The Power of ChatGPT: Understanding its Impact on Business (Episode 160)

Transcript

Jeff Bullas

00:00:04 - 00:01:37

Hi everyone and welcome to The Jeff Bullas Show. Today I have with me, Matt Swalley. Now, Matt is co-founder of a company called Omneky. Now, Omneky is a very interesting product and platform and we're gonna dive into that later. But just a little bit about Matt before we actually start chatting about what he's doing.

So, Matt is the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Omneky, an AI marketing platform that generates and optimizes personalized ad creatives to increase sales across all digital touchpoints. Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 and DALLE-2, to which I've been playing with as well and it is fascinating, and their own proprietary algorithms, Omneky’s platform empowers customers to analyze the design preferences of all customer’s target audiences and manage thousands of AI-generated ads designed to drive conversions for each customer profile.

Matt, before he leaped into the void of the startup world, spent 13 years in strategic leadership experience at AT&T where he specialized in corporate strategy, business development and sales team growth. As a member of the corporate strategy team, he led very strategic initiatives and Matt was inspired by what AT&T was doing and checking out said I need to go and do a startup myself, found a co-founder and here we are today.

Welcome to the show, Matt, it's an absolute pleasure and I'm really looking forward to hearing what you're doing at Omneky.

Matt Swalley

00:01:37 - 00:01:45

Jeff, I am so excited to be here and hello to all the listeners out there. Great introduction, you got the name right, Omneky.

Jeff Bullas

00:01:46 - 00:02:25

That's good. So Matt, you tell us a little bit about how you came to leap into, what can be a very scary place of being in a startup as a co-founder and what led you to step into that and I'm a bit of a Joseph Campbell fanboy and obviously you've had a call, okay, just like Star Wars, that call to actually go and do something amazing. So how did this all happen? Tell us about AT&T and what you were doing there and then how you came to be a co-founder of Omneky.

Matt Swalley

00:02:26 - 00:05:04

So I started in AT&T in the late 2000s, those days were the days when you were picking up the phone to make a sale, so a lot of my early days were carrying a bag making over 25,000 cold calls in my day, meeting with thousands of customers, driving to their offices and then I lead sales organizations doing that same thing. We're selling technology applications, mobile applications at the time, like GPS tracking, cell phones, wire line solutions and I moved all around the country and thought I want to take this corporate path. So at Dallas' AT&T headquarters, I made this goal that I'm gonna get to Dallas headquarters and I'm gonna get, you know, climb the ranks and help start making decisions at AT&T someday. So I started out in the West Coast and then moved to the Dallas headquarters where I was Chief of Staff for the global business office that ran like the multibillion dollar AT&T segment that actually had a team in Australia. We had about a 30 person team in Sydney as well. And so I got some big picture leadership experience there and during that I was like, I want to get into corporate strategy. Every decision is made with financial analysis. Of course, it was a tough, at that time at AT&T, you know, revenue was at a slight decline. So everything was financially driven, every single decision, I was like, I'm gonna get into corporate strategy, went back and got my MBA and then was able to do a couple of years of actually doing board of directors materials, go to market with a five year outlook. And I started looking at these really cool innovative companies like where can we go invest to catch that next billion dollar wave. And it was 2021 at this time when I joined Omneky and it was a bullish market, valuations were crazy. It was like you went from 2020 where it was like circuit breaker crash, circuit breaker crash like from the US stock market from COVID and then 2021 was the polar out, it was the absolute opposite. I was like I really want to get into a place where I can see growth and be part of that. And so I started looking for a leader that can lead a company to that next step and like Omneky’s goal is to raise an initial public offering at some point. So I found Hikari Senju who is a Harvard computer science grad who had already started building Omneky in 2020. It was like our first launch of our generative product. Like he knew AI was going to continue to get better and the key to all using AI was actually data. So you get these inputs from actual performance data and then you can use that to generate better performing creative. So I joined Hikari, he brought me on as employee number three, full time employee number three. And now we have about 70 total employees and 25 full time.

Jeff Bullas

00:05:04 - 00:05:56

Yeah. So it's really fascinating you talked about data in other words to drive financial decisions and any company now that isn't using data to make a decision whether you lean in or lean back is really doing themselves a disservice. So data is very important but the other thing that's really exciting is that we are now leaning into a whole new world of AI. And you've mentioned generative AI which and maybe you could explain what generative AI is to our listeners because I think there's general intelligence AI and then there's generative AI. Tell us what generative AI means.

Matt Swalley

00:05:56 - 00:06:33

Sure. So what generative AI does is it learns from the public domain, it learns from all this information out there. It can create copy or images or getting close to videos within the next 12 months of what it's learned from what's out there and it can do it very very quickly. And what's so exciting about it is that you used to be able to, you can take the data like what are the key words or images or concepts you want to go test and immediately you can create something that gives you a visually an idea of what you can go, do, you know, it's it's getting better. It's not perfect by any means today but you can actually like with a click of a button, go create something.

Jeff Bullas

00:06:33 - 00:06:53

Yeah, exactly. So you can do that with visual images and also do it with text and you got DALLE, D A L L - E. And also got ChatGPT, DALLE is the visual one, isn't it? And visual AI, generated AI and ChatGPT is a text based AI and they're both generated, aren't they?

Matt Swalley

00:06:54 - 00:07:34

Right. Yeah they're both generative AI. So ChatGPT is the most recent version by OpenAI. They had GPT-3, GPT-2, GP-1 at some point and it just keeps getting better, you feed it some information and it's gonna write you headlines for ads. It's gonna write you every aspect of it and you can just continually go take that and feed it right into an image generator. So before you had to go think of copyrighting and then go use it, you know, go design it out on a canva or canvas. Today, you can go create the copy and headlines with natural language processing, plug that into image generation. All of a sudden you have created an ad in less than 30 seconds. It is wild.

Jeff Bullas

00:07:35 - 00:07:41

Cool. So that is wild. And so is that creating just a static image ad? Is that what you're saying?

Matt Swalley

00:07:41 - 00:08:02

Yes. Today it's static images or what you can do. But by next year, there'll be videos and people are already beta testing different things that you can create certain types of natural language processing videos that's learning from the domain and it's piecing together in like different formats of ads and video. It's just not full AI yet. It's like in between.

Jeff Bullas

00:08:02 - 00:08:11

Right, yes. But what we're finding is generated AI that almost feeds on itself. So almost the growth is accelerating, isn't it?

Matt Swalley

00:08:12 - 00:08:58

Right, every single day these new open source applications are being used by millions. I think I actually saw ChatGPT was the fastest ever user growth for any like, anything. So all these people are discovering business problems in real time. Like they're figuring out, oh, what can I put in your, what streamlines and then they're sharing it and crowd sourcing it to the, to everyone. And then people are building off the business problems, which like, I saw one interesting one is some of the natural language processes are not site sourcing where they're getting this data from and sometimes it can be semi inaccurate, which is why it's good to have a human in the loop. But someone built a tool that then goes and figures out who the sources for this content that was created. Things like that overnight.

Jeff Bullas

00:08:58 - 00:11:06

The interesting thing you mentioned there was about the fastest growth platform in history. I'll put a number on that because I've been writing about AI in the last couple of months and it hit 100 million users in two months. It took TikTok 18 months, it took Facebook five years. That's to put some perspective on how this has just exploded into human consciousness around the world. For me, when I discovered social media, I was fascinated and I remember having many conversations around the dinner table saying why should we bother with social media? So what's going to change the world? Why? And I went well because, well it's connecting the planet. It's almost like connecting the world brain. We can have conversations then we had the mobile phone, the smartphone enabled you to do that, not desk bound, but anywhere anytime and everyone became a publisher. So I really think that AI and ChatGPT is the beginning of the most exciting thing to happen in a couple of decades. That's the way I see it and I believe you guys are obviously thinking the same so it's exciting times. I've lived through many technology bumps or shifts. I started technology industry in with PCs started turning up instead of mini computers and mainframes and I was excited then. I won't say how long ago that was because that would reveal my age, but it's a long time ago.

So Matt, so talk to me a little bit about one hand, where did the idea come from to work in this particular niche? And then the next question to ask is tell us a bit more about the OpenAI, how you can plug into it because it's basically available to everyone and get into that. But number one, where did the idea come from to actually play in generative creative ad production across platforms. Where did the idea come from?

Matt Swalley

00:11:06 - 00:13:42

Sure. So our founder Hikari is, his dad is a famous artist in Japan, so he was a Harvard computer science grad, sold his first company, was an educational technology startup and he ran, he was head of growth at this ed tech company, right. And so he started realizing what performance marketing was and how it can be a growth lever. And his dad was a famous artist in Japan and his grandfather was an IBM executive. So he combined this design and art with tech. Like he saw this vision back in 2018 was actually when he started thinking of the idea of the company and he started playing around with the data a lot like what insights can you get from the actual advertising platforms, right? There's so many personal information issues with having to keep that within the lockbox. But using computer vision was the first technology there from an analytics standpoint. If you can tag all the different elements of a creative, what's the copy? What's the value prop? What are the colors? All these different elements and then you can run a regression analysis or analysis across a huge population or sample of ads and start to make commonalities of why people are clicking, why people are buying, why the platforms are distributing ads. And that was step one of Omneky and then step two as these other generative AI components were getting started was you can take those inputs like the colors or knowing that Jeff likes golf for example and you can go create these things or the copy at the time as we were using GPT-2 is you could go right, really really quickly, show an ad creative in in minutes that takes brand assets and copy all on our platform was step two and then it continued getting better last year, I joined the team in August 2021 and as generative AI kept improving. The good thing about a startup that large companies can't do is we can integrate things so quickly, like we stability, opened up an open API and we built out the integration over a weekend and by monday, our customers were beta testing image generation within our platform and large companies don't have that flexibility because they have huge regulations. They're worried, they have to worry about so many different things, but that's why startups are so successful is they can go to market so quickly and that was really our first image generation and then now we've partnered with OpenAI, you asked for a number of different integrations and we'll continue to build that out. But part of the beauty of building our own plus open sources, we are, we can go anywhere we want. As long as there's an open API integration, we can go test whatever products we want and potentially build them in.

Jeff Bullas

00:13:43 - 00:13:51

So is OpenAI makes its access to its platform free. Is that what you're saying?

Matt Swalley

00:13:51 - 00:14:34

They, well, all the most of these platforms start as a beta testing and it's kind of if you're on the list at the beginning and know someone or like are connecting the community, you can get on the beta testing and that was like that cool, initial factor when DALLE got launched, Jeff. I know you heard people, you saw every single person posting on twitter and everything like these images they created that first week and like everyone was like holy cow and then more people gain access to it but you pay as that product develops, you start paying for usage, there all usage based. So the more content you create, the more you're gonna pay. So as your business scales it becomes very profitable for those companies but before that it's really a cool factor.

Jeff Bullas

00:14:34 - 00:14:38

Right. So anyone can basically get access to it as long as they pay for it, is that correct?

Matt Swalley

00:14:38 - 00:14:59

That's right for those. The differentiation is how you can build on top of it though, like how can you continually build out your own technologies that are filtering out this data or bringing in data and then you making the tools work better for the end users, that’s what I’m gonna say.

Jeff Bullas

00:15:00 - 00:15:16

Okay, so in terms of what APIs are you plugging into, how many different generative AI tools are you guys currently plugged into? You've mentioned DALLE and you mentioned ChatGPT or OpenAI. Where else are you playing?

Matt Swalley

00:15:17 - 00:16:12

We're also using a stability AI from time to time. It's another image generation and we're testing at least 10 other tools as they go to market. We're testing them. So we recently closed out of funding around at the end of last year, perfect timing hired on some amazing some of the best AI data scientists and engineers in the world. So they're testing all these tools and then we're building our own internal technology as well. Right now we're releasing products every month but we're testing probably 20 different tools right now across copyrighting image and video creation that we all pieced together to streamline the entire creative process and take something that used to take people months down two hours, right? Our current like, from onboarding a customer right now to launching a full creative campaign for someone with low brand assets is under like seven days right now. We deliver a first set of creative within 3-4 days they used to take people months.

Jeff Bullas

00:16:12 - 00:16:56

Right. So okay, so we've got creative and you mentioned the fact that we need, you need to plug humans into the process into the system because generative AI really, you know, I remember I plugged in a question about who was the scientist that got ideas by dropping a ball while I'm about to go to sleep. ChatGPT got it wrong, I got Buckminster Fuller and instead it was actually Edison. So I, we're gonna verify and I believe so this gets where it gets really interesting. So humans aren't perfect but they're scaled by machines. So tell us how the process works in terms, whereas the human involved in this as opposed to the machine and I'll be interested in that.

Matt Swalley

00:16:56 - 00:17:39

Right. So we have a generation tool that uses these different tools to generate creative and then we have an approval workflow tool for our customers. So we deliver all the creative on this really easy to use canvas where the customer comes in multiple contacts from the customer coming there, they review, they can annotate directly on the creatives themselves for changes. So this is one level of approval. But Omneky has a human as well, a customer success person that helps manage the account that goes back and make sure all this information is accurate. So there's like two levels, so Omneky has a level of human overview and then the customer also has to review everything before it goes live.

Jeff Bullas

00:17:39 - 00:17:57

Right, okay. So in other words, they can check the facts going what's spat out about our company is actually true. It doesn't get to the essence, whatever it is, whether it's persona or whatever. But so the human gets involved, making sure as a final check and also in the process to make sure it's accurate as possible.

Matt Swalley

00:17:57 - 00:18:27

Yes. And that's a definite necessity today. And you know, I was thinking I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's pretty scary for younger people in the world right now, right? I mean they had google search a couple years ago. We were able to find information when we were like, when I was younger we would read and we have to go write it down and then use the computer kind of but I had to actually go learn everything. So it's kind of scary like how information can get potentially misconstrued right now with people just using these tools and then believing what they are.

Jeff Bullas

00:18:27 - 00:18:55

Yeah, it's almost like I was horrified about five or six years ago when I got interviewed about young people are now getting their news from social media and I went you've got to be joking, really? So you believe everything that's on Facebook? I said that is a scary place to be. I guess what it's been revealed to be true because people believe everything on Facebook like and then the machine feeds them bullshit and lies.

Matt Swalley

00:18:55 - 00:18:56

Similar stuff over and over.

Jeff Bullas

00:18:56 - 00:20:08

Yeah, and then you get the bad actors go, yeah, we can have a lot of fun with this, we can actually take people down rabbit holes because they think Facebook is a God, no it's not. It's actually run by some good people and some bad people. Any text used for good and evil dynamite was used to actually demanding, but then it got used in industrial killing. So nuclear power, same deal. So and it was gone, we shouldn't be using this because it's gonna be used for evil and going, well that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, frankly, isn't it? So, you're in a very exciting space because I don't know if you can hear but I'm slightly excited about the space as well and my partner is sort of starting to put her fingers in her ears. Now I open my mouth because I'm talking about ChatGPT and AI. So currently up to 70 employees and just what, about 18 months, isn't it? Something like that. And how much funding have you currently raised to accelerate this growth into the next biggest evolution in tech?

Matt Swalley

00:20:08 - 00:20:26

We've raised a total of $10 million right now. So we went from a very lean team a year ago where, when I took over it was founder led sale 100% he was running the engineering team that I took over all the sales and now we're to a point, we have a team of people and tried, you know, starting the steps of scaling.

Jeff Bullas

00:20:26 - 00:20:34

Right. So what's your target market? I'm interested in that because it's maybe not mara and power, it's more enterprise, is that correct?

Matt Swalley

00:20:34 - 00:21:29

So we have a number of different ideal customer profiles. Right now we've had the most success with growth stage companies, one million to a hundred million in revenue companies that have a team, but it's a lean team, they can be a direct plug in for immediate growth. We can help generate tons of different creative and also pull out insights into what value props are resonating for each of their customers. We've done really well in SaaS, e-commerce, fundraising actually so crowdfunding digital ads to drive people to invest in your company is another vertical we've done along. And then now we're starting to get some enterprise, some very great enterprise interests like this past week, I've met with five of the largest companies in the world, which is really exciting. They're starting to come to us with all the generative AI, all the generative AI hype.

Jeff Bullas

00:21:29 - 00:21:42

Right, okay. So in terms of the pricing product model, are you doing a project by project pricing in other words, or are you doing a subscription based model? Which way you’re leaning or you’re doing both?

Matt Swalley

00:21:43 - 00:22:49

So we have two different pricing components and it's really a software as a service based. So one is a platform fee that gives you access to the analytics tool. So one thing Omneky does, I didn't mention is we provide a single place to view your performance across all channels. So Meta, Instagram, Google YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Cora, LinkedIn. And then with that you get creative insights like what are we seeing that should impact your results, like what colors, what video playing, things like that. So that's one tool and then also the generative components. So our customers can go concept, test all these different creatives, use the copyrighting tool. The second component is a creative as a service subscription. So based on the number of channels that we're doing work for. So like Meta, Instagram's one channel. TikTok would be a second channel. We charge a monthly subscription to deliver you a full set of finished creative ads in multi variant forms. So images, short form video, long form that immediately get launched into the market. And then we're collecting data and iterating every week for the customer. So more of a full service, mid market play.

Jeff Bullas

00:22:50 - 00:23:24

Okay, so creative as a service, which I've heard before. So in terms of, basically any startup is into races. Number one, there is what we call the technology arms race. And then the other one because you've got other ones breathing down your neck or nearby or being in the market a while and then you've got the actual market share arms race, which is a sales race. So where do you think you're playing best or can you tell me a little bit about both of those and how you're leaning into that?

Matt Swalley

00:23:25 - 00:24:20

Yes. So one of the best parts about Omneky is, I know you're very familiar with social media marketing, Jeff is we've been running our own ads and using our own product for multiple, a couple of years right now. So right now we are generating a crazy amount of leads from digital marketing plus PR so we are growing market share through running digital ads and bringing people to Omneky, running a lean sales team right now because like I mentioned back in the day, I ran an outbound sales team where we were calling and emailing people. Today, you can run digital ads, reach millions, they come to you and then you figure out how to further increase conversions down the funnel. Like how do I perform better, how do I give a better demo? How do I keep the sale moving forward faster? Like that's really where we're moving as quickly as possible right now is fine tuning those other emotions and then figuring out who exactly is our ideal customer profile and where we should not stray out because it's distracting us.

Jeff Bullas

00:24:20 - 00:25:06

And here's the thing about marketing is that you can have all the best ideas in the world, how you think the customer's gonna react, how much they're going to spend. But once you go to market, the market will either hit you in the face or will embrace you and you can spend a lot of money on advertising and it's just going to continue to be a bottomless void money pit. So, but you're selling there may be a higher ticket item, aren't you? In terms of monthly subscription access to creative resources, humans in the right. So are you constantly analyzing your data to work out what works and what doesn't so you can make sure that you make you spend a dollar and get $2 back?

Matt Swalley

00:25:06 - 00:25:53

Yeah. So that's the beauty of having data that's performance driven in real time. So we're constantly looking at that data. And then also the benefit about a startup is we're very dynamic with our pricing as we continue to launch product features and stuff. We can move really, really quickly with our pricing right now. We are a great price value. I don't know any other company I've seen out there that has a price value of what we offer right now with creative even a customer success wrapped, full analytics and generative AI, no one else is in the ballpark for that. Now, we're trying to find the right medium of finding as many customers as we can, but also, you know, being a very profitable company.

Jeff Bullas

00:25:53 - 00:26:41

Right. And you're and exactly. So you're also trying to find out what is your, is it gonna be enterprise? You can chase the bottom end which are the ones that don't have money. Or you can chase the top end, the ones with money maybe sits in the middle. But I'd be interested to see how you go over time in terms of what, where you land or whether there's two or three markets. And so yeah, it's really fascinating in terms of using data to try and work out who's my customer, how much will they pay? What works and what doesn't, it's, and the faster you do it, the faster you learn. So yeah, so how many, now, the other thing I'm curious about is in terms of your team mix, how many of them are technologists or engineers?

Matt Swalley

00:26:42 - 00:27:00

So currently, we have about 35 engineers, I'd say. Out of 70 employees so it's about, you know, roughly half the employee size is engineers. And then the other half is sales, customer success, creative. So half.

Jeff Bullas

00:27:00 - 00:27:09

Okay, so half for each, so basically you're making sure that you're trying to win the tech race as well as the sales market share.

Matt Swalley

00:27:09 - 00:27:21

That is the most important component is building an amazing product with technology that can change the world. And, you know, our goal is to be a publicly traded company within 3-4 years, that's how we're going to do it.

Jeff Bullas

00:27:21 - 00:27:34

Okay, cool. So in terms of what's the future for you guys? So are you profitable yet? I suppose, not really. You still be burning cash, I would say.

Matt Swalley

00:27:35 - 00:28:30

So we were, before we went through our recent hiring, we were basically profitable and then, so we were bootstrapped pretty much with very low funding and we were, we had quite a bit of revenue now with our recent fundraise, we're putting it all into that engineering talent and preparing for the next, you know, next stages of growth. So, yeah, we're putting it all out there to build this company and grow as fast as possible right now. Next stages are though what you mentioned is the different products that so right now we're focused on that mid market space. We're gonna be launching a self service product for S&B’s that doesn't have as much support. It's primarily customers that would be creating the stuff directly on our platform and being able to edit it. And then today it's digital advertising. The next things we have on our roadmap are landing pages and potentially chatbots because it's so easy to integrate those and they increase conversions.

Jeff Bullas

00:28:30 - 00:29:36

Right, okay. Yeah, because generating, you know, so Ray Edwards is a copywriter that I watched his video back in December that let me start to lean into AI, generative AI and ChatGPT. Is that ChatGPT can write the copy for your sales page, you can write a copy for your emails. Now you're talking about combining that with the visual mediums, in other words feed that text into a DALLE or Stably and then generates an image that suits that as well, which is, it's a beautiful intersection of both text and visuals, which is really, really cool. So I'm fascinated by what can be done. You guys obviously are just doubling down, doubling down, doubling down and having a lot of fun. And sounds like, you know what, sometimes a startup success can come down to one thing, as long as they're doing everything else right it's just tech. It's timing. It appears that your timing might be quite good.

Matt Swalley

00:29:37 - 00:29:47

Yes. Yes. This is the like you said, the best technology in the past couple of decades potentially and we're at the right at this spot, right at the good spot.

Jeff Bullas

00:29:47 - 00:30:06

Yeah, exactly. So you could have launched this 10 years ago with the idea that AI was going to do this and nothing really came out of the box that was able to deliver until 10 years later so you could get, so you can have the idea. So the other thing I'm fascinated by and you've got a science degree background as well, haven't you? I think. Is that correct?

Matt Swalley

00:30:06 - 00:30:11

I have an MBA, yeah. So, a masters in business and marketing degree.

Jeff Bullas

00:30:11 - 00:30:19

But you didn't, did you do another before that in science? Right, okay. Alright, so.

Matt Swalley

00:30:19 - 00:30:22

Just to make sure that whatever the question is, I can answer.

Jeff Bullas

00:30:22 - 00:31:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. Actually I completely forgot what the question was now. So yeah, timing becomes almost everything. So a good idea, wrong timing, slightly not perfect idea. But good timing can be the difference between success and failure. I'd be interested in your thoughts because Google's basically got a code red on its product or code red within the company and they dragged back the two co-founders into trying to work out what the threat is to their search engine business, which is only turning over 100 and 30 billion a year in revenue and Bing is the one that's leaned into OpenAI.

Matt Swalley

00:31:12 - 00:31:22

Yeah, the attitude AI, the one that was talking that was saying, yeah, there was saying things that shouldn't really yeah, that's the biggest news on that one.

Jeff Bullas

00:31:22 - 00:32:18

Yeah, yeah, they dropped I think 100 billion in on the share market, but it's like, I'm sure it's bounced back, you know, it's like pocket change for some of these companies. But so Bing is in beta now with running a search engine that's both driven by AI which generates a longer content and then running the other one which is generating search. I've signed up for it, but I don't think I haven't checked my inbox in Hotmail yet because that's where it is. So to see how that, what I call the hybrid between ChatGPT, text long form content creation from a question versus verifiable links. On the other side, I'm interested to see what you think about how searches, what search impacts what your product development is or if it does at all. But where do you think the future maybe search is going to go because it's got the potential to upend search as well.

Matt Swalley

00:32:19 - 00:32:40

Yeah, it's going to start to really start to take over a lot of that. It's hard for, I, we have some great product that is on this Jeff that I really can't share. But we are really thinking, we're thinking that exactly out right now. Like what's the next interface to use these tools to streamline a lot of these different processes you're talking about. But it's definitely going to change though.

Jeff Bullas

00:32:40 - 00:33:21

Yeah. Yeah. So and the thing for me is that we've got a lot of very good Google, we've got a million inbound links into the blog which has happened over the last 13 years so we've got a lot of Google authority. But if links become less important, how do you actually then define search authority? And because ChatGPT doesn't use links at the moment, whereas I think Bing is trying to plug that tension between just long form content that scraped across the web and then produce a link that actually then verifies that content because ChatGPT at the moment does not produce links.

Matt Swalley

00:33:21 - 00:33:29

Right. So tracking is gonna be basically impossible and verifying information is gonna be really hard. So there's two other business problems we gotta solve.

Jeff Bullas

00:33:30 - 00:33:56

Yeah. And the other thing too, which is really fascinating is that Getty Images and others have taken some of these generative image tools to court because they're saying you've scraped our images and you just turned them into something else. But the source and the foundation of the image scraping is our images. That's gonna be a very interesting court case that's going to emerge in the next few months.

Matt Swalley

00:33:56 - 00:34:12

Yeah, a lot of those will define the future really, because I mean every single Ai generation is supposed to be unique, right? So it's not supposed to have copyright, but then you copy up, you go do things similar to it. What is the line and how do you even decide?

Jeff Bullas

00:34:12 - 00:34:45

Yeah, so it's, that is going to be very interesting, but then you're gonna have judges trying to make decisions on that, who are in their sixties, seventies and eighties maybe and don't even use technology much. How do they make smart decisions? Well, I suppose there have been around a while, but it's gonna be very interesting to see how that tension plays out as well with old school thinking, meeting new school thinking and creation, which is where we play.

Matt Swalley

00:34:46 - 00:34:52

We've seen a little bit of that in the recent crypto arena over the past couple of years and how that plays out.

Jeff Bullas

00:34:52 - 00:35:45

Yeah, I know because there's always this lag between law and, you know, prudence over the market just just plows ahead. It takes years for the market to catch up. And you know, even Uber leaned into that going, we're just gonna go in and break laws and do stuff and so by the time the laws were enacted, Uber had actually had global domination basically. So they haven't made any money yet. But that's another thing. So, but yeah, you're playing in a very exciting space and you must almost be salivating every day in terms of what is coming out from your team. And yeah, so what excites you most about this new future with AI?

Matt Swalley

00:35:46 - 00:36:32

It is so fast moving. Like you asked me, I came from 13 years at a large company to joining a startup. It is so much fun and crazy how much you can just, trying to ingest the data every morning of like, what is going on? Like reading all these new technologies being invented. I mean one of the most exciting things for me is it's gonna just keep getting smarter and like reading your brain even and then being able to design things off your brain. I mean, how many years away are we from that? Not, probably not too far. So just the race right now is extremely exciting and being in a place where you can really make an impact and move very, very quickly because it's a race and that's what excites me.

Jeff Bullas

00:36:32 - 00:38:12

Yeah. I've just been reading a book by Nick Bostrom who wrote a book called Superintelligence back in 2014-15, and it is just fascinating to have a look at. And one of the things he mentioned that's important in terms of this race and the revolution, not talking evolution here, we're talking revolution that's happening that quickly. Social media was a slow burn compared to this, this is like a forest fire. So Nick Bostrom talked about the fact that computing power is one of the things that is being brought to bear because the more data you got and the more processing power you've got and that comes down to budget and Microsoft most of its 10 billion investment in OpenAI is actually giving it access to its data centers and computing power and crunching. So the thing that fascinates me and I'd be interested in, it's completely nothing to do with it and everything to do with it is we're seeing the rise and development of quantum computing. I think the intersection of that technology with AI technology is where it's going to get really, really exciting because there was a test the other day done with quantum computers that they were able to do in 30 seconds what we're taking 2000 years on a normal computer. That's to give you some aspect of how powerful they are. The problem with quantum computing is they've got to be very cold. They can go a bit crazy if they don't, but quantum computing isn't there yet. But once that's nuts cracked and that intersects with AI.

Matt Swalley

00:38:13 - 00:38:21

Can you imagine? Is that where we're getting artificial super intelligence? But they say that's many years out. So but that starts to get.

Jeff Bullas

00:38:21 - 00:38:48

Yeah, but that's where we reached a tipping point where we actually get recursive learning which is actually the intelligence now and they've got so much processing power that's learning on learning and learning and it's done at lightspeed and quantum computing for example. So I'm so excited and scared at the same time but yeah.

Matt Swalley

00:38:49 - 00:39:01

I'm with you, yeah. We're thinking about all that right now. We're looking more at the two year timeline, you know, we're looking long term too. But we're looking at how fast we can move right now on what we're building today.

Jeff Bullas

00:39:02 - 00:39:31

So are you using generative AI to make business decisions as well? In other words are you plugging stuff in and just seeing where the where that leads is because number one you're using it to generate creative content that is successful. Both visual as well as text. Are you using it to make business decisions at all? I suppose you are using the data to learn but where's your decision making with AI as well? I've been intrigued by that.

Matt Swalley

00:39:31 - 00:40:32

We are using a lot of different things like within our our database, like our customer relationship management running different types of analysis that can help predict who's a good customer to sell to. There's one example that we're using, second is smart lead routing. It keeps getting better and better. Like we figured out this process of where you can go route leads based on customer criteria, a number of the different ones, so little things like that is we're automating AI and then the third one, I mean with business decisions is we're using our own product and that's leading to all our growth. So you could say that's our biggest growth lever by far and coming from the direct side, this is just crazy to see how valuable some people are against this, but if you build the different channels the right way, plus digital, you are bringing so much awareness to your company. And as you develop your product, it is just crazy like the amount of leads we have coming to us and now figuring out how to optimize them, like you said, timing.

Jeff Bullas

00:40:32 - 00:40:42

Yeah, exactly. So can you reveal sort of what your growth is at the moment in terms of lead gen and sales? If you can reveal any of that.

Matt Swalley

00:40:42 - 00:41:07

We are growing about three times year over year right now and that's the goal to continue that. And then our leads are around 400 leads a month right now, which is considerable. And then we're figuring out it's a lot, there's another way to use AI as we're figuring out which way, where to build our product, like you were saying about which customers based on who's coming to us. That's another way you can help find product market fit.

Jeff Bullas

00:41:07 - 00:41:30

Yeah. And that raises nothing in thinking about this too in terms of there are a lot of marketing platform, automation platforms out there. And you know they've been around quite a long time now. This like for example HubSpot which is an american company based out of hubs out of Boston. So is there any thoughts in terms of plugging into their platforms and white labeling?

Matt Swalley

00:41:31 - 00:42:11

Yeah, we have a lot of a lot of ideas on where we're gonna go next to build off the partnerships right now. It's primarily focused on the platforms because it's anonymized data and once you start getting access to those other sources of data regulation becomes much different. So we're working through a lot of that and then figuring out which ones like HubSpot is a perfect, perfect partner because it's data you have access to, yeah, targeting retargeting. Taking data into HubSpot, bringing data out to go retarget. So trust me, we're definitely thinking about that and we know how to use it internally. Just we know that some there's some challenges to some of those integrations.

Jeff Bullas

00:42:11 - 00:42:19

Yeah, because it's almost like every rabbit hole you can go down, you can do something, isn't it? So I suppose your biggest challenge would be priorities.

Matt Swalley

00:42:20 - 00:42:41

Right, yeah, as a, that was the biggest thing, as a co-founder at a startup is every day you wake up and you're like there's so many things you can do, I need an extra day and a day really, and you're like what is the number one priority that can help us today, and the rest of stuff kind of has to go on the back burner. It's like a lot of critical decision making every single day of what to focus on.

Jeff Bullas

00:42:43 - 00:44:08

And the other thing too is the thing that I think about too is that the world's continuing more and more is to be run by bots, okay, automation then you're trying to work out what's real and what isn't real. And then the crowd throws up their hands saying, oh my God, we've got some fake followers on Twitter like, really? Okay that's been happening for the last 10-12 years, it doesn't matter what you do. And guess what, that provide social proof as well. So it's really interesting to do so, I remember when I started automating using an automation tool to actually follow people, so they follow me back. I got banned from Twitter for a day. I was horrified. And also my followers were horrified by how dare you use automation to actually go on social media so you're gonna sit there every day and tweet manually, are you? Thank you very much. So that was a big thing 12 years ago in social media that it was a human social global digital network and you were screamed at if you used automation and bots and some of them were very raw back then. So, we're leaning into some really unfamiliar territory again, and this is going to be I haven't been the six sided standing up for about a decade or so.

Matt Swalley

00:44:08 - 00:44:23

You gotta be smart, that's one of the biggest things that have been learning through all this is how to filter out that rubbish that's coming, you know, that's coming and you can figure it out, like we've gotten really good at blocking certain domains in different areas to figure out how to get those to stop coming in.

Jeff Bullas

00:44:23 - 00:45:40

Yeah, and I get bots hitting my contact form on my website which fills up my legion because once you start getting a reasonable size and reasonable traffic and authority and get noticed you then become a target because you know, the bad actors are out there chasing you down because they're going, what can I discover by automating a bot on your contact form, for example. So it's yeah, I think the challenge for all of us is especially the pace of change that's happening with AI that is filtering to every corner of business, what's your priorities and I think that's the biggest thing, so look, we get on this forever, so where every time, but just, let's wrap it up in terms of where you're playing, number one, what are some tips or other startups that you've learned along the way and I know it hasn't been along for you, but what are some top tips you would say to other start up entrepreneurs or people want to start a side hustle whatever. What some of the things you learn along the way as an entrepreneur and also give us some ideas what you've learned along the way?

Matt Swalley

00:45:40 - 00:46:43

Yeah, one of the biggest things is like you mentioned is focused, so it's, it's easy to not be focused on what, who you need to sell to. So the quicker you can figure out who is your best customer set and then build your product towards that is probably one of the best ones that I saw. And then second is Be very, very dynamic in how you go, how you price and how you do these different things because you can learn so so much at an early, early stage company and then for me, oh, this is definitely the biggest one is I've met with 10 customers plus a day for a year and, you know, I hadn't been selling in years, I've been leading organizations and it's kind of hard to go back to that sales step. But you learn so much about the market, meeting fantastic individuals that are running companies, telling you about what they need. That was the most instrumental thing. I'm still like, still running a lot of sales calls right now, but you learn so much about the market and the product that I think as starting your own company you can never let that go.

Jeff Bullas

00:46:43 - 00:47:07

No. Well it's learning, isn't it? And the market teaches you can have the best business plan in the world, but the market will hit you in the face with reality and it can be just thrown out the window, you gotta tear it up and start again. So what's the sort of, for listeners, what's the sort of price point you guys start at in terms of your product?

Matt Swalley

00:47:07 - 00:47:29

We started around $2,000 a month. And that is full service for one platform. And then it increases based on the number of platforms. I mentioned one platform would be Meta, Instagram or TikTok. And then our new pricing plan in the next 90 days will be a self service that will be like an annual platform fee where you can create your own ads that will run about $2500 a year.

Jeff Bullas

00:47:29 - 00:47:59

Right, okay. In other words, the more I suppose the entry level product will be about 2500 years you're looking at more than a small to medium marketplace. Yeah, and that's what I was thinking when I brought up HubSpot because their target market is not so much enterprise as small to medium businesses. That's why they crossed my mind. So anyway, any, how can we find the key, what's the best place? Maybe we need to spell it?

Matt Swalley

00:47:59 - 00:48:20

Go to www.omneky.com. O M N E K Y.com. You can schedule a demo on our website and put that you heard on The Jeff Bullets Show. That would be fantastic. Second, look me up Matt Swalley on LinkedIn or email me at Matt, M A T [email protected] O M N E K Y.com.

Jeff Bullas

00:48:20 - 00:48:26

Great. And just one quick question before we wrap it up, where did the name come from?

Matt Swalley

00:48:26 - 00:48:57

Omneky? Oh, so there's a number of different things here. First of all, Omneky is an anagram for monkey. So if you notice our logo is a monkey. Second, it has Omni in it. What's Omni? It means across all platforms, across everything. Third, there's lots of disruptive companies with Omni in em. Omnicom for example, that we want to disrupt and then finally when you say Omneky, it makes you smile. That's an old marketing technique that our founder knew, you know, makes you smile so you're happy.

Jeff Bullas

00:48:57 - 00:49:48

Okay, cool, awesome, thank you for sharing your experiences and we are living in exciting times and the world's gonna look a little different next year and look very different in 10 years I think and I'm grateful I've got a platform to play we're very much about content and organic, but I think maybe I need to revisit my digital ad spend strategy, so yeah, so maybe we need to chat. Anyway and that's not ChatGPT so, alright, thanks mate. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and look forward to catching up in real life someday when I visit America. So thank you very much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Matt Swalley

00:49:48 - 00:49:51

Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been a pleasure.