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Founder's Story
Why Most Businesses Will Fail Without AI Marketing | Ep. 204 with Raza Sheikh Founder & CEO of Identable
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- [00:00]
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Host 2
Hey everyone, welcome back to founder story. Today we have Raza and Raza, you are doing something very interesting that I believe is going to impact the entire world. And any entrepreneur, any business owner, they need to understand this doesn't matter if you have a brick and mortar, doesn't matter if you have an online business, E commerce, you're a coach, you're an author, whatever it is, everyone needs to understand the impacts of AI marketing. And that's why today we're going to. We're going to get deep into some of these topics today that at the end of this, people are going to understand just how important this is. But you are the founder of Identable. I love this tagline. One platform, zero fragmentation for organic marketing. But Identable is dedicated to unifying and simplifying organic marketing for organizations of all sizes. So let's just kick it off. Raza with what was the spark that made you say I need to create this company and I need to do it right now?
- [02:44]
Raza
Well, you see, Daniel, the inspiration of Identible came from Something that I witnessed on a day to day life before wherein the chaos of organic marketing team facing or juggling around with batches of AI tools, free utilities and legacy platforms that really work together. Right. I saw the talented team spending more time wrestling with the technologies than actually marketing itself. The frustration drove me to create identible, a single reliable platform that cuts through the noises and fragmentations. Basically our mission here is to give organization back the time so that they can focus on the strategy rather than creating the content, scheduling the content, hiring technical SEO team to optimize their website and so on, so forth. So the tool basically a unified platform that, that packages all together for, for organic marketing part of it.
- [03:47]
Host 1
So Raz, if you were to think.
- [03:48]
Host 2
Back just through your own success, other people that you know, would you say that a founder who can solve a problem for themselves first and then bring that to market is a great route for somebody versus coming up with something that maybe they don't even have any experience in.
- [04:08]
Raza
So that's a very good point actually because even the ident, the idea of identible, the frustration itself is a first hand experience of my own where with my previous venture because I'm coming from a data background, a technologist and so on so forth, I know how to build the code. But one thing that I was really missing out was shifting the code into the market and making, making it present to the, to the target audience. I happened to join at one particular point of time, you know, alumni as VC of Antler VC in back in Singapore. And that's where I actually learned these, the other side of the coin, which is the business side of the coin, the marketing and sales and so on and so forth. Having interacted with 52 founders, I realized that it, it is not that the me alone who's struggling with this problem, but most of the tech entrepreneurs basically have this issues of making their product visible to the audience. So I used to hire this content writer separately who used to do this content, writing the content and then basically we had this SEO expert who used to optimize our website so that the building block of the website is solid and the on page and technical issues has been fixed, which used to take ages for him to do that. And then Google start ranking the page and the content comes in, keyword optimization, lsi, keywords identification and so on, so forth. Lot of things that actually used to happen which used to take a time, right? And more importantly what I realized is the social media aspect wherein I used to hire. I remember one of the Australian based agency that we hired for. They used to create a lot of content for us on the social media which was great. But one aspect that was missing throughout this whole process was the prospect who used to interact with the content. They were not being captured and I did not know for whatsoever reason that who interacted with my content and who got who got to resonate with the pain points that we are talking about and so on so forth so that my sales team can go and approach them as a hot lead and so on so forth. These are the problems wherein we have bought in and centralized into identible. So ident basically is a as I said you zero fragmentation. That means the building block, what I call it as flywheel effect comes completely. The building block is basically optimizing your website, making it ready for Google to rank and then basically is the content creation where we basically entirely for six months or one year we schedule your content whether it's social media or a blog post or whatever it is with the right keywords. And we have seen the witness that our customer basically get rank within three days of the content getting posted for the blog post within from the identical and capturing those all leads who have been interacting with the content, centralizing into SEO. So complete flywheel effect that we are trying to bring into the whole aspect. Hope that makes sense.
- [07:31]
Host 2
Yeah, no, there's a lot of talk about SEO changes and when it comes to not just Google Rank but how AI is now ranking because you know, Google has their AI search and people are searching. I don't know what the number is, but I think it's like 20, 25% of people are searching now in ChatGPT in places. So it's, you know how the Google Rank is changing and digital marketing is changing. How do you see AI playing into this? If you know people are not staying up to speed with AI versus those who are.
- [08:06]
Raza
If you're not catching up with AI, then you're missing something for sure. But there is always an aspect where you have to really realize that AI is not everything. You have to have AI to feed into something that AI can personalize the content to you, specifically to your pain problems, to your custom, your target Personas, pain problems so that they can resonate to what problem you're talking about along with your solution. So in our platform we personalize this entire content. And one other thing that you really bought out is in my humble opinion, the SEO is not dead. SEO is still there. But Generative Search Optimization, gso, what we call it as is coming up is Coming up. But it is a semantic layer on top of the SEO itself. Right. And what is the difference between that is SEO is more backed up, backlink powered, but generative search optimization is more structural process, how you are structuring your content, how basically what keywords and what basically the information you are posting. You know, structuring the entire content basically. And that is the combination that we bring in to make sure that we are not even catering the SEO, but also the generative search engine optimization aspect.
- [09:46]
Host 1
Yeah, I'm glad you, you bring that.
- [09:47]
Host 2
Up and you clarify. I like that SEO is really traditional. SEO is backlink driven. And I agree it's not dead. Every, I feel like every year being in the digital marketing space for many years myself, every year they say SEO is dead or this is dead, or you know, meta ads are dead or this, but it's just changed and transformed. But I like how, I like this generative search and it's heavy importance on the content. So it's even more important to have a platform like identable and be able to create this consistent, good quality content. So what are you seeing in terms of. So if I'm a business owner and I start using this software, how does this transform the team that I have? Do you think that people might downsize their team because now team members can do more? Will people increase their team because now they're getting more output? How do you see this playing out?
- [10:43]
Raza
Good point. So I've been last two weeks before I was reading through that Meta actually has automated the entire level one engineers completely. So I'm not saying that the team size have to be reduced, but what I'm basically saying is AI is to give you the space to do the valuable thing, right? When you have AI to do your labor work so you can play smart, you can basically do things much better with AI and much faster. Because the whole idea of this current era that we are living in, or AI era, what you can call it as, it's all about speed. It's all about speed. If you can't match up your competitor's speed, then you're losing the game. As simple as that. And in my humble opinion, AI helps you in coming to the pace of your competitors or going beyond it.
- [11:45]
Host 2
So we were interviewing son recently, who I guess you would call him a futurist. And he was saying how IQ is going to be the least amort, the least important thing in the future just because we have so many tools that are going to be probably smarter than most of us and that there's other.
- [12:04]
Host 1
EQ and other things that are going.
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Host 2
To be important for this is just humans in general, like regardless of, of the digital marketing aspect. But how do you feel about that in terms of, you know, just our species, just humans in general in the future, you know, do you think IQ is going to be less important? More important? How do you think AI is going to be transforming how we think?
- [12:26]
Raza
I tend to agree with that unfortunately, or whatever it is, because we cannot match the IQ of AI whatsoever. So it's better that we agree it right at the moment rather than later. But one thing that we can make the differences. You know, like other day itself, I was reading one article where it is, it's. It was saying that there's nothing as smart work because if you're not working hard, you're not getting smarter. Right. So that is something that AI does not do it right. It could. AI cannot work harder to get smarter. You have to work harder. Right. As a human to make AI smarter. So how you are using AI is going to make the change in the shift of the game. What exactly are you doing with AI?
- [13:17]
Host 2
I like that. That is good. I really like that. How do you see, and this is just AI in general here, what excites you the most about AI in the future? And then what scares you the most?
- [13:31]
Raza
Okay, Metaverse scares me the most, to be honest. Okay. Because being a father of three, I see most, you know, most of my kids time being spent on, on the screens. Right. And, and that's, that's preparing them to be ready for the Metaverse, something like that. But see, ethical use, this is very important, right? Ethical use of anything.
- [14:03]
Host 2
Right.
- [14:05]
Raza
Definitely would, would make things adaptable and easy, easy, easy going as well. But too much is too bad for anything, whether in your day to day life or whether it's with AI, whether it's with data, anything. Too much is always too bad.
- [14:21]
Host 2
Too much ice cream is never good. We were talking about, you know, sweet tooth, right. I, you know, I gotta stop, I gotta stop eating ice cream basically because it's not good for my health. But so this has been very informative and I appreciate that. I could understand how important it is. You know, it's going to be because like you said in the beginning, we have so many AI tools now, there's so many, so many things to do. It's very confusing and really we just want it into one single place and I think it's a lot easier for our teams. So, you know, one last thing on what are you seeing in terms of the clients that are using this, you know, what are they telling you about how this is transforming their business?
- [15:03]
Raza
So one of the customer that yesterday I was having a chat with and being a small tiny team, right, they basically see the value of identical being added wherein they were basically able to do the posting just for the text, long form and short form post. And through identible they are basically able to generate their explanatory videos with the prompt and with a blog post that they have earlier been written from. And that made things very easy for them to convey the message to their target audience seamlessly. One other thing that they, you know, you know like pointed out to me because in identical, when we say that we capture the leads from the, from the content interaction, we also allow email discovery as well. But in our roadmap we do have this capability of, you know, email cadence and so and so forth, which is what they basically have to use a third party tool to do the email cadence and all those things. So that's a very good point that he have raised that when is this roadmap or when is this particular components coming into. Which is a delightful ask for me because that shows and that proves that the customers are adapting our platform and they are appreciating and asking for something which we already have in the roadmap.
- [16:36]
Host 1
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- [19:48]
Host 2
I can't wait. You know, it seems like possibilities are endless. And now that you have, you know, you have the foundation built, you have, you know, an amazing software that I just started using and it's really transformed our business in terms of being able to, you know, one person now that we, at least from my experience, one person could do multiple things. Before they had to master SEO content creation, they had to master social media. You know, they had to master these things. Writing an article took, you know, four hours. Now though, one person can master like three different things. And if you are a marketing agency and you're helping clients, you know, you can have more clients per person and making it, you know, doing as good or a better job than before which is, you know, good for anyone's business. But I could totally understand that in the future this will only get better and better. But if you want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more information, how can they do.
- [20:43]
Raza
So so you can basically reach out to our, you know, support team and I'm going to leave the link for my personal calendar as well. If there is any need for anyone to connect or you wanted to reach out to me, I'll be happy. I'll be happy to connect. I'll be happy to listen to what is to be said. And yeah, we are here to do whatever is needed to be done to make SMEs successful in the marketing aspect.
- [21:14]
Host 2
Well Raz, this has been great. Thank you for joining us today on Founder Story and I hope everybody checks out identable. Thank you and thanks for the conversation. I had a lot of fun as well.
- [21:23]
Raza
Appreciate that. It was same for me as well. Thank you very much.
- [21:32]
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- [22:02]
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