(40) Scaling B2B Marketing at an AI Startup: Channels, Strategy, and Team Ops with Holly Xiao - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwPcj6VE7R4

Transcript: (00:00) I truly believe that AI, it actually enables creativity. AI as a whole helps the humans like actually unleash their creativity. And with Han specifically, we're not meant to replace humans, but it's meant to make it much easier for them to create the videos. Hey, my guest on this episode is Holly Shiao. (00:20) She is head of B2B marketing at Hey Gen. She runs the enterprise marketing function over there. They're a very cool company in the AI video space. And so we help businesses of all sizes from creators and solarreneurs to Fortune 500s fasttrack video creation without the usual production headaches. I've been working on making my AI DG, the AI avatar of myself. (00:40) Maybe you'll see that soon. I'm trying to make myself a rapper. Not really working, but had an awesome conversation with Holly about her career landing her job at Hey Genen. But yeah, so somebody reached out to me at Hey Jen and I was like, hm, I've never heard of Hey Gen, but I just did my research on it and I remember thinking like, oh wow, this is so cool. (00:58) What's interesting right now about AI and video for marketers, why she doesn't think that all this stuff about AI and marketing is negative. She sees it as an opportunity for creatives and creators to find new ways to spend their time. And hopefully we can spend our time on the creative and the strategy versus all the kind of mundane tasks of marketing. (01:15) And then I talked to her about what's working at Agen right now. Like as an AI first company, what are the marketing plays that they're running? And no surprise, it's a bunch of the things that we've all seen working for us and the other people that I've had on this podcast from webinars still working, events still working. (01:34) One of the biggest things that's not working is SEO and we dive into that and what it means in this world of search and LLMs. I think we're doing things right. It's really just this like rise in LLMs. And to your point, like the AI, Google, there's just like a whole different market landscape now that we all have to like kind of adjust to with this like rise of AI. Here's my conversation with Holly. I think you're gonna like it. (01:52) Enjoy this episode. Exit. Hi, Holly. Hi, Dave. How are you? Good to see you. Good to see you. I'm doing well. How are you today? I'm doing awesome. I just was mess We were just talking uh offline because I was messing around with Hey Jen and having a lot of fun. Yes. And I love that you're doing that because I feel like your whole experience is definitely what a lot of our users are going through too. Yeah. (02:20) Yeah. Yeah. And uh I just wanted to have you on like we Hey Jen, has no we have no affiliation with Exit 5, but um I did this is like a you invited me to be a guest on a webinar and then like we had kind of reconnected through that and I was like I got to have you on on on my podcast. So you're you're here hanging out. It's more fun to not host. (02:40) You get to just hang out at work and and uh just talk about talk about marketing with me. So yeah, very important um to have this conversation for sure. Okay. Just so I can get it on the record, can you just introduce yourself? Like first name, last name, what do you do for work, and then that'll just give us a nice little sound clip to build off of? Yeah, for sure. (02:56) I'm Holly Sha and I lead the B2B marketing team at Hen, which is an AI video generation platform. And so we help businesses of all sizes from creators and solarreneurs to Fortune 500s fasttrack video creation without the usual production headaches. Okay, cool. Love it. And um your background, man. How did I first meet you? Were you at Eventbrite? I was at Eventbrite when this was back in the day when I was still in marketing operations. And I remember my manager saying like, "Hey, we need more MQLs. How do we find generate more MQLs?" And (03:27) I was like, "All right, let's look into chat bots cuz like chat bots is becoming a thing. Intercom was already pretty established there." Um and I remember looking at Drift and that was pretty much how we first met. Okay. How did you how did you get into how did you get into marketing ops? Oh my gosh. (03:47) Um I like lots of different like basically it was not a linear path where like I don't even know where to start. Um I feel like so I'll start in college since a lot of people are graduating or actually going to college this fall but I feel like switched paths like two to three times. Um I went to UCSC to study medicine because that's what they're known for. Took chem 2 and was like nope this is not for me. (04:04) So then I thought about going to law and I got a job at a law firm and was fully planning to take the LSAT. But literally the night before I was supposed to take the test. I called my parents. I was like, "Law is not for me. I'm not taking the LSAT." And I just remember at the law firm I was helping them with marketing adjacent tasks. (04:23) So one of the lawyers was an aspiring country singer and asked me to pitch a song to radio stations as my job at this. Yeah. It was it was kind of wild thinking back on it, but at the time I was like, "Oh yeah, this is normal, right?" Like this is what what people do. (04:44) Um, but yeah, so here I was researching radio stations in San Diego and calling them to basically like sell them on playing this person's song. And I thought it was like kind of just ridiculous, but also fun. And that was actually how I ultimately chose marketing as I path. Um, and yeah, so out of college, my first job was at this really small small like residential solar company and I started there as like a marketing communications manager to work on their website revamp and external strategy. (05:08) But pretty much like a month or two after I was hired, there was like a huge round of layoffs and I was the only marketer left at the company. And so I realized that the biggest gap that we had in marketing was actually in automation operations. So that's how I landed in marketing operations. I basically Google my way around to teach myself how to do it. Love that. That's like me too. (05:27) Just figure you just everybody I feel like there's few people like you know few people were like yeah you know I knew I was going to be in marketing when I was 7 years old and I you know had to eliminate like I think those stories are more nonsense. I think what happens is eventually you realize you have to get a real job and make money in this world and like find a and find a way to create a living and we kind of all get there differently. And then for me it was like I I got a marketing job because it was (05:52) only it was the only company that would pay me and it was like a paid internship and I was like okay this is I can at least sell this to my parents and be like well I got a real job they're paying it's you know 10 bucks an hour or whatever and um I got in this company and it was like I was using my skills as a writer and a communicator and I didn't really know those were like cool skills to have in the business world and I did really well. I was at a PR company and I like got coverage for my clients and (06:17) people started to like me internally and I was like, "Oh, this is I didn't think work could be fun. It like feels feels good." So, I'm just wondering like was there a moment in that early marketing ops journey where like you did something at work at this company and people were like, "Holly, like let's go. (06:34) You you you you're kind of good at this thing." And like that kind of is what ends up, you know, being a building block for you to turn turn into a career. Yeah, for sure. I feel like for me what I loved about it was the problem solving aspect of it. And I think that just goes for a lot of the marketing roles, but it was it's so operational. (06:50) It's like if you send this email, this is what happens. This is how it triggers. So like that was a lot more like there's a lot more logic going into that. Um, and I just remember I think it was like a customer I don't even remember what it was now, but I think it was something related to customer emails because like basically um at the different stages of the residential solar installation. (07:14) Uh there are a lot of like logistical things that you have to do or like steps that you have to take. And so I basically like created the whole process there and like created triggers for the first time at the company um using sugar CRM which I don't know if you ever heard of sugar serum but it's basically like a Marquetto um but just for very small companies and I remember that was a moment where people like oh my gosh this is great and we got a lot of great feedback from customers saying like it was really helpful to know like oh you know this a stage got approved so now they can move on to the next stage. Um so that was probably the moment where I (07:40) was like oh I'm pretty good at this. Um, and yeah, that's kind of how I kept in marketing operations and ultimately ended up at Eventbrite. Okay. So, then you go then you go to Eventbrite. Uh, eventually you went to Drift aka Salesoft and yada yada yada. Now you're at Hey Jen and man, I'm so fascinated and interested in what's happening in the AI space and marketing and you've been there almost a year. (08:09) Um, how did you how did you land this this job at at Hen like and did you know you wanted to go to an AI company? Yeah, so Hen actually I wasn't really looking at the time and somebody from Hen had reached out and say hey like hey I think you will be really great for this role and the role that I was actually applying to was um a solutions marketing role. (08:32) So leading the solutions marketing team because as you can tell Hen is a very long like we have so many longtail use cases and so the business really wanted to start focusing more on like solutions and use cases and like teams specifically to be more you know customized and personalized in the messages that we're sending out. Um but yeah so somebody reached out to me at Hen and I was like hm I've never heard of hen but I just did my research on it and I remember thinking like oh wow this is so cool. So, kind of like what you're doing right now of like playing around with it and creating these videos. I did the exact same thing. Um, and I show I (08:58) remember showing my husband of like me speaking like five different languages, but it still sounds like me. And he's like, "Oh my god, this is crazy." Um, and so yeah, I was like, "Okay, this is a really cool product." And, you know, coming from a product marketing background, I it's really important to me to work on a product that I'm personally really passionate and excited about. (09:22) Um, so that checked the box and then yeah, talked to a lot of the people here, Joshua, our CEO. Um, and it was just it just felt like it was meant to be in the sense of I didn't know that I wanted to ride this AI wave. Um, because I know like a lot of people are just like, oh, I want to get an AI, but I think for me it's, you know, how do I work on a product that's that I'm personally really excited about? And I think personally it's just like a really really cool vision and future to kind of what is happening here. Yeah. I want to talk about I want to talk about the this use case. You mentioned a lot of longtail use cases. I (09:52) want to get to that but I'm just trying to weave through some of these pieces and so and then your role specifically. Can you just fill us in on you know whatever you're you're allowed to share. Um just like the overall company structure. You are head of B2B marketing. (10:09) Like what does that mean? Where does that sit in the broader marketing org? Who do you report to? I'm just curious. It's about some of the the structure of the company and team and where marketing sits first. Yeah, for sure. So, so the company itself, we are much more so originally we were much more creator focused. So, a lot of the um people who are using us and our customers and users are more of like the creators and the solarreneurs of the world. And so, we have a growth team who actually supports that side of the business. (10:34) And for my role, which is more on the B2B side, I support the SLG side of the business. So these are kind of like how do we start to move up market? How do we sell to more corporate teams um and like marketers and L & D teams at these enterprise companies? And so that's kind of where um my team really focuses on. (10:52) And is there like a do you who who runs marketing at the company? We don't really have like a CMO that like runs it. So it's kind of me, an AI agent. There's an AI agent CMO. Yeah. So that's basically me on the B2B side and then I work really closely with my um peer Nick Warner who runs the side of things and it's kind of the two of us together. All right. (11:15) So do you have to like are you talking about marketing to the CEO to the founder? Yeah. So uh I meet pretty regular with Joshua and Joshua comes from an engineering background. Um but it's so great because as a CEO he's like just very naturally curious. So, he'll ask you a ton of questions and then you'll be like, you know, this is this is why here's how I think about it. (11:33) Um, and it's it's actually kind of interesting having marketing conversations with him because he's so he thinks like an engineer, right? Um, and so it's it's a very different world, I think, between Mark and engineering. It's really cool to kind of see that come together. I love that though. I like I think that now I've seen it I've seen a bunch of different ways now. (11:52) And you know Leas from from agency and and Drift days obviously and you know I think he was the not he was the CTO at Drift but he he was very involved in the marketing and the company vision with David who was the founder and CEO and um it is is very refreshing. (12:12) It can be uncomfortable because I think the engineering mindset is very much like question everything why do it this way? Can't you do it this way? But I think especially in B2B marketing, we have so many things that are just kind of like best practices or we do them because we've always done them that way. And one of the biggest parts of my career was in the early days of Drift being like literally one of the only marketing people at the company around 10 or 12 engineers. (12:35) You kind of that culture becomes contagious and it's like all these things. It's like oh I know I like I'm sharing an idea with someone like I don't know how to do that and then engineers like oh well we can we can just grab that data for you. Do do you want that or do you want me to just like spin this up at the end of the day? like you you can just do that. (12:46) And so I think that I love I love working with engineering folks and product folks because I do think they kind of allow me to move a little bit faster. And I like to I like to do more of the growth and entrepreneurial type of marketing stuff. I'm not as good at the like sit in a meeting and this is what MQLs are and all the kind of you know non nonsense. (13:06) Sure. We're actually um currently defining what MQLs are here at Hey Jen. Yeah. Whatever. Okay. All right. So, that so so that that's cool. So, so there's kind of there there there's two of you in the marketing side. One of you is responsible for like the self-service, you know. (13:26) I I just signed up this morning and spent 288 bucks on my credit card. I did put referral source Holly just so you know. I hope you get I hope you get credit for that. And you're I'm going to ask for credit. Ask for credit. Yeah. How do you explain like what what is different about the you have like the the B2B side and that's where you're selling you want to sell hey genen to other companies. (13:45) Um you know tell me like I'm an idiot which I am. Actually one guy wrote on this podcast one time he was like how was this guy ever a CMO? He asked the most basic questions. I'm like because most people sitting at home like you want to hear the actual answers like god. So, so, so the maybe talk about the difference in like your job and the go to market motion of selling B2B in Hey Genen versus selling not not B2B. What do what do they call that by the way? Self-service. (14:13) Self-service. Yeah. Grow. Um, yeah. Um, so I think what and again this is so different at different companies, but the way that it's broken out here at Hen is, you know, for Nick and his growth team, what they care about most is just driving anybody and everybody to Hen. (14:32) So anybody who signs up is a win for their team versus for the B2B side, we are really focusing on people who are um true enterprises and will want the enterprise plan and the package. So I think when it comes to so that's kind of just high level our goals and objectives, but when it comes to the tactics that align into those, a lot of what they like the other growth team does is really around feature-based selling. (14:53) So because AI is such a hot commodity and there's so many competitors, it's like, "Oh, we have this new feature now." And another competitor is like, "Oh, we have this new feature." And that's kind of just like the way it kind of is in AI with a lot of competitors releasing things like every other day. But on the enterprise side, we can't talk about things as like here's a new feature, here's a new feature. (15:11) Everything has to be based on like the why. Like there's story to it, a lot of education on the value, the different use cases. Um, so I think that's probably the main difference that I see between the PLG side of the business right now and the SLG side where a lot of the people coming in self-s serve are already like AI enthusiasts, right? They want to like start trying it. They want they see Avatar 4 that we just released and like, "Oh my god, this is so great. (15:33) " And they they're actually the ones who tell us what use cases our new features are for cuz like we go in building a new feature thinking that, you know, this is going to be the use case that people use it for. But a lot of times people come up with new use cases that we never thought of. (15:50) So I think it's a really interesting part of the business. And now on the enterprise side, I think the people and the teams that we work with are actually looking to us to tell them, hey, here's the value of Hen as a whole, not just the specific feature. Here's um why you should be using Hey Gen. Um and also like here are the specific use cases that you can use us for. Okay. (16:13) I I want to I want to get into those but I first want to talk about so I want to do like a whole section on you use cases for AI and video there's a lot there but I want to just I want to talk about what uh beyond hey Jen like you you running marketing for this part of the business what tools are you using what's working what's the strategy just as you as someone who owns a number and you're trying to drive pipeline and generate revenue in this in this new world um what is your marketing what are the what are the pieces in the hey genen you enterprise marketing playbook look like right now? (16:41) Yeah. So, I think you know typically there are eight engines that you can activate. Um, right now we're activating or placing bets on four of them which are paid search or sorry paid social, accountbased marketing, webinars and field events. Um, those are kind of the four big bets that we're basing. (16:59) What are the eight engines? What are they what are the eight engines from? Is this like a chart? Is this like a Andrew Chen like growth hacking like chart or something? No, but um Okay. Okay. So, let me try to see if I can. So, it's SEO as one of them. Paid search, social, account based marketing. I said webinar. Yep. Events. Technically, sponsored events like be a separate one. And then I think the last one is um Oh my gosh. (17:24) What is the last one? PR content is the last one. Okay. Yeah. Is that eight? Something like that. Eight and a half maybe. Yeah. Okay. Um but yeah, and those are kind of how I typically just see like the overall engine um or the engines that we can activate. And I think as a startup, we really have to be a little bit choosy about which ones we test. Yeah. (17:49) And and what which of those are are are working, right? It's interesting to hear you say obviously some of the the usual sus suspects, paid social webinars, but I'm curious if we if we dig into those tactics a little bit like what what what is it about them that's working? if you could give me some give me some examples or something like I I did that uh marketing institute you know AI webinar with you that that seemed great um just you know what else what what's working yeah so what's working so far has really been it's honestly been like inerson events and just webinars in general um but I think I mean we kind of know like after co a lot of people are like dying (18:19) like they want in person is so hot so we have like a big part of our business is sponsorships with exit 5 and like if if if I wanted to get on a plane which I don't if I want to get on a plane two or three times a month. We have so much demand for for events right now. Everybody wants to do events. I feel that. Yeah. (18:37) Yeah. So like events is probably like one of one of the channels that's working really well. Um and this is kind of a balance of you know sponsored events and also like um events as well. So let's talk about let's talk about each of those. So like a sponsored event would be what and what did you what have you done? Yeah. (18:54) So sponsored event would be like there's a conference that you're sponsoring. So for example, we sponsored a conference called abundance 360 in LA and you know we had a booth and we had a lot of people there to kind of um help people understand and educate them on like what hunen is. So that is kind of a sponsored event where it's not owned and hosted by hunen but we are sponsoring them um in that sense and then a hosted event is so for example host event that we did was actually a hackathon um and this is more on like the API side of the business but that had a really really great turnout and we also have hosted (19:26) events when it comes to community members so our community team hosts a lot of events as well and and what what makes a good like modern presence at one of these events is just like you're, hey Jen, lots of people know about you and you're kind of doing this like AI video avatar thing or do you have to have a compelling like does the booth have to be good? Is there are you giving away money at the booth? Like what how do you make it relevant other than yeah, we're paying to sponsor something, but how do you how do you (19:51) make it actionable for for both your prospects and for for your company? Yeah, I think it really depends on the audience who's there. But for example, Abundance 360, it was a bunch of executives. Um, so what we did there was actually we have a partner called Proto holograms. (20:11) Um, and we've brought one of their huge like hologram machines to our booth actually. Um, and we were able to have like my interactive avatar. We were able to have a couple other people's interactive avatars actually live in the box so that people can interact with us in any language they want and they can like try it out. (20:29) So, people have reacted really really well to that interactive component of the avatar piece. We also uh basically have like an avatar creation booth where like anybody can actually go in and create their own avatars and people love that, especially executives. They're like, "Oh my gosh, like this is so cool. (20:46) " Um, and they all wanted to create their own digital twin, which was great. Um, so like I think having something that's unique or interactive is really important for the booth. Well, that's what's so fun like to to your point about like taking this job, right? It's like it's so fun to have a product that you can do creative marketing activations like that. (21:05) Like, yeah, it's not about that's that makes it's not about like, yeah, come by our booth and we're going to give you some like cool swag. It's like, no, come by our booth and like we're going to actually make your AI avatar and you're going to demo we're going to demo the product. It's not some like, you know, back office type of technology that's very tough to demo. you can actually do it and show people. That's super fun. (21:23) Yeah. And people love it. Um because I think a lot of times to your point, you know, it's like, oh, we have these pens or we have these stickers and we do still have those, of course, but yeah. Um but it's I think that interactive piece is really important. Okay. So that's a great that's a great takeaway. (21:40) So do trying to use the product at the booth that was for sponsored events. Um and then are you like how are you measuring that as as a return on that on that spend? Are you trying to like do you have a sales team? Were you hammering on them to like try to book meetings from that? Like what what's the output for Holly to know that that was a good event for us in the enterprise segment? Yeah. (21:58) So this is actually a question that we had to answer and talk about more internally as well. But I think there's like a difference between more brandes as type of events that it's really just helping to drive awareness versus like demand generation type of events. Um and I actually didn't see abundance 360 as more of the demand generation part. (22:15) It was really more focused on like okay how do we get in front of these executives? How do we, you know, help them understand what is hijen and like why hijen is so awesome? And so for me, abundance 360 was already a big success because we already created like hundreds of avatars for these executives. (22:33) Um, and like can we nurture them after the event? Sure, I think that we can do that. But overall, I thought the abundance 360 event was a success just given the excitement around Hey GenE um and just the number of people who actually like tried to get their avatars created. Yeah. So it's like a decision tree in your mind of like not not all events have the same purpose and so we're going to this event for brand and that means we want to get you know awareness recognition also I think going to events sometime being out in person sometimes this is the underrated piece of events (22:58) is like I feel like personally I get to test my pitch and I get to have real conversations and it's like that's the stuff that you don't put in like the ROI calculator but man it's so meaningful and I would come back from an event and I'm like so fired up I'm like oh I reconnected with Holly I met this person da da da da like there's value in that, you know, beyond just like did we generate leads from from that event. (23:21) And then I also think there's a whole other part of this which is like pictures from the event, social proof, you know, stuff you can post on social followup that I I we just don't we don't always include that in the straight up ROI math, you know? Oh, for sure. And like another event that we actually did was South by Southwest, and that was for sure pure brand event. (23:41) And to your point, it was so amazing just to be able to test different pitches and see people's live reactions to like, oh, what? Oh, hey, Jen. Da da da. Um, and that was really helpful to just kind of hear what questions people are asking, what they care about. (23:58) Um, I personally love going to events myself because I get to do this, and I get to speak with, you know, these prospects and customers. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Oh my gosh, I am an introvert through and through. But you love events. But I love events. I just need to go back and decompress by myself and then I can go again. (24:18) I have this amazing video on my phone of my my wife after uh after hosting Christmas at our house. Everybody left and she just was upstairs in our bed like with all the pillows on her head just like hiding under the sheets for 3 hours and there's all these memes about, you know, like your social battery being being drained. And I'm I'm I'm the same way. I'm like a sneaky like extrovert. (24:35) I'll talk to you, but then after I'll be like, "What the hell just happened to me?" I feel like a demon just came through. Oh, yeah. Your battery's empty right now. Yeah, exactly. Um, and then Okay. And then for for putting on your own events, have you done Hey Jen hosted events outside of sponsored events? We have. So, we've done a lot of community events because we have a lot of um community users already. (24:57) We are planning to do marketing executive like more executive um sitdowns and like you know dinners and all of that but for the most part it's been a lot of community events. What is that? Do you have a community? Is is there like a hen community that you all started? Yes, we do have a hen community. (25:15) A lot of our users um are in the community actually and the community is great if I mean Dave you can probably use the community too as you're starting to think about like how do I use this? How do I you know add pauses? How do I add intonations and stuff like that? Where where is it hosted? It's hosted on um it's tool called gradual but if you search hey genen community you'll be able to get um to that. Okay, cool. (25:38) And do you have people that kind of maintain that and help with programming or is it just like a use a forum to like ask you know support questions? Yeah, great question. We do have uh we have two people on the community team right now who is kind of managing the community creating these events engaging with our community members and all that and you want to do more yeah more executive level stuff. (25:57) Yeah. So I think it's like how do we already doing a bunch of these events for um our existing users how do we get one step higher to you know do events with prospects as well. Okay. Uh what else is work? What anything not working that maybe worked back in the day at Eventbrite or you know Drift or or whatever else? Like have you seen anything change that like yeah this is not really a channel that's working for us right now? SEO um it's a hot topic it is. Every every marketing leader I've spoken with has shared some some form of like a drop in their SEO traffic because (26:33) of LM. So right now the big question is like okay how do we it's dropping but how do we how do we supplement that and I think there's actually been a few clever ways um like one marketer marketing leader I spoke with was talking about you know how do we start using more YouTube right like and this is why videos are so important because then YouTube can become like supplement to the SEO channels um and there's just a lot of creative ideas and I think nobody knows what the answer is but there's just we're just all trying a lot (27:02) of different Yeah, I was I saw somebody post something the other day about their it was basically it was from Google search console and it was basically showing like impressions continue to rise but clicks continue to drop because now and this isn't even related to chat GBT it's just Google's AI if I go ask something actually this just happened before remember I told you I was I was making this video and I wanted to bleep it out and so I just typed into Google I said um can I do a bleep in hey Jen and it gave me the answer in the (27:33) like, you know, AI overview area and that's search that you you'll never see and you'll never have a piece of. And so it's cra the whole thing is crazy to me. It's and it's not just about like traffic from SEO. (27:50) There's like if you keep clicking into that, it's like all of the discussions around marketing measurement and attribution. Like if all of our questions get answered by AI or, you know, Google search or, you know, whatever tool, then how do we know what to give credit for? No, ultimately people are just going to buy your thing and then along the way you're going to be have to like, well, I I don't even I don't even know. (28:09) Do we get credit for that? They they ask a question at some point. It It's crazy. Yeah, it's I I don't know what the answer is, but I think in the next few months, like people are going to start figuring it out, and I think it's going to be a whole new wave of marketing tactics coming probably. Um, and and when you say SEO is not working, so are there things that you're not doing at Hey Genen that you may you probably would have done in the past because of that from a content standpoint. I don't know. (28:39) I I don't necessarily know if it's not like things that we're not doing because I think we're doing a lot of the things right. Right. We're creating a lot of thought leadership blogs. We're leveraging the SEO keywords. Um, we're doing I think we're doing things right. (28:56) It's really just this like rise in LLMs and to your point like the AI Google um solution as well that's preventing a lot of the clickthroughs um that we typically get to drive inbound traffic to the site. And so yeah, I think it's more there's just like a whole different market landscape now that we all have to like kind of adjust to with this like rise of AI. What else? Oh, okay. This is the other thing. (29:22) So you're f you're leading marketing at this AI you know AI first company one of the AI startups right your founder CEO is an engineer is building an AI has that impacted um like the company view on how hey Jen should do marketing like are you being pushed to use more AI tools to use more AI and marketing to have AI agents instead of employees you know what you know what question I'm trying to ask there like if it's a founder that comes up in the AI world when when you're in there talking to him about the marketing stack and the marketing plays. I'm guessing that it's got to be a lot of bias towards like we believe in AI and we're going to run (29:57) marketing with an AI playbook here. I think it's I think it's more so around efficiency like AI in the sense of efficiency. So how do we be more efficient? um how do we instead of investing in you know 10 additional headcounts can we um do five additional headcounts but also leverage like these AI tools to help us be more efficient. So I think it's more around the efficiency piece. (30:22) However, I will say one thing that's been really new for me um coming to Hen working with Joshua is that instead of working in quarters, we actually work in sprint cycles. So the sprint cycles are two month cycles. And I never thought I would say this, but it's actually been a gamecher because the shorter cycles mean, you know, quicker feedback loops so we can test our hypotheses, measure what's working, um, and fast if we need to. (30:46) Um, and then it also keeps our team aligned with just evolving market needs, just like seeing how fast the AI market moves like we need to also keep up to adjust messaging, um, all the creatives, channels, stuff like that. So that's been one thing that's been really interesting because we're kind of matching the way product and engineering works um on the marketing side and it's been it's been working pretty well. It's allowed us to be really flexible and move. (31:13) I think that's a a hugely underrated uh element is the alignment. I talk about this all the time. The alignment between marketing and product inside of the company. I think we talk so much online and you know about in in marketing about marketing and sales got to get aligned. da da da but I think when marketing and product are aligned like to me product is like the heartbeat and the rhythm of the company and marketing needs to be aligned with them because you know whether it's every week every month every quarter whatever it is whether you're Salesforce lining up to Dreamforce every year HubSpot lining up (31:41) to inbound and then you have quarterly releases on top of that I think just builds the right type of like operating rhythm and cadence and yes as a marketer my job is to tell the story of the company but I need something I need some ammo I need some some you know features some new stuff coming out from product and we can't really tell a good story and share the vision if we don't have a strong roadmap. And so that that seems like the right cadence. (32:04) You know, every every couple months you have a launch and we're working on the next, you know, wave of this thing. Plus, it gets you out of the kind of like weekly we're changing everything weekly. We know that, you know, every two months something is going to change and we're going to kind of run in a campaign, you know, run on campaigns that are every every couple months, right? Yeah, definitely. (32:22) And that's not to say like the product team does like our product team ships every single day pretty much. And that's one of the things I'm trying to uh align with them on of like okay does it make sense for us to just every single time we have something ready do we just release it and like we'll launch it or do we package it up into a bigger story? Um, and I think every single company has this challenge initially of okay, but we want to move fast. (32:44) We want to show that we're innovating, which is totally true and so relevant in this AI space. But at the same time, and maybe it's a different audiences, right? For creators and these AI influencers, they want things coming as soon as possible, but for more enterp like bigger enterprises, they need the packaged story. (33:02) Otherwise, they don't know what Avatar 4 does or like why they should care about it. what what AI tools beside besides Hey Jen, as a as a marketer, especially someone with a coming up kind of from a product marketing and marketing ops background, what what what AI tools are you using? Yeah. (33:19) Um, so I mean at the most basic level, chat GBT, Perplexity, those are my best friends. Um, like I probably use Trag every single day, even if it's just like give me something to start with. Um, and I I think there's a difference between using chaff DBT and relying on it solely and using it as like a guiding or just like somebody to bounce ideas off of. (33:37) Um, and I think a lot of people tend to do the former where it's way more powerful to do the latter because you still have so much knowledge and so much context that LGBT doesn't have. Um, and that's honestly one of the mistakes I'm seeing. Like I'm actually hiring for SDRs and we had pre-qualifying questions and it's so obvious when people somebody just like puts a prompt in a chachi and just copies and pastes the GBT answer. (34:01) Um, yeah. I use it every single day. It's great. It's funny cuz I caught myself. I asked that question and then like I I made this little graphic the other day. There used to be this like iPod ad. had it was like a thousand songs in your pocket and I took the open AI logo and I made it and I said um a thousand apps in your pocket because every every week that chat chat GBP is getting better and is rep it is replacing lots of other apps. (34:25) Um but on your point of of writing just this morning um we have like a new product that we're working on and I I has been have been working on the pitch and I reached out to 10 CMOs that I want to get into this thing that we're doing and um I wrote my I wrote my message that the email copy that I was going to put and I put it in chat GBT and I put it in Claude and I kind of got the middle version of it but I didn't really like it and so I just went with what I wrote and I think ultimately that is the (34:56) that is the hard part is like relying on like knowing when it's not good just because it it helped me get from zero to one and get started. But the version that I got from that was was not one that I wanted to press send on. And so like I kind of like this intro from Claude and I took that but I like my middle section but this chat GBT kind of had a better outro and then I end up putting it all together and like my mish that's my mish mash like what I end up sending out. And so I I I hear you on that. Yeah. You know what I realized too? Gemini 2.5 has gotten a lot better. So (35:28) I've actually I'm like the main tools I use are like Gemini and Chat GBT and I do the same thing where I compare like give you some ideas. Um and I would say Gemini it's don't sleep on it. It's it's pretty good. (35:47) Do you have that because like your company has a Did you Did you buy the the the plan on your own or is it part of the G Suite? Part of the G Suite. Yeah. So you got it you got it for the company. Yeah. Interesting. This is the hard part though is like I see this stuff and I'm like you now I'm going to be like oh do I need to go look do I need to spend my afternoon now messing around in Gemini? It's just like it's non-stop. Yeah. (36:04) Like testing these new tools usually there's like one or two prompts that you just use across all of them and you just see like what each of these tools turn out. Um but it's really fascinating. I think it's it's going to be it's it's already a game changer but I'm really excited to see what this is going to enable all of us to do that. (36:21) All right, let's talk about some of the the use cases for AI and video and avatars and video. I heard you say AI AI influencers and it's like, wait a second. Oh, yeah. There's probably people that are using that are fully AI influencers that are using Hey Jen and like we don't know what their real face is. (36:42) And earlier in this podcast, you mentioned all of the longtail use cases for for AI video. So, I' I'd love to just hear like what what you all are hearing from customers, how people are using the product. teach us. I mean, I think typically I would say for the majority of the use cases, they are going to be marketing related. So things like product explainer videos, you know, social media ads, how-to videos, event marketing has actually been a newer one that's been popping up where it's like you can create using Hey Jen, you can create like event promos or you can create personalized um emails of (37:11) like let's say Dave, you're speaking at an event and it's Dave thanking Holly who just registered for the event to say, "Hey Holly, thank you for registering. I'm so excited to see you at the event. We'll be talking about X, Y, and Z." And so I think there's um I think personally that's a really cool use case because we all want to personalize more and events is a huge one where you can drive a lot more engagement with personalized videos. And then same thing for like postevents. So those are kind of the new ones that are (37:36) somewhat prop popping up um in the past couple of months. And is the is the goal for like the quality of those should be so good that you don't know if that was Dave in my phone like that I made that or I use my avatar to make it. Exactly. Yeah. (37:56) And I will say I can confidently say that most people who are using Hey Gen to create their videos, their audience is not going to know what's real and what's not. Like for example, we had a keynote or inaugural keynote a couple weeks ago at Hen and our CEO used his avatar for parts of his keynote. Um and people were like, "Oh, like no, this is real. This is fake. (38:15) No, this is like there's it's so funny watching the comments and so great because people just can't tell." And it's it's kind of true. you really can't tell the difference between is this a real person talking or is this an avatar. Um, and I think that's kind of the magic of Hey and enabling you to create these videos that don't feel fake and feel really authentic. Right. (38:32) Well, there's so many times that like I've had to make a one to two minute video to promote something or to or to you know and and and when I really need to do a good job, I don't freestyle it. I write out a script and I kind of sit there and now I have this like setup with a prompter and whatever and I can look right at it and read it. But it still takes work. I got to turn on all the lights. I got to turn on the camera. I got to set up everything. (38:57) I got to sit down. I got to put my nice clothes. I got to put a real shirt on and record a world where I can just like I got to write the copy anyway and I can use I can write some prompts in ChatGpt to get the copy. (39:15) Like that's an amazing use case is to basically, hey, let's make a two-minute video of Dave promote like of me promoting our event that we're doing in Vermont. And I I always go back to like I see all this discussion about like it does it does it matter if it was made by a human or AI. And I think in a use case like this, you're not trying to trick someone and say like I'm a human. I'm I'm trying not trying to trick you. (39:33) I'm trying to just do better content at scale without having to like sit down and and pull out my phone every time. Oh, for sure. And I one of the objections when I first joined a gen that I heard a lot was oh you know but I don't know if my audience is going to be ready for an AI video like for us to use AI in our videos and so we actually ran an AI consumer report um and the insight was very clear of like people are ready for it right like people are are likely to respond really positively to your brand if you use AI video. Now, if it looks and feels really fake, that's another story. But I think people are (40:04) generally very sensitive to Well, like that's where we're that's where it gets caught up though is like just even the term AI video, like what if you could just write what if you could just type words and have a video get created? How many marketers would say yes to that? And so it's like the real challenge is like can the hey genen product be good enough where you can't tell if it's an AI or human? Like of course nobody wants a I don't want a robot looking Dave pretending to be Dave and everybody knows that it's not really me. But if I can write prompts and I can (40:36) write a script and we can match my voice and I can create little video snippets and promos like that way that is an amazing way to work I believe. Oh absolutely. And we actually just rolled out controllability features because I think a lot of times, you know, with AI, you're it's a black box where you type in a prompt or you type in something and you don't really know what the output is actually going to be. (40:59) Versus with the controllability features, you can actually prompt it to say wave. Like you can add in like if you want your avatar to wave, you can have him wave. You can also like prompt it to um do different gestures like whatever gesture you want like mindb blown gesture or like whatever it is you want. So you can control that now directly in hen. Okay. So that's a good that's a good use case. (41:18) What what else? What are the the longtail um what what are some of the other use cases here? Mainly marketing. Makes sense. Okay. Mainly marketing. L & D. So a lot of how-to training videos. What's funny? Um Oh, interesting. Yeah. So like I can do all my support videos, all my knowledgebased videos with writing prompts as opposed to Yeah, (41:42) that's great. Okay. Yeah. And think about like sales enablement, right? Like before I had to basically create the PDF and then have to do a live training with everyone. Um but with Hey Jen, once you create the PDF, you can automatically turn that into a video. So you actually don't even need to type a script. You just upload your PDF and we'll turn it into like a training video with like your avatar. Um so it makes it really really easy and fast. (42:02) Um a couple other ones I thought were really interesting, very longtail use cases are actually music videos which you I know you out. Um, and the other one is actually fortuneelling. So like horoscopes. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. What do you mean? What do you mean fortuneelling? Like uh like hor like if you're I'm a Libra, right? So it's like Okay, I'm a Gemini. Yeah. (42:26) So the person would then be like, "Oh, as a Libra for the week of whatever like June 16th, you're you're going to be your favorite color is pink or whatever it is." Um, so it's kind of like that type of fortune teller. Yeah. I'm trying to I'm trying to work on my hey Jen to be like my rapper my rapper alter ego. I'm working on that. That's so stay tun stay tuned. (42:46) We'll actually use us for these like rap music videos. Um I believe it. I believe it. Listen, my friend Ding, shout out to Ding. Ding the sales rapper. He runs Event Shark. He's amazing. And he's like, I gota He's like, I'm gonna I got to ghostrite some stuff for you. We're gonna we're do something ridiculous. It's fun though. I I I understand. (43:05) I'm sure people will listen to this and they will roll their eyes and I've seen the posts of like AI is the worst thing ever. Da da da da. I look only time will tell. I just feel like if you were I feel like this would be like not using the internet in like the late 90s to do to run your business. (43:24) And yes, you can say that's how it always, you know, everything worked fine before da da. We all, you know, what about all the jobs and the creative I I think that we're going to find a way and I think we humans have a way of continuing to like reinvent ourselves and figuring out where this technology fits in our lives. And so I'm trying to be an optimist and say like what you have in front of you right now, Dave, is the opportunity of like you're you're going to you can be one of the first p first people to like understand how to use the internet to run your business and that's what you're (43:50) that's what you're going to do with AI. And so I'm trying to lean in as hard as I can. Oh, for sure. And I I truly believe that AI it actually enables creativity. Um, you know, we AI as a whole helps the humans like actually unleash their creativity. (44:09) And with Hen specifically, we're not meant to replace humans, but it's meant to make it much easier for them to create the videos. So the way we see it is that you as a human provides a creativity as the input. So like what is a story, right? And then the AI takes your creativity to then create the video as output. (44:27) So the future is really a world where anybody and everybody can spend more time doing the creative and strategic work and less time actually making the content. Um and that's kind of how I've always thought about AI of like not necessarily playing replacing humans, but it's there to help support um our creativity. I dig it. I I hope I hope we're right. Um Holly, thank you for hanging out with me. This was lovely. This was great. (44:46) I can't wait to share I can't wait to share my ridiculous projects with you. Um I'm more likely to now take you up on the offer of like going to LA and do doing the real shebang because it's very fun and I can only imagine what it would be like. But um hey uh go find Holly on LinkedIn, connect with her there. Send her a note. Ask her questions about hey Jen or just what she's up to. (45:10) She's a good person to know and connect with. Holly, good to see you. Thanks for hanging out with me on my podcast. Uh I appreciate it. Of course. Thanks for having me, Dave. [Music]