DN #17: AI Sentence DNA, Voice as the Last Moat & Audience-First Building (w/ Sadok Hasan)

Niklas:Hi and a huge welcome to you, my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today you are joining me for chat with Saduk. Saduk is a growth and AI operator and founder of Bloomberg AI. Building Bloomberg, how did you end up there and how far along are you? Well, I ended up there, man, because honestly, I am really sick of generic AI content. Number two, there's so many talented senior people out here. that when they use this generic AI contact, it literally dumbs them down and makes them sound more generic. ⁓ I frankly, I know it sounds like tripe, but I really believe in authenticity. ⁓ And I really believe that voice is the last moat. ⁓ Your authentic voice at the end of the day. ⁓ That's how I ended up there. We're only two months in. but we've already managed to organically scale up a pretty decent user base. We're about to get an advisor from a Fortune 500 company. We already have three employees. So it's starting off pretty good, hopefully, and it's pretty good. And how does it actually work? How can I imagine it? What's the output that I get when I use Bloomberg? Yeah, well, you can think of it as your end to end content distribution system. And really it's designed for executives, founders, solopreneurs. The way it works is literally learns your voice over time. ⁓ And so the more you use it, the smarter it gets. What you can expect from it is at some point, really my vision for this is that it will become your full autonomous agent for all your digital presence. As of today, you can either put a thought in there. You could put a link in there, you could take a full article and you could basically give it your thoughts on it and it'll extend that out into a content ready and published LinkedIn post, X post, Facebook post. But it goes beyond that. Then once it learns your voice, it becomes really your your PR in a sense, your own personal PR, meaning, you know, using your authentic voice, you can then start scaling that out across all the different channels. You start digitally building your digital presence. And we all know in this AI world with LLMs, scraping the data and everything else. For instance, for me, I started posting six months ago, back when Bloomberg was kind of a little concept. It wasn't even a full user facing UI system, as you can call it today. ⁓ And already I'm being cited by Gemini. Already I'm being cited for the research that we did, where we actually coined the term AI sentence DNA, meaning actual structure of how AI usually generates its content. ⁓ And so stuff like that. I mean, it's pretty exciting. I think For a lot of people in the Silicon Valley, it's hard to grasp right now because a lot of the feedback I get is, why don't I just use ChadGPT? Or why don't I just use something else? Well, number one, first of all, whatever you get from ChadGPT, it's not going to know if you even posted that or not. OK? And so it doesn't even add to your content library. Number two, it doesn't track your voice. I guarantee you right now, if you're listening to this podcast, go into ChadGPT. Tell it. You're an expert at something. Give it whatever you have in terms of, you know, your past history and all your expertise. I guarantee you it will start with, you know, most teams start blah, blah, blah. But really it's blah, blah, blah. And it's the most generic thing in the world. I mean, I've seen it over and over again. I don't know if I even answered your question, but, you know, that's really why I started it. That's how far along we are. And my vision for this is to become fully autonomous, a full agent. acts on your behalf. At some point, I want it to be an actual agent that goes through your accounts and actually starts to build and nurture relationships and community. Because at the end of the day, I really believe in authenticity. And I really believe that people buy from people they trust. And if you're producing generic AI content, they won't trust you there. At this point, people are almost trained to skip over that stuff. I am at least, mean, as soon as I see any, any posts, literally that starts with most something, something, something, but really it's this or like, you don't have a X problem, you have a Z problem. I'm skipping over that because I know for a fact, Chad TPT wrote that, ⁓ Claude gets a little bit better sometimes, but it's still ha you know, very, very guilty of that as well. ⁓ and so really with Bloomberg, we've identified already at this point, 7,000 plus cadences, structures, words. phrases that AI is constantly using and really have at this point systematically built out a system that's not really necessarily prompt engineering, but a full framework to not only prevent that to happen, but to understand, learn your voice over time and then build your content library. Really interesting. And do you have paying users already? Well, how far along are you in the build process? Yeah, we do. And so we're only two months in. You have to remember, I'm building this end to end, literally the whole product, all the distribution. We already have three employees. We do have some paying users. I don't know if I mentioned, one of our users is a VP at a Fortune 500 company. He loved it so much. He literally asked him to become an advisor. And so we're going to bring him on very soon to become our advisor. And I mean, it's been a crazy ride, man, because this is the first time I'm doing something at this, I hope, to be at scale. But ⁓ yeah, you know, it's going pretty well so far. And how do you finance it? I think that's also interesting. If you have employees, you need some money to do it. it self-funded bootstrap now that you already bring in investors? Where are you at? I'm not ready for investors and I don't want them to be honest with you. I'm seeing a huge trend in Silicon Valley right now where venture-backed companies are under so much pressure. know so many founders that ⁓ frankly just seem burnt out because of all the pressure that they're receiving from all these venture-backed companies. I've been bootstrapping this from day one. At some point, once we start scaling, ⁓ know, my background is in performance marketing. So, you you're talking to somebody who loves big budgets, love big resources. But at the end of the day, like at this point, if I can keep this organic as possible, my money, bootstrapping it, ⁓ I'd like to do that as best as I could until at least, you know, we get to a point where it's, ⁓ you know, ⁓ worth scaling. But at this point, there's so many things in this product that still want to add. ⁓ and again, you know, going back to your question about users, I have been laser focused on all the user feedback that I get. And so as soon as a U and I'm so thankful for that, by the way, ⁓ if there's any founders listening to this, if, if any user, if you have even one user by the way, ⁓ who requests a feature. drop everything you're doing, make sure you address it, and just make them feel powerful at the end of the day. Plus it's going to add to your product, you know, it's going to make your product a lot better. And chances are a lot of users will probably end up also asking for the same feature. Yeah, that's really interesting. And I think early stage growth is very different from later stage growth. Once you have figured things out more. How did you get your first users? I think a lot of people struggle with this part. So I got lucky, to be honest with you. ⁓ My first user was actually the first paying user too. And ⁓ it's so ironic because the reason I got him and this is also a very, very good tactic. I'm sure you use this too. I'm sure a lot of people on Twitter use this, but it's commenting and building community, My first ever comment from the Bloomberg LinkedIn account, literally on day two of launch, I had commented on a user's post. He clicked through to the LinkedIn profile. We had maybe three followers at the time. He clicked through the site. He signed up and he converted immediately, which is insane. And so for me, that was either like a sign from God, like, right, man, I gotta, gotta, I gotta keep doing this. But ironically, I haven't been. I haven't been able to even scale that tactic yet ⁓ since then, just because of how much we have going on and how fast and quickly we're growing this thing in terms of the actual infrastructure, the actual system, ⁓ and really our distribution tactics have changed a bit. But I would love to go back to that. Anyone listening, ⁓ if you are bootstrapping it yourself, don't underestimate the power of tactically and strategically commenting and following on all your perceived ICP, all your ideal customer profile qualified audiences. That's really how I got my first user. And again, he signed up immediately, which was crazy. I mean, we were on day two of launch. We had three followers on the LinkedIn account. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. And I think there's such a magic in that moment when somebody actually uses. what you built. think that it's pretty amazing. Whatever it is you're doing. Before starting to build, I think you have a history with a number of both software companies, but also e-sport teams. Maybe we start with this. How did you end up at Bloomberg? What, what the path that brought you there? My path has been very unconventional, ⁓ not your typical Silicon Valley AI growth operator path. I honestly... give credit to my early start, was, and by the way, this business model probably doesn't exist anymore. But straight out of high school, I started at a small company. If you're in the Silicon Valley, you probably know of it. It's called Fry's Electronics. And I started on the retail sales floor, commission only. You basically sell or you go home broke. And that's how I started to understand that to convert a user, you really, really need to get them to trust you. And to do that, you got to make them feel powerful. Like at the end of the day, you gotta make them feel powerful. You gotta make them... feel like this is going to be a life-changing purchase. ⁓ How you message that, how you communicate that, over time you start iterating and you start understanding what sticks and what works. But that really gave me the understanding of how to read people in person and really how to build that authenticity. And so you can almost say like I learned performance marketing backwards. I that's really how I started to understand how to sell. ⁓ That led me to a couple of internships in marketing. ⁓ eventually ended up at fanatics, ⁓ where I, I would say I really understood the, the power of licensing and merchandise and infrastructure at scale. ⁓ fanatics, as you know, I think they signed like a 20 year deal with the NFL shop, meaning that they are the sole and exclusive people or company to even be able to sell licensed, ⁓ sports merchandise on NFL shop, NBA store, NHL shop. all the different team sites. That was a huge strategic play from a company that, by the way, also started in retail sales, ⁓ in a shopping mall in Jacksonville. ⁓ and so I was there for four years. That gave me so much inspiration. Again, I was so lucky. my whole career has been so lucky, man. I joined that company. That company was a spinoff of eBay and I had one of the most talented teams you can ever imagine. Half these people ended up at some really crazy companies, C-levels, C-suite, VPs and all that, et cetera. And I got to learn from under them. Plus this whole infrastructure and, and, and, you know, merchandise that scale. So, you know, that led me there. After Fanatics, obviously I think it was Google. And then Procore, Pure Storage, and then Air Wallocks. And so I've had a very healthy mix of B2C, B2B, sales. ⁓ I got lucky, man. And I took advantage of a lot of that. think your last step before going on your own was Airwalex and you were heavily driving paid growth. If there's a founder who has been working on organic growth for now, maybe also doing things that don't scale, doing outreach themselves, they are now thinking about advertising. What should they think about? What should they do? Or what should they not do? Don't even touch it until you figure out what works. And to do that, you have to do a lot of manual stuff that doesn't scale first. ⁓ Iterate, iterate constantly and design a framework for your iterations. In other words, what we did at Air Wallix and kind of going back to your question about performance marketing, ⁓ every single test that we ran, we either killed in seven days if it didn't perform at a CPA goal ⁓ or let it ride. But to get there, mean, Hairwalks has so much budget and infrastructure and resources. If you're not there yet, I would honestly say just start building out your organic reach. Outreach is cool. don't know. Me personally, I don't like DMing. That's why I actually hired a salesperson to do that myself. It's just not where I feel like your time is most valuable. If you're a solopreneur or founder, I really believe that you should do founder led content marketing first, kind like what I'm doing right now with you, right on this podcast, ⁓ where you can actually start distributing your ideas, distributing, ⁓ your way of thinking, you know, hopefully people resonate with that. And it kind of goes back to just building that trust. ⁓ but the first thing's first is start with SEO. ⁓ you know, programmatic SEO, build that infrastructure, all your internal linking. If you can get some backlinks, that's great too. But I found that internal linking and really the infrastructure that you can build an SEO and programmatic is super crucial. ⁓ And just post, man, post consistently. Get all the channels going. ⁓ Use Bloomberg, you know, shameless drop, because what it does is it'll start scaling out your voice across all those different channels. You don't even have to think about it. And then you can focus on other things like infrastructure and product and hiring. ⁓ But I would say honestly, don't even touch performance marketing until you actually kind of find what sticks. If you're very limited on budget, at least. For me, I'm not that deep into performance marketing. What do you mean? Can you give an example of what sticks? What does it mean? What would be something like an indicator that I should now switch? Great question. ⁓ You will pick up very early on what resonates based off of... excuse me, based off of reach. Vanity metrics are great, likes and whatever, and engagement, that's cool, but honestly I found that like, you know, a lot of people have a decent community probably already built up, you know, if it's like your ex-co-workers or whoever it is, that's fine, but if you start getting engagement from strangers that you've never even, you know, heard of, ⁓ If you start noticing that your analytics, you're getting a lot more distribution for a certain posts or a certain messaging tactic or even a certain infographic or visual or style, ⁓ lean more into that and start iterating based off of that. And so for us at Bloomberg, I think when we first started, ⁓ a lot of the messaging that we did was like scheduling. And the problem is, is it's such a saturated market, dude, like there's so many other apps that also have scheduling. And so very quickly realize, okay, well, what's our actual, you know, reasons to do business with us? Well, we can scale your authentic voice. ⁓ And based off of that, can start iterating. you know, really it's about shamelessly testing every single angle that you have. If you're building a product, think about every single. outcome based solution and then just start posting about them. Take different angles. Try a visual, try a video, try a carousel and then basically just keep iterating. So it's a lot of manual work at first. Do the stuff that doesn't scale at first and then you will eventually find something that does. Yeah, that's really interesting. then from, and I agree that it probably changes over time how you acquire your customers. If I now think about once again, paid ads, right? Do you have like a revenue on your mind where you would say you should start with it or below something like that? Don't even consider it. And after X million in revenue per year, you can do it or a few hundred K. What do you think? Sorry, what do you mean by that? Yeah, I mean, like, there's probably, I could imagine that there's a change over time when you say I've reached a certain revenue number, for example, where you'd say maybe ads would make sense. Maybe they never make sense. I think there are some people out there, especially in the indie-hacker space, who have tried paid ads and are completely against it. They say it doesn't work for me. They do only organic content. But do you have a feeling like that at a revenue number where you'd say, okay, at this revenue number, I want fewer gross pay debts work, and that's probably worse investing in them. Um, well, think start smart. mean, either way, I mean, if you're at 10,000 in revenue, a million in revenue, 10 million in revenue, it's all the same. Um, start smart, start with Google, start with your lower acquisition funnel based, uh, kind of approach. Start with a very long tail, uh, highly comfort meant, uh, compartmentalized keyword groupings. Uh, Because the thing is, likely people are probably not going to be searching your company name. They don't even know it exists, right? Obviously you're going want your brand terms covered, but start with super generic, long tail keywords, super specific, go exact, go phrase match, do TCPA, right? And so you always want a bid for the actual cost per acquisition. Lower your TCPA if you have to, if you have a very limited budget. ⁓ And then just start scaling it. Start with your lower funnel. Bottom of funnel kind of tactics, Google scales. Bing is very cheap. A lot of people are not on Bing. As a matter of fact, at Air Wallix, we noticed that almost 90 % of the ⁓ competition that was within our ⁓ auction insights, taking our search impression share. didn't exist on Bing. ⁓ And so you can get a fraction of the cost, your cost per click at least on Bing. ⁓ But I would say start there. know, a lot of people start with Facebook ads. And again, this kind of goes back to if you have a very good, highly performing organic creative on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, test that first, test that first and start actually promoting it. Don't do a boost. You know, at this point, creative is the new targeting. AI is getting to a point where it's... It's smart enough to understand the creative. And so it's smart enough to serve it to your actual qualified audience. ⁓ And as a matter of fact, a highly regulated place like fanatics, we were actually under a special ads category. You probably know about this if you're in fintech, ⁓ where you lose access to a lot of ⁓ ability to target audiences. And so for instance, you're not able to do your CRM audiences. You're not able to do retargeting. If you're in a special ads category like finance and so creative really has become the new targeting. And so, you know, find what scales first in terms of your organic. Let's say you posted something, an image or a visual or infographic or video and it outperforms all your previous ones. That would be a good place to start actually testing into Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn, although I will say is getting a little bit more expensive now. But really, mean, just be super systematic with this stuff. ⁓ Test a lot, but start very, very lower funnel, bottom of funnel kind of ⁓ ads like Google and Bing. Yeah, that's interesting. I remember that on one of the first tours I launched like a long time ago, I just wanted to get some traffic. So I did some Google ads. Never worked without that well. So I wouldn't recommend the dirty stage. think you have to go the hard route and just somehow find people and talk to them. But later on, would be, I've personally never, never seen ads really work on. on a small scale. Like I think it's probably a different story once you have a brand and you can especially also drive competitor traffic to you. I think it's really, really hard, early stage to be honest. That's my feeling. I mean, it depends on the industry, man. I remember I had an e-commerce store back in 2017 and Google shopping was my primary driver for revenue. We hit a month of, I think our top month was like 60K, but this was during November. So obviously Black Friday. And the majority of that came from Google ads. ⁓ Obviously Facebook is going to play into it too, but be super, super conscious of your downfall of metrics. Make sure your attribution is correct. A lot of people think that, you know, Facebook is helping when sometimes if you actually look at the downfall of metrics and the actual model, ⁓ there are no significant touch points from Facebook. that actually end up becoming your bottom of funnel converters. But again, it depends on the industry. Look, if you're in SaaS right now, yeah, I wouldn't touch ads. I wouldn't touch ads, man. mean, do outreach, do organic, start with a few users, talk to people that you think in your industry could actually use what you have, ⁓ find what sticks, and then go from there. But again, it depends. It depends on the industry. Honestly, if you're in e-commerce, Go for it. Go for shopping. Always. Because that's very high intent. But if you're in like a SaaS, I'm still figuring that out myself, you know? Because I'm bootstrapping this up in a day. Yeah, quite interesting. And it also sounds very different to, I think, what you did before. What I would be also interested for founders that think about starting in a highly regulated industry, like some fintech or something like that. What do you think is the biggest mindset shift that you need if you start in that category, like air wallets or fanatics, for example? FinTech is difficult to get into, Jack Sang started this company, I think it was about 10 years ago, and you gotta do a lot of boring work first. You gotta get a lot of licensing. Licensing is difficult to get. I think Airwalks had 170 plus licenses across the globe. And the more licensing you get, the easier it is to get in the next one. And by the way, 170, that's even more than Strife, right? But at end of the day, you know... highly regulated markets like that. If you don't have like an actual backing resources and infrastructure, it's really difficult to get into. ⁓ So, you know, it depends on the size at the end of the day, you know, I'm not sure your audience is that they're solopreneurs, they're bootstrapping this themselves. Just find something easy to get into first and build that up. Eventually you can pivot it. ⁓ But I wouldn't recommend anybody get into fintech, honestly, if you're just a by yourself solopreneur, ⁓ unless you want to have the intention of eventually getting bought out. And if that's the case, then find a wedge. where your Aeroallocs or your Stripes or somebody else doesn't have yet. Try to find an outlier within FinTech that you could build. As a matter of fact, I've had some conversations with some people. Some are trying to build agentic layers that are kind of outside of the licensing realm. And in their mind, they're hoping to get acquired by a company like a Striper, Aeroallocs or something like that. No, I mean, at the end of day, it's crucial to choose wisely before you get into anything. And honestly, just find something that interests you. Like at the end of the day, if you don't know anything about fintech, it's going to be really difficult to break into that mold. And I mean, there's a reason why something like Striper took a long time for it to come up. The problem wasn't you. A lot of online shops were building this payment infrastructure. Everybody was building payment infrastructure. I think what they did at Stripe is just incredibly hard to it well. Like regulated, compliant at that scale is just very difficult. It's not so many to touch these fields. I think that's also to be appreciated. And the same probably for Airwallet. So yeah, that's also an interesting topic. would you raise funding these days? I think we have talked like you probably don't need the typical pre-seat round to build a product anymore. AI has taken that away, I would say. think if you can't build like an MVP, if you're talking software, obviously, you can't build an MVP bootstrap, then it will be challenging, I think. ⁓ When should you race? What do you think? Not until you hit at least 2k MRR, 2 to 5k I would say. Legit. ⁓ I don't think anyone's even gonna look at you before that to be honest with you. These days at least they probably won't. Even if you have a really cool concept, really good MVP, if you don't have users, if you don't have 2 to 5k MRR, VCs won't even look at you these days. Yeah, I agree. At least if you're a first time founder and you have no relationship, right? So if you have a relationship or something, it's probably different. if you're like trying to get through and you have no track record. And I also think, I mean, I often like to discuss this topic and you have to understand that if you take venture capital, you set yourself on a quite clear track, right? Because we see they want. their return, they need the outliers. So they need you to grow at all costs and achieve the scale to be a fund returner. So that's why they gave you money in the first place. They didn't give it to you to be a dividend case. That's not what they are looking for. They look for some sort of exit where they can sell their shares and return money to their LPs. And I think that's also something you have to keep in mind that from the second on, when you've taken the money, from the wee seas, you at least owe them to give it a try and become big. Like just getting by and growing slowly will not cut it that way. Yeah, mean, it depends. So like the days of, you know, the SaaS model where you can build a user base, I think they're not over yet. if your product is at least monetizable in the future, I think VCs would look at you if you have a decent user base. But yeah, man, mean, to your point, yeah, if you don't have a backing, if you're just kind of on your own and you don't have resources, you don't have a network, try to get MRR. Try to start getting some revenue at the end of the day. ⁓ And hey, mean, again, like this kind of goes back to the ads thing that we were talking about is like, you really got a laser focus on. ⁓ down funnel metrics and what's actually driving LTV. And so for instance, at Air Wallachs, historically, we always thought that our cards product was our primary driver. And then as soon as I got in there, I actually noticed that we were actually producing negative GP from all the cards product. And I completely reallocated our budgets towards our business accounts and global accounts, which is really where our primary, you LTV cohorts are coming from. But yeah, man, I mean, at this point, it's like, do something monetizable at the end of the day. If you're not doing that, honestly, VCs just won't look at you. Yeah, it's really interesting because it seems to be even true for OpenAI and the OpenAI and traffic group because OpenAI now... It seems like, at least from what I'm reading, Entropic has surpassed all of AI and revenue now. If you go one and a half years back, AI was a big one. had hundreds of millions of users. And Entropic seemed to be a bit lost in the space. They focused on B2B early on, but then they found the coding B2B environment and they heavily leaned into it and just... went into huge growth. I think that's, it's so much easier to monetize companies than it is to monetize consumers. That's what I feel like. And there so few companies in the world who have reliably monetized consumers like Google has and Facebook, yes. But it's so many others. And also if you look at the large companies, they're just a lot that sell to businesses like Salesforce. or Microsoft also at large, they a lot of what Microsoft does as businesses B2B. The thing is though, man, is like, these are completely different models, man. If you think about it with Salesforce, with the... If you think about, let's take Salesforce for example, the onboarding process, even Air Wallets actually, right? I mean, the whole onboarding ⁓ to get users to actually come on and then custom build out their own infrastructure is completely different from something like Google, where it's literally self-serve. You go on there, it doesn't matter. If you're spending $5 a day on ads or $5,000 or $500,000 for them, it's the exact same thing in terms of resources. literally just a platform. You go in there, you're to be in the auction insights. You're good to go. And then of course, you know, they'll give you account managers, et cetera, but with like a Salesforce with, ⁓ you know, anything else that requires like a clay, ⁓ where there's a custom build and an actual onboarding required, that's going to be way, way more different, way more resources than something like Google where it's self-serving. Literally the more skill they get, doesn't matter. mean, yeah. What do you need more server space or, you ⁓ you know, more account managers. That's it. But you're not like custom building anything for any, any of these B2B companies. So, ⁓ yeah, I mean, that's another thing to consider really. I mean, try to find something that is self-serve and it can scale easily, ⁓ unless, know, you obviously you're into kind of getting the resources and onboarding and that kind of stuff. ⁓ if you have an infrastructure built out. But agreed. Yeah, I think it's true, it's really interesting. I've been watching these spaces a lot. And what I also found is that at least of the B2C companies I know that became really big, none of them got big using ads like Facebook or Google. It's all organic growth. It's not through ad budgets or something like that. It's all worth of mouse and then... growing over time and developing some sort of stickiness. What do you think about that? It's just generally a lot harder in B2C to ⁓ keep the users when you grow with ads. So what do you think? I kind of disagree, respectfully. ⁓ I feel like B2C actually relies on ads. ⁓ At least at first. mean, of course, word of mouth kind of gets around. Obviously, ChadGBT is a pretty good example of that. ⁓ But I always take it back to like, if we're talking about B2C, know, something like e-commerce, software, in the beginning, you're really gonna have to pump out ads. If you really want people to know who you are. If you really want to differentiate yourself, uh, B2B I almost feel like is a little bit easier without ads because if once you get one customer, one user that you've onboarded from there, it's just about getting referrals. Um, and then the referrals basically just start building your flywheel. Um, so, you know, I kind of go back to what you said about connections, man. I'm like, I can't express how important it is to build a community, how important it is to start building out your connections like ASAP. And the right connections, mean, people in your niche, people who could eventually become partners, investors, angel investors, VCs, etc. But yeah, I for B2C, I would honestly say that ads is probably crucial in the beginning. That's interesting. And then you would probably be back at I have to raise because you have to fund it and ads are expensive, Yeah, so again, man, like I always feel like if you really have something in mind, if you really want to run with something, just start making money first. Work for some companies, you know, preferably, you know, high paying companies. And then, you know, treat your five to nine as a place to start your, you know, whatever you're about to do. But yeah, man, I mean, to your point, it's, it's, it's, at the end of the day, it's a flywheel. That's what we want. Right. And so to get that, it's like, do the stuff that doesn't scale first. ⁓ If you have even one user, ⁓ my gosh, treat them like a king or queen. ⁓ And then eventually they'll start, you know, telling their friends and everything else. ⁓ And then, you know, the flywheel starts building. And then once you start getting some more paying users, now you have a little bit of money to kind of get some employees, hire out some sales teams, hire out a content person to start building out your content. Then you can start focusing your time on the actual product, the actual infrastructure and partnerships and founder led content marketing. And then, know, start building out a little bit user base, starting in some, you know, recurring revenue. And then maybe you can approach an investor because, hey, you know, we're growing fast, but we want to start scaling ads. We know that this is going to work because of all the organic distribution we've been getting on this lately. We find this messaging works based off of our user feedback, our user research. ⁓ At the end of the day, it's all about alignment. ⁓ So yeah, I agree with you on that. Today, I think the world, and we talk a lot about organic content, has become a lot more noisy with AI. think before 2024, it ⁓ was a lot easier. Like in the pre-AI world, to create, generate thought leadership these days, it's just really easy to create content. ⁓ What would be a piece of advice for a founder now starting out to build an audience in an AI-saturated world? Protect the mid funnel leak. Protect it. And by that I mean post consistently on organic. I mean, these are free. You understand like TikTok is free. LinkedIn is free. These are free to post. Like if you're not posting 10 times, 50 times a day across these channels, you're missing out. Literally, you're missing out on so much distribution and it's free. At end of the day, you just pull out your phone, start recording something, ⁓ post it on TikTok, on YouTube. TikTok especially, by the way, the distribution there is insane. A lot of other channels, know, LinkedIn, Facebook, pretty much every channel I can think of, they will limit your distribution to pretty much your follower base. TikTok, you can start one today and you could potentially have a video that hits like thousand views, 10,000, you can go viral. So don't underestimate those. and protect that mid funnel leak, right? And so while you're kind of creating that content, definitely make sure that you're optimizing your landing pages for good CRO. ⁓ You know, start thinking about upper funnel as well, but I would say protect the mid funnel. And by that is, know, definitely put your resources into into creating as much content as possible. At end of day, it's free, you know? Yeah. And also, what would you start with? Would you start building an audience first or would you start building a product first? What do think? Audience. Audience. I'm a marketer at heart. Silicon Valley seems to think that software is dead. And I completely disagree with that. At the end of the day, the only variable that matters is how much value you bring to the marketplace and how effectively you communicate that. You can have the greatest products in the world. You could have probably built chat GPT before that was even built. But if you have no audience to distribute that to, it doesn't even matter. So start with the audience. Even if you don't really know necessarily what the product will be. ⁓ Directionally, you will eventually find that out. Keep that as your intention overall. ⁓ But stick to your values at the end of the day. Just be authentic. Stick to your values ⁓ and post the right kind of content. Signal the right kind of stuff that would actually get you strategic partnerships later on. You know, that doesn't mean like, you know, the shit posting and vibe posting and that kind of stuff. ⁓ eventually you can start doing that stuff too, but show value at the end of the day, show value of, of, of, of your past, your credibility, your reputation, what you enjoy, ⁓ what you think is probably the best. ⁓ solution and start shifting your content and your distribution towards that. And eventually you'll probably be able to build up enough audience to eventually get a small user base. And then if you get a small user base, ⁓ treat them like your literal lifeline because they will then be personal advocates for you. ⁓ And most importantly, they will be giving you the information that will make your product even better. So to answer your question for sure, audience, for sure. Really nice. And maybe find a question if people now got interested in Bloomberg, they want to try it, whether they find it. Yeah. So go to Bloomberg.ai. It's free to start. I highly recommend, I mean, if you're a founder and you're having difficulty with reach and distribution, you're very limited on your budget. Kind of the stuff that we just talked about in terms of the lowest hanging fruit to start being able to distribute your ideas or values. ⁓ It's a good place to start. Look, if you don't, if you're a founder, you're a solopreneur, you don't even have a LinkedIn or Twitter. First start there. Just create, create every social account possible. it's cringe at first, but then it becomes consistent. ⁓ when you start posting, but, ⁓ I highly recommend it really any founder, solopreneur, entrepreneur, bloomberry.ai, free account, start for free and just start posting, you know, Distribute your ideas. is somebody out there who wants what you have. A thousand percent there is. I know that. And so if you're not effectively communicating that, you'll never find them. So that's, yeah, I would say, hey, did you finally answer your question? Bloomberg.ai. That's where you would start. Saduq, thank you so much for being on and you my lovely listener. See you next time. Nick, this I appreciate you having me,