where we are into the value chain is finding the right people researching them generating the best message and getting them on a book call when we talk about that it's very direct causal line to investing in Valley and seeing additional book meetings that's ultimately what we're selling is how can we go get booked meetings on the calendar that's really what I Define as like level three value I think if you think about aisrs AI sales Tech in general you got this level one value which is finding the right customers it's researching them it's generating great messaging that of level two value which is generating higher respons rates than what you're currently doing level three is ultimately the booked meeting and so the biggest change that you see in this post AI world is that all the software pre aai could only offer level one and level two value and then humans had to step in to go and offer level three now you can say look we've unlocked level three value Zade how are we good man good excited to chat I appreciate you having me on of course man I've been doing research on you for the past day and a half past 36 hours and I took this little except from your website and I'd love if you can kind of expand on it because I think it gives a really or will give a really good encapsulation of what you guys do and how it works so so this from your website 98% of your website visitors never take a step but know about you Valley uncovers them and enables end to-end outbound automation to those people this has never been possible before tell me more about this yeah man so I think high level when you think about B2B growth yeah to really two channels you've got inbound you got outbound inbound you've got awareness you got marketing you've got Brands you got people coming to your site and outbound historically has been um s of these cold lists of people that you'll throw into a tool you'll send LinkedIn messages you send emails maybe you'll do some text messaging and calling but like high level that's outbound and inbounds now what we found really interesting was that with inbound it's maybe 2% of people who view your site will actually submit a demo request um but what happens to the 98% right you've paid for all of those people in some form or another through either your time and writing content or the blogs you're publishing for SEO or or ads that are bringing people to your landing page um but you can't identify them and so the best-in-class technology out there to try to help you with this sort of website traffic that you're already generating and capturing of some value from that are things like six sense or some of these website intent tools that can tell you the companies that view your site and we really found that to be I think marginally interesting but really in actionable right what are you supposed to do with that you've got sort of somebody from Google in Austin Texas has viewed your website like congratulations there's now 2,000 people that you need to go and reach out to and so what we decided to try to figure out is like how can you go down to the individual person the the person's name their profile the email a specific individual that's showing intent that's actually on your website Who is aware of you and how can we then outbound to to that person and inherently since they already know who you are um they should be the most responsive the most receptive and have the highest probability of booking of booking a demo so piece one was saying okay let's go and figure out this website intent piece which actually was the last thing that we built but that's really step one of how you can build a list inside a valley if you want to do the traditional cold Outreach um upload list from sales Navigator or CSV you can totally do that as well but really this Special Sauce there is let's go build a list of those people from there and there was some tech that existed to do that sort of independently as a silo we said well the whole point of building this list is to actually outbound to them and so let's build the ability to number one research them deeply um generate hyper personalized and well researched messages to them then automate those messages out to them on the best performing outbound channel in the world which is LinkedIn so we built the ability to sequence via connection requests and follow-ups and then inails as well so all in all you have this hyper performance outbound flow which is uncover the people who know who you are do an unbelievable amount of research on them sort of what a top 1% SDR would do if they had unlimited time in their day um look at their their posts look at them on the individual level their entire digital presence look at them on the company level what's happening to their company or their recent news press release spund rising and then on a macro level what's happening in the industry right what do we think is top of mind for them um build those three levels of intelligence summarize it all and then couple that with mine or Liam's writing style to generate hyper personalized messages in a matter of minutes out to those people um so yeah high level that's what I mean by that sentence and instead of what we've been building here for the past year and a half B amazing can we break that down even further right so I've seen um on your kind of website the steps you've got listed as arrival identification research craft messaging engage call scheduled list start to arrive on identification someone lands on your website how exactly are you extracting that information to understand who the [ __ ] they are yeah so I'll see how much I can say and how much I can't the generally the the like what I'll say to that question is that's funny because it's it's it's really just a string of of a bunch of sort of different technology providers ultimately this Tech to identify the people on your site has existed in the e-commerce landscape for damn near a decade right but the issue is that when you identify somebody's email or the emails of the people who are viewing your site don't book a demo on the ecommer side they were able to give you their personal you know right and for Ecom that's great because you want to be dripping on people who like abandon cart for example with their personal you need their business email so this Tech existed in that form now what we figured out at valy was saying okay let's go and work with some of these data providers that are able to find a personal email but let's point this to the B2B space and so let's build an enrichment flow that can go from personal email to business email and business email to LinkedIn profile and then once you have the LinkedIn profile you essentially have that that fingerprint right um you know who the person is where they're where they're from the companies they've worked for and you can use that to then further enrich with things like people data labs mix rang prosio and gather sort of mounds of data on them from there go do some agentic web scraping uh and then sort of proceed with the rest of of the of the flow but that was really the core Insight how do we take this sort of dust off this technology that's existed in Ecom for for quite some time and point it to the BW World got yeah and that really gets us from the arrival identification research and we're kind of now at this craft messaging point I don't think it's how exactly do you ensure someone's voice is kind of kept the same how do you influence that in the messaging and then the engag part of it the call scheduled as well how exactly is that work that I connect to my email provider like talking through yeah 100% so there's actually a lot of of sort of method to the madness here if you think about sort of the chronology of people working with AI text generators we started off with sort of just plain sort of chat gbt outputs everybody started playing with this thing um and it spits out messaging it's really good at sort of answering questions uh but you could tell like we've got this sort of uncanny Val moment where you can tell if these things are are sounds a generated and so from there people then moved into okay how do we build some gears and lovers to say hey um llm I want this output to be formal I want it to be funny I want it to be casual um and that's what I see sort of with a lot of different text generation tools is you can select from these preform Pockets but for us we still found that as as not malleable enough and so there's sort of this third phase which is what valley does today which is how can we um mimic the human that Valley is representing to the highest Fidelity possible the way that we do that is through through uploads and custom instructions so two vectors or two inputs the first piece is going to be uploading content um and so you can upload anything that is emblematic or indicative of how you how you write so this could be previous LinkedIn posts this could be emails this could be uh for example for me I've uploaded my newsletter into Valley um as much information as you can just give valy examples and then you're prompted with piece two which is slightly granular and it's custom instructions similar to if I hired a new college grad and I wanted to drop down notes on how I write and hand it to them I kind of work with B in the same exact way I give it dos and I give it don'ts one of my does is sporadically introduce things like LMK uh or uh sto or grateful like common words that I'll use I take a casual approach my Outreach uh use ctas like would love to chat or LMK if you want a One pager what we find is like giving Valley specific words or phrases is fantastic um telling it to use lowercase letters to the uppercase letters really anything that again is indicative how I write and then don'ts never use jargon never use buzzwords never sound like an SDR never sound like a sales rep uh you should sound like somebody uh messaging a friend that they've known for three weeks so not super casual but also not super formal stra there Valley takes those two inputs and we then feed that to to an engine that can say okay with all this information let me build a structured output of how this person writes from sentence and organization and flow from use of colloquialisms idioms and and slang um overall formality level and then about sort of 20 different categories and then when B generates messaging it's always looking at what it created for itself is like this style guide as a reference for how this output should be um should be presented so that's when it comes to to the writing style piece when it comes to actually generating the messaging this is where I think there is a pretty large misconception where people are saying look llms can't generate sales messaging sounds really weird um it just it doesn't have the same intuition as what a human would have and so we thought was if you are trying to generate a sales message with a single prompt and then just like a big lump of information on the prospect it is going to sound like crap it's going to sound really weird but if you force it LM to think like how a top 1% SDR would think then what does the output look like and so Valley we've got this sort of 13-step flow um where we are going through and saying okay we'll summarize the prospects now let's think about uh what kpis matter to this Prospect in their in their day daily life because a top 1% seller is thinking to themselves how can I get my Prospect promoted right how can we win together how can I position my product in that way so we force valy to think like that for every Prospect what kpis matter okay kpi 1 matters kpi 2 matters kpi 3 based on those kpis um what is my Prospect probably thinking about day in day out right what what thoughts are sort of running through their mind while they're thinking well how can I generate more pipeline in this industry how can I compete with this series B funded company when we have 80% of the funding um X Y and Z from there based on those thoughts can we extract problems that they're likely facing and based on those problems how can Valley be positioned in a way that can help solve those problems now once you have that that's now a chain of like four or five prompts you've got this core really interesting Insight of how your product can directly uh support in in solving a prospect's problem couple that with the prospect summary and couple that with a bunch of other inputs that we were able to grab on that person the writing style Etc and then you can generate your final messaging sequence um now I'm skipping over a couple steps because obviously we don't to give away of exactly how we're generating the messaging but timately it's about 13 different steps um that we will that we'll employ to to get to a message that sounds like you that directly addresses a pain that we have a s High degree of certainty that the prospect is facing um and positions the product that we're selling in a way that uh that can solve that problem so uh hopefully that gives some insight on sort of the writing style then this how do you actually generate sales messages what was the first version of Valley and how did you get to where it currently is cu it sounds like you've just used first principle thinking to the nth degree and just asked the question what if what if what if what if and I'm just wondering like what the very first version of this looked like that you put live oh man it was very bad it was very very bad um so it's it's funny like we to kind of prove out the MVP we knew when we started like we were working with models gpt3 gbt 3.5 um so there it was like world's worse than what we're dealing with now um so anyways the first version was like a very simple front- end dashboard uh my background is in sort of LinkedIn appointment setting previously uh founded two and and exited to appointment setting agencies and we'd use tools like zapo and expandi and like some of these basic L autovation tools so my heisted going into it was saying how can I build the most basic version uh or replicant of zapto for example with AI messaging instead of templated messaging um and there was a single prompt like exactly what I said we you don't want to do now is what we did uh and so as a single prompt to try to generate messages there was no sort of ability to mold the tone we would have customers sort of fill in this Google sheet of like what are you selling what are the value propositions the proof points the pain points we would then take that Google sheet and throw it into a prompt and then try to generate messaging for uh for these prospects and the research that we had on the prospects was solely LinkedIn data we had no other data sources so somebody didn't have a good LinkedIn profile the messaging was terrible um and then from there I had a team of um to my CX team at that time I asked them to do the very laborious task of reviewing all of the messaging making sure it didn't hallucinate making sure it made sense before we hit approve and actually showed it to the customer on the front end of our dashboard so it was actually a very sort of it was very rubber bands and and duct tape way of saying look we know the tech will eventually get there but right now it really is sort of AI for humans to to see if we get a good output um and then as we progressed in product Dev it's okay we have prioritized our road map such that we're looking at what humans are doing and saying that's going to be the next thing that we try to solve with technology uh once we do that we then look at what the humans are doing next next next next next until humans are sort of way at the edges of sort of the delivery chain of how to get a great message out the door uh and now they're pretty much non-existent in our in our messaging process so um yeah really basic but uh a lot of iteration I think you touched on something it's 100% first Prin principles like that's that I'll try to put forward for me I have to think through logically like what are the immutable truths the things that nobody can disagree with pure facts and then get to to a assisting conclusion from there um and that's really bit what the process is look like this far I love it what is your ICP now like what companies do you work with most often and is that different from what you initially thought when you were kind of producing that mvp the world is changing fast AI is transforming Industries and those who don't adapt will get left behind if you're not actively learning AI you're already falling behind your competition but here's the good news you don't have to do it alone when you join the AI report free community you'll get immediate access to powerful AI resources that will help you stay ahead first you receive the first five issues of a pro newsletter packed with AI insights trusted by over 400,000 professionals at Google Microsoft and openi you'll also get three exclusive AI guides from HubSpot designed to help you work smarter and integrate AI into your daily workflow this includes a complete guide to using chat at work so you can start and pressing your co-workers immediately secondly 200 AI powered income ideas to help you discover actionable ways to turn AI into a money-making machine and lastly a thousand marketing and productivity prompts to make sure you start strong we're including a beginner friendly AI course that will get you up to speed in under 10 minutes led by our very own creative director Arturo Ferrera finally you'll be part of a thriving network of AI driven professionals the total value of everything in inside is over $549 and today you can get it all for free join today and start learning AI instantly it's interesting because in my prior two agencies we we were very vertical um and so we worked with first one was financial advisors and the second was Capital risers so emerging funds that were looking to raise from LPS with Valley it's the ICP has pretty much stayed the same because it's such a horizontal product and it's sort of a blessing and a curse um because you think about the position that we're offering is book sales calls that through to sort of your financial advisor it's applicable to to Salesforce uh so everybody wants that and so we really have to think about one what value will the customer pay for we know people will pay for for uh booked meetings uh but two what value can we provide predictably and repeatably um and where do sort of one and two line up and so majority of our our customers or sort of these really stage companies post their first round of funding whether it's like friends and round an angel round a seed round um but they've got something that has a semblance of product Market fit CU we earlier in our sort of gation we had a number of companies who founded by technical Founders Brilliant Minds but they had no idea people wanted what they were building and they saw valy as the Silver Bullet to just say ah I don't want to learn sales valy will go do the sales for me and and that was just an insane churn Loop because obviously the problem of booking sales calls was most intense for them but we could not predictably and repeatedly provide that for them so they move slightly up Market uh to the seed and and sort of uh preed post early funding companies then we also are working with in in Pilots with the number of companies that are 10 Billion Dollar Plus Enterprises uh which we can't disclose any names right now but um exploring what that looks like to actually find ourselves in those ORS and that's ultimately where we want to go because that's where obviously all the budget is everybody and in in B2B sass that's selling let's say a 10K ACD or more if they're series V plus they've got massive SDR teams and so obviously very acute pain if you can reduce your cost for appointments it's a massive light item uh that we can support with so we want to get there however one thing I find really interesting is that everybody in our space is also going through this same Journey up Market because naturally with a startup you find one point one point of the value chain where you can be 10x better than anything that existed before you have to either 10x better or 10x cheaper ideally both so everybody in this AI sales space found their own sort of wedge into how can we do one part of this process 10x better and now it's a race to saying we found this core nucleus now we need to build all the scaffolding around it to sell into these mid-market plus companies right Salesforce Integrations SSO um sort of oo compatibility sort of Enterprise level permissioning and roles workspaces like you don't start with any of that you start with the 10x Improvement but now you have to race to go do all that stuff so you can actually sell into those accounts so anyways long story short right now our ICP are going to be those S of early stage companies and we're working our way up Market as we start to build more of the scaffolding around this core 10x better nucleus that we've created who's a terrible fit for your company who's a terrible fit for someone to work with you who would you turn away the door yeah I would say there's three one I don't know why a lot of b2c companies um and it's like dude we have not to be your best bet uh your customers will have like a they'll have a I don't know you're looking for free customers and maybe they're paying eight bucks a month um you don't one you don't want to take sales calls with those people because that just doesn't scale uh and two you're just going to be burning money with us like don't don't don't do that go away um or thank you for coming but like we we can't service you um so I think BTC companies uh companies that are woefully pre-product aren't fit they haven't really talked to any customers they haven't done any sales calls they don't know if anybody in the world wants what they what they think the world wants um and then companies that have let's say are selling into 200 Target accounts or selling into the sort of the The Fortune 100 right at that point the marginal additional cost that you're going to spend for human to spend time researching and writing and building a relationship and building Rapport it is totally worth it there's no need for you to Outsource to uh a software to an agency or a group of people because ultimately if you win one of those accounts you're looking at Million Dollar Plus ACV is invest in that right humans are fantastic we're unique we're special for a reason get humans on those accounts um so that's what I would say so one in the Spectra over here the other over here and then like B to C over there for some reason uh yeah those would be are our worst customers what's the real difference that you're trying to make for organizations is it just a matter of revenues a matter of like top time on sales calls how do you really sell value when you're on a sales call with someone so ultimately like everybody just wants pipeline right everybody wants Revenue um for us the the biggest selling point is like look where we are in sort of the the value chain is finding the right people researching them generating the best message and getting them on a book call so when we talk about that it's it's a very direct causal line to investing in Valley and seeing additional book meetings from there it's passed on to the sales team we can't say we're going to generate this much revenue for you we can projects based on sort of your current ACV and historical close rates from your sales team but that's ultimately what we're selling um is how can we go get ook meetings on the calendar that's really what I Define as like level three value I think you think about aisrs really the S of AI sales Tech in general you got this level one value which is finding the right customers um it's researching them it's generating great messaging L of level two value which is generating higher response rates than what you're currently doing because that again has sort of a downstream effect level three is ultimately the book meeting and so um the biggest change that you see in this post aai world is that all the software pre-ai could only offer level one and level two value and then humans have to step in to go offer level three now you can say look we've unlocked level three value with anyways yeah that's uh that's why I think we we are where we're positioned and then ultimately there's a lot more that we want to do around um solving that problem because I think that a lot of companies have gone around this in in a in a I don't to say wrong way but it's like in a non durable way which I'm happy to to expand on more if you think that would be useful expand on non durable yeah so a lot of AI sales tools um a specify aisrs here I think they're trying to solve problems in a process that no longer exists or no longer works right so if you think about the past 10 years of sort of spray and pre Outreach you'd use a filter-based list uh to build those massive list of contacts you would have a templet message that you've sent out to those people and ideally you get a booked meeting on the back of that now when Outreach first on to the scene 2013 2014 um you're able to see 20% response rates plus pretty easily right it didn't take rocket science and you could say great if we send a th messages we book 10 meetings let's go ramp that up to 100,000 messages and that's how all of these sort of s FL Salesforce a lot of these sort of traditional outbound Le organizations grew when you're thinking about the first sort of iteration of asdrs they said cool we can now go solve a lot of problems in that process you don't need to do a filter-based list you can just type a query and will go build that list you don't need to upload a templated message we'll generate those templates to be personalized lightly and we'll send out the masses of message for you uh automatically the problem is that sort of what coincided with AI coming to the fold in sales was also this spray and prey approach not working right response rates atrophying every year um and now you struggle to see even 1% it takes like a a wizard to get one two% on email um so you can solve problems and you can remove friction from that process all day long but if the foundational process doesn't work anymore you're not going to see any improved results and so that's where I see a lot of the aisr world and why I think it's not going to be durable if you take that path what we've really tried to think about is what does the new process look like to generate pipeline what are the world's best sdrs humans doing right now to generate pipe and then how do you solve problems in that process how do you remove friction from that process and so I think it's two pieces it's like one people want aous Pipeline and two people want signals they want intent they want to know okay how do we target the right person at the right time the right message um so Val we're thinking about how can we couple the two right how can we go and find the the right intent signals the right buying signals um and capture people who are already exploring something that you offer and from there running that AISD Playbook uh on Research sending messages Etc and ultimately we want to be the outbound tool to send fewer messages because we've done such an incredible job at the top of the funnel where I think AI is going to ultimately be most useful um and so if you reink the process of hey we should actually be focused on doing all of this work up here so ultimately you're not scaling to 100,000 messages a month you are trying to scale down to a thousand messages a month to the perfect people that's the process that's going to work um and ultimately where I think AI sales Tech as a whole should be going I have conversations with a lot of people that own AIS SDR businesses it's a very big thing right now I think the real difference I'm seeing in what you do is that it doesn't seem like sheer outbound it seems like you're more the gap between inbound and outbound right is like you're already s you're you're basing on int the signals are already there my question for you is like why do you think Valley's been so successful so far like my kind of immediate thought would go to the kind of Creator economy we're in that people are more producing more top of funnel content thus there's more signals kind of coming in it's easier to capture that t like have you got any kind of thoughts on this in general well to your first point um yes I think that that Valley does sit in the intersection like where we're moving is is really try to sit in the intersection of of in inbound and outbound But ultimately I think it's it's one of the same right outbound as a whole is is moving that direction right these these two sort of circles are going to become concentric circles or as much as they possibly can be it's like yes you got your 2% that actually submit the the demo request but then all of your outbound Target should exist really closely to that pocket right really close to the people who are already aware of you and so I would say look we're still we're still an outbound tool we're just uh we're just following the riding the way of where outbound is going which is it wants to be neighbors with inbound if you want to do it right um now why do I think we've been successful so far I think two reasons uh one is sort of the the right Market at the right time right all these transitions were happening uh all at once we were able to capture that wave early and we're still riding out wave uh so that's sort of piece one obviously the I think there's some saying it's like of you would have a a an of average idea or average team or average everything but if you're in the right Market you're going to do much better than a incredible team with Incredible product the wrong market now by all means I think we have an incredible team and we're in an incredible Market but really just saying if the market is ultimately going to be what what decides uh if your startup wins or wins or loses um so that's one two is going to be we started with LinkedIn versus email um I think email was just incredibly crowded we saw a lot of writing on the wall around uh of it getting a lot harder to get into inboxes around the infrastructure getting a lot more important and expensive um domains being harder to warm email sending and spam we were like all right everybody else is trying to run to go and do that side of thing start with LinkedIn which is where I have my experience but also is what we think to be the the most performant um outbound Channel today and moving forward uh and then three because we we we figured out this thesis pretty early of uh you really should be focusing on on The Who and if you can get the who right then then the what becomes a lot easier uh so get the right get the right targets find the right people uh and couple that with Incredible research and incredible messaging because just that alone is not going to drive the top of funnel improvements so really the bottom of funel improvements that you want to see how pertinent is time scale to you because I see a lot of companies popping up and especially with like the rise of AI agents people are kind of pretty much saying we've got a two-year window before Salesforce comes out and they've got their own kind of option for this they just entirely captured that market how does that kind of phase into your development and how rapidly you're developing the product and capturing that market yeah it it sort of goes back to one of my my one of my favorite say um I can't remember Alex rampel andent hor right can the incumbent Acquire The Innovation before the startup can acquire the distribution that's the core of it and so it's it's when you think about time window you're thinking about okay you got Goliath organizations like Outreach Salesforce uh sales Loft you name it who have been sort of the omnipresent forces in this past era of sales Tech um how long will it take them to to acquire The Innovation and actually ship something that can do exactly what we're saying so I think the thesis is directionally correct that is what the world is moving towards it's what sort of all our sales leader advisers have talked to us about deep conviction on that um can they go build that products before we can go acquire distribution um and so look at the end of the day I wouldn't be here if I didn't think that we could go and do that so time Window Wise I would say you've got like you can't really put a a finger on it you could say two three five years I think three years ago we have no idea that we're here today technologically um so anyways can't really give you a time window but for us it's it's we're obviously working as hard as we possibly can on on on building the best product possible and and my job is just distribution distribution distribution uh and so far that's been panning out quite well let's take a step back for a second um you touched on it briefly earlier on that you had exed two companies prior to this and kind of describe a little bit about how you kind of came to where you are today but I'd love to hear about the founding thesis for the Genesis behind Valley in general like why start this business in the first place what was it that was important to you what was what was the idea I I can't I I realized the the whole service is a software idea before anyone sort of named it serves as a software um CU it it seemed pretty intuitive right it was like my I serendipitously fell into my first business I was scrolling through snapchat I saw this like dark screen with one line on it that said hey I'm looking to start a company is I don't want to do with me I was in the middle of studying for acts which I did not want to do um and so I swiped up and said sure let's do it jumped into the service company with this by the previous co-founder Zayn um and we were setting appointments for financial advisers we were using zapo which is like again a basic sort of linked automation Tool uh great tool by the way and then sort of a human layer on top and the humans on top would manage finding the right people and generating the right messaging uh handling all the responses notifying the customer that somebody wants to meet with them um and so it was third party Tech Plus humans Pure service play right all we did was sort of operationalize those two things and that business was acquired then started a company called fish um which ultimately I handed over the Reigns to Zan to go and run he was the one who's actually should be credited with the ultimate exit I kept a little percentage of the company um but started that company fish and it was the same process third party Tech and humans and then you got the Adent of of AI and llms and you could realize okay the foundational pieces of what humans were doing in those prior two businesses was finding the right people generating the right message handling the responses and notifying the the the client if somebody was interested in meeting with them with overnight all of that suddenly became possible to do with technology so the easy bit was saying all right let's go build this this sort of foundational uh automation infrastructure and so to start consolidating outbound tooling and then build a layer on top that can orchestrate all this tooling and find the right people generate the right message send them out manage responses let them customer know if they somebody's ready for a book meeting um and so technology could could color in all the gaps that that humans were previously coloring in for me uh now obviously I think that we all started quickly realize that that transformation of when humans can do that is actually going to take longer than we thought it wasn't possible with 3.5 it became a bit more possible with four now 01 being introduced there's a lot more that could happen um but uh but yeah that was the sort of the The Logical path of why I thought holy [ __ ] I got to go start this company um and I would realized I was for me the most qualified founder to go and do it just because I intimately I was intimately familiar with the services side right in a in a service as a software um transformation I think service experience is really important uh Now sort of other Founders have come at it from a purely technological background maybe they're an SD or a sales leader at a big tech company uh but I think uniquely sort of having the service experience has been has been very helpful as we as we got through product Dev and and selling and go to market Etc how did you settle on the name Valley and talk to me a little bit about The Branding because it's maybe one of the best websites I've seen ever in my entire life and I don't say that lightly I've never said that to anyone in the podcast before but I am obsessed with the design on it oh thank you I I got to go tell my designers that um all right so the name Valley that was just purely stubborn um so in between in between these two agencies and this this uh product Valley there was another Valley and initially what I wanted to go and do after building the agencies was build this social network for Founders and investors um I was seeing that a lot of fundraising and connecting with investors and sort of startups pitching was happening on Twitter and I was like okay what if you can build a derivative of of tech Twitter or Twitter that's just focused on the tech industry and you build tooling on top of this social feed um to pitch your startup to invite investors into your round to sort of formalize safes Etc um and so the feed would be le bit- size investor updates right so it's a way that you can communicate with your current pool of advisers Angels investors and then you also Al had this like micro pitch which was like a Tinder style um so just investors can why BL are the ones they don't want and WR are the ones that that they're interested in so anyways I needed that Valley because I was like okay that's a digital Silicon Valley uh that was really interesting and then I was like hold on this isn't working for a number of different reasons uh which I'm happy to get into but it was just the business didn't work and I fundamentally think it's going to be really challenging for someone to solve that problem uh but I said like I'm am not going through the whole rigma Ro of of uh reincorporating and doing game so whatever I decide to land on Tex is going to be named valy um and then ultimately it worked out right like it's it's it's uh it's not a traditional sales Tech sort of name like Outreach or or sales Loft it's got sort of like this this other feels like it's other thing over here um and then with The Branding I think the differentiated brands are sort of they're under they're under value it's it's the emotion that a a prospect has when they come to your website versus another um I think is one of the biggest ways that you can differentiate yourself past obviously the product and and the features you want your prospect to feel something different especially if you're trying to frame put yourself in a different frame compared to a lot of tools that have come before us so one of the things that I was you clear on at the start was that a lot of people would try to compare us to traditional sales enablement technology right sales enablement tools that are 50 bucks a or 70 bucks a month and here we are at 8.49 a month and so both through the copy of the website and the product and like the way that we explain the tool we wanted to make sure it was clear that hey we're not sales enablement we're sales execution we actually do this workflow for you with sales enablement you need to buy a piece of technology and you need humans to get the outcome you want value is just going to give you the outcome uh but there are also other ways that you can sort of you can convey that through a differentiated brand so our website doesn't look like any of the sales enablement tools our name isn't like a sales enablement tool um the colors and gradients and all this stuff is is is completely different um so anyways that was the the the the Genesis of the brand and then handed out those ideas to to our designers and then they came up with uh the stunning site that we have today just a real quick Interruption to the podcast I just wanted to let you know about our free daily newsletter we've been doing this for around a year and a half now we sent an audience of 400,000 subscribers with readers and likes of open aai Microsoft Apple NASA and many more organizations like that all it is is a daily digest of everything that's happening in AI plus tools that you can use plus automations that you can employ today to save time and earn more money and everything is happening in AI in general so if you want to stay up to date with AI on a daily basis just subscribe to our news letter down below yeah I I love it it kind of reminds me of open a eyes as well especially the way you've got your about page set up um with the the different kind of thumbnails for the articles that you're writing and stuff as well like it's it's very different to what I've seen out there as well and I the kind of difference that you DeMark there as well that it's not just a sales en a sales enablement it's sales execution um and I think that's it really comes across in the quality of it and I assume that you had such an importance and such a focus on this in terms of the idea of framing because you had that past experience in this exact industry in the past as well right so framing is important to you 100% And and also I I would be lying if I said we didn't look at open ai's website for for some inspiration so uh yeah there is definitely going to be places where where where we pulled into both them does that overlap into your personal life as well in terms of how you dress this is just a random question you just got the the airpod Maxes on you've got the Hat on you're looking very fresh like is that something that you carry into your everyday life as well in terms of framing like is that important it's really interesting question I never really thought about that to be honest [Music] um yeah I think so I I I I think that the a company ultimately is not just a product a company is is uh the people number one two is the product and then it's this whole sort of culmination of of perception ultimately you're buying off of what you perceive the the the product the team the company to do um so yeah I I do think that framing is really important I talk about framing a lot when it comes to sort of uh productive discussions and it's like if you can unify a frame you can have a really productive discussion but anyways um yeah I do think that's that framing in all aspects of the company um a perception matters right uh perception is brand brand is awareness uh awareness will will lead to to uh a lot for your business to top of funnel and referrals and word of mouth and and these types of podcasts so uh yes interesting question never thought about that before thank you that's um the greatest compliment to someone does podcast when someone has an interesting question it's it's jail is like a hat crack or something straight to the veins that's that's awesome here in terms of pricing I'd love to jump into the numbers I'm not sure how much you can reveal um I know that your pricing starts I think a49 goes up from there and scales further talks me one about like the pric and why you can have settled on what you currently have and maybe if you can jump into the numbers in terms of how much you've grown how much you've raised stuff like that left here as much as you can R about the financials yeah yeah I think high level um so we raised it's like 3.1 3.2 uh inced funding um Revenue grw 5x from from I guess from 23 to 24 uh and now we we we want to do that again so that's the those are the the targets we set for for 2025 um in terms of the pricing pricing is interesting right the initial price that I set was and use a very basic model for for like our first pricing model which was about 500 bucks a month um and it was they do customer interviews and then keep raising the price by 100 bucks a month until over 50% of your calls in a given week say no uh and then go back to whatever that previous sort of uh number was uh that was 500 bucks a month and it seemed like a lot of our competitors kind of stuck around that number too so Direction I don't know maybe they had much more comprehensive ways of finding that number uh but we all landed around the same thing um then 849 so we when we launched our V3 where we added in website 10 to be added in this sort of 13-step message generation flow and the research agents and a whole hord of new new pieces to the product um that is uh sort of why we have to increase the pricing a bit because our our margins got squeezed we spend probably I think we spend more than anybody when it comes to Mage generation because we really want to be the leader in hyper hyper performing messaging um because a lot of people say that AI messaging is generic and it sounds weird and and we wanted to differentiate ourselves we're saying look we are going to invest everything we can into building the best messaging system possible um so that's why we increased pricing of Bix now ultimately like steep peek into the future we're going to have a much cheaper option that's going to be sort of potentially more of a a self- serve trial sort of explore Valley um Avenue in the past or uh in the future and then we're also going to have a much more expensive much more expensive version so uh one of the big insights from 2024 was that this $500 to $1,000 a month price um I think makes sense if you sort of work bottom up from what makes sense for the business and how to sell it uh based on your cost structure but it is No Man's Land because you can't really go bottoms up sdrs and AES can't afford anything between there and they're not going to take the risk to to put their credit card in to try something about price um and then top down it's like it just the pricing structure for go to market motion just doesn't really make sense you either want to be a 50k a year piece of software or you want to be able to give somebody something to test out and try build adoption from the underlying team so all the sdrs the AES that then forces the hand of their SDR leader or their manager the cro to ultimately buy a company by deal it's like how slap grew a number of these Bottoms Up companies grew uh so that's ultimately what we're going to do Enterprise plans and then much more starter startup plans I love it I think if anyone's listen to the podcast now they got a pretty good understanding of your story so far how the business Works how it operates how it generates Revenue one last question I've got before I want to jump into some personal questions for you is where do you really see see this going usually I ask where do you see this in a 3 five 10 year timeline maybe that timeline's condensed like as a goal ultimately for an exit as a goal ultimately to capture and establish yourself as part of the market I don't know how much you can reveal again but I'd love to hear from you yeah I think that ultimately the the goal is to build this sort of outbound operating system for modern sales teams and and to be to be an established name as a business that helps build other businesses right I think outbound is is will always be one of the most predictable and repeatable channels to to go and grow your business um and I think it's it's a really just it's an empowering mission to think that you're building sort of this system that can go and help hundreds hundreds of thousands and all potentially millions of companies go and build their own businesses uh become their own entrepreneurs hire their own employees and and and and build their own little ecosystem so um ultimately that's what I want to go do uh I don't know if that's going to take me one year or 10 years uh but that won't stop until we get there um in terms of where we see sort of vision going I was alluded to this earlier but I think the the largest opportunity for aisrs is to is to couple um this idea of autonomous pipeline generation with consolidation of first second and third party intent signals and once you build a A system that can do those things right consolidate the intent piece consolidate the outbound tooling piece you then go and build what I like to think of as like a system of intelligence or go to market brain right we've had system of records for the past decade what is a system of of Action System of intelligence or or again go market frame look like um and ultimately it's something that can set itself up right uh it can communicate the action it's going to take versus taking in inputs right um for example you input your company website we then look at what's worked for other companies that are in a similar industry selling to S similar customers we tell you these are the intent signals that you're going to want to look for these are the personas that you're going to want to go after here's the messaging style that you're going to want to use here are the medians that you're going to send messages on um if all of this looks good quick go and we set up this entire thing for you where we understand how to capture the right people generate the right message and send that message at the right time um s like this idea of Revenue in a box um so yeah that is that's where we we ultimately want to go when I think about this this operating system or operating engine for for the modern sales team Revenue in a box and like like a [ __ ] great box so that's a box I want definitely someone wants to deliv that box you free we had a conversation before you're 22 right now right how did it feel to re to raise over $3 million at such a young age like you have a background in a sort of Industry how did you go into it like what was your upbringing like was that not just insane it was good question uh I would dream about that sort of when I after starting the first business it was that's when I got in spenter capital and learned about this whole world of tech and um yeah I'd stay late at night staring at the wall dreaming of of of that moment like what would that feel like it be like I I I want so desperately to get there um it was an amazing feeling it was an amazing feeling for like the first one or two days and then it was like holy [ __ ] like there's [ __ ] like how on Earth am I doing this how am I in this position um what am I supposed to go do next uh I've got like all these people counting on me I felt like the pressure of the faith and belief of and like sincere humility to the fact of somebody and this somebody actually was Jeff Becker some general parted antler who was like I believe in this kid we're going to go invest in him he said specifically this was when I was doing my previous social media sort of silic vality thing he said Z I hate this idea this business idea sucks but we're going to invest in you anyways because we believe that you're going to find something here um or ultimately go and pivot and build something incredible and this was on the back of sort of talking to 150 investors who all said and so he wrote the first check that we compounded some additional checks and and so anyways to answer your question it was it was excitement it was Elation it was it was wow I can I have this shot um and then it was oh my God I have this shot right it's like I I can't [ __ ] it up I can't screw it up um investors count on me people count on me like you've got careers in your hands um you got a lot of investor money in your hands uh and you also have like your own sort of self-belief and and sort of I guess ego in your own hands and saying look I have so much conviction on this opportunity um my greatest fear would be to to not live up and and U fulfill the opportunity that I've I've found my way in um or found my way to so yeah two sides of of a really interesting coin um a lot of Happiness a lot of pressure and and then a lot of of just gratitude and humility to uh to be in the seat how has that pressure changed you how has it molded you maybe how's it matured you how's your person personality changed because of it it's interesting cuz growing up like I was I was never really stressed out by anything um yeah it's an overstatement there are probably things that stress me out but like if I'm sure if you talked to my parents they would say I was not the guy who was who was stressed out studying for a test like I would always be the person at 900m even if I studied for an hour I'd be like you know what the doctor's sake at your eight hours I should probably just go to bed and then that will work out um so yeah we're just like go go to sleep to take the test and and hope for the best and um I think I just had had Faith like I'd be able to figure it out and and there going to be a lot of ups and downs and I think I was able to to build that sort of comfort and turbulence really early like I would get a get a bad grade and and somehow like things would ultimately work out I'd figure them out and it wouldn't be I wouldn't be emotionally attached to these terrible outcomes or these amazing outcomes I was able to stay pretty level so I think that was to clear early on um as I was going through going through school I think that's helped me in in in building Valley because it really is a a world of ups and downs um for employees who who join the team like I have to have a conversation with them and say look if you haven't worked on a startup before the sign wave of emotions you're going to feel is going to be wildly more intense than anything else that you felt um so the amplitude of like that wave is is wildly different uh but if you zoom out and keep zooming out ultimately those the the amplitudes levels out to just up until the right line I'm like I really want to encourage you to do that so I think that ultimately the pressure has helped me uh realize number one realize that and to work work on myself to refine the comfort in turbulence um hopefully that answers the question but I I will also add I just want to add to that like I'm absolutely not impenetrable to it um it 100% gets to me it 100% gets to I think all my founder friends and sort of founders of my network um they may not show it they may not talk about it they may not uh be wildly open about about the fact that like it is a lot of pressure and a lot of stress and then you feel um again an unbelievable amount of responsibility so uh I think all of us are working towards that end state of like making sure that we can be levelheaded and confident and and and energetic and a positive energy for for the team that the team can feed off of um but I can promise you when the lights of the office go off and and you head home it's uh you definitely feel it and sometimes you just got to sit with it right you can't you can't push it away you can't push it down um so it definitely is definitely exists it's definitely something that you'll deal with daily um but ultimately it's it's something you chip away out every day and and you're forced to right if you want to show up for the team you are forced to figure out how to deal with that so uh I would thank that the the situation and that I'm in and the company for helping me figure out how to operate with the turbulence talk to me about that on a practical level um you obviously have a like an amazing group of people that are behind you supporting you they kind of invest your stuff like that s if you've got some mentors as well and you probably get a lot of practical advice but I'm curious to hear from you do you meditate do you exercise a lot do you drink alcohol do you take neut Tropics is there supplements like probably on a practical level how you kind of deal with these stresses to make sure you're kind of as competent as possible when you come to work yeah great question and it's all of the above what you just said um like we so let's see start off um one of my intentions for for this year is to meditate more I I did very sporadically last year uh but I'm now making more of a habit of it so I will meditate like right now it's like five minutes in the morning that's it and trying to add a minute uh every week um and then exercise so we'll be in the gym before uh before work and so I I'll tell myself five days a week I got to do a cardio workout at one point in the day and then a lifting workout uh one point in the day so whichever if I'm if I wake up late then we'll do cardio in the morning if I got some more time I'll go to the gym sometimes we'll flip-flop after before work um but uh but yeah exercise has been a huge thing for me if I if I don't I was sick this last week and it it's uh definitely sort of a messed with with my mentals um so exercise uh we'll drink sporadically uh on the weekends happy hours with the team but uh but obviously not a crutch and then um let's see and then New Tropics I've got a I've got a crazy neut Tropic stack which uh I don't know if it actually works maybe it's more Placebo but um it definitely helps me to have this routine in the morning where I can wake up uh we'll sort of do some workout fasted come back have a protein bar huge fan of David Bars by the way they're awesome 28 grams of protein 150 calories fantastic can't find anywhere else um anyways not sponsored by them I love them they should sponsor me um so so yeah we'll come back and proie bar and then I've got like this like longevity mix that'll take it's like a mixture of like Al and a bunch of stuff um and then oh man promix has like this Flow State mix um so I'll take that collagen creatine um and then yeah we'll then head to work so like that's the that's generally the uh the the morning routine so ultimately it's like the ritual of having that slow morning is really nice uh gets me the right head space I don't know the fact but I have the routine or whatever they're putting in these supps uh either or it works I love it I'm a huge fan of uh RX bars I spend a a decent amount of time in the US and it's the only anytime I get there is like the I think it's chocolate and salt chocolate and sea salt I just I'm obsessed with it dude I I I cannot get myself to eat those I'm I'm I find that it's I don't know I feel like I'm like trapped when I'm eating them I take one bite and it's like it's like [ __ ] but now I deal with the rest yeah I think it is I think it is it's like now I'm responsible for this bar I need to eat the whole thing and I oh I love it I'm part of an obsessive group about it I've got a friend called Lewis who introduced me to them as well he's in he's in Tech um and he was telling me this fun funny story about how's at the airport he saw a guy front of him eating an RX bar so he starts talking to him about RX bars and then another guy from across the room notices a conversation joins in starts talking about our EX parts and then this room comes over she's like in rxr joining in the conversation about it's just this airport light of people obsessed more more people just conting that's fantastic it's like a magnet I love it right I got two I get three questions for you to finish off what time do you wake up at uh 6:30 why New York why not New York um five like New York is everything uh I think couple reasons like a one investors here companies here uh it's really there there could immediately limit sort of my where I want to live to two cities New York or or San Francisco um and so actually it's a pretty simple answer it's like those are the two cities uh my family is east coast so my parents are in DC my sisters in New York wanted to be close to family um and then sort of the cherries on top there's always stuff to do tons of tons of friends here um so yeah was a very simple decision two options where's family it where friends or a place where I can have like a an interesting balanced lifestyle and so so I'm going to provide no further context on this last question and I asked this to everyone as well why do you do what you do there's nothing else I would rather do there's nothing else I can see myself doing um it was never like a I was never looking at different options of what to do it's like it was kind of this this tunnel vision singularity if what else am I supposed to do right this is probably the number one the one thing I'm qualified to do um and two it's like I I don't think I would be successful in in any other role I don't think I'd be successful in the job I don't think it would be um I need to be moving I need to be thinking I need to be creative um yeah super simple answer there's why do I do what I do there there's nothing else for me to do uh I feel like it was since I was a kid I was always trying to be an entrepreneur in any way shape or form of the classic lemonade stands the car washes the dog walking um I would I had this little toy truck in uh in my grandparents house like this little H Truck and I would go and and take fruit from the fruit bowl put it in this truck and I'd like drive it around to my family members and force them to uh to to buy the fruit from me and so it make like $3 and visit to the grandparents house um and then started this nonprofit in middle school high school uh then started this it's like it's it's the only thing I'm I'm here to do um so that's the easiest way for me to answer the question it's it's gratifying it's uh it's a lot but it's it's it's beautiful and and and fun and fulfilling um and feel grateful that I can say all those things about the things uh that I do did I appreciate you thank you for your time