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- [00:00]
Keith
Of Jotform, which just crossed an amazing threshold. 25 million users. 25 million. And I love to bracket that, the book end of that fact, without raising.
- [00:12]
Aytekin Tank
Any product that I want, I would build when I, when I start my own business.
- [00:19]
Keith
So you built a product, you gave it away for free for a while. Right. How did you make do that with no funding? And then when did you make the decision to cross over into a freemium or paid model? When this CMO and the c, you know, CTO as well. But really I'm curious on that flywheel of how do you keep that going? Welcome to the podcast. It.
- [00:43]
Aytekin Tank
Hello Keith. I'm, I'm honored to be on your show. Like, you have so many great people. You had like I was just listening to Steve Blank and Mitch Kapoor and just, I was like, okay, you know, how am I gonna do after these people?
- [00:59]
Keith
You're so nice to say that. I feel very fortunate that have, have grabbed you to join. You know, I, I'm talking about the look back as we find the people that were the real pioneers of the early PC and tech era. But I also like looking forward as there's so much going on in the world today and you represent sort of that next generation of founders. You're not new because of course you're the CEO of JotForm, which just crossed an amazing threshold. 25 million users. 25 million. And I love to bracket that the book end of that fact without raising any venture capital funding. So that's always an amazing fact. The other, of course, amazing fact is you're based in Turkey and I haven't, I haven't talked to a lot of founders based in Turkey today, but I'm delighted. Congratulations. And again, welcome to the look back.
- [01:53]
Aytekin Tank
Thank you, Keith. Yeah, I can talk about our history a little bit if you, if you want.
- [01:59]
Keith
You know, the first, the first thing I, I, I go back to the beginning. Always. Right. Because it all started for you on a journey of how do I get to a hundred customers? How did you decide on what path? What was the, the, the seed that you planted and decided to germinate? That's a big bet. And ultimately you had to, had to make a few decisions. What led to that decision of creating Jotform, which is the simplest way of putting it, it's forms, automation that just caught fire.
- [02:31]
Aytekin Tank
Yeah. So before Jotform, I was actually working for Internet.com. i don't know if you remember them. I worked there from 2000 to 2005. So I was a Developer working for a media company in New York for like, you know, we had like over 100 websites and I would actually help our editors with forms. Like, I, you know, I had many things, but one of my duties was to like kind of help them with the forms. So I was creating all kinds of forms, like, you know, payment forms, questionnaires, you know, contests, you know, forms. And so I kind of wanted to find a product that can actually help me with that. Like automate that creation of the forms instead of like doing it myself with HTML. It was kind of boring. Boring. I hated it. I wanted to get rid of it, but I couldn't find a good product. And that's when I knew that this could be it. This, the product that I, I want, I would build when I, when I start my own business. I actually had a co founder. Like I, you know, we planned like we were really excited about it. And then. Right, right, we were about to start. He came to me and he said, hey, you know, my accountant actually told me it should be like 51 to 59. Like it's just know it's like 5050 is not a good idea. And I said, you know, we have always been talking about 50 50. I don't think it's fair, you know, maybe we go our separate ways. And then I jumped ahead all by myself. It got kind of scary and I was just like. Before that I was just, you know, coding and just. I had no like management experience, no marketing, no business experience. So it was kind of like just jumped in right away and straight into the deep end.
- [04:23]
Keith
It's like no one. Yeah, yeah. No water.
- [04:26]
Aytekin Tank
It was a good decision because the friend we were planning to go together with, he was like 10 years older than me and he had a really good job and he was leaving a good job. He had a big network, so he came with lots of clients. Like he said, okay, we are going to build all these products for them. Just. And I actually wanted to build my own product. Like, I was really excited about the idea of Jotform. So it was actually good in the end, like that we split apart and he went his own way and it was, you know, successful building a consulting business. But I just went ahead with Jotform. And when I started with Jotform, it was all bootstrapped. So for the end. So 2005, summer, I started working on JotForm. And then 2006, February, I released Jotform. You know, I just worked on it by myself for like over six months. And, and just I wanted to make it free so that I can get a lot of people to use it, give me feedback because I knew that, you know, it wouldn't be great. Like just I needed those feedback before I had like a paid version. So, you know, the first premium version came out in 2007, March. So it's like by the time, you know, from the start until I received my first dollar, it was over one and a half years.
- [05:52]
Keith
Well, a lot of, A lot of those startup founders who listen to the show are thinking to themselves, wow, that's great. So you built a product, you gave it away for free for a while, right? How did you manage do that with no funding? And then when did you make the decision to cross over into a freemium or paid model?
- [06:12]
Aytekin Tank
So, so one thing I had was I already had a product. Like when I was a student, I actually released open source product. And then just like I had like people, you know, and I created a paid version. So I, I kind of had this product that was selling, but it wasn't like great. It wasn't, it wasn't as exciting as Jotform. So that was kind of a source of funding for me in the beginning. So I. Having that, that other product kind of gave me the Runway to be able to work on Jotform without, you know, without having to charge for it. So it's. And I always recommend that like, just like people who want to start their own business, I recommend just start doing stuff while you are, you have a job so that when you, you know, you, you will have some funding when you go all in and also you will gain experience, like you will learn a lot of things while doing that. So I had that and that helped me and I also really believed that Jotform was going to be successful. So you know, at that time, like I wanted to like really lower my expenses. So one of the things I did was I went back to Turkey and just, you know, went back to my, you know, went back to living with my family after like so many years in the U.S. like nine years in the U.S. and I'm back to Turkey living with my parents. Like, just, I just, I, I had like almost zero expenses, like just, you know, and it was actually good to spend time with the family as well. But so, you know, I bet the.
- [07:49]
Keith
Family had some better eating. You're.
- [07:55]
Aytekin Tank
And so it's. That actually helped me, you know, start to gain traction because like, you know, I released it and I. People started using it and one of the Things I did in the beginning was I just put an open forum forum as a support area for my product. People would see that, like, you know, they would ask for something and I would just get back to them, like, okay, it's fixed, or it's. I added that feature. Like, it was like that. And people could see that how I was developing the product while everyone was watching.
- [08:29]
Keith
So you crowdsource a lot of features, you crowdsource feedback, bug fixes, all that good stuff, and you take that into an epic that you try to minimize the amount of outreach or continue.
- [08:40]
Aytekin Tank
Exactly. And it felt slowly like that for the. For the first few years, like, actually.
- [08:48]
Keith
But how about moving to paid? Is that. Was that a big jump or was that pretty much obvious?
- [08:52]
Aytekin Tank
At some point, I felt I saw that people were signing up. I saw that people were actually becoming active users, and I was sure that they would also start to pay as well. But when I released the premium version in March 2007, I want to add some stuff. So I also developed additional features. And as soon as I released that, I had 500 people subscribe to the paid version. It wasn't much. Like, it was like $9 a month. Like, it was on. It was only like 4, 500amonth. But, you know, I could hire my first employee.
- [09:34]
Keith
So you were early days of the SaaS, Cloud App, Freemium premium model and all that good stuff.
- [09:43]
Aytekin Tank
Exactly. And one of my inspirations was Gmail, because Gmail came out a year before, before I started working on Jotform. And so one of the great things about Gmail was like, before that, like, if you remember, it was all like, single page. Like, just you submit something, you go to another page. But with Gmail, like, these single page apps came out. The idea for like, single page apps, the idea for like using things like drag and drop and like, you know, like instant edit, all. All those kind of ideas started to come out. Like, this is. This is the time, like the AJAX and the what you see is what you get kind of ideas started came out. And that was actually one of my angles when I released Jotform. It was like one of the early showcases of what you could accomplish with the new technologies that were coming out. And I think this is also a great time. Similarly, the founders who are coming out right now, they can. They use the AI now, like, they. They use the technology angle to be able to, you know, reach more audiences. And at that time, that was my technology angle. And that. That's why I was able to get, like, so Many people to sign up, try the product, and share the product with others and write about it on their blogs. There wasn't much social media back then, so it was more like, you know, there was this blogging culture. Like people would write and they will include someone else.
- [11:13]
Keith
Right, right, right.
- [11:15]
Aytekin Tank
So it was very slow growth after that.
- [11:17]
Keith
Like, at what point though was there that moment where you go, yes, this thing is real. I've got this and I'm going to be on this ride this wave for a while.
- [11:29]
Aytekin Tank
As soon as I saw that people like, you know, as soon as I released the product and as soon as I saw like, people were using the product, people were creating forms and like.
- [11:39]
Keith
How many tens or hundreds or thousands or what type of scale we look at much.
- [11:43]
Aytekin Tank
Like I was getting like, you know, 100 signups per day. Per day or something like that. Even less. Yeah, it wasn't much.
- [11:50]
Keith
That's serious though.
- [11:51]
Aytekin Tank
But what I really, what really excited me were like, they were actually really using. They were really getting value out of it. They were really using the forms, they were embedding the forms on their websites. You know, they were getting submissions. So that's when I knew that this was going to become successful because from my previous job, like, I was creating like, you know, so many forms for our editors. I knew the value the form said. The only thing I, I haven't like, proved, proved yet was like, if, you know, I could reach an audience, if I can really find people who, who needed forms. But it turned out there was a real need in the market and, and you know, I don't have much expenses, so, you know, I, I didn't care about like, big, you know, big growth. And as a bootstrapper, that was actually good because I didn't have any experience managing people. So, you know, hiring my first employee, the first year, hiring my second employee, second year, like the first five years, I actually hired only like one employee per year. Like just that slow growth.
- [12:58]
Keith
Well, that's what they say. I. Right. Hire slow fire, fast. You. You took it to an extreme maybe, but yeah, yeah.
- [13:06]
Aytekin Tank
And that actually that was an opportunity for me to like, grow, learn and grow. Like just learn managing people, learn how to, you know, do product development, how to, you know, customer support, sales, all those things.
- [13:22]
Keith
What would you say is your. I'm sorry to interrupt you. What was your underlying philosophy as it. As it came to bringing new team members on and people? How did you decide what the right. What the right fit was? Obviously there's a skill level, but what was the Culture you were looking to create?
- [13:41]
Aytekin Tank
I think in the beginning it's, I was kind of looking for people like me, people who were excited about creating a product, excited about the technologies, excited about like doing something on the Internet. Like we building products on the Internet. So my first hire was like, he was very, he actually built products himself. Like he, he was really excited about things and I knew that we would click like instantly. So and the great thing about like the early days was like we were actually spending the whole time together. Like we, we would go to lunch together, we would discuss the product together and like, you know, when we were like five people, like we all did like we had this small office, we had a whiteboard and we all, all we did was talk about chat form, like how we can make it great, right? And that environment actually that we created a culture of like this, you know, how to build a great product. And there wasn't much help back then. Like, you know, there wasn't a lean startup or anything like that. You know, I started reading the blog of Eric rice like in 2010. So this was even earlier than that. And so it, you know, we were. But the great thing was like we were small and we were fast and we were constantly learning, making mistakes, you know, you know, sometimes we would break things and people would get angry, but we would quickly fix it. And when people see that you fix something very quickly, they, they don't, they forget about that. You know, whatever happens because they said you care about it.
- [15:26]
Keith
How do you balance the trade off of being in Turkey versus being in San Francisco where the company is based? And I know that happened a little bit later, but the cross cultural differences, the fact you're, you're sort of there. I know we live in a, a world today that, you know, global commerce is pretty common, you know, all that. But, but were there some different challenges for you being from Turkey?
- [15:54]
Aytekin Tank
I think spending like nine years in the US made me very like very like, you know, very familiar with the culture. So there wasn't any problem with the culture aspect of that. But you know, having a company with over like, so we have offices around the world in seven, seven cities. So not just San Francisco and Turkey offices, but also, you know, we have an office in London, we have Vancouver and like Sydney and so. And also we have a, like a big remote team in the US like we have a, like a sales team is remote and we have a customer success team that's remote as well. So this, it's actually there's a lot of, a lot of offices and a lot of remote teams. For me, it's, it's kind of about like I, I actually care about product. I'm a product person. I see myself as product person and I, that's why I prefer to spend more time in, in, in hunkering.
- [17:02]
Keith
I get that. So now that you cross the chasm, you've got, you know, millions of customers, you know, how do you balance your need to stay on top of product with your need to stay on top of keeping that, that viral growth with the product happening From a marketing sales motion? Because in a sense you're CEO, but CEO is really the CRO and the CMO and the C, you know, CTO as well. But really I'm curious on that flywheel of how do you keep that going?
- [17:38]
Aytekin Tank
How I don't actually separate product from growth. I think that's, they're like part of that. Like when I look at product, like when I mentor other like startup founders, like, I don't just look at like how high quality is your product is or you know, product is not something separate from the usage or the users or the customers. Like you have to, you have to look at it together with the customer. So you have to. The growth actually should be coming from within the product. And how does that happen? Like if you, if people use your product more, then that's also going to create products. So in, in our case, like what makes Jotform, the biggest growth factor in Jotform is actually people using Jotform. Right. Someone sending you a Jotform form. You see Jotform on the URL or if you are like one of like Most of our 25 million users are actually free users. Like we give, we give away so much for free. And that's actually, you know, I actually enjoy seeing also people use product. It's just like, you know, I care less about the money part, but more about like the, yeah. Having so many people use the product. And when people actually use the free version, there's also like a small Jotform logo at the bottom that also creates a viral effect. But it's, you know, it's not something separate. So it's if when you have that product led growth, when your product grows because it's good because people use it. I think it's, it's the best of both worlds because.
- [19:15]
Keith
Absolutely.
- [19:16]
Aytekin Tank
Because it's, it's very natural as opposed to like just trying to do marketing on top of what you have.
- [19:22]
Keith
Okay.
- [19:22]
Aytekin Tank
Or being sales on top of at first for the like, first I think like 12 years of JotForm, we didn't have a sales. It was all fast service, like just people using it, free version, upgrading to a paid version. But, but then, you know, like I, I had like, you know, companies coming to me and saying we can't use Jotform because you have, you don't have a sales. Like we need, we need someone to fill out those questionnaires. We need someone to help us with, you know, security questions. Like that's what I wanted to ask.
- [19:53]
Keith
You in a way too because at what point do have to organize yourself to be a growth marketer and a head of sales and things like that? Or are you just comfortable bringing in the right people does so other founders are going to ask, hey, I don't know much about sales or I don't know much about marketing. How much do I have to learn as a founder who is selling to, you know, millions of customers and has that kind of a, a large revenue business?
- [20:19]
Aytekin Tank
That's why I was like so bad at this. Like, I hated sales. I didn't want to go into sales. But it was like, I think there was this moment that there was this big company and like someone actually told me, if you know, you don't send me a salesperson, we are going to use your. Use a competitor. And I didn't go myself and I didn't send a salesperson and they picked a competitor who had like sales team. And then that was actually the turning point for me. And then I started looking into, you know, we built our platform enterprise product after that. And then, and then I started hiring for a salesperson. Right. And then I hired someone. I failed. I hired a second person. I also failed again. Like just another year went by, like just. And I tried to promote someone from within and that also didn't work. So the fourth the sales hire was actually successful. So because, you know, I didn't know anything about it. And today our sales team is like remote and in the US mostly and we have a really good VP of sales and just we are growing our sales team as well. And I'm still not doing any sales, but I learned a lot. You know, I went to like SAS CR and just learned more about it. And I also, when I actually get into it, like when I actually looked into the data, like data part, like understanding the data, understanding how it works, like, you know, what does it take to get a, create a lead and, and just, you know, turn that into a prospect and, and just the process I actually started liking it. I actually started spending more time with it. I'm still not doing any sales calls, but I'm just, you know, I'm looking into the data. I'm helping the sales team with the kind of understanding the growth, how we can grow it and just figure out with the data team. And today Jet for enterprise is like, it went from zero to like 40% of our revenues now. It's just growing much faster than our regular SaaS service product and it's probably going to pass our SaaS service product and it was 30% last year. This year it's like 40%. Before last year it was like 25. So it's growing very fast. And it, it turned out that that was the right approach even though I struggled a lot to build a sales.
- [22:58]
Keith
I know you're, I know you're being modest, but you see where the sales and marketing helps inform the product decision making and some of the other elements of the business. Hey, curious too about a company your size and still very private and, and not capitalized. How do you manage the growth from a capitalization standpoint? You, is it all from revenue and you must be fielding a bunch of acquisition type of offers. How do you, how do you, do you listen to that or just completely hang up on people?
- [23:26]
Aytekin Tank
So as, as I mentioned like you know the first year I had my first employee for the first five years like I was like just going one employee per year. And I actually had like some, I have like two rules. Like one rule is that I'm not going to hire a person unless I have like salary for one year in the bank cash. So that's actually our, actually growth is defined by the like employee growth is defined by the, by the revenue growth. So it's like it's completely customer funded. So it's like there is no like never received any investor or any debt, investor money or debt. So I still keep that rule. Just make sure that. And we never did a layoff and if our expenses go too fast we will just do a hiring freeze. And I want to create an environment. People stay for a long time and that's what's happening. People are staying at JotForm for 10 years and that's because we care about the environment you provide and we also provide kind of like the, like I know this. It's very common for many Silicon Valley companies. Like people move from company to company quickly. But I wanted to create a place where people actually, you know, they enjoy working there and they enjoy coming to work every day. So that was one of the rules. Like just make sure that I have, I have enough money for at least a year when I hire someone. And the, and the second role is like, I always make sure that we have like 25% gross margins. Like whatever we earn, like we don't spend more than 75%. So it's just always like keeping within our means and not just growing too fast. But I also don't, don't like try to grow slowly. Just I want to make sure that I invest in the company. I continue to just grow the company as much as possible. So I'm not a risk taker. I don't like taking risks. I'm terrible at poker. And that's actually that created this stable, bootstrapping, slow growth approach. And I see it as a journey. I want to make sure that I enjoy working on what I do. And for example, like, you know, I have a coo. You know, I don't want to work on too many administrative stuff. So you know, I don't want to work on too many operations stuff. For example, right now just, I'm all about AI. Like just, I work with the AI team building the AI team building these, those capabilities so that we can actually do something great. Like just. I'm bringing all that experience.
- [26:08]
Keith
Let me, let me come back to the AI discussion in a second.
- [26:12]
Aytekin Tank
Yeah, sure.
- [26:13]
Keith
Finish, finish that last part of my question only because I'm, I'm curious. A company like Jotform gets a lot of visibility and you're probably getting those calls. How do you resist the temptation? Are you interested in doing something on a bigger scale like merging with a company, acquiring other companies or possibly going public or any of these? How do you answer that question?
- [26:37]
Aytekin Tank
I've seen too many competitors who were, who exited and then their, their products just stopped improving. And maybe not name names, but just like, just I've seen like many times, like I see competitors, I see other companies like just, I feel like there is some like, it's kind of like kind of poisonous when a company, you know, exits and then they, when they merge with other company and then they just, they, they just decided product is not important anymore for them or like, you know, they are taken, you know, over by private equity and then the private equity is just about milking as much cash, as much sales as possible and then they stopped like improving the product. So I've seen like so many cases where exit actually caused the company to actually, you know, the product to go, go bad. And just, you know, I don't want that to happen. And I, I, I still enjoy working, working on Jotform. I still enjoy the journey. I look at it as a journey. Clearly by some point, you know, if I decided, okay, hey, I'm gonna retire or something. Yeah.
- [27:54]
Keith
So right now you're just, you're just saving those voicemails. Yeah. Tell me about AI. Because I look at a thing like Jotforms, and I go, that's the kind of thing people point to that says gets replaced in a lot of ways by AI, or obviously gets implemented or integrated into the large language models and the agent apps and things like that. So how do you, how are you looking at AI? I know it's been around for a while. I know you've been studying it probably for, for several years, but where do you stand with that today?
- [28:28]
Aytekin Tank
Yeah, I mean, we had that AI team for a while because, like, one of the things, one of the problems we have is like, we have like problems with phishing and spam and frauds and people sell all kinds of illegal stuff on their forms. Right? So we had to deal with that for a very long time. And that actually helps us build an AI team. Even before AI was like this really popular thing. But in addition, that actually helped us build a team that, you know, start a team, have a team, have an existing team so that we can actually build on on top of that. But we have also been working on our own on our AI approach. So we haven't released anything. Right. So what, what the approach we take is like, we'll just release, and this is an excellent approach we take with product as well. We will, you know, we will, you know, create a product and then we will just release it to small number of users and then, and then we will watch what happens. So, for example, right now we have this AI copilot in development and it's, it has been this way for the six last six months. And then every day, like, you know, about 100 people actually use it. And then we have someone actually every day sits down and watches that hundred sessions and then, and that person actually creates a report. They say, okay, you know, we had 100 sessions with our copilot. And here are, here is the worst, worst session and there's a video for it. Here is the best session here. And we opened like three bug tickets because there was problems with it. So it's like, it's, AI actually has like a lot of problems. It's just very hard to just make it, put it in front of, you know, Real use cases, like real people, people who are going to use it for work, right? They're going to depend on it. So it's, you have to kind of go slowly, but this is also an opportunity to kind of to develop your product. So it's, so we are actually working that way to, to kind of improve this product before we can release it. And at our company, like we prefer to release something when it's ready. Right. As opposed to just putting it.
- [30:46]
Keith
How do you look at it from the standpoint of when will you begin to start dripping those features into the product? And what do you see as the, as the potential, like over the next several years? Are your eyes getting wide because you see amazing transformation or is this, do you see this more gradual evolutionary adoption within your customer set?
- [31:08]
Aytekin Tank
I think there are, there are two ways founders can use AI, especially the SaaS founders, especially existing SaaS founders or people who are starting out. The, the, the two use cases are co pilots and agents, right? So copilots are kind of like you are doing something, but it's just, you know, you want someone to help you. And the AI AI copilot can help you. Like you're writing code. The copilot actually helps you write code, provides help. Or you know, in our case, like, you know, we want people to be able to use Jotform. You know, it's, it's actually like we spent so much time making it easy, but even then, like, people are busy people, you know, they don't want to figure out how to use it. They just prefer to like, just talk to the AI agent, just speak to the AI agent or not the agent, but the copilot speak to it. Or like use the live chat to discard what they need and the AI creates it. Like, you know, so this is the copilot example. The second way the, the startup founders can use AI is the agent one. And the agents are more like they, they actually do this stuff for you. Like whatever task you want to accomplish, they actually accomplish that task for you and you just tell them, okay, this is what I need. And then they go. And then there's even like more advanced versions of this where there are multiple agents, they work together to build the, you know, solution. So, and I'm really excited about that. And if you think about it in terms of forms, let's say, you know, let's say you, you need to create a reservation form for your hotel, right? But the, the, the forms are not very smart, right? It's just, it's very slow like, you just have to type so much stuff and you have to like, just, you don't have a lot of information while you are filling the form. But what if you could turn that form into an AI agent and if you could actually provide context information about that, you know, everything about the hotel, if you could provide, then when you're talking to the AI agent, the AI agent can just, you know, tell you, you know, things like make suggestions. It's kind of like talking to a salesperson, right? And you know, we had that experience, like my wife and I, I were actually, you know, I had like this idea, idea came to me because, like just yesterday we were planning like vacation and then we were talking to sales people from hotels and then we were telling like, okay, we have three kids, you know, what kind of room, you know, you have, what kind of rooms you have. Can you send us a picture of the room picture or like, you know, what kind of options you have? Like, what's the price point? So there's a discussion, so there is a form actually filled out, but there is, that form is like, that requires a continuous discussion between, you know, the, the salesperson and the person who's filling the form. So, so AI in general can make things easier, faster and smarter, right? In this case, a reservation form is like, not very easy. Like, you have to type it and it's not very fast. It takes you so much time to fill it out and it's not very smart. You cannot ask questions to it. So, you know, so this is actually one of the ways forms might change in the future. Instead of filling a form, maybe you're just going to talk to an AI agent that replaces form. So it, I, I think you have to go all in. I, I, I think if you are a SaaS founder today, and if you think that you, you're just going to sprinkle some AI to your product and just, you know, like just salt food, it's going to, that's not going to help you. You have to recook, you have to, you know, cook a new meal. Like you, you just have to start with AI from the, and that's how I see it. Like, I'm, I'm actually looking at my job as I'm going to build the capabilities, I'm going to build the teams that's going to actually come up with those ideas. That's going to actually build those ideas. There's no way for me to actually imagine those ideas, come up with those solutions. If I can build those AI teams, if I can make sure that they work well and they have all the things they need and make sure that they work closely together with again, going back to Steve Blank and Eric Rice, like just work together. And AI is amazing for that. Like every day we watch those copilot sessions and every day we learn something new because we can actually see what people want. Like we can actually see what they're typing on the chat box and then what they're requesting and we can see if we can actually give it to them. So AI actually gives us so much information about the needs of the people. So there's just so much.
- [36:16]
Keith
Right. And you also have a unique perspective because you're a business owner. So you're looking at, well, how do I use AI myself to, you know, reduce headcount? Becoming more operationally efficient too.
- [36:29]
Aytekin Tank
Yeah, I mean I, I think it's, it's replace and search for everyone. Like just instead of going to Google, just go to ChatGPT and it gives you better efforts. Like it gives you idea. Are you starting to see.
- [36:43]
Keith
Yeah. Are you starting, are you starting to use AI yourself in accounting and marketing and sales and some of those areas?
- [36:50]
Aytekin Tank
Yeah, we do, we do use it especially on the growth and marketing area. AI is really useful to come up with ideas, to come up with, you know, to generate ideas. And I think the trick here is like to be really good at prompting prompt engineering. Like just if you get good at writing good prompts, like just AI has like so many possibilities for you and just we try to train our team about like doing a good job at prompting whatever they do. And yeah, it's, it's like just, you know, you can use it in every, every part of your company.
- [37:27]
Keith
Yeah, yeah. Well, I, again, I like, I have a bunch more questions, but I so appreciate your time and it's just been such a pleasure to catch up and do the look back and the look forward because you're sitting in the middle of a very exciting time, not just in technology, but in business and in life. So I see, I see a lot of fun, exciting changes and we get to experience all of it.
- [37:52]
Aytekin Tank
It was great to chat with you. Yeah, I really enjoyed.
- [37:55]
Keith
Well, I don't have any immediate trips to Turkey, but know when you're back in San Francisco, it'd be great to, to chat, maybe go to Kokari and have a good Turkish meal or something. You maybe know another place.
- [38:08]
Aytekin Tank
Yeah, yeah, let's do that.
- [38:10]
Keith
Or you may be sick of that. We may have to go have some pasta. Thanks again for your time and continued success. To the next 25 million.
- [38:19]
Aytekin Tank
Thank you for having me.