← Startup Stories - Mixergy
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- [00:00]
A
Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I'm the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. You know, lately I've noticed that I always have a ChatGPT window up on my screen. And if I don't have it up on my screen, I hit command shift space and I immediately start asking it a question. And not only does it give me a great answer, it's lately been giving me sources, direct links to where it got the information, which I love. I'll click the links and what I've noticed is at the end of it, it says utm source equals chatgpt.com and I think, whoa, it is now starting to both drive traffic to websites and it's starting to tell the websites how much traffic it's getting them. This is like the future of getting traffic to your website. Well, joining me today is someone who realized that long before, frankly before it was a realization and long before I did. His name is Chirag Kulkarni. His company, Taco helps businesses get into those answers in ChatGPT and perplexity and others. And he also does SEO the traditional way so companies can rise up in the Google rankings. And even there, he uses AI to help them get better results and do it all faster. The company name is Taco. Chirag, good to see you here.
- [01:20]
B
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
- [01:21]
A
You know the first question, how much revenue are you doing with this bootstrap business of yours?
- [01:27]
B
Well, the good news is that because we're private business, you know, we don't have to share the specifics, but you know, the business is doing several million in revenue today.
- [01:38]
A
Several million. Like the fact that you added the several to it can I take to mean more than $3 million in revenue.
- [01:45]
B
You can take whatever you want from it, but, but you know, I think for us, like the most important thing is how do we build a profitable monster of a business and grow in a very like, disciplined manner?
- [01:59]
A
Are you profitable right now? Yes, you are. What are you doing with the money?
- [02:05]
B
My, my belief is two things. Personally, what we're doing with the money is a part portion. We invest into product and other interesting stuff. But personally, I invest in non traditional assets as well. As before the markets took a turn, I was doing a lot of just dollar cost averaging into the S&P 500 and just Nvidia. So I've done. Luckily that's worked out before. Things have taken a turn.
- [02:28]
A
You know what, actually I want to get into the AI stuff that you're doing and how you listened to Mixergy interview years ago and what happened to you and how you built up this business. But you got to tell people about the non traditional part because you and I have been friends and you told me about an investment you're considering and I think give, give people a taste of where you're thinking about putting your money or where you are putting your money. That's non traditional.
- [02:49]
B
Yeah, I think like, look, with AI, I mean, nobody knows what's going to happen, right. With any business that we have today. And so, you know, one thing I know for sure is non traditional things, right? Like even like, for example, you know, we bought a condo last year, right? Like that's an example of something like people will always need places to live, people will need food, right? Like the means of how we're going to create food is going to become more and more efficient with AI. And so my belief is, you know, make money from AI and invest in non AI assets.
- [03:21]
C
Right.
- [03:21]
B
And some AI, I guess if you say the stock market. So I get it. I'm, I've been getting very interested in even like farming, for example, right? Like, how can you.
- [03:29]
A
That's what it was. You were, you were pinging me. You go, hey, Andrew, what do you think of this? Farmland? And I go, farmland. What do you know about farming? And apparently you know stuff about farming. And anyway, all right, let's get into this thing. Give me an example of what you're doing with AI. Like what is it that you're doing that makes it, that makes it easier for you to build your business?
- [03:49]
B
Sure. So one of the realizations that I think I had was, and I think everyone today is having, is that AI is helping us become more and more effective as business owners as well as as individuals.
- [04:01]
C
Right.
- [04:02]
B
I saw a really interesting video by Satya Nadella which said that just like we go to a job and we have skill sets, right? So we have Excel as a skill set. We, whatnot, people are going to bring agents as a skill set, right? And so if I think about a world where you have hundreds of people working for you and those are hundreds of agents, how can we basically take off a lot of the root work that needs to be done? So for example, you know, when we started Taco, we had writers, right? And today we have agents that we custom build for each company that we're partnering with or that are clients of ours. And we've actually upgraded those writers to editors, right?
- [04:40]
A
And so the difference, your old writers are now editors. You have zero writers on Staff, an AI agent is writing the first draft and an editor human being is fixing it up. How much work is that editor doing? Are they really editing or are they doing basically 40% of the writing they are probably doing?
- [04:59]
B
Yeah, I'd probably say 40% of the writing. So instead of doing 100%. Right, so let's say something like a piece of content would take 44 hours before it's now taking two hours.
- [05:08]
C
Right.
- [05:08]
B
And I'd say that their time is probably better well spent because writing a piece from start to finish today and in today's day and age and finding out what's going to be the right H3S, what is ChatGPT mentioning for a specific query and pulling that data into a piece and then deciphering where what should be first, what should be second and third within a piece of content is not something worthwhile for a human to be doing. They need to be bringing their own expertise and authority into a piece of content. And that's what we feel is just a more effective use of their time.
- [05:40]
A
Okay, that writing part doesn't feel so special, to be honest with you. I'm wondering, is Taco really an AI tech enabled service or is it using AI just like the rest of us are using it? I mean, kids are using it for their homework. Are you using it at that level? Or what makes you so special with AI that it's part of your brand, that you're the AI company?
- [06:02]
B
A lot of what we do, Andrew, is we take a process and we think about what are the ways that we can use AI to streamline that. So the content example is one example. The other example I'll give is even when it comes to things like competitive positioning from a search standpoint, right. What we'll do is we'll build an agent to go and actually fetch who are the competitors in the space, what are the keywords they're actually bidding on and and or ranking for competitively that have commercial intent. And instead of the specialist doing all this root work, the agent is doing that work on their behalf so that the specialist has all the data in one place and they can make strategic decisions as to where the focus needs to be for a particular campaign. Okay, so that's kind of the difference is like with a traditional business like an SEO agency, you know, they may be including AI, you know, using off the shelf tools, but all the agents that we're building are custom for a company. And that's the difference here.
- [06:57]
A
All right, and then on the other part that really excites me. And we're going to get into how you built up the business and your background. I love entrepreneurial stories, but the other part that really excites me is you showed me a tool that you use to tell you how your customers are ranking for different questions in tools like chat, GPT, perplexity, etc. What is that tool and how does it even know?
- [07:21]
B
Yeah, so we have some tooling that we built internally. We also leverage some external, like third party tools.
- [07:28]
C
Right.
- [07:29]
B
And what we do basically is we will query ChatGPT and perplexity 50 to 100 times a month for a specific question. Right. So for example, what's the best business podcast on the web and how do we get Mixergy to show up number one? Those are the questions that we'll query and to determine who is actually currently showing and what are the references that we're pulling from. So we'll pull all that data so that it's accurate into a dashboard so that we can see who's number one, who's number two, who's number three, and then that helps us understand what are the actions we need to be taking to optimize this so that mixture shows up number one, if it's not today.
- [08:08]
A
And then what are the things that you can, what's the name of the tool that you're using?
- [08:11]
B
So we use several. We use one is called Profound, the other one is a tool called Scrunch. The other one we haven't, I mean we just internally call it as Guac. But we'll use these different tools to give us insights into where rankings currently lie or what it's actually shifted from is from rankings to visibility actually is.
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A
What this looks like and what's working to get these AI chat experiences to rank a site higher.
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B
There's a few levers that I think we are noticing and there's some kind of hackier things that I can talk about that we've tested and some have worked, some haven't. The first thing that I think is important is to understand what is the correct content structure that alums like to pick up on.
- [08:58]
C
Right.
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B
And so if you notice the content structure for Google, it tends to be very heavily indexed on keywords.
- [09:05]
C
Right.
- [09:05]
B
For content on alums, it's much more around questions and driving the right intent around what the question is being being asked in that piece of content. So that's the first thing that's really important. The second thing that's really important is inclusion in citations. So like you look, like you said in the beginning, when somebody asks a question like what is the best business podcast?
- [09:26]
C
Right.
- [09:27]
B
ChatGPT is basically crawling or any LLM, right. ChatGPT is an example of that is crawling the open web, synthesizing this information and then reasoning it on their end. And so when you have inclusion in places like certain high authority sites.
- [09:43]
C
Right.
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B
Or organic social, like for example with Grok, they tend to cite Twitter.
- [09:49]
C
Right.
- [09:49]
B
Naturally, for perplexity, they tend to cite YouTube. For ChatGPT, they tend to cite Reddit. We need to basically figure out for specific queries, where are the right citations being pulled from and then how do we get inclusion in those relevant citations.
- [10:07]
A
I see. Okay, I noticed that it's a, for my search right now that I happen to have on my screen. I'm going to interview the founder of Matt Mullenweg in a little bit and I asked a couple of questions about what's going on with them with a lawsuit. And it's a lot of tech blogs and then it's Wikipedia and Reddit. And so if it's tech blogs, do you have anything that you would do to go and be in there?
- [10:32]
B
Yeah, one thing that we've been doing which has been fascinating is this idea around creating kind of content on those blogs. But also, you know, some, some cases it's been picked up, some cases it hasn't, is many of these large tech blogs have affiliate type content. And so what you can do is you can go to them and say, hey, like I, I want to pay you guys X amount of money and I want inclusion in this specific piece of content. And when you see inclusion happen, you tend to notice visibility on AI traffic. And Andrew, one of the interesting things that were ANECD really seeing is even though you're getting less traffic from AI search, your conversion rate is much higher. And what I mean by that is a lot of times you'll get traffic from Google and the traffic from Google may not have the same quality as AI. And what, that's what's the fascinating part is because when we're using agents, for example, to do work on our behalf to actually determine where is the right, for example, product for us to purchase. Say I'm trying To find a GLP1 product, you'd go tell Deep Research, hey, here are the two products. Go figure out like which is the best product for me based on these health parameters, the chances of you converting to buying is much higher because now the heavy lifting is being done by Deep Research.
- [11:47]
A
Yeah.
- [11:49]
B
Instead of us.
- [11:49]
A
So I definitely see that, you know, What? I hosted a dinner here for 30 people, 30 speakers from a conference. And so I had a company come out and cater it. Actually, not cater it. They just set up the tables. And then I hired a catering company. The company that set up the tables on their way out of our property just smashed into the gate. Now I don't know how to buy another gate, so I go to ChatGPT. I say, I need a gate that is 11ft wide, that is made out of steel that does this. It gave me three companies. I looked at the first one. It was perfect. I talked to them yesterday. They could ship a gate. It's freaking tastic. And you're right where ordinarily I might do a lot of back and forth research here, because I gave it so much information, I was able to get a result that is much more customized to me. All right, I'm curious about you as an entrepreneur, largely because you had listened to one of my interviews years ago and you reached out to the guest. Who's the guest?
- [12:47]
B
Yeah. So it's probably helpful, Andrew, if I share a little bit about why did I even listen to that podcast?
- [12:54]
A
Yeah.
- [12:55]
B
When I was younger, I was just really fascinated by, you don't have to go door to door to sell Cutco knives. You can basically create a website and people will just come to you on their own. And that, to me, was really fascinating. And so I started to kind of dive into this world of affiliate marketing. How can you basically not even own the product, but still get paid for getting sales? And that led me to this whole world of search engine optimization. And I just started to go online, and I found this guy named Neil Patel. And I was like, man, this guy's making hundreds of thousands a month from SEO. And I remember he had quick sprout, and he was like, writing about, like, yeah, his black card, all this stuff.
- [13:42]
C
And.
- [13:44]
B
And that's where I was like, okay, I got to learn. And one of the things that I do is when I find someone, I need to learn every single thing possible about them. And so I saw, I think you guys did two or three interviews on Mixergy. He had a course on Mixergy. So I listened to all that, and I'm like, all right, I gotta get in front of this guy. And so I'm like, well, I don't know him. And so I emailed him a ton of times, and I knew some things about SEO, but I knew he was the SEO wizard. And so I was like, I want to learn from this person. And he gave me a shot. He's like, yeah, here's a contract for 10k a month and the rest was history. Whoa.
- [14:18]
A
So he paid you 10k a month to do what?
- [14:22]
B
So he had some work that he needed done on neilpatel.com and I think he just needed the support. And maybe, maybe he found me enticing or AKA aggressive enough that he's like, yeah, whatever, let's just give this guy some work. Sounds like he'll do a good enough job for what we need.
- [14:39]
A
So you know what? He was really good about being public and then having people reach out to him and spotting talent and ambition and drive ahead of time. And one of the reasons why I've suggested that you do this interview and why I pushed for you to do this interview, and I think it took us several months to get this to happen, is because I think you are going to see what other people who I've interviewed will see, which is the more public you are about your story, the more you teach people, the more you're going to start to gravitate the right people to you, whoever that is. For Neil, it's a certain type of hustler for you. I don't know, probably more of like a meditative, very thoughtful, very disciplined type of type of thinker, whatever that is, you're going to start to bring them to you. And yes, the audience gets a benefit, but I found that people I interview get a bigger benefit, maybe. All right, why did you leave Neil and go on to Medley?
- [15:31]
B
Well, I didn't, I didn't necessarily leave him. I'll tell you a funny story. I was at Northeastern at the time, Northeastern University. I remember being in the back of like a psychology class. I wasn't listening to anything about the psychology class. I was just busy doing the work that he had had me do. And he's so funny because I got a glimpse, Andrew, into how a high performer works.
- [15:55]
A
Tell me.
- [15:56]
B
Because he would literally within seconds of me sending an email, call me directly to my cell. And I'm like, this guy, you know, he's worth millions of dollars, is calling this 17 year old, 18 year old at the time and wants to talk about something so minute and specific. And so I learned that, you know, high performers have a very innate ability to zoom out and then zoom in really fast, right? And I just like watching that. And learning from that taught me like what, what it, what are some of the good qualities to kind of take from any person, right? And so I remember he was like, hey, like, I'm going to be In New York, let's hang out. And I was like, what the hell? Like this guy wants to hang out with me. Like, that's crazy. And so I took the Peter Pan Express overnight to from Boston. The bus. I love the bus, by the way. I still love the bus.
- [16:46]
A
I'm with you on that. There's some buses that are really high end and wonderful, but okay, well, by.
- [16:51]
B
The way, this is not that.
- [16:53]
A
Oh, really? Okay.
- [16:54]
B
And so I took the Peter Pan Express. I got, I got to the Baccarat Hotel. I won't forget it. And I remember him, he was writing a book at the time called Hustle. And he's like, hey, I have a company that I'm going to introduce you to. And I was thinking, all right, what? Like this is probably going to be some random company. And he did the introduction and it was Expedia. And so I just built like this like small consulting ish business. I did some, you know, white label work for other agencies and I just like kind of doing a little stuff on the SEO side. One of the companies was Medley, and they were like, hey, like, we want you to do some keyword research for us at the time. And I think what excited me about them was it was an opportunity to be in New York City. It was an opportunity to go from just SEO to learning about full funnel marketing. And like, what does that look like? And I felt like at the time I was 21, like, why not lean into this opportunity and see where this goes and learn about healthcare and all this stuff. So that's why I kind of like left what I started more or less. I hired a GM to kind of like maintain and just continue the stuff that I was doing. And I joined Medley as their chief marketing officer.
- [18:08]
A
Medley is an online pharmacy, right?
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B
Yeah. Medley had brick and mortar pharmacy businesses and then did same day prescription delivery in, in the city. So instead of having to go to Walgreens, stand online to get your prescription, your doctor would immediately send the prescription to Medley and Medley would deliver to you the same day for free. So that was the problem.
- [18:33]
A
You were telling me about how one of the things that you tried there was social. What happened with social?
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B
So look, as a 21 year old, you're around Grubhub and Uber and all these businesses and they're spending millions a day maybe on Facebook. And so I thought, okay, you know what? Like these businesses are spending so much on Facebook and Google and these other channels, I need to start doing that. And so, you know, I remember like we set up These individualized landing pages. We said calling doctors from New York City was like the tagline that we use. And I thought, you know, it's a B2B business where we're going to doctors and other stakeholders and getting them to refer their patients. They've got to be on Facebook, and they are on Facebook, right? And so we got to go reach out to them. I even remember that there was a company that I looked at that sold to chiropractors, and their acquisition channel was on Facebook. So I was like, all right, dermatologists, chiropractors, they've got to be one and the same. And I remember just spending so much time optimizing this landing page. We had, like, a design hire at the time who, like, created this nice creative of, like, somebody doing some admin work at their desk. And so I said, hey, let's leverage that. And Andrew, like, the campaign just, like, just did not work. We were not able to get clicks. I remember even talking to somebody who. Who ran marketing at one of these companies at grubhub, I believe. And I even had him come in and audit the campaign. He's like, yeah, like, this is just not converting. Maybe it's the creative. So, like, I went to the design person, I went to our CEO, and I was like, we need to fire this design person. Like, she's not able to, like, match the same tone and voice and creative that we need to actually convert for Facebook. I just learned, like, the hard way that, you know what? Like, the channels and the customer acquisition channels that I would be compelled by are not going to be the same as a doctor. And maybe that's obvious today, but, like, I learned that the hard way really fast. That, like, it's just different.
- [20:34]
A
Why didn't they just throw you out and say, listen, you're an SEO guy. We clearly hired the wrong person. Get out of here. We'll go find someone with more experience.
- [20:42]
B
Maybe they didn't. They weren't experienced enough to realize that. I think that was one, but I think the other thing, too, was I think they liked that I had, like, an innate ability to learn and just to have a network to. I think I learned really quickly that you don't have to have the answers. You need to know who knows the answers and extract that knowledge and experience. And that's what I did, by the way. That's why I said, that's exactly, like, why I was excited to work with Neil.
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C
Right?
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B
Is.
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A
So then who had the answer from Edley for the solution that got you guys to grow.
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B
Say that one more time.
- [21:22]
A
So who had the answer that helped you save Medley's marketing?
- [21:25]
B
Well, I think what we learned was is that selling to doctors through specific channels, some channels work better than others. And I think any business that raises money, you have to test and learn and most things are not going to work. And so I think what we learned was when you build relationships with these doctors and you go to their offices, very similar to like how pharma does it, that actually was the best way to build relationships with doctors. And then marketing's job was to support that, but it was also spent on how do we get in front of the right stakeholders, such as hospital executives.
- [21:58]
C
Right.
- [21:58]
B
And hospital executives. Again, sending them letters and sending them cold emails is not going to be the way to convert them. For them, it's going to be conferences. And so part of it just came down to we're going to test a bunch of tactics that work and most of these are not. And the things that do are going to work. I think you can find that person and somebody who's had experience, but what you trade off of is like the technology experience and like the relatability to like how a consumer is going to think in a technology driven world versus some of these other channels. So yeah, in theory they could have gone and hired a bigwig cmo. And I think towards the part where I ended up leaving, they were starting to think that as the company matured, which is natural.
- [22:38]
A
Okay, so what worked for you? It was chotkis at the pharmacist at the doctor's office.
- [22:44]
B
Tchotchke worked really well creating like educational leave behind. So like if you're an HIV patient, having information about the HIV drug side effects, whatnot, and giving that to doctors to give to their patients is really effective. We also did like billboards within the offices that had like information about a therapy. And then like we had like the brand underneath there and that drove brand recognition. We did like, there's like digital advertising that were specific to certain EMRs. So like when a doctor was in an EMR and typing in the prescription, they could see our brand. So these are the things that worked really well.
- [23:26]
A
Not at all the same.
- [23:26]
B
I wouldn't have known.
- [23:28]
A
Not at all.
- [23:28]
B
Non sexy stuff. Exactly.
- [23:30]
A
Yeah. The company filed, they sold, filed for bankruptcy. I think they were even. I mean they had some legal issues too. How much of that were you aware of? Where, let's see, the three executives were charged with fraud.
- [23:47]
B
Yeah, I honestly, I remember I was at home, I just finished a Sales call, and I got a text from a friend of mine. He's like, hey, what's going on? And I was like, I don't know. And I thought, you know, hey, maybe somebody said something about Taco and things were blowing up. And then I saw this. Like, I saw this document, and I. I just couldn't believe what I was reading. And so I had no idea to put it. To put it clearly.
- [24:18]
A
Wow. What do you know about what happened to them and why. Why they. Why they went bankrupt?
- [24:27]
B
So when I left the business, I left the business for two reasons. The first reason was I knew that there was some general, like, tightening in the market. There was, like, a bank restructuring that was taking place, and they were trying to get a loan for that. So I think that was one of the. One of the issues. And then the second issue is, unfortunately, my mom had cancer at the time. And so, you know, I just felt like, you know, it's been such an incredible journey to go from a handful of employees to thousands of employees at the. At such a young age. And I also felt to some degree like it's time for me to be with my family and take care of my mom. And so that coupled with, like, some of the financial challenges within the business, I thought it was just the best time to leave and just think about what was next. So that's why I left the business.
- [25:18]
A
How's your mom doing?
- [25:19]
C
Or.
- [25:20]
B
She's good. Yeah, she's. She's much better. So during that time, I actually. It was during COVID so I completely moved to Richmond, Virginia, and it was great. I mean, like, just being able to at a young age, take care of your family.
- [25:34]
C
Right?
- [25:35]
B
From an emotional support standpoint, like, I would go to the hospital quite often. Like, I think those are the things that looking back, like, I wanted to do and I care deeply about. So, yeah, she's doing much better now.
- [25:48]
A
You know, I gotta pat myself on the back for growing as a person. In the past, in these interviews, I'm so rat tat tat, machine gun that I don't take a moment to acknowledge that someone just said that their mom had cancer and just check in. And now I'm like, all right, I could be a human being for a minute. It doesn't have to. I don't know, it doesn't have to hurt the conversation that people came in to listen to. I feel good about that. Thanks for helping me grow. All right. And so the way that you came up with Taco was you were at Medley. You saw what that led you to create this agency?
- [26:18]
B
Yes. Like SEO was an acquisition channel for us.
- [26:21]
C
Right.
- [26:22]
B
Because when you acquire a physician. When I say acquire, basically go to a physician's office, the physician tells their patients about Medley. Now you have a bunch of patients and you need to do something with them. And, and consumer marketing. It's not that it wasn't important, it just wasn't as efficient as these B2B channels were. And so we were doing SEO and what I found was like, we were hiring freelancers, we were hiring contractors. I thought, hey, I know SEO really well, I don't need to hire some massive agency. But like, as a cmo, you're doing a bunch of things. Like you start to end up hiring other folks. And yeah, one of, one of the, one or two of the agencies that we hired, I just realized that they don't really have this like revenue first mindset when it came to search.
- [27:06]
C
Right.
- [27:06]
B
It's one thing to drive traffic, it's another thing to drive revenue. And I think that was one thing that was really critical. The second thing is that they were not really search experts. They were really good at a bunch of different things. They knew paid ads, they knew SEO, they knew affiliate marketing, they knew out of home. But being really skilled in one thing I felt was a differentiator. And the third thing, of course, now hindsight is search is going to change. People aren't going to go to Google, they're going to use LLMs and they're going to ask questions and aren't going to get their answers. And so all of that led me to believe that there needs to be a business that I wish I could have hired that I can go out there and create. And that's why we started Taco.
- [27:45]
A
You know, this was two years ago. The thing that happened two years ago was people were saying, yes, AI is coming up. And this was just the beginning of it. But the feeling was that no one would need a link to a website because the answer would just come into chat. Why didn't you believe that at the time? What was it that made you realize this is going to be a source for traffic?
- [28:08]
B
I didn't honestly know is the honest answer.
- [28:11]
C
Right.
- [28:12]
B
I believe that search was going to change, but I knew that the one innate thing that humans will always do is look for things. And now even, even non humans, even agents right on our behalf, will always look for something. And so I knew that search was going to change. I didn't know how it would change, but what I, what I did do Andrew is. I just said, let me just get my, let me just jump into the water and go with the current. And as I'm starting to go with the current, I'll feel where makes the most sense for us to move to as the market. And I think when I, when I left Medley and I was doing some fractional CMO work, I, I was like, you know, I'm like the cmo. Like I grew a hundred plus million dollar a year business, right? Like, I'm not gonna freaking do SEO. Like SEO is for chumps right before. But I think what I ultimately came back to is like, that's what I know really well. And having that pattern matching experience is like really helpful, right? When it comes to stuff like this, especially during changes.
- [29:16]
A
You know, I go back and forth on agencies. There are times in these interviews over the years where I felt like agencies are just not worth even interviewing because it's very much like an individual who has a support staff, not a company that runs on its own regardless of any of the individuals being there or not. And then again, I say, well, actually agencies are the ultimate bootstrap companies. And yes, there are agencies that bootstrapped and did well and went into the tens of millions, even the hundreds of millions. And then there are many who then shifted into becoming software companies or something else because they saw the opportunity. But the one thing that's always been consistent for me is the understanding that it's easy to bootstrap. You don't need to have much because you're doing the service. What you do need is customers. And how did you get your first customers then?
- [30:08]
B
So we got our first customers through two ways. Number one, you know, through the Medley journey, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of like really sharp investors. And so that was like a big way for us to meet just companies. And just saying, hey, like, I'm a free agent, I'm doing some fractional work. And that kind of like developed into, oh, like maybe you can help this company with SEO. So that's one. The second way is just, you know, there are other agencies out there that don't do SEO but have customers. And so what I did is I went to those businesses, I said, hey, like we do SEO. Notice I said, I didn't say I do SEO, I said we do SEO. I'm thinking about taking on one or two more companies. Like, we're very exclusive. Who do you have for us that could be a fit, right? And that's how we got our first few customers.
- [30:59]
A
And from the Beginning you weren't doing the work yourself. You would have other people do it to avoid the issue that a lot of agencies have.
- [31:08]
B
Yeah, from the beginning. I mean, honestly, I mean, this is the truth is that I know and I knew SEO quite well. But again, to get back into the nitty gritty, you kind of need somebody who has been up to date on what is specific today. That didn't exist a year ago. And that's the nature of marketing. Like, unlike software, where I can use AI to create a website, right? And that doesn't really make a big difference with marketing. Every month things change, right. And especially with the pace of AI. And so, you know, I hired a contractor to support on the SEO side, and I was spending most of my time just channeling them in the right direction to make sure that we could get the right outcomes for the company. But, yeah, it was like a lot of, like building the plane as you're flying it right in the beginning to make sure that it's gonna. It's gonna build, but it's also gonna go in the right direction. So, yeah, that's how we did it.
- [32:06]
A
So it was you reaching out. Who should I know? Who should I talk to? What helped you close sales when there's so many other people, including Neil Patel's company, that do SEO.
- [32:17]
B
At the time? The relationship is what helped me close.
- [32:20]
C
Right?
- [32:21]
B
Because if, if you say, hey, Chirag, if you're pretend, Andrew, you run. You run a performance marketing agency and you're like, hey, client, we already work with you. We already have a really good relationship with you. Meet Chirog. He does SEO. He used to work at this company. He grew this agent, you know, this business to a lot in revenue. He was a cmo and he wants to work with you. That is what ultimately got us the sale. Initially.
- [32:51]
A
You and I reconnected because you had seen Jesse Puigi, my partner in Bootstrap Giants, do a post on Mutual Intro. What got you to pay attention to Mutual Intro and how do you use it as a way of getting customers?
- [33:05]
B
You know, Andrew, what I was fascinated by is, like, through the medley journey, I met a lot of incredible people. And what I. If I. If there's one thing I regret, I wish I didn't spend enough time building the relationship.
- [33:19]
C
Right.
- [33:19]
B
When you're in startup and you're an exec at a startup and you're growing, all your time is consumed in that. And so. But one of the things I found fascinating, and you know, even when I was doing consulting work before you know, I didn't have a real way for acquiring customers. There was no process for doing it. It was just, oh, like, Andrew, can you think about us when you're talking to X company next time? And that's not, that's not repeatable. That doesn't. And that's also why, honestly, why I didn't stick to the consulting thing. And I also felt like, okay, like, Medley opportunity as CMO could be really exciting and let me try to go in that direction. And so I wanted a repeatable process for me to actually grow and get customers that didn't feel inauthentic to me. And I tried like cold emailing and like, you know, it's hit or miss you're getting on these calls. They don't know who you are. And I, I don't know. I didn't know what other channels were. And so when I saw this guy that I admired deeply. Funny story about Jesse too is like, I actually wanted to work with Jesse when I was at Northeastern. I didn't cold email him, but I actually, I remember there's like a photo of him that maybe he still has just like him looking to a side. It's a black and white photo. I remember reading an article about him. Okay, like this, they're doing something in performance marketing. I don't know what they were doing at the time, but I want to learn this because SEO is what I knew, but I wanted to learn performance. So anyways, long story short, I saw that post and I was like, let me, let me learn more. And that's. Yeah, that's. That's how we got connected.
- [35:01]
A
I love that about college that I had enough time and so much determination to just reach out to people. I would read about them in an article and I'd reach out to them. I'd read someone's book, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and I'd reach out to them. And it felt both like, like I was going in forbidden land. And at the same time it felt like I was going to my destiny. And that combination of no, you shouldn't, yes, you must, is such a good place to live because then you decide with every phone call, who are you going to be? And I remember having incredible access. Who did you get to talk to? That was especially exciting when I was in college.
- [35:39]
B
When I was there, I was building a software business called Insightfully and Honestly. If I give you the pitch now, I still don't know what I was trying to do, but basically what I was saying was, as a salesperson, your Network is your. More efficient. Is the most efficient place. You have to get revenue. But the best way to get business is by helping people. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to use artificial intelligence. And I hired these, hired as, and partnered with these two MIT engineers. And we basically built an ecosystem in which we pull in data from Twitter, we pull in data from these other places, and it was almost a social listening tool that looked on your behalf, where somebody may say, hey, I'm looking for, like, a person to help me with SEO. And if you can help that person, you end up building a tighter network, and that'll lead to better outcomes. And so, you know, one of the guys I met who's a. Who's a good friend, just like Neil, his name is Wayne Chang. Wayne Chang sold a company called Crashlytics to Twitter for, I think, 100 million. Then that company sold to Google for another 100 million. So, you know, young guy, I remember just reaching out to him and being like, hey, this is what I'm working on. Can I get access to the Twitter API? Because he was a GM at Twitter, and I got to meet him. Several people like that that were in the Boston ecosystem that I just built relationships with just by cold outreach.
- [37:09]
A
I used to think that that was only available in college. It turns out even afterwards, if you're persistent, if you're considerate, if you. If you're showing that you're doing something not just, you know, picking people's brains, doors will open up. So then you discovered Mutual Intro. What did you. How did you use the first. How did you use Mutual Intro at first and maybe describe it for people who don't know what it is?
- [37:31]
B
Yeah, so Mutual Intro is basically a process that you use your network or people that you may not even know directly, but basically that are part of some network and LinkedIn in this case, to basically get in front of a decision maker that you can help in some way. And so the way that I got started is, Andrew, you and Jesse sent an email that had a Excel sheet attached to it that just broke down the process for mutual interest. So I was like, okay, like, let me try this. And I. What I even did is I actually reached out to Jesse to Mutual Intro me to a company, and he did, and that company closed. Wow, interesting. Okay, like, what can I do now to put some more resources behind this and resourcing being like, how do I learn about this and how do I actually build infrastructure around this? And so that's how that. That's how that came about.
- [38:23]
A
And so you actually really did. You put together like whole infrastructure. How many people are working on finding your ideal customers, asking for introductions?
- [38:33]
B
It's. It's not that it's only two people right now, but. Oh, really? Yeah, it's only two people.
- [38:41]
A
You know what, it's. I mean, it makes sense. Obviously. It doesn't take that many people to do it. I've seen Jesse do it with one person who's working part time and then get hundreds of these out. I always assume that because there's so much interaction, there's so much engagement, there's so much activity, it feels like there's a lot of people, but. But it's not.
- [38:59]
C
It's not.
- [39:00]
A
Okay, that's interesting.
- [39:02]
B
Only. Only two people. And you know, one person is spending their time, like, figuring out who the right people are, creating the list, things like that. The other person is more or less managing some interactions on LinkedIn, the Conversation, and they kind of work with each other, but then the other person is also doing other stuff. So like, maybe if you combine both of their time, it's one person actually. But yeah, to hold people.
- [39:27]
A
You know What? I asked ChatGPT to analyze me based on everything that it knows. And one of the things that it said, actually it wasn't one of. It was the only thing that came back. I thought I was going to get all this deep analysis about every aspect of my life. No, it all comes down to Andrew likes systems for everything. And I wonder if that's a you too. If you have an aspect of your personality that is so systemized that you could get these people who are going to work together to find your potential customers, to reach out, to follow up, to then do this. The work for SEO and everything. Do you think in systems to that degree?
- [40:04]
B
I think, I think more in systems now than I did before. Like, one quick story is when I was at Medley, I remember a CEO creating a whiteboard. And this is. And he told me, he's like, I want. I want you to create an SOP for this. And I'm like, sop? What the hell is that?
- [40:21]
C
Right?
- [40:21]
B
And I'm like, why do I need an SOP for content if I know how to do it right? And I thought, man, maybe this guy's just trying to replace me. Like, I didn't know what the reason was behind that. But like, to answer your question, that's probably where I saw some resemblance into. Okay, when you're doing something yourself and everything lives in your head.
- [40:40]
A
Yeah.
- [40:40]
B
You're not going to be able to grow. And the only way to grow is by creating a process, recording that process, and then having somebody else follow that process who will be able to augment it even further than you were able to do. So I don't think I'm so systems oriented like you are, but I understand the importance. It just doesn't bring me the energy that maybe it brings others to create that process.
- [41:03]
A
It doesn't bring me the energy to create it. It brings me so much energy to have it. To just know this is something that I know works and I could improve it. And that constant iteration is exciting. In fact, one of the books that I thought about writing over the years is a book on. I would, I would call it Playbook because I frickin hate sop. It sounds very much like we're office dorks trying to, I don't know, TPS this and that, but Playbook feels a little cooler. Feels a little bit more like football something or other. But it's so, so helpful. One, one thing. And then I want to go into the future of AI and AI search and where you see the opportunity for building companies here. But you, you also joined the accelerator. If you already figured it all out from the email, why join the accelerator, the sales accelerator that we have?
- [41:47]
B
I, I joined the sales accelerator for two big reasons. Number one, you may know something, but by working a process and learning, you can always learn more. And frankly, it was a little bit of a math equation, Andrew. I was like, all right, if, if it cost, I don't remember what it costs, but if whatever it did cost, right? I was like, okay, our, our average customer pays us at least 10k a month. So if I can get one customer from this, I've already made back my money. And I'm not talking about revenue, I'm talking about profit.
- [42:23]
C
Right?
- [42:23]
B
As a true bootstrapped entrepreneur would.
- [42:27]
C
Right?
- [42:27]
B
And so I was like, what's the. I mean, we have enough business for me to do this, right? It's not like I was at zero. So I had something and I also felt like I tried out it myself. And I don't like, I felt like, okay, I tried out of myself. I'm good in getting here. The accelerator can maybe take me to here, which will greatly change my business and which it did, right? Like we generated, I think to date run rate, it's not exact because people may churn and stuff like that, but probably a little under a million in revenue from just this process alone.
- [43:01]
A
I, first of all, that's exciting and second Now I love watching. As you build this business up, let's talk about where you see this opportunity going. Do you think that Google is going to be replaced with ChatGPT and then everything needs to be optimized for them. Do you think that Google is going to replace their main search with Gemini look like? What do you see as you're looking in the future?
- [43:25]
B
So here's what I see, right? Today, as of March. Excuse me. May 8, ChatGPT search is ahead of Yahoo Search by a hair.
- [43:38]
A
Oh, you mean in usage?
- [43:40]
B
No, no, not in usage. In searches.
- [43:43]
A
Meaning more people are searching on ChatGPT than Yahoo.
- [43:47]
B
Exactly. So usage is different.
- [43:48]
C
Right.
- [43:48]
B
Usage is, hey, here's an email. Rewrite it so that it sounds more professional.
- [43:54]
A
Got it.
- [43:55]
B
That's usage. Searches is. I'm looking for the best software for my e commerce business to manage fulfillment.
- [44:03]
C
Right.
- [44:05]
B
Google is 300 plus times larger from a searches standpoint compared to ChatGPT. Now what I believe is that Google kind of has that innovator's dilemma issue right now because they built this massive online, you know, giant quote, unquote.
- [44:22]
C
Right. Who.
- [44:23]
B
I believe that they're going to continue dominance. I think what's going to happen is search is going to fragment. And by the way, the users who use ChatGPT also use Google. It's not like we're not using one or the other. I just think people prefer the modality. And again, specific users prefer a certain modality over others. Like we have a company, they sell hearing aids. You know, for them, Google is like a really attractive channel for them to continue to dive deep into. Even if you look at Meta, do you go on Facebook anymore? No, I don't go on Facebook anymore. But it's still the number one acquisition channel for most e commerce businesses. So I think Google will remain its dominance. I don't think it's going to have 90% market share. It's going to slip. But I still think it's a critical modality to optimize for. And I think Google is trying to figure out how do we maintain revenue through this traditional paid advertising model while still incorporating AI tools. And I think what the data shows is users are loving Gemini and AI overviews in Google. And so my hunch is that they're going to go where the data and the dollars are and that means they're going to integrate more and more. I just think the way we use Google is going to slowly change. It's not going to be an overnight change because that's going to cost them their business.
- [45:45]
A
Couldn't they though give you paid search results in the answer? I mean they've always said that if they did their job right, then the paid results would be better or at least as good as the top search results. They just happen to get paid for the best for the best reference. So couldn't they do that?
- [46:06]
B
I think they could. Even Perplexity has started to test sponsored advertising within questions. I think the question though is that their usage base and their users are so broad and diverse that if they move towards a model that's totally conversational like ChatGPT and perplexity are, they have a massive risk of alienating a large percentage of their user base and impacting their revenue As a result, 50 plus percent of their revenue comes from search. So they don't want to mess that up on trillion dollar a year business.
- [46:42]
A
Meaning like even if they could still make money from it, if they confuse enough people who come in expecting blue links and some text and then they give them an answer that they have to read, that could be enough to disrupt their business and ruin it or ruin it for those people. Okay, so for the foreseeable future you're saying I see both of them standing up, Maybe even Google doesn't lose any search usage, but more searches will be done on these AI tools?
- [47:15]
B
Well, I think what the data tells me is that from last year to this year, Google has grown 20% in terms of searches. So it's not that Google's dead, it's that users, specific users really, really like ChatGPT and Perplexity and other LLMs for search interface because it gives them what they need faster and more efficiently than Google is. Yeah, I think what's going to happen is if you notice Google has AI overviews where they'll summarize parts of the answer.
- [47:49]
C
Right.
- [47:49]
B
I think that's going to happen more and more and they're going to slowly move the traditional SERP from 10 blue links, which it's not even 10 blue anym, to just conversational. It's just going to take time for them to do so. But the good news I think for businesses is that that gives them as much opportunity as humanly possible for more searches. And more searches means more opportunities to reach consumers and more revenue for the business. And so to me, if I'm a business, this is a land grab opportunity for you to get as much visibility as possible. Because if you can get more visibility Today, guess what, ChatGPT perplexity are only increasing in volume. And so if I can solidify my position as the number one business podcast today. Well, it's going to be much better when the tide rises and searches are increasing drastically. And I'm seeing the benefits of that.
- [48:44]
A
You know, one of the interesting things, like we're kind of coming full circle here because we're talking about Neil Patel and his strength in SEO and how much revenue he was and how he was generating and what kind of a business he built on it. When he was starting with SEO, it felt like this silly game and it wasn't worth pursuing. There was even an interview, you can find it online somewhere, of him and Jason Calacanis debating whether SEO was even a thing. And then Jason Calacanis eventually moved his whole business model to SEO, which is a credit to him's his ability to be persuaded once he gets the facts. But Neil got in there early when it was silly, small and not worth other people's time and just kept building and building. And I feel like the same thing is happening now with, with AI search results.
- [49:28]
B
Yeah. And I think, Andrew, the other thing people are wondering is, okay, if I'm using, you know, most of the companies that we work with are north of 20 million in funding. And so these are, you know, these, these are businesses that spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month on marketing. And so the challenge is, hey, if I'm a marketer and people are not looking at advertising the same on Google, I'm spending a hundred thousand a month on Google and people are not engaging with me in the same way. And none of these LLMs have any type of advertising. I need to do optimizations on organic because if I don't, I'm not going to see that revenue because all of my users are potentially changing behavior towards organic and there is no paid for chatgpt to there.
- [50:15]
A
Yeah.
- [50:15]
B
And so I feel it's a massive tailwind for our business, but also a great opportunity for businesses that, by the way, you don't have to be dominant on Google to optimize for LLMs. And that becomes also an opportunity because now you can play in the SEO world, in the search world without having to be dominant on Google. And that's exciting.
- [50:35]
A
Yeah. All right. I like the simplicity of your website. Usually this is the part of the conversation where I bust people's chops about their website and like why it's this long URL now this is short. It's just Taco Co and I'm looking forward to seeing how much this grows. Thanks for doing this interview.
- [50:53]
B
Thank you, Andrew.
- [50:54]
A
Hell Yeah. Bye, everyone.