Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
Join us as we dive into the journeys of startup founders and venture capitalists who share their insights, successes, and lessons learned from seed stage to successful exit.
Each episode, we bring you candid conversations with startup founders, executives, and investors. Whether you're looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem, Seed to Exit offers invaluable knowledge and real-world experiences to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tune in to Seed to Exit and get ready to be inspired, educated, and connected with the exciting and ever-changing world of startups and venture capital.
Seed to Exit
Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy | Future of Consumer Behavior, Authenticity in Branding, and Business Innovation Strategies | Harnessing Gen Z Insights and AI for Brand Success
This episode with Matt Britton reveals how branding has transformed in the age of Gen Z and the significant influence this generation has on consumer behavior. We discuss the shift from traditional advertising to personal branding, the importance of authenticity in marketing, and the financial mindset of younger people today.
• Exploration of how Gen Z shapes brand perception
• Discussion on the importance of individual creators and influencers
• Insights on consumer behavior changes and brand adaptation
• Highlights from Matt's entrepreneurial journey and rebranding of Suzy
• Examination of generational shifts in financial attitudes and spending
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So I think the new brands are individuals, and the reason the new brands are individuals is that, you know, gen Z grew up with the iPhone in the house, and so when they're staring at the iPhone, they're staring at content, but they're staring at content not from big media organizations. They're staring at content from other people. Right, that's just where their eyeballs are, and, because of that, those are the brands that matter, the creators and those are the people who are, I think, going to create the next big crop of brands, just like the old world was around TV and television advertising, and I think that's why it's shifting that direction.
Speaker 2:It's about the medium. Welcome to today's episode of Seat to Exit. I'm Rhys Keck and today I'm joined by Matt Britton, a leading expert on consumer trends and the intersection of technology, marketing and culture. Matt is the founder and CEO of Suzy, a pioneering consumer intelligence platform that empowers brands with real-time insights. Under his leadership, suzy has secured over $100 million in venture capital funding and serves clients like Google, procter Gamble and Walmart. Before founding Suzy, matt established MRY, a digital and social media marketing agency, in 2002. He grew MRY from a one-person startup to a global powerhouse with over 500 employees. Matt is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book Youth Nation, which explores the impact of millennials and Gen Z on business and brand building. In our conversation, we're going to talk more about Matt's entrepreneurial journey, ai and consumer engagement, generational trends, how to engage with younger demographics, consumer behavior shifts and some of his leadership philosophy. I'm really excited for you to listen. Let's go ahead and dive into the episode.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Seed to Exit, the podcast where we uncover the stories, strategies and insights that power the startup ecosystem.
Speaker 2:I'm your host.
Speaker 1:Rhys Keck, founder of MindHire a talent acquisition firm specializing in helping startups build exceptional teams. Each week, I sit down with founders, investors and industry leaders to explore the journeys behind iconic companies and game-changing ideas. Whether you're building, investing or just curious about what it takes to succeed in the startup world, I want this podcast to be your go-to resource for actionable insights and inspiring conversations. Now, if you enjoy the show, please don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with your network.
Speaker 2:Your support means the world and really helps bring more incredible conversations to life.
Speaker 1:Matt, thanks for coming on board. Excited to have you. Glad to be here, absolutely All right. Well, let's dive into things. I'm really excited to talk to you. You have done a lot in your career, both in terms of services, business, running a tech company. You've obviously written a couple of books, done some speaking, and so I'm really excited to dive into your brain a little bit and pull some of that out for the folks listening and for those listening. Maybe it would be helpful if you could just give a quick overview of yourself to get started, and then we'll dive into things from there. Sure, so I've spent my entire career, so the last 25 years, helping brands really connect the dots between their business of today and the consumer of tomorrow. That's kind of been the common theme.
Speaker 1:Earlier stages of my career, I spent a lot of time in the marketing services business. I started an agency way back in 2002 called Mr Youth, which is really at the dawn of theY, to become the first ever social media marketing agency and create the social media marketing practice of companies like Visa and Microsoft and P&G Built the company up to about 500 people. It was acquired by the Pulpacist Group in 2014. And then, prior to selling the company. I spun a software company called CrowdTap, which was originally kind of an influencer activation platform, but kind of evolved over time and basically after I left the publicist group, the company brought me back on as CEO and I pivoted that business into something called Suzy, which was launched in 2018, which is a market research software platform, which is a now late stage software company servicing over 500 leading brands. Oh, yes, please, please, go on, go on, please. I was going to dive more into Susie, but it sounded like you were beating me to the punch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was about to say like the common thread is, you know, helping brands understand the new consumer, and the consumer keeps changing. You know, if you look at the trajectory of my career, when I first came out in the marketplace, the internet was a thing and then it was social media, then it was mobile and now it's AI and with every new innovation, there's so much disruption that takes place. The legacy incumbents try to hold on or many of them go away. There's new upstarts and the consumer adopts the way they live their life, the way they spend their time and their money and their behaviors and helping brands sort of effort. The first half of my career is helping them reach them, based upon those new behaviors. Now it's helping them understand them, and you know, I've always been an entrepreneur and always been really fascinated by the topic, which I think makes me effective in terms of what I do every day.
Speaker 1:So tell me a little bit more about the consumer behavior, because obviously it's shifted a ton in the past two decades. How have you kept to that? What would you say are some of the most meaningful shifts that you have seen? Well, I mean, the shifts are all driven by largely societal and technological changes. You know, on the technological side, you know I mentioned the big ones it's the internet, it was social media, it was the mobile device and now it's AI that's going to have a huge impact into how consumers and individuals communicate with one another. If you look at the internet and you look at mobile, how many families are created because of something like Tinder, right? You look at how much wealth is being created by cryptocurrency or new jobs and new industries that were spawned by these new technologies. So it really changes consumers in every single way.
Speaker 1:I think some overarching trends that go across all those is that younger people now are dictating the future of business, culture and society.
Speaker 1:So if you look at a pre-social media age, the music people listen to, the styles that they adorned, the way they live their life, is really driven by the boardroom. It was driven by companies that could dictate the popular discourse because they controlled the airwaves. They controlled the radio. Clear Channel, basically, could make an artist a hit or a flop because they controlled most of the radio stations, same with the big three TV stations. So young people didn't really have a voice and now it's completely flipped where brands and the boardroom, frankly, is in barely any control at all. It's really about what the consumer wants and that's really why I started, suzy, is that the way business is done now and the way culture is formed is no longer from the people that work their way up to the corporate ladder. It's from the people that have a phone and that share content and have a voice, and that's a that's a sea change in the way that every company should go to market.
Speaker 2:What are?
Speaker 1:businesses underestimating today when it comes to thinking about younger audiences. Well, I think they underestimate their broader influence among people of all ages. So if you look at like Coachella, you know you'll see a 50 year old there and it won't look strange. But if my dad when he was 50, was at Coachella, he'd be wearing a suit and tie and people would be like, why is he here? Right, and the reason that a 50 year old can be at Coachella now, right, and Mark Zuckerberg can kind of go through his you know fashion transformation the way he is and people look at his cool, can kind of go through his you know fashion transformation the way he is and people look at his cool is that young, older people are now in touch with what younger people are doing because of Instagram, because of social media. So because of that, they feel like it gives them license to live younger later in life. And because of that, you have people with a bigger you know disposable income that are living younger later in life. They're going to Coachella. They're buying, wearing Air Jordans to work right, they're buying fashion that they normally wouldn't, they're traveling. People are having starting families later in life. The average age of a first-time mother in the US is now 10 years older than it was three decades ago time. Mother in the US is now 10 years older than it was three decades ago. That means it's 10 more years of people going out to bars to, you know, to basically going out to brunch in the morning versus buying diapers for the kids and doing all these things. So that changes the way that people spend, so I think. And so if people with bigger kind of disposable income are acting younger later in life, well then, who dictates what acting younger means has more power? Right, and that's where I wrote my book, youth Nation, which I created back here. It's about young people kind of dictating culture, and I think that's probably the one thing that I think a lot of brands overlook, because they look at the spending power of young people as inhibitor to really focusing on them. But you're marketing not to them, but you're marketing through them, if that makes sense, and that's, I think, it's lost on a lot of brands.
Speaker 1:Very interesting, when you were writing Youth Nation, what did your research process look like? How did that all come together? It was interesting. You bring that up because I just finished writing my second book yesterday and I haven't publicly announced yet, but it's called Generation AI and it's basically about Gen Alpha and the age of AI and how it's going to change the world. And writing that book was a completely different experience than writing Youth Nation 10 years ago. Right, because I had a research team.
Speaker 1:When I wrote Youth Nation, I wrote it within my agency walls at MRY and I had a whole team of researchers and when I had a thesis, I needed to back up that thesis with data, which would result in infographics and charts and things like that. I would basically have to brief my research team. They would come back to me five days later with either saying what you said is right and here's the data to support it, or what you said is wrong and here's the data to support it. But either way, I had to wait five days.
Speaker 1:Now, when I was writing, I had two screens open One had perplexity open and one had my you know my tool Scrivener, which I was writing a book. And to give you an example, you know and I would talk about when I went to college in 1997 and I brought a TV with me and the difference being the point I was making is that when I dropped my daughter off at Columbia. No one had TVs right Last year. So it was just kind of emblematic of how things have changed. But to color in that story, I wanted to not just say I brought my TV, I wanted to say what type of TV I brought. So I basically went perplexed. I said if I would have been going to college in 1997, what's the most likely brand of TV that I would have brought? And it said it's a Magnavox. Blah, blah, blah. So I can say I vividly remember going to college with a Magnavox Model 7 TV freshman year. And that adds color to the story, right.
Speaker 1:Or I can say something like give me five examples throughout history where people demonized a new technology. And it would tell me that Socrates demonized the advent of writing because you know he believed it would make people not have to remember as much and it would basically like rot their brains and obviously writing ended up being huge, like think of where humanity would be if we never adopted writing. So it was to prove a point that people are doing the same thing with AI right now. But I never would have had that example in the flow of writing without a tool like that. And there's just so many examples. Actually, the last chapter of the book was how I used AI to help me write the book and no, I didn't have AI write the book, because if I did, it would sound like a robot and it wouldn't be my story but it allowed me to write it so much more fluently and, frankly, I think it's going to be a much better product as a result. Well, I'm excited to read it. Yeah, we copy for you. All right, I will give you-. It doesn't come out till May of next year, which is another challenge, because I'm writing a book here in November. It doesn't come out for six months, and in AI, that's like three lifetimes. So the things I'm talking about is innovative today. That was that's the concern about writing a book, but I'm using it more as a platform. Totally makes sense Any interesting findings you can share prior to the release of the book that we can look forward to?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I explore all corners of society, so I explore healthcare, I explore parenting Education is a huge piece. I explore commerce, media, the financial world, how people spend their money. Like, one insight I came to which makes sense when you say it, but it was something I hadn't formulated is the relationship with money that Gen Z has versus baby boomers is the polar opposite. So you know, you look at baby boomers. So what my father passed away a couple of years ago. When he did, I was shocked with how much wealth he accumulated relative to how he lived. Right, he lived like he didn't really have a lot of money and he did relative to what I thought. Right, he's not a gazillionaire, but I was like wow, and it was. It was shocking because I was thinking like why did he live the way he did? Like why didn't he go on an extra vacation or actually do more? And as I did research for the book, what I found is baby boomers grew up with parents who went through World War II and the Great Depression and their relationship with money was one of the scarcity and they passed that down to their kids. So their brains are hardwired that way.
Speaker 1:And then, if you look at Gen Z, you know, gen Z, what happened when we had all the fiscal stimulus during COVID Meme stocks, nfts, cryptocurrency collectibles, like it was. It's the polar opposite. It's a relationship of risk. And now you have, like sports betting becoming legal and you could bet on the presidential election and it's really playing into the hands of this, of this generation that has more of a YOLO kind of risk on relationship with money. And what we're about to see over the next 10 years is the biggest wealth transfer in history, as Gen Z and Gen Alpha inherit from an aging out population of baby boomers. So you're going to have over $40 trillion of assets transfer hands to people who had a scarcity relationship with money, to people who have a YOLO relationship with money.
Speaker 1:So what is that going to do to the economy? And we're already kind of seeing it start to happen. Like credit card debt passed a trillion dollars for the first time ever. Savings is a percentage of household incomes at the lowest level that we've ever seen. It's because that youth kind of mind frame is spreading up to the broader population. But actually once they have that much money to spend, what's it going to do to the economy? Right, and it's just fascinating. So that's a topic that I didn't expect to stumble into. That was so rich until I did, and then, during the process and that was in my section about finance, and it really was fascinating, the deeper I dug into it it's really interesting that you say that, because there's something I read a couple of years ago and I couldn't tell you where it was from.
Speaker 1:It might've been on Reddit or something, but it was the overall message is something that really resonated with me, and it was. It was talking about crypto investing since you mentioned the meme stocks and it was also about the younger relationships, the younger generation's relationship with money, basically saying that things in general have become so expensive. There is so much wealth inequality. You know we're having to pay, you know, on a per capita GDP basis, a far bigger percentage of our income for rent than our parents did. So we almost have to take that YOLO, because the only way that we think we're going to be able to have a shot is by striking it big.
Speaker 2:Did you see that?
Speaker 1:in your research at all.
Speaker 2:Does that make sense to you With?
Speaker 1:risk comes, reward Right, right. So that's why you know, robinhood, like you know, has taken off Right, and they push options trading. And when Robinhood first came out, everyone's like, oh no, it's not a gambling site, it's investing, yet you it's investing, yet you were able to now use Robinhood to bet on who would win the presidential election. That just happened. So they kind of just proved the point right that it is about risk. It's not like fidelity, right. So there's a payoff to risk on, right, and the payoff to risk on is a quick reward, right, it's instant. And that's why, you know, I want to be an influencer and be a millionaire, like the notion of patience and hard work which is also embedded in baby boomers because their parents had. That is not really the case right now, but that's obviously that's not a great thing, right, because more often than not, risk doesn't pay off. When you make that big parlay bet on FanDuel, you're not going to win. But you see, in social media, the only people who post big bets are the ones that were won. But nobody wins in gambling, right, and same with options trading and same with influencers and all these things. People compare themselves to other people's highlight reels, which drives that yellow mentality. But we're also seeing the kind of downside of that, which is depression and addiction that's hitting our younger population like we've never seen before. You know, we're seeing a loneliness epidemic that's occurring and you know, more males are living at home at age 30 than ever before and it's a tough thing for our country and that's why you see this polarized, politicized political environment. Right, because when people are lonely they want to gravitate towards something, so they'll gravitate towards a cult mentality and that's when you have, you know, these extreme extremist groups and bad things happen and you kind of see it all happening. So I'm definitely worried for our country as a result of this.
Speaker 1:I think that the risk on appetite with capital is a symptom versus the cause. You know, and I think, and the cause is ultimately people feeling disenfranchised and wanting a quick way out, and they assimilate a quick way out with a quick hit of dopamine or money and that's what's driving their behavior. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense when we also talk about the loneliness epidemic and in the context of AI, I've seen a lot of people who are using chat, gpt or clot or whatever your poison is, almost as a therapist, or they're fine tuning it for areas to make it almost like a quasi type of therapist. Do you think that's valid? Do you think that risks trapping people in their own echo chamber, of just wanting the AI telling them what they want to hear? What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1:It's interesting that you brought that up, so that was another chapter of my book. It's about relationships and I talked about kind of evolution we've seen from how people used to meet to dating apps and to now kind of this what's called loneliness paradox, which is technology has made us much more connected but more alone than ever before. Right, and because you know, we feel like we're connected when we're on our phones, but kids are not going out after school. They're sitting on their phones and scrolling or connecting with people and it's making them less happy. How I feel about, you know, ai based therapy, which is basically what you're asking, is. I do think there's a role for it, because the fact is that therapy is expensive, that you know what healthcare covers is not as wide-ranging as it used to be, right, and a lot of times people are embarrassed for things that they're going through and they keep it inside and then we both know that creates depression, that creates suicide. It creates bad things, and then we both know that creates depression, that creates suicide. It creates bad things.
Speaker 1:So if serious companies can create solutions that are AI based, yes, I think that it can yield great results. But the problem is and we just saw this happen with that company character AI where allegedly somebody you know was talking to a chatbot on you know a startup and the chatbot told him allegedly to kill himself and he killed himself and you know that wasn't the purpose of that platform, right? So it's a lot of it, and I wrote about this in my parenting section on the book, and this is actually the first time I'm talking about the book publicly, so but so it's a good primer for me. But you know that that's something parents have to address, because Gen Alpha is going to be the first generation to grow up with AI in a household, so they're never going to know a world where AI didn't exist, just like Gen Z never knew a world where the iPhone didn't exist. Millennials never knew a world where the internet didn't exist, right?
Speaker 1:I was born for all those things and, based upon your upbringing, it wires your brain into a new reality and when parents don't have that same reality. There becomes a generational divide in the household that can create a rift of understanding. And now the good news for Gen Alpha is their parents are predominantly going to be millennials, who, at least, are digitally savvy, where Gen Z's parents were Gen Xers who weren't as digitally savvy. So that divide really existed, so it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. So I think everything with AI is going to have positive and negatives, just like social media caused wars and it created reunions of long lost family members. Right, and that's just the reality, but it doesn't matter because it's going to stop for no one. Yep, absolutely. When we go back to the discussion around brands a little bit, how do Gen Z and I don't know if you did the research on Gen Alpha yet- how do they?
Speaker 1:generally differ in what their expectations of brands are, and how do you think businesses can adapt to that? Yeah well, the oldest Gen Alpha is just turning 15 and you can't really collect data, because of the Children's Online Privacy Act, with people who are under 14. So it is challenging still to get data like that from Gen Alpha, but I don't see there being that big of a change between a 17-year-old and a 15-year-old. Brands are changing Because if you look at the most prolific brands that we have in America, right, it's Nike, it's Starbucks, it's Hershey's, it's Tide. Right, it's Gillette, it's these brands, all of which were built in the golden age of television, where those brands were built based upon having a big checkbook and essentially forcing your brand message down people's throats, and all the taglines that we know are from an era where we were watching television, live television, and we had to watch it, when now the last bastion of live television, which is sports, is going away. Then there's news, but even news is now more accessible. So broadcast television is slowly going away and with it comes that mass brand building tool that also is going to wither away and in its wake you're seeing new upstarts. So Nike is really struggling, right Because you have On Running and these other companies, because the kids that are buying sneakers yes, so you have the sneakerhead population, but they're open to other brands because Nike didn't get to reinforce their brand message during these kids' upbringing because they didn't watch TV. So I do think that these big brands that were built in a different era are going to have an increasingly challenging time of maintaining brand as moat, especially when the barriers to entry to do anything are so low to create a website, to build software, to manufacture a product, to ship product. You know, now anybody can sell anything instantly, Right, and I think the new I do believe the new brands are people.
Speaker 1:I think people are brands and brands are people and and you know, you saw Mr Beast had 10,000 people show up to his burger shop in New Jersey when he opened it because he commanded that. I don't know if McDonald's or Burger King would be able to get 10,000 people to go to any one location unless they had Taylor Swift perform there or something, and that's a big thing. So I think the new brands are individuals. And the reason the new brands are individuals is that Gen Z grew up with the iPhone in the house, and so, when they're staring at the iPhone, they're staring at content. They're staring at content, but they're staring at content not from big media organizations. They're staring at content from other people, right? That's just where their eyeballs are and, because of that, those are the brands that matter, the creators and those are the people who are, I think, going to create the next big crop of brands, just like the old world was around TV and television advertising, and I think that's why it's shifting that direction.
Speaker 1:It's about the medium, Right? Well, it's like I have a TikTok and I scroll more than I'm going to admit on here. And you're right, it's, it's. It's not brands at all. I mean, there are a couple of friends anymore? No, it's not.
Speaker 1:It's it's largely just individuals who are have created this platform for themselves, you know, and media, Right, and that's interesting that it's another point that young people seek community, and we used to see community on social media. We used to be able to track our our old high school friend on Facebook, but now all these social platforms have optimized for creators and and traditional media content creators and you don't see your friends anymore. So now people are going to Reddit or they're going to, you know, texting or WhatsApp to create those communities, because social media doesn't even bring it anymore. Social media has basically replaced TV and now there's going to be a new place that people go to create community. That's off social media. It's kind of like a shift that's slowly occurring. So really the message is then is that you know, brands are going to be probably made up more of people, but then and really that just makes it more accessible People will create the brands.
Speaker 2:Yeah, People will create the brand because you, as an individual person, you don't need to have anywhere near the marketing budget that a Nike has, right?
Speaker 1:So then, what is the key to building a brand? As a person or as an influencer, I mean? And it could be a brand like you know, like Logan Paul, right? Or it can be a brand like me, or it can be a brand like you know somebody who is, you know, a dentist, right? Like you know, it doesn't matter, right? We're all brands.
Speaker 1:Brands are what people say about you when you're not in the room. Brands equal reputation. So, if people are brands, what your brand is is your reputation, right. It's what people know you as, and your ability, first of all, to know what you want your reputation to be ie who you are and what makes you unique and special is number one, right? So it's like what do we do uniquely? I can tell from talking to you.
Speaker 1:You know you're a great listener, you're very introspective, you have a good view of the world, like that's part of what makes you unique, right? And we all have to figure out what that is. After we figured out what it is, we have to commit to sharing that on a consistent basis and doing it in a way where we don't feel like it has to be scripted, because people don't want scripted content. That's why they're going to people and not watching traditional TV anymore, right? So we have to be comfortable doing that and pushing ourselves out there in an authentic way, like, if you look at, like I've wrote about him in my book KB Lame I think that's how you pronounce it it's 160 million followers on TikTok and doesn't have any special talent. It was all about him being authentic.
Speaker 2:Isn't that the guy who does the motion? Yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and he's created a great career for himself just by doing the basics. The reality is, the reason most people don't and won't do this is because of insecurity. It's like you know, I'm not going to get enough likes, people aren't going to like me, I don't like that pimple on my face and in this new world, it's the only way really to stand out. And I think, in a world where a lot of work is being increasingly commoditized and automated with AI, your personal brand becomes a moat. Right, and listen, I should be creating 10 times as much content and I just don't have time for it. And sometimes I have the insecurity block, like we all do.
Speaker 1:Right, it's not perfect, blah, blah, blah but I think it's ultimately about authenticity and knowing what makes you unique.
Speaker 1:And obviously, if you're the best freestyle rapper in the world, you're going to get a lot more engagement than somebody who knits blankets. But that's OK, right, I mean, if you knit blankets, you could start a blanket knitting business. But you know, but, and you can, and you attach your name to the brand and we see it throughout history, like I would watch the documentary on Martha Stewart, right, like she was the original influencer and she created a brand, and there's Oprah, and there's Dr Dre with beats headphones, and there's Ryan Reynolds with aviator gin. I mean, the list goes on and on, and I just think that all the next great brands, or most of them, are going to be created by people, because I think that creating great products is going to become increasingly commoditized just because of the automation and technology that's out there. You know that we can all create great stuff, but why would I buy your thing versus someone else? Because I believe and I have a relationship with the person that is pushing it to me right, which is why podcasts are great as well.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean it's funny. You touch on the insecurity thing. I think I hate the sound of my own voice. I think probably 99% of people too. I think you have a great voice. Oh well, thank you.
Speaker 1:I hardly listen to my own podcast, because I can't stop listening to myself, but I get it, but I think the other thing, too, that I would say, the other thing that the vast majority of people miss out on, is just consistency. Right, like they release one to five podcast episodes, they post one to five times on social media and maybe it doesn't get the traction that they thought it would, and they stop. It's like exercise. It's like exercise. It's like exercise, you know, you go to the gym January 1st through 5th, new year, new me and then you just life gets in the way and you stop and you know, and that's just kind of the way it is with almost everything in life. It's the same way it is with AI. It's like so many people I talk to are like, oh, I use chat GPT a little bit and I'm like that's not AI, that's just retail entry level.
Speaker 1:If you really want to understand it, you have to go deep, you have to do research, you have to know what you're trying to solve. For I wrote about that in my book, too, and I think that's so. I think most of the important things you're right is about perseverance and just sticking to it, just like starting running a business, like I could have given up so many times in the early days of Susie. Um, you know, and, and you know how many times, when I was first trying to sell a license, where you know, it was the 20th email or 20th call that got me the business, and if I would have quit on number 19, I wouldn't have and I might not be here today. Yep, um, well, it's funny you say about the improper use of search engine or of uh, chatpt or other, because I feel like most people use it as a search engine, but that's a different conversation.
Speaker 1:Any, and I want to get a little bit more into the origins and kind of growth of Susie in a minute. But you mentioned the since we're talking about the consistency part, any tips other than just buckling down and doing it, to ensure that you can consistently do the same thing every day, whether that be Well, I think, first of all, now it's definitely easier than ever before because of AI, because you can put in anything you've created in the past and say here's my voice, here's everything I've created in the past. Give me a content calendar for the next, like I think, if everyone just did that. Give me a content calendar for the next three months of exactly the topic I should post about and why, based upon, obviously, unique information. So, like, most people would just say what should I post? And it doesn't know you, so it's going to be generic, it's garbage in, garbage out. But if the more you have right, like, so I basically use it my transcripts from my podcast and I load it into a model and I say what should my next topics be? Because it reads it. So the more content you have, the better. You can create more content of right, because it just that's what AI can do it's extract more, more, more. So if you told AI, based upon data that's relevant to you or content relevant to you, what should I post for the next three months? And it gave you a schedule and you followed that schedule. You would be in a different place in your career. You'd have at least one opportunity. Like I do a lot of public speaking and it never is a direct like. I saw your post on LinkedIn. I want to hire you, but there's a direct correlation to me posting on LinkedIn and getting a lot of inbound speaking engagements. There just is, and we've tracked it and so.
Speaker 1:But it's like again, it's like doing sit-ups. You're not going to do sit-ups once and go to the mirror and be like I look great. It doesn't work that way. It's the best correlation with exercise and, just like exercise, you need to carve out time for it, you need to commit it, you need to be committed, you have to be goal-oriented, just like anything else. And it's the epitome of something that is important but not urgent. So, basically, our brains are wired to go on whatever the most urgent thing isond to that text, respond to that email, you know, and posting content is never something that's urgent, it's always just something that's important. So I think and exercise is the same thing, right, and that's why a lot of people don't do it Like you want to eat, because your body's telling you I'm hungry, so that becomes urgent, but your body's never telling you I need to exercise right now, so you just don't do it or call your mom or whatever those things are.
Speaker 1:And I think that's the people who I've seen in my career who are the most successful are the people that do things that aren't urgent but are important across life, whether it's how they focus on family time, whether how it's, you know, their goal oriented in terms of how much time they want to spend with their kids, or focusing on the business strategy versus responding to that one client right. Or you know, figuring out how to hire people versus how to go win a customer, because hiring people, you know responding to the customer season urgent because there's a business right there. But if you focus on hiring people, you could have 10 clients right, but it's and but focusing on talent is the clearest correlation between people I've seen being successful, interesting.
Speaker 2:And I think that's a great delineation of urgent versus important.
Speaker 1:Quick side note question just tactically, you mentioned feeding a bunch of your podcast stuff into the model. Is that just like a custom GPT you use, or what else are you using?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I've built a ton of custom applications in AI. Yeah, so I've built a ton of custom applications in AI. When AI first came about we're a 300-person company and I have an engineering team of about 85 people I gave my engineering team AI to figure out and it was going nowhere. And the reason why is giving them AI and say figuring it out is the same thing as basically giving somebody I don't know flour and say make a recipe like that, you have. No, I make a dish like you have no idea what to make. Right, and ultimately that was the wrong approach.
Speaker 1:I took it back to myself. I took over AI myself and I'm not an engineer, but I'm fairly tech savvy and I started with like, what problem do I need to solve versus how do I use AI? And I, I I made the decision that before I solved anything for the business, I was going to solve something for myself personally, because in doing so, I'd be more motivated to solve it and going through that process would teach me about AI. And I'm turning 50 next year. I have young children, so I made the decision I want to keep myself alive and that's what I want AI to help me do and any great use of AI is based upon data, as I mentioned earlier, and in keeping myself alive, it's data about my body. So I went through 20 years of information about. I got my hands on every blood test, every MRI, every x-ray, every doctor's notes, information from my Apple Watch on my heart rate, information from my Wi-Fi scale, and I trained a custom GPT to basically say your one job is to keep me alive, act like a world-leading doctor from Johns Hopkins, et cetera. And I start to ask questions like if I was going to die five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, based upon what you know, what's the most likely cause? And it didn't care about pissing me off. It just told me what the data showed and it woke me up and I'm like well, how do I present that? What showed? And it woke me up and I'm like well, how do I prevent? Present that? What am I doing? You know what should my diet be, and now I, um, I use it several times a day and I then create the same thing for my financial information, where I upload it. Um, you know my bank statements, my tax returns, all those things, and you know where should I be investing my network statement and it's incredible. So then I turn into business. What's the business? What's the blood test PDF of my business?
Speaker 1:And we use a tool called Zoom I mean not Zoom Gong which basically it sits on top of Zoom, which basically records every call. And our company has been remote since the pandemic and, as it turned out, we had access to over 20,000 hours of call transcripts from customers and prospects. So I got my hands on those 20,000 hours of transcripts, I fed that into a model and it changed our entire business Because from that we could understand what you know company is like about Susie, what they don't, what comparatives they use, why not? I overlaid customer revenue data so you know, if a customer jumped in revenue, tell me what was the correlation in the last six months of everything that was said during that call. What did the salesperson say? What did the customer say? Well, that equals good. You want more of that, you need less of this. It helped us, you know, come up with an SEO strategy, a customer segmentation strategy. So we built all these automations on top of that data and now our whole business runs on that data, because that's the source of truth, that's the voice of our customers in the wild.
Speaker 1:So, from that whole journey, starting with the health bot all the way through now, I feel like I am more knowledgeable about AI than 99.99% of people out there and I can build anything and I'm not even an engineer. And I'll see people on stage talk about AI but they've never done any of this stuff right. They just go on and chat GBT and talking about what it could do. And that's kind of the difference. I often give the analogy of like people go to a national park like Yosemite, right, and 90% of people just go to the gift shop and they go behind the gift shop and take a selfie because of the waterfall in the background. Right, 9% of people go down the steps to the trail that's paved and walk around the lake and then 1% go deep into the woods and really experience the natural beauty of the park and they sleep outside and they see the stars and they get the peace and solitude that it was meant for. The same thing exists with AI 90% of people will just go on chat GBT and do a couple of things. Exists with AI 90% of people will just go on chat GBT and do a couple of things. Maybe another 9% will really think about it and reprompt and do things, and then 1% will do what I do and actually build applications that are scalable. And it's going to be those 1% of people that are going to be the people that are going to be on the right side of this innovation, because they're going to be able to do the work of 99 other people, and that's kind of where I think it's all headed.
Speaker 1:No, that's fascinating, and I've done some similar things. I mean even for the podcast. I've trained it in my voice. I have fed it some transcripts. Yeah, I do that too. I'm a little late on it, so I probably got to feed it some updated ones, but that's incredibly helpful. The question is what you're going to do with the transcripts, right and like how you're going to leverage it.
Speaker 1:Ultimately, I think the biggest thing about ai is it's less about how to solve the problem and it's more about understanding, in terms of people's success, what problem needs to be solved. Yes, because data analysis and like a lot of these things can now be done by ai, but you have to tell, you have to figure out, what problem you want ai to solve for you. So people have to become more strategists and less tacticians, and a lot of people who are very tactician-oriented are the people that are going to be losing their jobs because they're going to be automated out of a job. Yeah, well, I mean, it's really just like a bigger, better gun, but you still have to know where to point it right.
Speaker 1:Well put yeah, and so I think you combine that and then you combine what we were talking about a little bit earlier with the personality of being a brand, and one person can really just a hundred X what they could have done. Yeah, and we're starting to see that. Yeah, I'm excited about that. Switching gears a little bit. I know we mentioned we would. We would come back to talking a little bit more about Susie and just kind of this building component.
Speaker 1:So help me understand. I know that you mentioned it was rebranded a few years ago. How?
Speaker 1:has the company evolved itself over the last several years and what does it look like now? So when I joined Susie, basically the company had raised about $12 million and it was originally called CrowdTap, which was the software company. I spun out of my agency and what CrowdTap had done is amassed about a million registered users, consumers who could earn points for creating and sharing content on behalf of brands. So, like Huggies would say, if you're a mom with a baby, take a picture of your baby in a Huggies box and share it on Facebook and earn rewards. That was like their business model. But once Facebook launched programmatic advertising, that became less in demand and the business just kind of hit a wall. They stopped growing. They were burning too much capital and since I had a vested interest in the business because I incubated it, the board asked me to come back and basically try to figure it out. And after talking to the customers, the one functionality that customers liked had nothing to do with content creation. There was a polling tool where you could ask the users like you know, what new packaging of deodorant do you like best? And they loved the fact that it was so instant in terms of the response from consumers. There was no sophisticated research tools or analysis there. It was just kind of rudimentary, like ABC, like multiple choice, but they loved it. So I made the decision that that was going to be the business and at that point the company was doing about 10 million in revenue and of it, maybe $500,000 was from this insights or research tool. I had to tell the board we're walking away from 95% plus of our revenue to focus on this other thing.
Speaker 1:How did that conversation go? The main investor from Foundry Group, seth Levine. He wanted me to come back on because we had a great relationship and he trusted me. He wanted me to come back on because we had a great relationship and he trusted me. The reason he is a prolific entrepreneur is that he isn't afraid to take risks and he knows how to bet on experienced entrepreneurs. Not only did he say go for it, but he gave me an extra $5 million because I needed it to basically get there, basically took that next year, tore down the old business, tried to sell it. Nobody wanted to buy it. Um, and you know, cut the staff from 130 people to 30 people cause we were going to run out of money. They had just taken on debt they barely service and basically came up with a new business model.
Speaker 1:I had to rebrand the B2B side because I didn't want to have to explain that it's crowd tap now does something completely different. Um, so came up with Susie. Came up with the name Susie because I'm a huge fan of the band Phish and I was at Madison Square Garden with a friend. They played the song Susie Greenberg. I said I'm going to call it Susie, but the reason I chose somebody's name is that I knew we were going to be hitting this age of AI where we were going to be talking to our technology-led people. So I could have called susie, sally or john, it didn't matter, I wanted to give it a name of a person and susie was just ownable. Um, for letters we were able to buy the url, etc. Um, at first it was very quick and dirty. It was an extension of of kind of the functionality I inherited, which is like ask these people questions. You know we kept that original base of crowd tap members as kind of like our panel, if you will.
Speaker 1:Will, and over time I start to learn more about the market research industry, because I didn't know anything about it and I learned that it's very sophisticated and there's kind of a lot of deep domain expertise in terms of the way that you ask questions, the way that you analyze the data, the way that you weight to data statistical significance. All these different types of methodologies I had never even heard of and I quickly realized that was kind of like over my head in terms of expertise. So I hired a woman who's now our president, katie Gross, who is a market research veteran and she's been around working for the biggest companies out there for years and when she first saw our product she was like I can't believe you guys actually are this successful with this type of product. But it's because I know how to sell and how to storytell, et cetera. And she brought on basically this whole other faction to the company of people who are research experts and over time we had kind of this dual path of kind of my DNA, which has been storytelling and content creation and consumer trends right, which is ultimately like one of the outputs of research, and her and her expertise, which is on research methodology, deep domain expertise, understanding different ways to get panels and different segmentations of panels and all these things that I never even thought of, and when you combine the two it ended up being like a Peter Butter and Jelly where we're able to be very unique in an industry that was starving for innovation, that had a bunch of sleepy legacy incumbent companies out there that haven't really innovated. And there have been a couple of software companies, like Qualtrics being the most prolific, that had first mover advantage, surveymonkey being another one. But SurveyMonkey never got to the enterprise because they never knew how to service the enterprise. And Qualtrics the founder, ryan Smith, who's a great entrepreneur. He left and when founders leave, a lot of the innovation comes out. He owns a bunch of sports franchises. Hopefully I'll follow suit in his steps one day.
Speaker 1:But so we knew that we had an opportunity out there to innovate and innovate. We have. It hasn't all been up and to the right, but you know we've taken our lumps. We've learned a lot over time. We made the decision just to focus on servicing large enterprises, which I think has been a great move, um, and we've kind of rounded out our offering, whether it be enhanced data security, um, or uh, you know, very sophisticated service offerings which clients want. They just they don't want, when they're conducting research, just to use their password. Um, leaning into consumer trends and things, I do well to really build a differentiated brand. So we're nearing 100 million in annual recurring revenue, which is a big number. I think it's 0.001% of software companies get there.
Speaker 1:We've raised now $120 million to date and it's a different phase in the business because, you know, up until I would say a year ago, when AI came on board, I was kind of like running a big ship and I wasn't able to do the things that I really love to do as an entrepreneur. But now with AI, it gives me an ability to kind of get my hands dirty again and it's kind of reinvigorated me to run the company and I'm fortunate enough to be surrounded by just a great executive team, which didn't come easily and we've had to make a lot of changes to get to the team that we built today. But we have a great exec team that each has different kind of specialties and we work well together and we have incredible supportive investors. Seth, who I told you about, from Foundry Group, is still our lead investor and through everything he supported me and us, as well as the other investors we've had. So, very fortunate, it's definitely been the best experience of my career.
Speaker 1:Obviously, we're in a very tenuous time running a SaaS company based upon the disruption that AI will bestow on our industry and our company, which is like, it's like innovate or be or disrupt, or be disrupted sort of thing, if you will and that's why, like I, it's like a such a sense of urgency for me too, to really be, because we're in a position where we're small enough that we can move fast, but we're big enough that we work with a third of the fortune 100. So we're in a really good spot. There's a lot of new startups coming up every day, but you know it's going to take them two years to get an MSA with a big, leading advertiser. And we're already there. So we have a headstart. But we can't rest on our laurels or else one day we'll be the sleepy legacy incumbent, right, and that's kind of where we're at from a business standpoint. Cool, we'll love that. I mean congrats on all the success and everything that you've you've done to get so far.
Speaker 1:Um, final question for you what are some of the key lessons or guiding principles that you've followed along the way to get you to where you're at? I think you always have to be reinventing yourself, both in terms of your business and you as a person. Um, you know, so I don't know if you saw, like Beyonce was just in a TV commercial for a jeans company and it was like country-themed and I was like, what does Beyonce have to do with country? Well, she's reinventing herself, right? She's exploring new parts of music and her persona and how she feels and it's going to keep her relevant. And I think you have to do that as an individual, right, and you have to continually be curious. You know, I had Mr Youth, which is focused on reaching young people, but then social media came out and I rebranded it as MRY, because we wanted to be a social media company. And then I went to do a software company and that's what reinventing yourself looks like.
Speaker 1:I think there's a big risk of being complacent and doing the same thing and a company that keeps doing the same thing. And then, quickly, you look back in the last 20 years, you're like what have I accomplished besides forwarding emails and joining meetings? I think you have to reinvent your business and yourself constantly, based upon how fast things are moving. That's not easy to do because we're creatures of habit. I think people always underestimate the value of a network, of their personal network. Just like it's harder to meet close friends later in life. It's harder to form your business network later in life.
Speaker 1:When you're young, you should be going to every single event, every single corporate gathering, every single group that you can possibly join, because you never know, like I made the mistake where I would go to a conference when I was in my twenties. If somebody had, like, a nonprofit badge, I would like not sit next to him or her and I would like be a heat-seeking missile to the person that had Nike on their badge. But, like you never know, if the person with Nike is decision-making power and a nonprofit person could be the CMO of Procter Gamble in five years. So you also have to have a long-term purview it goes back to important but not urgent and build relationships with as many people as possible, not based upon like a transactional approach of what can they do for me today, but just if they look intelligent and smart and they have something interesting to say, talk to them and then, most importantly, mind that relationship over time. Find ways to add value.
Speaker 1:When I started, suzy, you know, I got a couple of clients off the bat and the only reason they became clients is they were people who knew and trusted me. And if, if I didn't have those people to call on, well then I wouldn't have gotten the business off the ground, because I don't know anything about research and the tool wasn't even that great, right. So if you're changing jobs, if you're going through something in your, in your career, if you want to get your kid an internship one day, your network is all that matters um, personally and professionally. But I think a lot of people overlook building a long-term professional network because they're focused again on the urgent contact of the moment and they lose touch with the people that can't help them in that moment but, over a long term, are most likely to be able to help them. I love that. I agree with that in every aspect and I think that's some incredible wisdom.
Speaker 1:So, matt, really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for coming on. It's been great, thank you. Thank you for tuning into this episode of Seat to Exit. I hope you found today's conversation insightful and valuable. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe, leave a review and share it with your network, your support means the world helps us continue to grow and bring more incredible guests onto the show.
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Speaker 1:Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode of Seed to Exit.
