- Duration: 20 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01J7449G9AXF5ZY33KF8V370RH (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J7449G9AXF5ZY33KF8V370RH)
Transcript
[Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah, not watching Netflix What’s that? No, what you what you focus it? What were you focusing on in the gym? You didn’t wait So you didn’t running or what? It was like that. It was like that Nice. Nice. Yeah, I’m gonna go to the gym after this actually Cool man, how have you been? [Michael Houck]: What’s going on? [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Good. Yeah, I was just wanting your quick feedback on something. So basically I I’m going you my screen to give you an update on the stage our product’s at. And I would love to get your feedback on how approach the first few months in a pre-seed company where you’re kind of a horizontal platform. So basically what we are is we’re building an intelligent document processing application. So effectively people can feed in documents of any kind from email or via API, or they can upload them directly. Our platform will parse those documents, extract the data, and then structure it. So documents that are in an unstructured form, so like a physical document that’s had a photo taken of it, or a scan, or an attachment to an email, can then be put into a structured form that you can then use to trigger workflows. So you can actually activate that data across the business. So effectively, these are the main use cases. So financial statement analysis, procure to pay, so the end-to-end of accounts payable, the end-to-end of accounts receivable, and then just generally contracts and agreements. And the table within Playmaker looks like this once the data’s been structured. So effectively, like we’ve had a whole bunch of different use cases coming in, and a lot of the use cases that we have, they then have other specific feature requests that they want that relate to their specific roles. And what we’re kind of struggling with at the moment is the dichotomy of like, Do we make our data extraction and intelligent document processing application better as a horizontal platform in that effectively a magic table that enables you to do all sorts of things with the data? Or do we go down one particular vertical and focus on, for example, a functional vertical like accounts payable, or a kind of industry vertical like manufacturing and make it specifically valuable for that. So that’s kind of like the broad question I’ll ask you initially, and I’ve got some follow-ups, but I’ll wait for you to answer that or give me your initial thoughts on that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I would throw a question back to you, which is, you know, out of the customers that are using it already, like, who are they, right? Who’s the early adopters? [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah, so a variety. So like the most interesting kind of large customers like 1K MRR, which is a private equity firm. So they sent us through like 5000 PDF pages of financial performance data of a company they were going to invest in. And they said, you know, it’ll take us like a week to find all this specific information from these documents and these pages, can you just like, you know, run through them, pick out the documents and put it in a spreadsheet so that we can analyze it. So we did that for them. So that’s the sort of bundled under the financial statement analysis piece this bit here. And then we’ve got other people who are asking us to automate their accounts payable process. So the invoice processing piece, send like hundreds of invoices into Playmaker per month and have us parse out those details. And then we’ve got random ones like waste transfer notes coming through from a company that helps analyze waste transfer, sorry, waste management of large companies like British Airways. So it’s kind of difficult to spot trends right now. So that’s why we’re like thinking, How deep do we go or do we lean into this broad platform? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, the good news is that on a long timeline, you’re going to be able to have support for both, right? You’re going to be able to maybe focus on one initially and then expand into other verticals or however you decide. Yeah. We’ll do that eventually. So I don’t personally view this. I’ve talked to other other folks who’ve had this kind of same type of issue. Personally, I don’t view this as like an existential thing. I think a lot of founders, when they’re in this position, they’re like, I need to make an existential decision. Like, is it one way or the other way? I don’t view it that way. I think it’s more like, where are you going to be able to generate the most momentum most quickly in the short term? Because if you do this really well, for one vertical, then it’s Peter Thiel, right? It’s dominate your niche and then expand from there, right? It’s replicate what you do in tangential to dominate the initial one. So that’s how I see it. If you’re not feeling the pull from any particular market though, my recommendation would be to sort of just like continue testing. And if you feel urgency to make that decision, I’d be curious why that is. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah. Uh, that’s good. That’s useful. I just made some notes. Uh, scrolling down here, what we’ve done is, is lent in a little bit to that horizontal nature because we haven’t felt the pool yet. Particularly the reason we wrote up here, like mostly these are relating to finance and logistics things is because the pool so far has been from like what I would just broadly label as financial operations. And then what we’ve done here is we’ve got like we’re spinning up about one and a half thousand programmatic SEO pages For like all the different types of documents that people might want to process So that like if you click on invoice You can then see all the details of like how and then we’ve got like an invoice specific table here plus all the different use cases Yeah, that’s that’s very smart. [Michael Houck]: This is the kind of stuff people will Google for sure. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: This is uh, yeah, yeah So we’re trying to be hyper specific. And then like a follow up question is, you know, obviously one might be easier for early traction, but like less appealing for investors, which is always quite funny. So like, you know, if we went right down like an invoice processing one, it could be like fairly good for early traction. But then I know that investors would say, well, do you know what, like there are so many accounts payable automation platforms. So like, what’s exciting. So I’m sort of thinking like some, Maybe we stay horizontal and the narrative is much more around the power of using AI to make the tabular structure we have and all the different capabilities that can be built on top of data being extracted interesting across multiple verticals, and then there’s more excitement being generated about the prospect of where it could go than just some kind of boring AP automation thing. [Michael Houck]: The most excitement that’s going to happen is if someone’s like, this tool is built for me, I need to share it with my friends who have similar jobs to me, right? If it’s just like writing general sort of AI makes productivity increase, like more efficient, whatever. If you’re just writing that, that’s something that like feels exciting, but doesn’t like mobilize people, right? So I would hesitate to say that that’s like the strongest excitement path. That usually the thing that gets people most excited to actually mobilize and use something is when it’s specifically made for them. So I think I hear your concern about the investors. What I would say, though, is that, you know, the right investors will see the opportunity where if you nail this for one either type of document set or one vertical, if you nail this for one, you can expand the technology to the others. You’ll have spent the time focused on the playbook on how to grow one of these, one of these verticals, right. And so you can just apply that to, to others. So I think the right investors would see that. But my hypothesis is that if you go the broad route, you’ll, you’ll get more investor meetings for the next round, but you might have trouble closing the deal. Whereas if you go the more narrow route, you’ll get fewer meetings, you know, people will filter you out, but you’ll probably have a higher hit rate. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah. But you think basically that it’s, it’s not, it’s not something that sort of like, I mean, it’s obviously not existential yet because our runway is still, still good, but like, uh, it’s not too much of a concern to stay broad if we haven’t yet felt a pool, because my question has been, should we force, should we just make a bet and just try and create a pool? Or should we just wait for the pool? [Michael Houck]: No, you, I mean, neither, right. You, you, you shouldn’t try to force it, but you also shouldn’t wait for it. Like you guys should be. You guys should be, I’m not sure you are right. Like you’re, you know what you’re doing with this stuff. So you’re probably in the weeds with your customers, sort of hearing what their, their pain points are, hearing how they’re using it, hearing what they like and don’t like, um, and trying to get them to share it with other people. So I would say, um, yeah, you, you want to be sort of in the middle of that. You don’t want to force something that’s not there. But you want to be like constantly on the lookout for any signs of that pull so that you can drill down and spend your time and attention on it when it pops up. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, that makes sense. And I think like what we’re now planning to do with, with where we’re at is like, we, we did a, uh, we did a product launch on like the very basic version of document AI back in June and, and got products of the day and stuff like that, which was good. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah, and now we’re at a stage where I think we’ve got something that’s sufficiently advanced from that that we can do a second one so we’re just trying to think about like if we do another one at the end of this month and just kind of jazz up effectively this sort of tabular UI and some other story about why it’s different and interesting enough, and then people can actually use the product, then we’ll also get a good guide from that launch, because we’ll have enough people using the product that we can start looking at the trends. If we say we get 200 signups, how many of them are in one or two specific use case verticals, then we double down there. [Michael Houck]: How are people finding you guys today, since the product launch, not counting the people that came in from that? [Alex Gordon-Furse]: It’s like it slowed down because we didn’t build out the website enough after it and we Because we didn’t have a huge amount of the pro actually built out We kind of mocked up a lot of it as if it existed But it didn’t really so we didn’t have to follow up and actually create it So we were focusing a lot on that. So it’s mostly been me like honestly doing network and warm intros and things like that and Hopefully the the inbound will start coming in now that we’ve got these PSEO pages up Okay, that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Are you doing any any cold emailing? [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah. A little bit of emailing plus LinkedIn outreach using Lendlist. [Michael Houck]: Got it. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I would just, you know, with something like this, you can get people sort of business email addresses and just, I would set up a ton of inboxes and just start spamming them and see where the responses come in from Cause what you, what you’ll learn is like who opens the email, who responds to the email, who actually converts and pays for the product. Like, you don’t, you don’t necessarily need to have everything nailed. It’s just, it’s just data collection. Right. So if you, if you say, Oh, maybe make a list of like, Hey, here’s our top five customers today. Here’s what sector they’re in. Here’s what job title they have, you know, et cetera. Let’s find 10,000 more people like that and set up a cold email drip campaign for, I don’t know how deep you are in the cold, but, um, Yeah, just just start reaching out to them and seeing if it takes off, right? Because worst case, you spend like, a couple hundred, maybe with with the leads a couple thousand bucks of, of trying to generate revenue from it. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yep. Okay, man. Super helpful. I know that we’ve we’ve just finished up with the 15. [Michael Houck]: But I can go a couple minutes over because I was I was late. So if you got anything else. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would say on the cold email stuff, it looks now like open and click tracking and stuff like that is kind of shutting down or it’s putting things in spam. I don’t know if you’ve seen much about that yet, or do you think that it’s still good to do that from a data gathering point of view? [Michael Houck]: No, no, no. I mean, really since the beginning of the year, I’ve sort of gone deep into this world. And we’ve built out some pretty extensive campaigns for a few different products, both for our own and for other people. And there are still ways to do it. There’s new tooling that’s kind of come up in the space that still makes it possible to scale it. So yeah, I mean, if that’s of interest, happy to help. But there’s still ways to do it, for sure. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah, OK. And do you do you just get your your data from like Apollo or something basic like that? Or do you use one of these new fancy tools like telescope? [Michael Houck]: We’ve actually built we built some proprietary stuff for our own products But for others we can you know, you can scrape from LinkedIn. You can go to Apollo. You can go to those more standard tools But there’s yeah, there’s a lot of options to get them Yeah, that’s what I generally do. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: I, I, I pull using LEM list from directly from, from, uh, from LinkedIn, which is pretty, pretty good to do. And then I can just fill any gaps using Apollo. Um, but I’m going to check, check out, check out telescope as well. Okay, man, that makes sense. I think that’s clear. Um, you’ll, you’ll see another product launch from us at the end of the month anyway. So, uh, hopefully, uh, hopefully it goes well. [Michael Houck]: Sounds good, man. I love the look of it. It seems like you guys are making progress, which is great to see. Um, keep me in the loop. Thanks a lot, dude. [Alex Gordon-Furse]: Yeah, I appreciate that. Have a good weekend.