Seed to Exit

AJ Goyal, Founder and CEO of Fibr AI | Embracing a Privacy-Centric Internet | AI-Driven Marketing Strategies

Riece Keck Episode 5

Ever wondered how new privacy initiatives by Apple and Google will reshape the marketing landscape? Discover how AJ Goyal, the founder and CEO of Fibr AI, is using AI to revolutionize digital marketing. As tech giants shift towards a privacy-centric internet, AJ shares groundbreaking insights on leveraging first-party data to maintain competitive customer acquisition costs.

AJ shares share his serendipitous story of how he met his co-founder and their plan for strategic conquest of the tech market. Faced with challenges like sales bottlenecks and technical integrations, they reveal their dual-pronged outreach strategy targeting both marketers and developers. AJ illustrates how connecting with the right audience can fuel remarkable growth using social media as a funnel.

In this episode, listeners will also explore the potential of AI in personalized marketing. While expressing skepticism about the impersonal nature of AI-driven outreach, we dive into the transition from building to selling in the startup journey. This episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone intrigued by the intersection of AI, privacy, and innovative marketing strategies.

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Speaker 1:

The good part of our entire sales process is that when we pitch, marketers understand it more. So I don't have to sell the problem, I just have to sell the solution right, and that's the feeling. Our solution is a couple of parts right, like it requires if you have used Mixpanel or Amplitude. It requires a similar way of integrating a code in the website. I think that's our biggest bottleneck right now. So we have so many marketers in, but getting the first meeting with the tech so that this code goes in, so that they become tech-free, is where we are struggling right now. So typically we're seeing like two to three months of sales cycle.

Speaker 2:

After the tech bottleneck, it moves really, really fast. All right, welcome to another episode of Seed to Exit. As always, I'm your host, rhys Keck, and today we're diving into the world of AI-driven marketing with AJ Goyle, the founder and CEO of Fiverr. Aj is a serial entrepreneur with a fascinating background. He's a Stanford MBA, a second-time founder, and is working on tackling one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing. Today, we'll explore how Fiverr is revolutionizing personalized marketing in a post-cookie world, aj's transition between vastly different industries, and talking a little bit more about the recent $1.8 million funding round led by Excel. I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you all will, too. Thanks for listening and let's get into it.

Speaker 3:

You're listening to the Seed to Exit podcast with your host. Let's get into it the right people and more Subscribe and listen in for new episodes and enjoy the show.

Speaker 1:

Hey, jay, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me here.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so super excited to chat with you today. I love talking to early stage founders, particularly when you've just gotten traction and funding, because it's such a new and transformative time for the company. So really excited to dig a little bit deeper into Fiverr with you today, learn a little bit more about the company, what you've done so far, your growth plans and what your overall vision is.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Happy to share everything we have gone through in the last one and a half years.

Speaker 2:

Super. So for the uninitiated, tell me a little bit more about Fiverr, the problem you're solving, the market you're serving, etc. Awesome.

Speaker 1:

I think Fiverr started. When I saw this news in 2022 that Apple kicking killing cookies and so all the third party cookies, Apple was saying they will deprecate and they started pushing a lot on privacy.

Speaker 2:

And sorry not to cut you off, is that where it will say, will say like ask app not to track on a particular application? Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1:

Okay, that's what apple did, and then apple may like, if you, if you go around times square, you will see apple board talking about privacy everywhere. Right, like is your browser private. So I think apple did, did hammer on it a lot so that google follows suit, and they said they will do it, although recently, if you might have read the news, they just backtracked their words and said we're not going to do it but we'll figure out some other way, because of which both GDPR and CCP are behind them now to tell us what to do. So I think privacy in general is going to be here. Cookies are gone. That means all the personalization that people are doing on gone. That means all the personalization that people are doing on other parties. Content is gone. So it's either your own collected content on which you can make the experience personalized for the consumer, or nothing. Right, and so that's where fiber started.

Speaker 1:

We thought, hey, how do we make sure that in this new, in this new way of marketing, we can enable marketers to keep their CAC low, to keep their CPCs low? And CAC is customer acquisition cost, cpc is cost per click. How do we make sure that these remain low for them so that the way marketing has been done does not get disrupted continuously. One of the key factors like 2022 to 2024, cac across industries is at least 2x and it's steadily growing and I think this will continue to grow, like if Google would have taken the bet and would have killed the cookies. My bet was that CAC would have been 5x of what it was in 2022. But it didn't happen. So fingers crossed when that will happen, but I think market is going to change completely.

Speaker 2:

And so the reason why CAC is going up is because, ultimately, they don't have the data, so they can't accurately segment the target that they're showing the ads to. Therefore, they're showing the ads to more irrelevant people, but those people are clicking anyway and that's driving up. Cac is ultimately the problem.

Speaker 1:

Exactly. And then those people landing on your website are not converting. And then, yeah, you're cracking cases, because the best business model is invented by Google and Facebook. You pay by click right, you just click it and you pay, whether the customer who comes on your website buys or not, and so that's the reason why customers and why marketers are paying. And if you think about it, it's like.

Speaker 1:

One thing which is there is that we were so spoiled by third-party cookies we can completely forgot the kind of data we used to collect for our consumers right, who has visited us, what they have visited, which ad did they click on? Ad is still created by us and we know which ad they have clicked on. But rather we will personalize our website based on third-party data. So so I think we like as ad they have clicked on, but rather we will personalize our website based on third-party data. So I think we, like, as marketers, we have been spoiled a lot, and I think everybody is now realizing that those third-party cookies which they were like betting a lot on, might go away 100% in soon, and so they might have to figure out alternate ways Got it.

Speaker 2:

That's certainly a big problem. So what exactly does Fiverr do? How does it solve that problem?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I think we are starting when we started. We started pitching this concept of hey, okay, you don't know much around the ecosystem about your consumer, but you do know a couple of things. One which ad did they click when you were targeting the ad? Who would the customer profile so like?

Speaker 1:

If you, if you have ever run facebook and google ads, the way you define is, you go about and define an audience. You say, hey, I want to target, uh, 50 to 60 year old people who play golf, live in this particular city of america, right. And and then you show him, show them a particular message for your product. So, for example, you're selling credit card, you might want to show them free golf course lessons, uh, five times in a year, right. Or if you are selling, or you might want to show them like 10 off on their favorite buffet palace that they want to go on a weekend, or like a brunch palace. But if you think about it, when the, when the customer clicks both these ads, they, they go to the same landing page. This is not personalized, because earlier we were personalizing with third-party cookies. So Fiverr did a very simple solution hey, you have created an ad. I know the audience you're targeting with the ad. I'll take that data and change your website dynamically and so that what they have targeted on, I will double click on it and show exactly that.

Speaker 1:

Like you know, when in a conversation you are with somebody, somebody is just nodding their head and when you just ask them hey, do you think this? They don't know what you talked about. Right, like they're just listening. I think that's how, as marketers, we have been treating ads. So what we are saying is not don't just show and listen, but also implement. When they click it, double click on the proposition you have said, let it be the hook, and then go down and write whatever else you want to write. So that's what fiber is solving right now. The eventual goal is, over time, our ai will be able to learn every click interaction. Every time a consumer is looking at his screen, seeing a text line, we'll be able to figure out what to show in the next fold, what to show in the next fold, what to show him in the next click, and so that's where we want to go as a vision, but like starting up ads to landing pages. That's what we are solving.

Speaker 2:

That's fascinating. So obviously your buyer persona within a company is marketers, head of marketing, VP of marketing, et cetera. Is there a particular business vertical or business size that you're selling into?

Speaker 1:

Yes. So I think the solution is common, but we do want to be very focused when you're going out and solve deeply on it. So one persona that we are selling very strongly is people who are doing form fills on their website or calendar booking right now. These could be companies like credit card insurance, telecommunication, broadband, and or could be companies like B2B software B2B software selling where, like you, you have to fill form. So these are the companies and I call them lead generation companies, because they basically take your mobile number and phone number and then they follow up and sell your sell you the stuff. So that's where we are right now targeting um. The reason I'm going after them is because I think retail is very crowded everywhere. Like personalization is also a very abused word in retail right like, even a simple change in color on a button is considered personalization. So so we're going after like market, which we feel is underserved and which we feel could get a much larger impact if we do so.

Speaker 2:

So you and your co-founder, preetam am I pronouncing his name correctly? So you two? How did you two meet and did you identify the problem that you've laid out together, or what was the origin of the founding of the company itself?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that's a crazy story, right? So I thought of a problem like this whole CAG going up and I was like, hey, I need to find a tech co-founder because I come from marketing 12 years only doing marketing and so I was staying with a friend for a weekend and just looking for co-founders, meeting a lot of people, and then Pitam was a common friend to that guy. He visited the flat and we just started talking and I actually tweeted about it and I was joking to Pit, to that guy. He visited the flat and we just started talking and you know, like it, just I, I actually tweeted about it and I was joking to peter, like it was co-founder at first sight for me and peter was already working on a web3 startup and so I told my friend that, hey, I want this guy to be a co-founder, make it happen.

Speaker 1:

And so, so it took us three months of courtship to figure out that we are going to work together. Eventually he called back and said, hey, ankur, do you want to work together? I think I don't want to do Web3 idea. Let's do what you were thinking. I think I can add value. I have some relevant experience around it. And yeah, that's how it happened for us.

Speaker 2:

I love that. So what sort of? So you founded the company and recently just raised 1.8 million seeds, so congratulations on that. What traction.

Speaker 1:

Have you gotten so far from a customer and growth perspective? Yeah, I think in terms of traction we are still way early. So we raised our capital, we announced our capital recently. We actually pushed our product out, especially india market, in february, march, and then, when we have couple of couple of clients there, we start selling in a us market in july this year and so now we have like couple of paying clients like paying us market value around twenty to thirty thousand dollars and yearly, and now we are expanding into Canada, us.

Speaker 1:

So I have a lot of meetings aligned, but the point is we're still converting a lot of them and still learning and building. So I think for now we are still figuring out whether people will pay for this or not and how much value do they extract from it. We are at like four or five clients right now and hoping that we'll hit 15 by end of this year and then maybe from there we'll see the growth and what the expansion looks like so what does your sales process currently look like in terms of how you bring clients on board?

Speaker 1:

yeah, so. So we we actually are like. So one thing which is working well for us is both pre terms and my twitter and linkedin accounts are working well. Like us is both Prithams and my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts are working well. We are getting a lot of people coming in, a lot of traction coming in. People are actually marketers are quickly.

Speaker 1:

The good part of our entire sales process is that when we pitch, marketers understand it more. So I don't have to sell the problem, I just have to sell the solution, and that's the feeling. Our solution is a couple of parts. Right Like. It requires if you have used Mixpanel or Amplitude. It requires similar way of integrating a code in the website. I think that's our biggest bottleneck right now. So we have so many marketers in, but getting the first meeting with the tech so that this code goes in, so that they become tech-free, is where we are struggling right now. Right Like so. So typically we're seeing like a two to three months of sales cycle because of this bottleneck. After the tech bottleneck, it moves really, really fast. One of our client is right now. They are so hooked that every week when they launch ads, they also launch landing pages with us.

Speaker 1:

So it just and we think, I think, like with Google and Facebook, if you can just ride the wave of people making ads and you making landing pages along, that that works, that works. We just have to get in, and I think that's the biggest bottleneck for us.

Speaker 2:

So, with that tech bottleneck, what approaches are you taking to solve it? What have you tried? That's worked, what hasn't worked?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think one approach now we have started doing is a couple of things. One is in the product we added hey mail to your developer. So directly from the workflow it goes to a developer that this code has to be added. Second thing that we are doing now continuously is we are figuring out in our ICP what is the typical content management system CMS people are using. And then we are figuring out in our ICP what is the typical content management system CMS people are using. And then we are doing a direct integration with those CMS so that once marketer log in because they own the CMS, they can give us admin access and we can put the code ourselves.

Speaker 1:

So that's the second thing, but it's a long game because it's integration heavy, right. And the third one which we are doing is we are also doing a lot more outreach to developers now, like just to talk to them hey, it will save a lot of your time because you don't have to make landing pages anymore, like your marketing team can do it. You don't have to put your bandwidth into this. Do solve, like, better problems with tech, with your tech. And so that approach has been better, like it's been helping us going two prong one to the CMO or the head of marketing in that company and also to the CTO, or like a engineer who is working on landing pages.

Speaker 2:

And which has yielded the better results so far. Because you're a marketer, I'm sure you're tracking in terms of, you know, number of reach outs, conversions, et cetera. Yeah.

Speaker 1:

I think like the best one for us is right now. The best one for us is right now, uh, the second one, which is integrating with the ecosystems, because that's that's quickly help as soon as the person learns and then say, hey, I am on salesforce, I'm like, okay, we are already integrated directly, use it like you don't have to do anything, give me access, I'll put the code. That's working really well, because most of the companies that we are targeting in our icp are, uh, unfortunately, fortunately, traditional companies, right, like the credit card and all, and so they are on like old tech, and so it becomes easier if we are already integrated with these folks so that they can directly start. That's been something that's not working. But the problem is, uh, the tech is very, very distributed. Like only 30 people use salesforce, then 20 use webflow, 20 use wix, 10 use something else, and so it's like really wide.

Speaker 1:

The way we are going after is hey, we figure out who people are integrated with, integrate that, then make it open in our product uh, ecosystem product pipeline. Then we figure out another client who is integrated, then we integrate with that and then open it in the product pipeline. But it's like a one step at a time process, and that's the reason I was telling you, by the end of the year, the target is to get 15 clients so that I have 15 CMSs cracked, and then after that we can go faster.

Speaker 2:

I love the iterative approach. What sort of objections are you running into throughout the process, beyond your typical things like now is not the right time, we don't have budget for this, etc. You know, is it something in the context of we're concerned about, you know, using this level of AI at scale, or what are the things you're running into?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the first objection we always get is hey, ai is not reliable. How much control do do I have? Will it like, uh, be on my brand tone? How's the content looking like? I think that's the biggest one and I believe like this is common to the entire ai ecosystem. Everybody is getting this like ai outputs are really bad. So we take a.

Speaker 1:

We took a lot of time to create a tool or a kind of like a tool where we basically train the AI or we basically like teach the AI on what the brand language is. So the way we go about it is, as soon as the customer comes in, they can put the website URL or the domain and we pull all the data on the domain and make AI learn what the tone of the data is, what is the emotion in the data, how the brand, how the marketer has written that data, so that we understand the tone and feel of the brand. And after that, when we ask somebody to write, hey, this is the headline, generate me a second one. It becomes much closer to what a marketer will write. So that's the first thing that we have done.

Speaker 1:

The second one we have done is we put a lot more control for the marketer. Rather than automatically generating all the all the landing pages. We, what we do is we generate an Excel sheet and we show the marketeers hey, look at it, verify everything. Once you are happy, we'll publish it. In the backend already the pages are created, but just to make sure that the content is right and the marketeer sees it and he's happy about it, we create an Excel sheet for them to go about it, and so that's like the biggest one we were getting. But now, like with putting these small checks in between and making sure that the marketer is happy about it, has helped a lot.

Speaker 2:

I can imagine. Yeah, because if there's something wrong, it's much better to just have that show up in an Excel file rather than a live page.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think, like we sell our product as two tools that marketers use the most right, like as a presentation, a PPT and an Excel. If you know these two, you can use the platform as easy as you want. Like it's just the combination of these two tools and that's what I tell marketers. Because another concern and to your previous question, another concern that I get is hey, how much time of my team will go in this? Do like they are already creating an ad. Now they have to do this as well. And then when I tell them, hey, if you create one ad, the amount of time it takes, that's the same amount of time it will take for creating a landing page. If you get 100 ads, the amount of time it takes like it's still the amount of time it takes to create one landing page is the amount of time it takes to create 100 landing pages.

Speaker 1:

With us, because our ai can do it really really fast, we can do 100 000, 10 000 landing pages all in like less than two hours, and so so that's the whole pitch, right, like there's something, um, I do with b2b clients who do outreach, who writes email and linkedin campaigns. I say, hey, you write 100 000 emails and you tell me the content of those emails and the client profile and the LinkedIn profile and the website of the client. I'll generate 100,000 landing pages for those emails and you really don't have to worry about it. We can do it for entire outreach. Maybe only 50 will click on your email, but those 50 will see a super personalized experience for them and so yeah, so that pitch has been working really well as well.

Speaker 2:

That's great, yeah, because I think that the there's a lot of talk about AI in sales outreach right now and more of it is around customization, but it's really more around customization of the email text itself, and I really feel like that's lost some efficacy, because at the beginning it's impressive and that's impressive, and the only reason why it was impressive is because, traditionally, sending someone a personalized email means you actually did your research, you took some time to look into them, and this is something that only someone who's actually done some research could have sent. Point where now, if someone says me personalized outreach, all I wonder is, oh well, I wonder what AI system they used. But, to your point, making it a landing page. Of course, I know that that's custom generated, but it still is looks and feels like a much better experience, I would imagine, than a run of the mill landing page.

Speaker 1:

Exactly right. I'll tell you one of the key use case where I've used it and it has resulted really, really great output for me in terms of bookings is events right. When I go to events and I meet somebody like, say, I meet you, Reese, and I'll click a selfie with you and I'll go back, create a landing page and send you an email following up. And when you land on the landing page, it just becomes easier because you meet so many people in events.

Speaker 1:

You don't remember anything in events. You don't remember anything and then you don't. You don't even remember what pain points you've talked about. In our landing page you will see the photo with me so you'll remember quickly like there's a meeting and then we detail down the pain points that you talked about and the solution that we have. So that becomes very focused and we have seen like a lot of booking demos and a lot of follow-through happening of that and it's just as simple as that, because then people don't say, oh yeah, he has done just superficial research on me. It's more detailed because it's about your pain point, about the solutions to your pain point. That's awesome.

Speaker 2:

So what sort of data do you have in terms of results that you've been able to get for clients, in terms of either better click-through rates, lower CAC, et cetera?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think, more than click-through rates and CAC, for us, the biggest one that we've seen with the clients is the increase in conversions. We call it form fill rates because that's the major focus for us. So we are seeing almost at a minimum of 25% increase in form fill rate across our clients right now. And the second one, which was surprising and which came from a couple of our clients, is that what is the actual conversion after form fill rate, and I call it quality? So form fill rate for me is quantity. So we are seeing 25% increase in quantity, but what's the quality? Are people actually getting the broadband installed after giving their details? Are people actually taking the credit installed after giving their details? Are people actually taking the credit card after giving their details? We realized we were actually improving quality as well by 11 percent, and so that becomes like a double thing for a brand, because they see 25 percent more people coming in and overall 11 percent higher subscribing to the actual product and not just the lead. That is the that they've got from us.

Speaker 1:

These are two things. The other one that has been very interesting and it came from a client only who said hey, all of my Google ads have high quality score now. So there is something called Google ad quality score, which basically determines whether your ad should show in the first place and what will be the CPC of that ad, and we've been able to increase the Google ad quality score for our client by at least seven and plus, so it's a rating out of 10. If you are five, then it's a bad ad. If you are like two, then it's like a worse ad. You should just shut it down. So we've been able to get ads to like seven plus, and so that's something that as a number and as a result that we are really that's awesome.

Speaker 2:

Congratulations on all of the early success. Obviously, there's still a lot left to do, but it sounds like you've gotten some awesome traction. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about the recent fundraise that you did. So it was led by Excel. What was the? And it was 1.8 million seed round. What was the fundraising process like? What did you have to do? High points, low points. Talk me through that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I know Cool. It's been a while since I've talked about the fundraising process. I think, like going in because I am second time founder and my co-founder, pitham, is also like third time founder we thought it would be a piece of cake. I think, like raising a million, million or 2 million will not be that difficult, but like it was crazy tough, right, like so we, we went in a couple of usual suspects my previous uh mentors, my previous investors, previous investors they were in but we needed like a lead and we kept on pitching, kept on pitching to people. But you might have been seeing, like the macroeconomics right now. It's just really, really bad. It took us almost three months. I think three months is still a good time for us to close the fund, but it took us around three months to close the entire round and when Excel came in, it got easily stitched up together. Like it becomes easier to get everyone in one place and to sign it.

Speaker 1:

But I think during the entire process, it's more like wait, like oh, we want to wait, we want to see some traction, we want to see something and uh it was. It was a bit tough. I think, uh, from what I was expecting and what I was going through. Um, but, but yeah, but like, uh, we did the usual stuff. We created like our deck. We created, we created pitches. We personalized the pitches based on like, because our theme was personalization. We personalized the pitches for every investor that we send out, send it out to. We also made sure that we are talking to the right investors who might see it through. We are trying to figure out anybody who is a marketer in the investment community so that we can reach out to them. So that's how we went about it. But, but yeah, but yeah, so like, so, so that's that's the process. I think that's what I remember right now.

Speaker 2:

How many pitches were you doing per day? How many pitches did you have to do total to get the this the round done? Cause I know it's a full road show and you're doing, you're doing multiple. It's a pretty grueling process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you're doing multiple. It's a pretty grueling process. Yeah, I think we did all the major funds. I think Axel was the one who bit the bullet and who was like yeah, I think I want to take a bet on you guys.

Speaker 1:

Overall, I think first two months we were almost pitching one or two people every two days or one people every day, kind of. So both small investors, large investor angels. So first couple of months, that was the day. But like, when we are like slightly closer, we have couple of family and friends, couple of uh, really small or micro vcs come in, our number of pitches reduces, because then we were just looking for like a big, big fund to come in and stitch the round. And that time, like the second half of second half of the second month and the third month, it was more like one or two pitches every week and yeah. So overall I think I did around 30 35 pitches and totally that's not bad. Very nice, I know, I know. But like when you, when you're coming after running a startup, selling a startup, you don't like you will get it, but entrepreneurship makes you modest, right, like you realize.

Speaker 1:

nope, whether your first time, second time, anything would happen.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. And how would you say because I know that you've previously and I was very interested in the almost complete industry shift that you did, because your previous startup was a women's health startup what was? I understand that you saw the problem and made the company around it, but what was the? What was that like for you in terms of transitioning from just completely different industries, completely different problems?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I think actually not just the, not just the industry should. It was like a entire shift for my career, because I've been a CPG founder, a worker, everything over 10 years. I started with Nestle, did an early stage company, did a very, very early stage VC fund, all through CPG and my brand as well in CPG Women's Health. I think the transition. There were a couple of reasons for me. One, I was tired of operations right, like there's so much operations in cpg. Like you're, you're chasing your vendors, you're chasing suppliers, you're figuring out where the material is, is it delivered, not delivered, um. The second one was like I think a lot of like 2022.

Speaker 1:

If you'll remember, there were so many crash crashes that was happening in public and private market, especially for d2c and cpg brands, right and so so I didn't feel like starting up again in cpg was the right time or the right macro for me. And third, I always wanted to try something different, especially software, because everybody says, hey, software is scalable, you can make like billion dollar company in software. So I like okay, let's give it a try now. The choice for me was whether I want to do b2b or b2c, and I think this apple problem came to me and I thought, hey, I've been a marketer, I have done this for over 10 years, I understand the problem. Maybe I'll be I'll be able to get to a solution which is much more better than somebody else doing it. And so that's how I ended up. B2b Could have been as equally a B2C tech company, but, yeah, I think it was like a 50-50 odds. I chose this one.

Speaker 2:

I love the pragmatism and now that you're a couple of years into it, how are you feeling about that change?

Speaker 1:

Now that you're a couple of years into it, how are you feeling about that change? Man, I have moments right. I feel consumer was so much faster. I think the high of consumer is that you pitch, you push something, whether it's a product or an app. You get very quick feedback. The customers download it. You get to know it's working, not working.

Speaker 1:

B2b is slow. It's like you really have to be patient. You send a mail out. You have like a 21 day cycle process first mail, second mail, one linkedin message, one twitter dm, and it just keeps on running. And then you had one high and you're like okay, now I have to sustain this high for the second one to come in. I think that's the major difference. That's the kick. I think the kick that's missing for me. So I keep on creating my own small win kicks within the team, like doing like some random small wins, defining like micro wins, uh, with the team to get the kick going. But I think that's the major difference. Like it's a lot more perseverance, persistence and and being like very, very calm in b2B versus B2C is like push out, like have more features out, see what's working, change like iterate, then push out again. B2b doesn't work that way.

Speaker 2:

No, it doesn't. I mean, I've been in B2B my whole career, obviously from more of a services perspective than a product perspective, but, yeah, it's slow, it's not that easy to get feedback, and that is the thing. Yeah, exactly with consumers, they'll tell you very quickly and they're not afraid because they're not coming from a, they don't have their corporate voice on. They're much more likely to just give you very blunt feedback, and so, yes, I can absolutely imagine how that's been a little bit of a transition. You mentioned the micro wins on the team. We haven't really talked about your team much. What does that look like? How is it currently structured? Where's everyone located?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so most of the team is back in India, because most of the team is tech. Then we have one person in Canada I am in New York and then we are setting up a team, somebody in US as well. So the idea is like, because so far we've been building, uh, most folks are from tech, are in back in india, in bangalore. So we have around 17 people on our team right now, out of which 10 are intact two in product, one in design. Who's supporting tech again? Um, yeah, so like 13 on that, then two of us founders and one I have social media I think you might have talked to Prerna right like, so she takes her and one on the SEO side. So that's a team structure right now.

Speaker 1:

Um, I'm hoping like, and then the sales guy in in Canada, and then I'm hoping to add like more sales, a couple in New York and a couple in India, like AEs, mostly in New York, and then having BDR and SDR back in India. I am still not a fan of AI, bdr and SDR. I'm not feeling it so far, so I have not used it that much, but I'm still going and maybe it's early for us because we are still learning, we are still doing everything manually, figuring it out manually, working with the right partners, right tools, but still doing it manually.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the AI BDR. I mean I've seen them all over social media and it was a little bit like I was mentioning earlier with the fully personalized AI. I feel like that once someone realizes it's fully robotic or an AI reaching out to them, there's just it's not a good experience at this point and honestly, I don't know if that's something that can be solved Like, even if you make the personalization better. I don't know if people, just from a psychological perspective, are going to be okay with being reached out to by a robot. But who knows, we'll see. So, is that part of what you're using, planning on using the funds to do is expand the sales team, or what is your overall utilization of the recent fundraise?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think we are transitioning from the build mode to sell mode now. So far we've been building and, at least as a company and as a CEO, now I've taken a call not to build anymore. The whole idea is sell, sell whatever. Like sell the dream if you want to, but sell it and then, once you have the client in, you focus on building it If there is like additional asks, so that so the entire focus of the company, as well as the utilization of fund, is doing sales and reaching out and making sure, like you have, you're reaching to the right people, you're attending the right events. Like I'm attending four events within this month, this month, one, one in October, so like total of four, three or four events in total across us, and then I'm also traveling to Canada, but like the whole idea with the entire team is sales.

Speaker 1:

The other thing we are investing money is on SEO. Like we do want to ramp up our game. We are already doing well in that space, but we want to ramp up our game. We want to make sure that we are also creating additional tools which are free of cost for marketers to use so that they can do some of their day-to-day work. So that's something like getting some marketer tools out. There is something else as a focus for us in terms of users of fund and, lastly, some bit on whatever is happening as and when we scale with our clients. The AI cost increases, the platform cost increases, aws cost increases. So that's the fund going in, but majority, if I have to break it down like 60% to sales, 20% to 30% to tech and 10% to other marketing activities.

Speaker 2:

And that is your job ultimately. As a CEO, you got to be in sell mode all the time. You're selling to clients. You're also selling from a talent perspective to people who are on the team because, as you mentioned, you've got quite a bit of hiring to do, and so it's a fun place to be. I mean, personally, I love selling, so being in sales mode is great. I'm curious. I love selling, so being in sales mode is great. I'm curious. So you mentioned that your goal was to get to 15 paying customers by the end of the year. What is your overall vision? I mean, I know you're in startup mode and three months feels like an eternity at this point, but if you look past the end of the year and you think 2025, 2026, 2027, et cetera, what is your ultimate goal in terms of what you want to achieve with this company?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think more than okay. So there are two parts to any goal with the company, like what your product will do eventually and what scale that you see as revenue in your company. I think with the product, I feel that where internet is, with AI, I think what will happen? It will become autonomous, and when I say autonomous, what it means is the manual input and the output that marketers are doing right now will go away. So once you create an ad, once you create a communication and somebody visited that website, the website will start thinking of its own, realizing what the person is is doing, realizing what they might be interested in, showing them that behavior. You can see this in netflix, like the shows that you see, the movies that you follow. It start start realizing what you like and then start clubbing it together. I think that's what is going to happen with the internet and for me, internet plus ai is the the 3.0 version of internet that is going to come and we believe that we will be at the forefront of it because that's how we are envisioning the entire journey to be. So that's on the product side and that's where I think we could add the highest value to the market.

Speaker 1:

Yes. Now, coming to the revenue side, I think if we could achieve this dream of creating this internet, the whole idea of having apps etc. Goes away completely, because now it's basically one platform where you can get everything personalized. The whole idea of app is because it's a local platform where you can get personalized, personalized.

Speaker 1:

Web can't do that much, but if internet can do, that whole app ecosystem goes away completely and it becomes tough. It becomes like very personalized focus plus everything will be crawlable by ai, so, like your chatbots will work much better, it will give you a much better in outputs from from the web searches, and so I think if we could achieve that like in terms of revenue, I think we could grow really, really fast. For me, the typical idea right now is like hey, get to like 300 400k by end of this year, um, get to like a million by mid next year, get to like two to three million by uh, end of 2025, and then then see where where we'll grow from there. But but for now, like I, I don't see revenue numbers so far down, but I do see how the product vision looks far down that people will start using and it becomes kind of like a no-brainer, like if you are having a website you need to have. Fiber is where we want to reach.

Speaker 2:

I love that vision and when you say 400K a million you're referring to ARR. Yeah, okay, gotcha Well awesome. I mean it sounds like you have a strong vision, love the traction that you've gotten so far and I 100% see the value. So I'm very excited to follow along with Fiverr as you continue to grow. Aj, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on today.

Speaker 1:

Hey, thanks. Thanks a lot, Rhys, for this.

Speaker 3:

Thanks for listening to See to Exit. If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you next time.

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