Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Glossy Spotlight, the place where we get real about customer experience. Get ready because today's episode is gonna be a good one. Let's get into something We all care about customer experience, and there is no better to chat about this with Kate Bradley. Journeys. Kate is the real deal in the world of AI driven customer engagement and the brain behind lately, ai. Lately AI is a powerhouse that crafts social media posts that sound just like you. Keeping your data private and uniquely yours and Kate's journey is just as unique from rocking the airwaves as a DJ at Sirius Exam to scoring big wins in marketing with her own agency. Kate's no stranger to the spotlight. With her insights turning hats from Harvard all the way to Hot Street. She's not just talking, she's making waves with her approach to AI and marketing. But before we dive in and pick Kate's brain, do check out lately, ai, it's the kind of cool stuff you won't want to miss. Now let's get this show rolling. Help me give a big classic spotlight. Welcome to create Bravely Journeys. Kate, we're super pumped to have you here.
Speaker 2: (01:15)
What's up Ron? I'm so stoked to be here. And hi everybody. Hope you guys are doing pretty good.
Speaker 1: (01:22)
Yeah. So Kate, before we get into the nitty gritty, is there anything new and exciting happening at lately AI or like, you know, any cool projects you are working on that you'd like to share with us today?
Speaker 2: (01:35)
Well, I'm about to close an equity round, which that's pretty exciting for us and, um, especially in this landscape 'cause you know how hard it is to raise money right now, and we are doing it. So I'm really proud and I'm tired. It's a long, it's a long process. I need a vacation for sure. Oh
Speaker 1: (01:53)
My God. And you're joining my podcast today. I admire you for that. Um,
Speaker 2: (01:57)
Oh, thank you .
Speaker 1: (01:59)
Yeah, so talking about, um, serious a b or I guess
Speaker 2: (02:08)
Yeah, wait, sorry, talking, talking about what? Yeah,
Speaker 1: (02:10)
No, no, no. You said about, you talked about the, uh, funding grounds and I'm curious to know at which stage lately AI is
Speaker 2: (02:18)
Oh yeah, sorry. Um, so we're doing a $2 million round now, and we've raised 4.2 previously. So this is our series A actually. Um, and I'm excited because I mean, obviously we have like a lot of plans and the AI wave is here. You know, we have a 10 year lead on everybody else because we built our own language models. We're not a layer on top of chat db, chat DT or anything else. Um, and, you know, we wanna keep that lead, obviously, but we've really, it's been so weird, Ron, because, you know, suddenly everybody thinks they know what generative AI is, but we are a totally different kind of generative ai. So we've had to do like this education to help people understand, like when they come to lately, it's, you don't prompt something. I mean, that's not how we work. Um, so, so it's been kind of fun.
Speaker 2: (03:09)
And then also I think, I don't know if you guys are saying this too, but because of the way Hollywood sort of represented ai, that's the expectations that people have. They think it's all magic, you know, which is not the case. And so we often have to kind of burst some bubbles and, and help people understand sort of what they can expect and that, um, you know, how, how much the symbiotic relationship of humans and ai, like how, how great that reliance really is. Because I mean, what you want to be able to do is to analyze the results that come out and then course correct them, course correct them, because it's only a robot after all. Right?
Speaker 1: (03:53)
Absolutely. And I always said that as well to our customers with the various conversations I have with them, is that AI is only as good as you train it to be, right? Yeah. And it requires a lot of maintenance both from our side as a company and their side is clients. Um, and it's definitely not a magic, um, not at
Speaker 2: (04:14)
All. Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny how, how we ha I mean, part of that is because at least in marketing, like marketers have this really lazy, generally lazy attitude like outside of AI even, um, that we've seen over the last decade. And that is always like surprising to me. You know, when people sit down with QuickBooks to do their accounting, for example, they, uh, they understand that they're gonna be doing some work alongside the software, but when they come to marketing software, there's just this like groan of like, oh wait, I have to do something. I can't just push a button and walk away.
Speaker 1: (04:51)
No, I think that in general chat GPT and, and all that, that other tools that marketers are using, um, just made us, you know, just a bit more, I guess, much more lazier than than we were before, um, , but for
Speaker 2: (05:09)
Sure,
Speaker 1: (05:10)
As you know, it's, it's all about the prompt eventually and your prompting skills if you wish. Um, but yeah.
Speaker 2: (05:20)
Yeah. And, and interestingly, so when I was doing some research, um, for this blog I was writing, and it turns out that globally there's this massive vacuum in analytics skills. And so, like part of the laziness is around that is because people have lost the skill to, to analyze problems and point to point out problems. And that's because for the last three or three decades or so, it's been, you know, present me with solutions don't bring me problems. And so it's just something that we're not really good at doing, which is kind of a shock. I mean, think about like, even if you're, if you're watching teenagers Google something, they know they, they know that they can Google something, but they don't know what query to ask.
Speaker 1: (06:08)
Yeah. , I can, I can relate to that 10 years ago. I can relate to that. Um, , totally. Well, before we get started, um, with today's episode, I, I have to say that I went to your website and as a marketer with a few years in, in the field, over a decade, I have to say that this, this thing, that the fact that lately AI can increase visibility by a thousand percent and tripling inbound leads just, you know, it caught my eye and I was like, taking my money now, you know, .
Speaker 2: (06:44)
Um, would you like, I mean,
Speaker 1: (06:47)
Would you like to share like a recent accolade or, you know, a success story that that comes to mind? When, when I,
Speaker 2: (06:56)
Yeah, sure. Yeah. Um, and, and that's because, you know, the, it's this collaborative AI piece that we've woven into the product. Um, and also because we have a continuous performance learning loop as well, so that the results that we're generating for, for you, for our customers are always tied to analytics. And they're not out of thin air, which is the case with all other generative ai. Um, so one of our customers run is signify, which that's Phillips Electric, they changed their name Mm-Hmm. . And they wanted to do kind of a, a, a runoff. So let's do some social posts the old way, and then let's do some the lately way and see who wins. So we did 16 of each, and then it was over a 20 day timeframe, and they'd asked for LinkedIn because, um, lately we'll generate content specifically for, for different channels in the, in the unique voice of whatever brand we're working with or, or individuals who are doing social selling or thought leadership online, for example.
Speaker 2: (07:57)
So with signify, there were four wins. The first one was they wanted to, um, cut their workflow in half, which is what we did together. Now, part of that was because they were working with an agency and they were annoyed because the agency wasn't getting the key messaging correct. And so someone had to constantly rewrite, um, the content the agency was delivering. And then the second thing that they didn't like was that when the agency was writing content specifically for humans within the agency, within the, um, enterprise, they were making the human sound boring. They were making them sound like a brand, you know, had nothing to do with that person's specific audience or anything like that. So, um, don't be mad agencies, we work with agencies to, but, um, so that was the first win. The second win was time savings. Everybody knows that AI is fast, so we saved them, um, 85% of their time. They were, for example, um, taking about 60 minutes just to write one social post. But because of all the back and forth with the corrections, and then legal had to approve everything, and they weren't, because the key messaging wasn't being enforced. Um, we did it in nine seconds per post. So pretty, pretty massive time savings. Wow. And then the third win. Yeah, thank you. The third win was, yeah,
Speaker 1: (09:18)
I'm just, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a numbers kind of person and I'm doing, oh, you're a drop, drop in in terms of like percentages. And I'm like, oh my god, 16 minutes to nine seconds. Wow. Okay. Yeah, please proceed.
Speaker 2: (09:31)
Crazy. Yeah, to totally. Um, and then with the win number three was in the cost savings. So we saved them 80% of what their spend was. So they were spending about 40 grand on 200 posts, and now they can spend a little over seven grand on the same 200. So that was pretty rocking as well. And then the best part is the results. So across the board, they had asked us to do for LinkedIn, right? So we increased the rate, um, 115% impressions, 279% engagements, 152%, which is pretty substantial. Wow. But then sort of the best part was, um, we also had taken the same content and put it on Twitter and Facebook, but it wasn't optimized for those channels, and it still performed super duper well. So, um, it was just a great win. And, and it was so easy because like the work that you have to put in is not that much to get these results, but it does, it takes a mindset shift, Ron, right?
Speaker 2: (10:37)
Like we're, we're we're asking people to do is to, to basically toss FOMO out the window, which is hard for marketers because that's how they live, right? And to instead, think of what I call post mo. So post promotion, the thinking of content as it's gonna live forever because it does. And how can you leverage that? Like, like Chris Anderson is the long tail. How can you drip feed it out over time? So, and, and, and colorize it like the Gary V Method, right? So take a long form piece of content, atomize it into small pieces, drip, feed it out over time and watch it continuously drive traffic back in, um, exponential numbers. Because not only is there the quantity there, you're think you're taking one thing and promoting it multiple times, but then with the help of AI that learns exactly what your unique audience will click, like common and share, then you get the quality as well.
Speaker 1: (11:36)
And that is ladies and gentlemen, how you raise funding round in such a turbulent time, um, about things like time reclaimed. And you talked about cutting in operational costs, and you talked about increasement in engagement. And I think these are like pillars for success in, in, in, in today's world.
Speaker 2: (12:08)
You know, what's ironic is in social media platforms across the board, the least visited page within someone's account is analytics. And what's fascinating to me about that is what this is goes to the lazy point, what marketers care about most. And I, by which I mean it's usually the people executing as opposed to the bosses, the executors care about time savings, whereas their bosses care about making money. And so, like, that's something that we have to sell against all the time, you know, is time savings is valuable of course, but if it's coming at the cost of effectiveness, it's, it's garbage.
Speaker 1: (12:50)
That's so true. And what if you can combine them both, I guess this is even better. Um, yes.
Speaker 2: (12:57)
Magic, right?
Speaker 1: (12:59)
Yeah. So for our listeners, today's episode called Navigating the New Wave, Kate Bradley, journeys on Startups, gen ai, and the Future of Customer Relations. Kate, your transition from a rock and roll DJ to spearheading a generative AI startup is quite a journey. How have your experiences and the music industry influenced your approach to enhancing customer relations and messaging strategies at Lately?
Speaker 2: (13:28)
Lately? Yeah, it's all connected. Um, amazingly. And that's just because, well, in part, because I have the wisdom to figure that out, because I'm, you know, old enough to see those connections, I guess, which is important. Smart enough. Mm-Hmm.
Speaker 1: (13:41)
Speaker 2: (13:42)
. Thank you. Smart enough. I'll take that. Um, well, one of the things that I was interested in Ron with radio was the Theater of the Mind. And the theater of the Mind is when your imagination fills in the blanks, because you can't see anything, you're only listening just like this podcast. And I saw parallels between listening and reading. I was a fiction writing major in college, and I'd written hundreds, even thousands of commercials in radio. And I, I knew that in order to wield the pen well and wield the mic, well, you had to know that the imagination was gonna be filling in this, these blanks and leave room for that. And if you did it the right way, you could make the listener or the reader feel as though they had some ownership in the story that they were participating in the conversation.
Speaker 2: (14:34)
So it wasn't a one-way street anymore, it was a two-way street. And I saw evidence of this in radio because when I was in radio, there was no social media. You couldn't look people up. We barely had a website, and I don't think anyone's photos were anywhere. Um, and so, so we would play around with the Theater of the Mind all the time and, and make stuff up and really lean into it. And listeners felt as though I was speaking to them individually, personally, and that they knew me. And even my friends who I didn't know, who hadn't seen me, maybe I, you know, didn't catch up with them for months on end. Sometimes they would feel as though they knew me because they thought I was talking specifically to them on the air. And, um, I took these ideas and I started to learn more about them.
Speaker 2: (15:22)
So I, I was number one, um, at the station in North Carolina, which was very unusual for my format, which is called AAA or Adult Album Alternative. Normally we are like 20 or 21 in the market, and like rock and pop are, are number one. So my boss was like, Hey, what did you do? ? And I, I didn't know how to express it. So I started, I, I read, um, I read Daniel Levin's book called, this Is Your Brain on Music, which is about the neuroscience of music listening, which is a thick book, and I don't recommend it. I I don't think I finished the whole thing 'cause it was, it was hard to get through. But, um, what I did understand was that when your brain, Ron, when you listened to a new song, your brain must instantly access every other song you've ever heard before.
Speaker 2: (16:12)
And what it's trying to do is to index that new song in the library of the memory of your brain, right? So it's running down all this, all these instances and in a moment, and it's pulling on nostalgia, obviously, your memory and emotion to try to figure this out. And all those things are, um, cues for trust. And trust is why we buy. So now think about your voice. Your voice is, has a sound to it, like a song, like All Sound has a frequency, like a, a musical note. And when I read text, like a newsletter or a social post or an email, I'm gonna hear your voice in my head. And so it's your job to conduct that in a way where if you're clever, you're tugging on nostalgia, memory and emotion and putting trust in that mix, right? The trust is the, is the key to everything.
Speaker 2: (17:10)
And I took these ideas to a little company, you know, called Walmart and got them 130% ROI year over year for three years on their social channels, basically doing the same kind of thing. That became the prototype for what is lately today, right? So lately is designed to turn listeners into fans or customers into evangelists. It's not only just get people to do what you want them to do, which is the point of all communications, but then to also create a, a flywheel of megaphones. And I'll give you an example of, of this. So since 2019, we've only used lately to market lately and nothing else. And we have a 98% trial to sale conversion because our AI is so good at identifying exactly what our target audience will click, like, comment, and share. Right? And also since 2019, not a day has passed where someone hasn't spontaneously written something positive about us on social media. People do it all the time.
Speaker 1: (18:22)
Wow.
Speaker 2: (18:23)
Should I stop there? ?
Speaker 1: (18:25)
No, I, I think that first of all, the correlations are amazing. Um, second, I wanna touch on the Walmart thing because I think it's huge and I think we can even find some, um, you know, correlations for startups. So obviously you guys are working with Walmart and it's obviously resulted in substantial returns. Can you share like how lately unique AI driven strategies contribute to such success and what startups can learn from these experiences? You know, like to enhance their own customer relations in a way?
Speaker 2: (19:02)
Yeah. With, well, with Walmart, with that project I was looking for the pattern. So I had, it was really unique. There were, it was Walmart corporate and the Walmart Foundation and the IRS, which is the Internal Revenue Service in, in the United States. Also, Goodwill International Bank of America, and at and t and also National Disability Institute in the United States. So these were for-profits, nonprofits and government organizations. And the, the uniting factor, and this is important to sort of talk about for a second here, is that Walmart, um, was funding software to help the poor get out of poverty through income tax credits and financial education. That was the goal. So everybody wanted to help him be a part of this big project. And there were about, over the three years, there were about 20,000 individual and, and company or nonprofit marketing teams involved in the project.
Speaker 2: (19:57)
So it was a lot of people, and I started looking for the patterns, like, what are we doing well, what are we doing not well? And I saw redundancies, and it occurred to me, well, if we're doing something, if we have an advertisement in a newspaper that works really well, and why don't we take that same content and try it on social media and can we localize it? This was for a specific zip code, is there a way we could use hashtags on social to sort of, um, talk to that same group? So I think, and, and that has carried over to startup life, right? So it was the best advice. I didn't even know I was doing it. And someone had, someone gave me the advice later in startup life and said, always look for the patterns. And what's great about startup life and and very rewarding is that you can see patterns so quickly.
Speaker 2: (20:48)
Um, usually for us, if, if some customer says something to us too, maybe three times we know we need to take an action on it. Um, or at least seriously consider it because that's, that's enough proof we need. It's, it's probably happening many, many more times. Um, and there's patterns within everything. Like, like as you, you had sort of pointed out, like, I could see these correlations between the writing and the reading. Um, so that was interesting to me, you know, on the customer service side, like we, what we do, what the core of what we're we're doing is to turn listeners into fans. And so we do that as, um, the way that our employees work, that I try to first of all make my employees fans and they're really loyal and have gone to believe me, the ends of the earth. They have bled with me. They're incredible people, but their task with, with treating our customers the same way, and even customers who've left us, right? So we always say, don't make a sale, make a fan, right? Because then you get both, you get the sale and the fan, and that's the fan is forever.
Speaker 1: (21:54)
It's a great motto to live by. Totally. I think, um, your point about how that all correlates between the enterprise, um, level customers and what startups wants, it's also kind of what we try to, um, envision here at Glass. You know, we kind of realize, you know, we work with, um, with a lot of different enterprises, um, the likes of Nike and Dyson and Nintendo to name a few.
Speaker 2: (22:25)
Nice. Yeah.
Speaker 1: (22:26)
These are like amazing brands that, that, you know, constantly deliver memorable customer experiences. I think we can all agree on that, but what we have found is that startup, I, I think this gap between enterprise level customer experience and brand experience versus the startup one is shrinked as we drift into the future. And I'll explain what I mean by that. I think that a lot of startups, regardless of the verticals they operates in, um, they really want, they, they know that delivering that outstanding customer support or this customer experience for that matter, is more important than ever today. And they just gonna help them increase their revenue or, or, you know, going through different running funds or just reach their business goals revenue wise. Um, and that's what kind of what we try to bridge here as we have different plans for startups that looking to scale support and to deliver that different, um, and vulnerable customer experiences just like the enterprise level brands are doing. Um, and that's, that's kind of what we're honing in in the past quarter or a bit more. Um, and it, it works quite well, not just in terms of lead gen a lot in terms of like, um, more customers are just delivering better experiences and, you know, more startups or delivering better experiences than they used to, uh, prior to that motion.
Speaker 2: (24:11)
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. It's also because, you know, in the end you're dealing with people, not just the brand, and people are expecting the automation, the individuality, like all the things that they just experience in their life anywhere else. And if they don't get it with your software product, you know, it's, it's a big disappointment. And we've got some really nice accolades by the way we treat our customers. Meaning, you know, we know when to put on a, a jacket or when to wear a sweatshirt, you know, that kind of thing, when to wonder, have your hoodie on. But, but if you, even the way you email people, um, you know, we're always connecting on, on social with the individuals that we're working with. I personally take a lot of calls, so I don't just push them off into my sales team.
Speaker 2: (25:03)
Um, I text a lot of our customers because I can, and it's faster to get things done that way, you know, and, and so pulling down those barriers or shrinking them as you put them, I think is happening more and more. And I think it's more effective. Um, like I said, like the whole point of everything we we're doing, communication is to get people to do what you want them to do. And the, when, whenever you can shorten the distance between, um, just like tell, asking a question and getting an action or whatever, um, in any way possible, whether it's a DM on LinkedIn, like there's just, there's just more intimate without crossing any lines of course, but there's just more intimate, personable ways to do things. And like, I was just texting with Ishma, who's the CIO at Tricon Residential, which is a global, um, real estate company. I think they just got by BlackRock, bought by BlackRock, but they have like 31,000 properties. And, you know, stuff was getting with like invoicing and billing, it was getting like clogged up in procurement. And she just texted me and she's like, let's get this done. And I was like, great, let's get this done. And we took care of it in five minutes as opposed to all the nonsense back and forth over emails. Right.
Speaker 1: (26:18)
Wow.
Speaker 2: (26:20)
So yeah, it is crazy. I mean, I think, you know, on, on that note, it's because we're a small team and everybody wears a, you know, a million hats. Not to be cliche, but it of course is true, is our lines blur. I mean, I've got people in sales doing customer service or customer success. I've got my engineering team once in a while, I have to call them up to do a demo with me, you know, know, um, the ability for That's the
Speaker 1: (26:46)
Fun. That's the funding.
Speaker 2: (26:46)
That's the fun.
Speaker 2: (26:49)
It's the funny, but it's also necessary. I mean, I, like, I look for these qualities. We we're actually, um, doing some hiring or we will be as soon as this round is closing. And so we've been doing some interviews and um, you know, really just tr trying to think, and I don't know how long we can get away with it, but like to continue to hire people who are a capable of wearing multiple hats and doing different jobs outside the scope of their, um, work description, but then also who are willing to do those things as well.
Speaker 1: (27:20)
Yeah. I wanna shift the conversation to be acting like a marketer for two minutes. Um, mm-hmm. , if you'll allow me. Um, and you know, I'm not very familiar with like social selling and brand amplification platform and all that, um, space. And I'm curious to know a little bit about your competition, a little bit about the differentiators, a little bit about where you're positioned at the moment, because you are obviously serving this big mega brands and, and you're doing that very well, as I can see. Um, and I'm just curious a little bit about where the company's at in terms of its positioning in the market and the niche, um, and versus the competition.
Speaker 2: (28:12)
Yeah, it's, you know, we certainly have pivot pivoted, like back and forth on this a few times over time. And the reason is because, you know, we started out to be a social media management. Um, well, we started out to be actually, uh, a content resource management platform or, um, like, sorry, it's called marketing resource management. MRM was the, a, an acronym. Acronym, excuse me. Our, in fact, our original name of the company was Cloud MRM. How terrible. I know. Um, wow. and we, yeah, I know. You just
Speaker 1: (28:50)
Made me more lately
Speaker 2: (28:53)
. Yeah. Um, well, lately rhymes with Kaylee, of course. Oh, there you go. So there you go. So, so at the time, there was one company in enterprise that was really succeeding in the MRM space, and that was percolate. You guys might might remember them. And they were, they, they rose to the top and then they died a fiery death. And we had positioned, positioned ourself as like the SMB version of Percolate. And we, but we built out this pretty robust platform, most of what you see in the enterprise platform that we have today. And we were trying to sell it to, to SMBs. The idea was like, can we, can we give you guys what I did for Walmart? They paid me like 140 grand at the time. Can, can we, um, do it for 40 grand? 40 do for $40 a month? You know, that was the idea.
Speaker 2: (29:40)
And, um, we were working with SAP, they had an accelerator in New York City, and at the time they, it was cutting edge to have an accelerator with all female entrepreneurs and AI and, um, looking at enterprise. And I said, you've got the wrong girl. I'm doing SMB. And they said, well, we see something that you don't. And I was like, okay. So I'm trying to sell lately to the marketing team, and they felt threatened as they should have. Um, this is early days of ai. And then meanwhile, because I'm in, I'm in a startup and they're, they're giving me all these showcase opportunities within the company. And, um, I have about 200 individual employees signing up for my, my product, which at the time was only the enterprise platform. So, 'cause they wanted to like look smart on social, who doesn't? So I'm trying to charge them each 300 bucks a month, which is not flying.
Speaker 2: (30:38)
And I'm, I've got my CS part-time person trying to onboard them, which is a long experience and none of this is working. And so it occurred to us, you know, we need to create a self-service product so that people can actually enter the product and then sort of land and expand in that way. So this is a long way to answer your, your question. And we started to pivot not what the, the, the product was always the same, but the way we were describing it, you know, there was this one piece that everyone gravitate gravitated to, which was the, the generator and all the other components that we'd built around it, which is some social media management, publishing and scheduling. But we'd also built in the things that I'd used with Walmart, which is, um, ways for the key messaging to be enforced because the comms team was always getting mad at marketing.
Speaker 2: (31:28)
And the way we built the analytics was totally different because there were all these people who knew nothing about marketing, but needed to know if it was working. And so we would do things like overlay your Google analytics traffic right on top of your Twitter traffic, so you could literally see, visually see that social media was working, you know, driving traffic. The, the bumps would be the same. Bumps and valleys would be the same. So, um, anyways, when we were leaning into the AI and people started to understand what AI was, it got even a little bit more complicated. 'cause then we were like, all right, are we just a social media management platform that really wasn't what we, what we went out to be? Um, but it turns out that now we're the only platform that does all the things, but was built from the ground up and throughout with ai. Whereas all the other social media management platforms are a couple of decades old, haven't evolved at all. Some of them are now tossing a dollop of AI and it's just chat CPT. So it's all the same AI on top and calling it themselves, you know, with, with the trend. So we are in the process of repositioning ourselves as the new evolution of, of social media management platforms.
Speaker 1: (32:45)
That's beautiful. And I have to say, your current value prop and messaging on your website is crystal clear to me. Like it
Speaker 2: (32:54)
Really,
Speaker 1: (32:54)
Thank you really stands out and very clear on what you're doing and the results you, you're, you're providing your customers. And, but yeah, I mean, you know, as startup grows, and I have experience in, in this a lot actually, um, yeah, the value prop changes, the messaging changes, the, the, the organization is changing entirely, the culture pretty much everything. But you know, it's part of the fun, I guess.
Speaker 2: (33:23)
Um, it is part of the fun. It's also like, it is a bit of the bane of my existence because, you know, my job is supposed to be able to communicate well, but when you're so close to your own thing, you know, that's just part of the whatever part of the kick in the kick in the all the time, you're just like, Ugh, God, why can't I get this exactly right. And part of it is, is because you're too close, but part of it's 'cause it does change so quickly and we don't wanna be something we're not, you know, um, and the value prop and, and thanks for saying that by the way. It's because everything is changing and AI is changing so quickly, it can be different for different people. And you don't wanna be everything to everybody, of course. You just wanna be really great at your one thing. Um, I, I
Speaker 1: (34:13)
Have to say, it had me, it had me because it has no AI in it. Like literally it says lately is a social selling and brand amplification platform that learns any brand or employee voice, takes all your content and turns it into targeted, effective social media posts, increasing visibility by a thousand percent and tripling inbound leads. There is no AI there. And unfortunately to say this, but did it is a differentiator today because every second website you go to has the word in it. It is the word in it. Um, it's true.
Speaker 2: (34:52)
It's becoming like, it's like awesome. Like it's been over said, you know, and I'm guilty of saying awesome all the time, but that's what I feel like it is
Speaker 1: (35:01)
Now, um, before, um, I thank you very much for joining us today. Um, I have to pick your brand on this one, so it's a fun question. Okay. So imagine you're creating a time capsule to be opened in 50 years. What piece of advice or insight about generative AI and customer relation would you include for future startups?
Speaker 2: (35:28)
You know, the, I would include this story. Okay, so the story is, um, so here in the States, we have cake in the box. I'm sure everybody has that. Mm-Hmm. Somewhere, you know, and, um, Betty Crocker was the originator of cake in the box and in the fifties, and they were marketing it to house wives. And at the time it wasn't selling very well because it was totally weird. You were just adding water and then boom, you had a cake. And they didn't feel like they had any ownership or like they had baked anything. And remember my story about listening and reading and the ownership of the, the audience, and it didn't sell. So instead they pulled the powdered eggs out of the box and they made the tagline, just add an egg, and the sales skyrocketed.
Speaker 1: (36:25)
Oh, wow.
Speaker 2: (36:27)
And I like that story because it reminds you about how important that human participation alongside the automation, the cake in the box, the AI is.
Speaker 1: (36:42)
Yeah. I love that story, Kate. So I, I really want to thank you for joining us today. Um, marketers head of customer experience, VP of supports. I'm sure you're gonna love that episode. I love that so much. Thank you for joining us. Uh, everyone's looking for more CX gen, AI startup life insights. I urge you to follow Kate's on our LinkedIn. She's doing an amazing job there. And be sure to visit lately ai. Kate, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: (37:19)
Thank you.
