:45)
I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong. I'm not sure if it's AI. Like at some point my brain was really fried. And the realization that I had after spending three, four days digging deeper into the data is that you need to know how to analyze data, what questions to ask AI in that case, and what is the, let's say the template, the format you should ⁓ use for your insights, for example. Now, one of the templates that I came up with is I wanted the top 10 user issues that AI can find where

Talia Wolf (32:50)
Yeah.

Yep.

Yes.

Jim Zarkadas (33:14)
⁓ I wanted to list down the top 10 with popularity, how frequent it is, the size of the team ⁓ that has this issue, some customer codes to understand more, like in terms of voice of customer, how do they describe the problem? ⁓ So that's kind of one of the ways that I analyze data set, but it was one of the moments where in theory, it's very simple. You have AI, you have the knowledge in a big CSV file, how complex can it be? But it's also not.

Talia Wolf (33:39)
Hahaha

So complicated. Because you also need to know what you're actually looking for. A lot of times ⁓ we do something called social listening. So we'll go to Reddit, for example, and mine conversations there. that is where Reddit is the place where most people go to make a purchasing decision. We trust...

Jim Zarkadas (33:42)
That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah.

Talia Wolf (34:07)
Reddit and other communities more than we trust brands. So after someone has gone to your website and has seen that you have everything that they need, they go into places like Reddit or LinkedIn or Quora and so on to have conversations or at least see what other people have said about this product. And one of the things that we do is we scan for all of those conversations and then we copy all of those conversations. So it can be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of threads of conversations.

about our clients or about their industry or about the competitors. And if we just took all that and threw it into ChachiPT and asked it to say, you know, what are people complaining about? That would be very problematic because it would just say random stuff. So it took us a while to figure out, okay, what are we asking for? What are we actually looking for? How do we analyze it? And I will say that even these days,

Jim Zarkadas (34:51)
Mm-hmm.

Talia Wolf (35:03)
we're still second guessing everything that comes out from a chat GPT Gemini, ⁓ perplexity, because it's not exactly what we're looking for. And one of the things that we did, ⁓ start doing very often is say, only use this data and, ⁓ support your claim with quotes from this particular data set.

Jim Zarkadas (35:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Talia Wolf (35:29)
So in order to actually make sure that we were getting real insights, we had to say like every time you make a claim, like the biggest claim people have is X, show me five quotes from this data set that prove that this is right, that this is correct. ⁓ Because you have to know what to ask for. And you also have to make sure that AI isn't hallucinating and making stuff up. I literally had this

Jim Zarkadas (35:30)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (35:56)
thing happened to me last week where I was recording a podcast episode for my podcast ⁓ and I took the transcript and I said, ⁓ let's just see. Let's just see. mean, it never works and I waste my time, but I'm like, let's just see. So I put the transcript into ChatGPT and I said, suggest five titles for this episode. And it made up nonsense. And I was like, did you read this?

And ChatGPT wrote, you are right. I didn't actually read this. I made assumptions based on previous conversations. I will now go in, analyze. So ChatGPT was lazy and didn't feel like going through, not feel, but you know, didn't actually go through the transcript. And I'm like, and this is what people are using every, everywhere.

Jim Zarkadas (36:27)
So classic, the year right part. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Talia Wolf (36:49)
because you're just like, well, but you to be decent. So, but like, no, it's pulling all sorts of rubbish from places and it has nothing to do with your audience or your product. yeah, knowing what to ask, making sure it only pulls from the thing that you just sent it. All that really, really matters. And honestly, the more people I speak to about this, the more I hear, ⁓ it's just too much work. Like I'd rather just do it myself.

Jim Zarkadas (36:55)
Mmm.

Talia Wolf (37:18)
Which is crazy.

Jim Zarkadas (37:19)
Sometimes, yeah,

that's very true. Yeah, yeah, especially when you're an expert and you know exactly what you need to do. Sometimes you feel like, yeah, you kind of work around Tzatzipiti instead of working around like the project itself in a way. And it's a bit, I saw a tweet the other day where they were explaining why Tzatzipiti sometimes gets a bit addictive because it's always like almost there. So you're like, it's always feels like a prompt away. And like, okay, one more prompt, one more prompt. And I found myself like wasting two hours.

Talia Wolf (37:39)
Yeah.

Like

a casino.

Jim Zarkadas (37:47)
And in the

end I didn't have anything sold it. I'm like, ah, that's annoying. Like I just wasted like two and a half hours of my life and now I have to balance it out because I don't have something to sell to the team. Like I was supposed to create something in these two and a half hours. So yeah.

Talia Wolf (38:00)
Yeah, and that it

really is addictive and like a casino, honestly. And it's just like over and over and over again, you're doing all this stuff. And it's funny to me, because when I think about the psychology of that, in some ways, it feels like we've been told that AI is going to take over our job, right? It's going to take over everything. all going to be without a career within a few years. Everyone freaks out, but they keep using AI.

Jim Zarkadas (38:19)
Yeah, yeah.

Talia Wolf (38:26)
So in some way, on some level, we all want to be, you know, out of a job because we keep trying to perfect using LLMs. And it's bizarre to me because we do end up spending.

dozens of hours on something that if I just took five minutes with no screens in front of me with a whiteboard, I would get so much more out of that in those five minutes than two and a half hours of prompting AI for an almost correct answer that on any hand sounds just like everything else and everyone else and everyone saying the same stuff because AI is feeding everyone the same thing. it's just it.

Jim Zarkadas (39:07)
Yeah, exactly.

Talia Wolf (39:09)
It's always interesting to me the psychology of that where everyone is freaking out about losing their job, but on the other hand, everyone's still trying to make it work for them.

Jim Zarkadas (39:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's very true. I'm kind of going through kind of a similar journey on this, like trying to find, yeah, find like how to use AI in a meaningful way. from my experience, what I found so far is the use cases that I found to be helpful with AI are UX writing. So help me write UX copy, like micro copy in the app that is easier to understand because sometimes I can help in a write to technical copy and I like I need.

like a second brain here to kind of give me some examples. But the things like the only cases where Tadgbt or like any kind of yeah, mostly Tadgbt for me has been useful is when I'm super intentional and know exactly what I want. going to the example of the podcast, I found a tool like I found it on LinkedIn and I think you should give it a try if you want like to kind of use AI into your kind of creation process to help you kind of get some workload off. It's called Stanley. ⁓

I didn't know about this tool. It's not really popular from what I've seen. I don't see it online. And my God, it's pretty cool. Like it's, it's the only time where I was like, this thing writes like good copy. ⁓ It's for LinkedIn. So it's a LinkedIn AI code. So it's very interesting on how they think about the AI and how they've used it. They have a weekly report where it analyzes your content and then gives you suggestions and so on. That's where you get more click-baity.

Talia Wolf (40:17)
No, tell me.

Jim Zarkadas (40:37)
kind of a tips where I'm like, okay, I see your point, but I'm not that guy. I'm not gonna do this. ⁓ And on the content creation part, for me, it has worked really well because for example, the podcast, I have a problem with a very specific template. want you, for example, the title, I want you to focus on the core topic of the podcast. And I want you to write me like exactly why you believe this is the key topic and so on. Then I explain that for the intro, I want to explain why Talia is great, for example. I want to share something about your story.

and explain to people why they should pay attention and listen to this episode. And then I wanted a list of chapters where you highlight kind of the key outcome of the conversation. I really know exactly what I want, but I'm not a copywriter and I don't wanna spend brain energy to come up with the right words. And that's the gap that AI fills in for me in a way. But if I didn't know, when I tried to just come up with a post, it was the worst. It was like a AI internal. It would do exactly what you described before.

Talia Wolf (41:25)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (41:33)
From my experimentation so far, because I'm also new to this journey, that's where I've seen AI working when I know exactly what I want. Like what you said with the research analysis, give me customer codes and you provided the exact template of the outcome you're looking for that I want you to report the insights in this specific way. Five codes, the key problem, like the percentage of people that are having this issue and so on.

Talia Wolf (41:52)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (41:58)
And I feel like the big problem is that people deferring to AI as the expert, that you're like, okay, you're the smart guy in the room, like, please give me the answer, when they should actually just kind of use it to ⁓ brainstorm, prototype, kind of ⁓ increase the efficiency. Like on the branding side, with Gen.AI, it's been very interesting to prototype photos. So photography is a very expensive thing to prototype.

Talia Wolf (42:08)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (42:25)
because you need to go out there, hire people, build a studio. And with AI, it's more advanced. I cannot do it. A brand designer does this. It's very cool to actually prototype some visual ideas and test the vibes and convince other people that this idea has some potential. it's not my conclusion in the end to not make this too long is that it's not gonna really replace. It just changes workflows and gives more freedom to people that.

Talia Wolf (42:36)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (42:50)
have more of a director strategy role. Like people like you in this case, for example. But it really depends on the medium, if it's copy, if it's images, videos, and so on. But yeah, it's an interesting and complex and weird kind of time with all this stuff.

Talia Wolf (43:06)
Yeah.

No, I agree. I've what I found for me is that Chalgpt, Chlord, Propaxity, Gemini are less

helpful than using very specific AI tools to create very specific things. And it's for that reason of I don't want to outsource my brain. I am not a designer. And for me, creating visuals of what I have in my head is so hard. I'm unable and I will spend hours in Canva. I will like I just waste so much time. So for example, like I use gamma AI and I am like my

Jim Zarkadas (43:21)
Yeah, yeah.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Mmm, yeah.

Talia Wolf (43:42)
brain explodes every time because I'm like, here's all this verbal diarrhea, like all this stuff that I have to say. And this is the concept, this is what I'm trying to do. And I will break it up and I'll say like, here's what I want and these are the cards, but now please visualize it for me. And suddenly I'm like, yes, this is what I meant. Like it's great. And it's the same with Notebook LM. Like Notebook LM ⁓ will like you...

I upload my podcast episode or I upload, if I walk around, I record myself and talking about something or an idea that I have, I upload it to notebook LM and notebook LM will create a slide deck. I don't actually use that slide deck, but the visuals that it creates for me, it really ⁓ complements what I'm missing. I'm always missing on my end, a visual representation of what I'm trying to say. So I have all this stuff in my brain. I have no idea how to show it to people.

Jim Zarkadas (44:32)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Talia Wolf (44:38)
And that is where I love AI, because I'm like, yes, thank you. Because even explaining this to a designer would take a million years for me. So just having concepts and like, hey, designer, like on my lovely team, here's what I'm trying to create. And they will make it better and they'll, you know, make it actual usable. But it's so good. mean, it's just those are the things that I love. But it's that point of

Jim Zarkadas (44:47)
Exactly.

Exactly.

Talia Wolf (45:04)
Use your own brain and then use AI as a tool to help you amplify whatever it is that you're trying to make.

Jim Zarkadas (45:12)
Yeah, 100%. And I feel like you nailed it on the part that you said that in the end, the specialized tools are the ones that can actually create value because they're problem focused. They're built around a very specific problem and not a catch-all kind of a product where it's like, hey, it's a very smart product. It's gonna solve everything. Nope, it's not. It's not gonna do it. So yeah, these are some really good examples. And one key comment from my side, I'm curious like how you feel on this one as a service provider yourself as well is that.

people don't just pay for the expertise, they pay also for transferring the responsibility to you. So what I mean is I'm letting design for ZenMate, for example, right? And one of the key values, like I've been, this whole AI and the fear of I'm gonna be relevant in like five years has really helped me to squeeze and understand like what is the actual value that I produce? Why do people pay me and my team? And one of the things is that they don't have to worry about design. They're like.

You care about design, you study design all day, you love branding and colors and all these beautiful things and UX. You spend your whole day reading about this. I will never reach your level, but I want this level of quality. So I'm outsourcing the responsibility to you, and now you're the one that should feel stress about design. You can use AI, can do whatever you want, but you're responsible for this. like on the example that you said, yeah, exactly. And ⁓ what you said on the...

Talia Wolf (46:28)
That's an emotional trigger.

You

Jim Zarkadas (46:33)
⁓ on notebook elements I want with the design team, before AI, you wouldn't really hire a designer because again, it would be like too expensive for that. It wouldn't be as important to actually go and find a designer and it would also take a lot of time. And now it actually gives more creativity to people that wouldn't really use somebody ⁓ if AI wasn't there. And if you have the resources and the capacity to use a designer because you have so many presentations to make, let's say, then they still get the dope in a way. Like you still need a designer.

but they can like the pricing is gonna change. So if we take the example of LinkedIn, people have been charging, let's say three, $5,000 per month for writing five posts per week on LinkedIn. Like from what I've seen, for example, with AI this becoming cheaper because you can create more, but this doesn't mean they become irrelevant. It's just the service that needs to change because now you can produce a bigger quantity and the value per post goes down, the price per post, but they don't really become relevant.

Talia Wolf (47:29)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (47:30)
the service that gets transformed into a new one. yeah, it's kind of outside of the key topics of the conversation, but it's very interesting to hear, to discuss about AI. That was one of the topics actually I wanted to discuss is to understand how you think and feel about AI and what are some workloads you have that you already mentioned. But these are my personal observations on trying to figure out what the world looks like with AI.

Talia Wolf (47:49)
You

Jim Zarkadas (47:54)
On this one, I wanted to ask you going back to the emotional targeting about the practical frameworks we could have there. So I'm a founder, I'm a SaaS founder. I believe into everything you've said, like the emotional targeting and understanding what triggers MSO one. And I described this project of onboarding improvements, right? That we need to improve retention within the first three months. How would you approach it? Of course,

Like it's not as easy as, okay, you're do guys one, two, three and problem is gonna be solved. I don't expect like this one. It's not as simple, but based on your book and like your experience, what are the first like five things or three things that you would do? ⁓

Talia Wolf (48:33)
So in my book, Emotional

Targeting, I do actually talk about retention a little there because I think one of the most important things is whenever anyone asks me about the problem that they have, I say research. And that's really annoying because people want like specific like, do this, change that. But honestly, the most important thing to understand is the why. And if people are churning within three months, I think you said,

Jim Zarkadas (49:00)
Yeah,

yeah.

Talia Wolf (49:01)
One of the first things I would try and understand is what are they doing in those three months that they don't need to do after. And a lot of products I feel, and from my experience I've seen, are products that people use.

a certain time amount a year, like they don't actually use it all the time. Some products are products that are like, periodical, some are for very specific teams, some are for, just need to get this job done, I just need a report, I just need it for the holidays. And one of your goals is to understand...

what happens after three months, like what is actually happening during those three months and try and figure out if they don't do that afterwards because it rarely is a price issue. It rarely is a features issue, especially if they've been paying for three months. Mostly it's going to be, I was doing this thing for a certain amount of time. I'm not doing it anymore. Of course it's going to be billed, they're like, I don't want to pay for this anymore.

but usually it's gonna be something like, well, I don't do this as much, or I only needed it for then, or I found something else that's better, or, so there's all sorts of different pieces there, and that's where I would go. I would try and research that point of what were they actually doing, so that you can use of data, right, within the dashboard of like, okay, what are the specific features they were using, how many times did they log in, how many times did they book things, what were they doing within the product.

Then I would have an interview and say, what were you doing? Asking them the same questions to see if it resonates of what you're seeing in the dashboard. And then I would also ask, are you not doing that anymore? And just leave it. Like just, you know, close my mouth and wait to hear. And a lot of them will say stuff like, no, we still, no, I don't, yes. And just trying to figure out like what happened in that point.

Jim Zarkadas (50:47)
Hmm.

Hmm

Talia Wolf (51:00)
Sometimes it's the smallest technical thing and sometimes it's a big thing that we need to understand like, whoa, people only need it for X or, and it can even change the way you do pricing, right? Like I, we had a client that was a regular SaaS company that we paid monthly for something. And then when we did the research, we were like, no, people only use this on a quarterly basis because they're using this product to create reports.

Jim Zarkadas (51:25)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (51:28)
and they don't use it daily, they don't want to spend so much money. And what we did with this client is we switched over to credits, a credit system. so companies, these brands would buy, these users, sorry, would buy credits for the entire year, and then they'd go in quarterly whenever they were ready, and they would use their credits to create that report, and they would leave. And then we wouldn't actually measure how much time they spent in a product. We'll measure

Jim Zarkadas (51:37)
Mm-hmm.

Talia Wolf (51:57)
How many credits did they use? How can we get them to buy more credits? What are things that they need? So it's a shift in understanding, do people even need to be using your product after three months? If they do, or can they do it with something else? ⁓ Just as an example, ⁓ there are many companies like Fiverr and Upwork that are...

Jim Zarkadas (52:08)
Hmm.

Talia Wolf (52:21)
⁓ based on the fact that you hire a freelancer through their platform to get something done. And in one of the competitors that we were working with, we noticed that the first sale is the easiest one, then the second one works well, and then the third one, there's none. And when we did the research, what we understood, which is obvious, right, when you think about it, they just removed the platform.

They were like, I don't want to pay this company more money. I will just chat to this person on WhatsApp or on Facebook or LinkedIn, and we'll just do it and I'll PayPal this person. So understanding the blocker to me is more important. I don't know if this answered your question, but that's kind of how my brain works.

Jim Zarkadas (53:01)
No, that's great. Yeah.

No, that's fully useful and great. And I want to ask you on the research part. So one thing that I find really fascinating, I think Gia from Forget the Final is talking about this idea. Like it's a term that I heard from her operationalized customer research, which essentially means like building your processing systems in a way, the way that I understand it. And I'm curious for you, like what are some, you can call them feedback loops or personalized research, like how...

Talia Wolf (53:24)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (53:31)
What are some ways to do the research? I'm just gonna bring some very quick examples. The new customer survey that we created based on your surveys is something that we send to every new customer. So now it's part of the process of the product experience. Every new customer gets the survey within the first two weeks. Reality is that not many people answer this, but still like the ones that do, we get some beautiful insights in there. It's I think the most useful survey we have so far at KnowledgeHall.

⁓ And yeah, we have also the turn survey when they're canceling their account, they can give some feedback, but we found out for example, they're already done. Sometimes they're also pissed, like especially at SendMade, they don't wanna give you feedback. They're not gonna spend like five, 10 minutes typing the why. Sometimes they're gonna even swear and be like, hey guys, like screw you, like I just wanna cancel my account, stop asking me questions. So finding the right moment, the right medium that takes the right amount of time for them to...

to provide you the info and everything is also an art from what I've seen. Understanding that specific audience and defining the right way to ask feedback in the right time. So I'm curious from your experience, what are some ways you do research?

Talia Wolf (54:41)
Very similar to what you

just said honestly like thank you surveys visitor surveys customer surveys We have feet we build in feedback loops into every you know every client project we work on so we set up a reoccurring Visitor survey we set up a thank you Survey so on the thank you page once someone has converted. We have a one question that we ask everyone We have the customer survey that we will send out within X days of someone becoming

customer and we also make sure that we are segmenting them out into very specific ⁓ audiences. But those are kind of the big things. We also ⁓ have tried to kind of systemize interviews into that ⁓ and the other thing that we'll do is also ⁓ use customer success chat.

demo calls, sales calls, stuff like that in order to constantly review and check and get more insights.

Jim Zarkadas (55:43)
got it yeah yeah that's right I'm typing some notes on the same time based on things you're saying yeah that's that's very useful yeah and ⁓ let me see for the I'm looking at the time we have around like six seven minutes from from the time that we booked and I'm thinking what would be my next ⁓ question so

Yeah, you had one actually that you mentioned when we discussed about interesting topics. I think we could go into that, ⁓ which is CRO and buying journey in this new era of AI. So ⁓ how the role of CRO is changing dramatically and how AI is impacting buying decisions. I'm curious to hear more about what you've seen because we're more on the product design, you're really into marketing and buying journeys and so on. So I'm very curious from you as an industry expert, like what have you seen in terms of...

Talia Wolf (56:28)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (56:32)
behavioral change from people.

Talia Wolf (56:35)
Honestly, what I'm seeing right now is that over the years, CRO, conversion optimization has always been about optimizing the website and the assets that you own, ⁓ landing pages, website, emails, ads, ⁓ but...

I kind of spoke about this before, the decision of whether to buy something or not isn't being made on the website anymore. Once someone has gone to your website and confirmed that you're in the right pricing bracket, that you have the right features, they've made sure that like, yes, this is for people like me. What they do is they go to third party platforms. They're going to LinkedIn, to Reddit, they're going to YouTube, they're going to Quora, they're going to Facebook groups to figure out if this is a right decision because

they trust the community more than they trust the brand. And that means that there are conversations happening there that you need to optimize for. So as a conversion optimizer, you actually have to be everywhere in order to optimize that narrative. That's where emotional targeting comes in and why it's so important because you have to understand who your customers are, why they buy from you, what they feel, what their pains are, what their concerns are, how they want to feel about themselves.

And then use that to start optimizing the narrative within these communities. You have to be where your customers listen to podcasts. You have to be reading the blog posts that they are reading on different blogs and you have to contribute there. the reason I say all this is because more and more people are using AI to ask questions about pains that they have, how to solve them or about specific brands. And AI isn't just pulling information from your website and your

homepage, it's pulling from all over the web. And if you're optimizing that narrative across the web and being everywhere, then you have no real way to influence LLMs. You don't know what it's going to be telling buyers about you. So your role as an optimizer has to be beyond the website. It has to be about optimizing the story and the conversation everywhere.

Jim Zarkadas (58:20)
Hmm

Yeah, yeah, that's a very good one. That's a very good one. And also like what you said with the AI that people actually go through conversations asking for problems and so on. It's something I find myself more and more into to actually instead of like Googling, I still Google sometimes, but such activities usually where I do my research and questions because I can always do follow up. I don't have to just open pages and then try to figure it out. It's very interesting like how people start searching products, right?

now or they describe the problem and everything. If somehow we had access to these conversations, it would be so cool like to really understand what they're going through in a way and what they're trying to achieve. Cool.

Talia Wolf (59:24)
Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (59:28)
Thanks for the insights on this one. And the last question that I have from my side, which is always like the question that I ask every guest is, what is your favorite SaaS product at this moment or software product could be an app on your phone as well that you feel excited about? Like that when I ask you, it's like one of the top three products that come to your mind and why is it? Are you in love with it?

Talia Wolf (59:54)
would say that Speechify is probably my favorite right now. Speechify is a product that you upload any content to and it will read it back to you.

Jim Zarkadas (59:58)
Hmm, speedify.

Talia Wolf (1:00:05)
So I'm very good. I love listening to stories. ⁓ I love, it's harder for me to read long pieces of content and blog posts and articles. So I upload them into Speechify and Speechify will read it back to me. And I noticed that when I use Speechify, I can almost double the speed and I will listen and hear and take in a lot more than when I'm trying to read an article. So anytime I'm trying to study something, if I need to like get through tons of

Information or research I have that I use speechify. So that's one of my favorite tools right now

Jim Zarkadas (1:00:43)
That's a very cool product. I had no idea about like I'm taking the landing page at the same time. It's very interesting. It's actually the value that it creates is the thing that gets you more most excited on this one, the actual impact. ⁓ Yeah, I also have a really nice landing page by the way. Okay, thank you. I'm gonna go deeper into it. So yeah, thanks a lot for today. It's been a really, really interesting.

Talia Wolf (1:00:46)
Yep.

Yeah.

Jim Zarkadas (1:01:06)
conversation and honestly, really hope we're gonna somehow gonna work together in some kind of project. I feel like we have many values and mindset in common. So I feel we could do something really cool there.

Talia Wolf (1:01:18)
amazing.