Exploring the Interplay of Geography, AI and Business Culture with Omneky CBO, Matt Swalley

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right? Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Believe it or not, guys, kyle Stevie he is in the house. Yep, he's charged for this shit. He should charge. Yeah, yeah, you definitely should. Man, I mean, I don't know why I have a charge for it. Yeah, we're doing this for free. This is community service work.

Speaker 3: 0:48

We get our updates every like couple of days. You get paid for this podcast and it's like you got paid. We got what a penny the other day.

Speaker 2: 0:54

Yeah, we got our ads, whatever they're offering us inside of our hosting platform.

Speaker 3: 0:58

Yeah, we got like a dollar five. One day we got a penny. I looked at it and it was like you just got paid. I was like click one cent.

Speaker 2: 1:04

Oh yes.

Speaker 4: 1:05

Anyway, today those ex content thing people are getting paid out when you know. They start paying people all of a sudden and the people that were advertising a lot were making big bucks for a month.

Speaker 2: 1:15

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, guys, you just heard Matt from Matt Swally. Matt is our guest today. Matt thanks for being on the show.

Speaker 4: 1:21

Hey, thank you so much for having me at Adam and Kyle. I'm really lucky to have both of you here today during this call. I'm excited.

Speaker 3: 1:28

I love it. Look, dude, the logistics of this is not the easiest thing to do all the time.

Speaker 2: 1:34

That's right. I get here as often as I can. Well, it could be worse, Kyle, because I've been, you know, with this whole issue 22 situation that's going on. I've been asked to be on 55KRC, which is a radio show here locally, and I got to be there at 7am, like be there at 7am. So we're here all four times already in the last month, so it's been busy, but this isn't at 7am. This isn't a real.

Speaker 3: 1:56

My grandparents are dead, so I don't know anybody else. This is a radio.

Speaker 2: 1:59

Hey man, voters, voters listen to it, but anyway, Matt, so you've been all over the place, Like I mean, start out Carmel, indiana, which is awesome. It's got a place called Cake Bake. I'll give a shout out to Cake Bake. They'll make some money even though we're not making any money. Cake Bake is this like fancy little, like French bistro place with these delicious desserts great coffee.

Speaker 3: 2:21

It's the greatest city within like 500 miles radius.

Speaker 2: 2:24

A very well designed city especially in the last several years.

Speaker 3: 2:27

Very well designed, with a lot of money. Yep, it's set up.

Speaker 2: 2:31

If you're going to live in Indiana, carmel's probably the number one place. I would say.

Speaker 3: 2:35

I haven't been all over Indiana because it's kind of boring. I drove enough there in college.

Speaker 2: 2:39

So we know, matt what. I do know is Carmel is pretty awesome and we know Matt comes from Goodstock then and he's probably got a good business sense to him. But, matt, now you live in Pittsburgh, a former city that I used to live in. Lots of new there, similar to Cincinnati, but you were in, would you say, la, near the beach and a few other places in between.

Speaker 4: 2:58

Yeah, so I grew up in Indiana. The most natural transition after going IU is people moved to Chicago. So that was my first move where I worked for like my first sales job, where I was making 50 to 100 cold calls a day outside sales territory, learned a lot about that aspect of sales. But then I took this big. I joined AT&T and they moved me to Atlanta through this leadership development program and then at the end of that training program they're like these jobs are open. Do you want to move? I ended up in Southern California living in Newport Beach, manhattan Beach, all these beach cities and then finished off my last five years in Dallas, in Frisco, texas, which you mentioned. Carmel's a fast growing Frisco Texas was the fastest growing area of Texas at the time. It's a North suburb of Dallas, so hypergro cities and then that's where they moved here to Pittsburgh a year, half a year.

Speaker 2: 3:50

Soccer stadium there, right, yeah, that's right. Interesting. So you, yeah, you've seen different cultures as well and I want to tell people, newport Beach has a completely different culture than the rest of California. It's completely different. They do not like the governor there. There's, there's a small pocket of capitalism happening in Newport Beach, in the Orange County area, there, and then, I guess, down to down to San Diego, I would guess, and that's mostly because of the military. So you've experienced that. You experienced Texas culture, which is probably similar, similar a little bit politically at least. But then Atlanta is all across the board. Atlanta is pretty balanced, I would say. Chicago maybe not so balanced the other way. And Pittsburgh, I would say, is pretty balanced. In Cincinnati would be too, if you, if you outside of the city, for just the metro area.

Speaker 4: 4:42

But but yeah, so you've been all over the place with just different cultures, different parts of the country, geographies, food food is a big one too, right, yeah, lifestyle lifestyle is a big one, like I like to tell people I'm happy anywhere. I can figure it out, as long as I have like the basic amenities, like the amenities that I like to do. Like California has this beach. This lifestyle you can't even explain. People are up early in the morning surfing. You know it's a little bit more laid back, but there is a business sense. And then Texas is like very business heavy, like everything's centered around business and companies moving there. I love that. I love Texas. It was probably one of my favorites. And then, yeah, the Midwest is all very similar as well, but they're all great in their own ways.

Speaker 2: 5:28

I would say so. I would say so. The other thing is is you just mentioned something about sales. Well, Kyle and a lot of people that listen to the show regularly know that. Kyle, you deal with salespeople all the time, but short, short times, because a lot of them quit very quickly.

Speaker 3: 5:42

Well, I mean it's century level. So it's like making numbers, or you get dust boot.

Speaker 2: 5:46

Yeah, yeah, well, he does, I and tell him what you do.

Speaker 3: 5:50

Oh, I do. I'm a freight broker, so I just line up. I get freight from a customer and I line up in that carrier.

Speaker 2: 5:57

Yeah, so lots of super exciting.

Speaker 3: 6:00

I can't wait to die so I can come back and do it all over again.

Speaker 2: 6:03

But when you mentioned sales and doing all those cold calls, I did a lot of that in college. We actually did surveys, a cold call surveys out of it. I literally had to go on the white pages and they would give you a page of the white pages and you would just call down that entire page.

Speaker 3: 6:17

The worst is like so I was in law, I was in the middle of going to law school and successful accounts already, and I was still, you know, prospecting and just talking to some of these asshole doc guys Like this is the most powerful they'll ever be in their life. Yep, they are. This is the most authority they'll ever be given and they wheeled that thing like a sledgehammer. It was like I just got so sick of talking to him. I was like you guys realize you sound stupid, Like I've got the track record.

Speaker 2: 6:47

These are awful jobs.

Speaker 3: 6:47

We're talking about guys.

Speaker 2: 6:49

This is one of the reasons we're not. We decided to be entrepreneurs and Kyle Kyle dips his toe in and out entrepreneurship, but but he's, he's invested in entrepreneurs, let's put it that way. But I mean, I'm sure this was part of your motivation, matt.

Speaker 4: 7:01

Oh yeah, well, those early days of sales Kyle, you know, say, even in logistics and broker, like brokerage, like you get really concise on asking a couple of quick questions to get some information and trying to move it, move it somewhere, and then it's all about follow up and building a relationship. But you learn a lot there. But yeah, that's why I kind of, when I was an AT&T I led sales teams that were outside sales and then that's why I've made the transition over to corporate strategy. I went back to school to get my MBA, but the reason I did that was so I could understand big picture strategy and how all these decisions are made with financials. And then that led me to Omniki. I was looking at really exciting companies to potentially invest in and I kept looking at all these startups I met. I met Hikari Senju, who's the founder of Omniki, more San Francisco based company. So when you talk about cultures also, our headquarters is there, hikari, and a group of a pretty large group of our engineers. And that culture is completely different too If you have an experience like the startup mechanism of the United States and going on there that's surrounded by venture capital. But yeah, that was the whole process, was those hard times and sales and relearning and then figuring out how to, how to build things and make bigger decisions. And then joining a startup has been the most rewarding and exciting decision of my life. Cause large companies, you can't make decisions.

Speaker 2: 8:21

You learn to execute. They don't want you to make decisions, they want you to just do what they say and you're not supposed to think. And they've got this culture. That is not. It's not conducive to thinking outside the box. There's HR stuff in place.

Speaker 3: 8:38

There's moving, a battleship.

Speaker 2: 8:40

Oh it is, it's. There's so much red tape you got to jump through which never, I never understand. I brought this up on the podcast before. I never understood the whole reason why a PNG or a Kroger or one of these guys, aqua hire people out of these startups. Like, these startups are moving fast, they're growing, they're doing their thing, and then, all of a sudden, here they come with that big pen of theirs they're taking, just write a sweet check with and they say hey, you know you could, I will give you all $200,000 a year jobs. We're going to pay you a 5 million for your company. And what do you say? You're like oh, we can keep growing, but here's money right here and $200,000 a year sounds pretty good.

Speaker 3: 9:15

And Cincinnati, and then you realize you got to work with people who have to make like confusing decisions just so they can keep their job. That's right. That middle level of management where you're like this doesn't make any sense, but we're going to make the process so convoluted that only I can figure it out. So therefore I can't get fired when they find out how unnecessary my job actually is.

Speaker 2: 9:38

Well, on fire. They want more numbers, because then they could say they're growing their company. Oh, we have a 1500 employees, 2000 employees.

Speaker 3: 9:43

I'm talking about. Normally you have to interact with the people that are established in the worst, the workiness of mid-level management.

Speaker 2: 9:50

Also, matt, there's an ego thing that comes with that. So you could have a successful product that's been around for 100 years and you could just be handed the keys to this product and a $60 million a year budget to advertise said product, and then the startup community here welcomes you in to be an advisor for a young company that has no brand recognition and has maybe $10,000 in the bank. It just doesn't make sense. But these are the mentors we have in town. Right, like and oh yeah, I took a certain dish detergent from you know 1.8 billion a year in sales to 1.9 billion a year and says, oh wow, that qualifies you to go work with a startup all ofa sudden. Yeah, isn't it wild? Like, I mean, this is what happens. But when you are in a startup, I mean everything's new. Everything's new. I mean look at what you guys are doing. You're in the AI space right now. How many people working at one of these big companies middle management guys, upper management, brand managers, whatever in the world you want to call them can jump into this space right now?

Speaker 4: 11:01

Yeah, it's crazy. So this company was founded in 2018, like I said, and then 2020, we had our first customers. We had GPT one and two built into the platform in those early days. So different elements of it. But there's a big mindset shift when open AI released Dolly and then chat GPT came out at the end of last year, where people started like a light bulb went on and they started understanding AI. But what the challenge with large companies is? They have really big safety mechanisms in place and they're really worried. Like you saw, samsung got in trouble for someone typing in confidential information and chat GPT and stuff, and a lot of them are hesitant to make the move and it becomes a top down like a board member or CEO saying we have to get into generative AI. There's a good statistic actually that says 75% of Fortune 1000 executives believe they could go out of business if they don't enable AI properly in the next five years, and the length of an S&P 500 company has decreased from 35 years to, most recently, 16 years right now. So imagine how much shorter the lifetime of these companies is going and if they don't start to move faster, like we mentioned startups do, because they don't have all the same guidelines. They don't have the bureaucracy. It's going to continue to decrease because right now the scale effect it multiplies. Some companies are going to be built with five employees or 10 employees and have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and that's because, just like you said earlier, adam, ai can. Before this call, we were talking about how AI can power so many different thought processes, from strategy to even like asking, like, write me something up for a specific business function you didn't have any expertise in, and it really does like it. Two different things. It's great for new thinking process, new concepts and iteration. And then the next step is going to be as these companies all figure out how to solve these business problems and plug it into the workflow. There's going to be huge efficiency gains.

Speaker 2: 13:02

I believe it. I believe it. I mean, I'm using it to write blog posts and brainstorm blog posts, topics. And you know, look at companies, look at competitors with the companies that I'm working with, help me come up with targeted keyword lists. You know, outside the box, like long tail keyword phrases, things like that. Most people don't know what that means, but you know, it's not just if you were looking for dog food. Most people don't just type in dog food, they type in healthy dog food that will help my dog lose 20 pounds, some crazy stuff like that, right? So you know people are looking at those and you want to go after those. Like niche keywords and chat to PT and other other AI generative or not generative AI, but other AI platforms can help you do a lot of that stuff and you don't have to sit around a room with a bunch of other people in your company and brainstorm that stuff anymore. You could go into that room with ideas and then people could just you. You could use that meeting to filter things down. You could use that time for something else. I don't have to write my entire blog post. I could just have chat to PT come up with the outline. If I wanted to. I could have it write the whole blog post, but I don't want Google dinging it as AI written right now so I can go in and then alter that. I mean, there's a lot of things you could do with it. Have it write ad copy, which is what you guys are doing. You know how do you cross-trip.

Speaker 3: 14:24

I guess one of the main concerns people have at least I have and I assume a lot of older folks like myself have is how do you cross-reference the input, that the input that comes into that becomes the output that chat GPT uses? So like you get market research, but you also have to, can't just take it at face value, right Like there are errors with efficiency thing.

Speaker 4: 14:51

Yeah, go ahead, matt, you can answer that, yeah, so our process is it's still always going to be Kyle 10, 80, 10. So 10% human input on the front end. Ai can do the middle 80%, 10% on the end. It's going to require human review and then there's going to be so we build in some safety tools, generation two and three of these. A lot of these open source ones are eliminating bias and a lot they're switching the data. They're scanning. Like AI is built on large language miles that scan huge data sets. A lot of these companies are just focusing on smaller data sets or different types of data sets for situations, but the thing today is there needs to be a human in the loop and some of it still needs to be reviewed and the companies need to build in mechanisms for review.

Speaker 3: 15:33

Yeah, that's the part that needs to be marketed better. So, like for my, on my end I wrote a book. It's pretty awesome.

Speaker 2: 15:44

It is awesome, it's fun yeah.

Speaker 3: 15:46

It's 100 pages of nerd, but it's about tokenization of real world assets, and so the hard part with that is that people think of that and they still think of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, even though it's not that it's just what you would. But when you buy a share of a company, now you're able to trade your ownership in a private company Same thing, just using the word token, and it freaks people out. And when I hear AI, it's the same thing. It's like, oh well, the computer's just going to do everything and the human's going to get eliminated from the process completely and, like you just said, no, no, no, no. It does the middle part, but the part that's most important to public facing, like, what is this going to be about? And making sure there are no errors on the back end. That still comes down to the human operator, and I think if more people understood that, I feel like the acceptance and use cases would go through the roof, because right now, only the most the business leaders and people like Adam. They get into all this, get into everything. They're the ones that understand harnessing this and how crucial it is, but getting people to accept what it can be and what it is, as opposed to being afraid of what it is. That's the hard part, I think, for a lot of business owners.

Speaker 2: 17:03

If I had to guess, I would say so. I mean it is a business owner. I think people they don't know how to use computers half the time I mean you ask them. When we did our startup, people would call us and say oh, dot Loop's not working. It's like is your computer on? Something happened? Oh, I had a surge. Oh sorry, my computer died. Okay, turn it back on and then just start using it again. I mean it was crazy. I mean just the stuff you get and you probably know this with a company that is cutting edge, this is one of the hardest companies to get off the ground. I mean you and I both know If I was starting a laundromat. I just got to find the right location location, location, location, the barrier, the barrier entries like minimal financial and just buying equipment.

Speaker 3: 17:45

This is like the IP and everything goes into it.

Speaker 2: 17:48

It's so much harder to run a software business, a cutting edge software business. I mean, yeah, I just like, hey, a machine broke, we got to fix it right. That's what that. Those are my big concerns every day. You know it, did the water get shut off? You know stuff like that that somebody break in. You know those physical things that I got to worry about. But I know that a laundromat has a 94% success rate. Same thing with a car wash and a business maybe of like vending machine business. Those three businesses, it's like you just buy them. You know some old guy wants to sell it, he wants to move to the islands or down to South Florida. You buy his business off of them and you just keep it going Like this is something you have to. It's it's in an industry like you mentioned. A lot of people are confused about AI. What do I do? How do I get on chat Gbt? I don't even know how to find chat Gbt Mid Journey. If you don't know how to use Discord, you're not going to know how to use Mid Journey, right? I mean, this is a lot of this. Stuff starts out. I suck at Mid Journey. I still can't. It's in chat Gbt. Now, though, dolly is part of chat Gbt, so you can actually change. There's a drop down now up at the top. You can say Dolly and then just do some image stuff.

Speaker 3: 18:50

I never. It never makes a fucking picture the way I wanted to make it.

Speaker 2: 18:56

Look at crypto, right Dude, if you wanted to buy Bitcoin prior to Coinbase, I mean, how hard was that? Even now that you have Coinbase, it's still complicated for people, right?

Speaker 3: 19:05

I tried to do D5 once and it was just like I just take my money. Screw you. This is. This is a waste of $1,000. I'm sorry I did this.

Speaker 2: 19:12

Yeah that. And then the NFTs buying and selling NFTs and finding a wallet to put them in. I mean, guys, we're at the beginning stages of this. I mean, crypto has a has a 10 year head start on you guys. Right now, I mean it really and it's still not figured out.

Speaker 4: 19:27

Yeah, well, there's one. There's one difference in crypto and AI is like AI can solve a whole lot of different business problems than just the crypto does solve a huge payment problem and that problem is continually getting worse right now with the cash, a lot of the influx and cash and everything that's happening. It'll be interesting to see how crypto evolves. But AI can solve a lot of different problems. It's just can you find that niche, that small focus that your software can solve that problem? Like solve that? And we look at it as right now, the creative process could have like four to five owners. Right, it could have a strategy person, a copywriter, an image generator or video generator, and then a traffic or someone that launches into the platforms. The future is a curation process where you could have less owners, that you could empower those others to go work on other more strategic items, but it's more of a curation process and just guiding the AI or, like you said, that 10% input. What are your goals? Who are your audience? You could be focusing all your ads and what are your audiences like, let's just say, with the consumer products, since you have PNG there in the hometown. Is you have a family you're focusing on, but you could also be wanting to focus on some city with a single income person that's in their 20s. All of a sudden, you can type that in or use that data and then generate a whole bunch of different concepts and copy that go directly with that. The other thing I wanted to mention too that's really exciting, is there's a flip in how you can target people on advertising. With all the personal information regulations that continue to get more and more stringent, like California Data Protection GDPR in Europe, Targeting is becoming more restrictive. You still can, but all the platforms build these algorithms that recognize what Adam and Kyle like. If you look at something on social media or they know what your IP address looked at, they're going to start to show you a bunch of ads that are similar to that. Businesses have to have content that has the skills all their products otherwise it doesn't get distributed effectively because the platforms recognize what's in it and it sends it to who they believe it's a good fit. For A lot of times that performs as well as very precise target.

Speaker 3: 21:44

Yeah, it gets you in trouble too. They had this naked underwear. I was at, popped up. I looked at it and said there's something I could buy, Allison, because there's this soft cotton type sleeping wear. From now on, it's permanently embedded in my Facebook timeline. I can't get rid of it. My daughter was walking by one day when I was scrolling through Facebook. She's what is that? I'm going to tell mom. It's like, oh God, I understand exactly what we're talking about with the algorithms. They're powerful tools for good and for evil.

Speaker 2: 22:22

Well, there is. You can have what is it? Decision paralysis or whatever the term is. A paralysis by analysis? Yeah, that's it. But you could just have so many options. Because AI is so quick at coming up with things. You could just be like, oh man, I don't know, you could spend more time messing around playing an AI on a project than just doing it yourself. That's why you go with experts.

Speaker 3: 22:45

That's why you go with an expert that can actually, like you guys, can channel your client in and say hey, get out the weeds, buddy, get out the weeds.

Speaker 4: 22:52

These are the inputs you need. Yeah, this is the output you're trying to get. Let AI do the middle.

Speaker 2: 22:57

That's it. That's it. But you know people will do a bunch of stuff and you mentioned something earlier that sparked something Just being you know, years in advertising. One of the big things that you have to do is personas, right? So whenever you do a startup and I'm sure you guys did your persona development at some point you create these persona sheets. So you say, hey, this is the industry I'm in. I need research on three people who would be my most likely customers and name them. Do personas? And it knows what personas are and it'll name them. It'll be like Bob the Builder. Bob the Builder likes to build things. Bob the Builder has certain tools he likes to use. Bob the Builder doesn't like to change these tools. If you want to change Bob the Builder's mind, you're going to have to do this, this, this and this right. So you create these personas, generally three of them, three different customers.

Speaker 3: 23:45

They're also called avatars in a lot of cases. How did you?

Speaker 2: 23:47

research that before AI, you just the copywriters researched it. So in an ad agency you would get tasked with doing this. It would be a client project. You'd create a new project out of it. The copywriter would get it, the copywriter and probably the brand manager on that inside of that agency the client service person would work together to come up with these personas and they'd probably drag a couple other people in this meeting. So think about this this isn't just the agency that's saving time. This is unnecessary meeting times, money that the client is spending doing this stuff, and it just meetings suck, Meeting suck.

Speaker 3: 24:23

Just for a morale, just for a morale standpoint. It's like I don't have to go to meetings anymore. This is fucking awesome.

Speaker 2: 24:27

You're charging $300 an hour per person and there's five people sitting in a meeting talking about what the names of the persona people are going to be.

Speaker 3: 24:34

Yeah, the whole time we're there is like please, please, let me have turned my volume down, so this video, this reel that pops up on Instagram doesn't get long.

Speaker 2: 24:41

Yeah, exactly, I got three hours that I get to actually do work today, and I'm sitting in a meeting brainstorming. You know, something today I could do in 10 seconds, so you know. This is what I'm talking about, Matt. So how?

Speaker 3: 24:51

does it get to? Sorry to interrupt again, but I think I feel like people listening are probably the same boat. I am have a vague idea of what it is. How does it get down to chat GBT where they can pull from the internet Like, do people have entered what is normal? These are standard personas and it goes off to that type stuff.

Speaker 4: 25:12

It's learning from a whole bunch of data sets out there, from things that have been done before, and then it's concising that. It's like putting that in your situation. So whatever you give it details, you say, give me personas on this. It's gonna go research whatever details you have and try to triangulate it as much as possible and then it's gonna spit out things like consultants or agencies do that they'd seen before. But it does great. I mean, like Adam said before, from those personas you move much, much quicker. And the other funny thing is a lot of the big consulting like the McKinsey's and the BCG's are doing a lot of this work as well. It'll be interesting to see how they were. It's always very high level, right, high level. Here you go for a large brand or a large company. Here's the delivery here, and we can almost produce similar output with AI.

Speaker 2: 25:59

Well, and in a problem for you guys too, since you have a startup, it's raising money. Do I go to a McKinsey? Do I take their money? Because if I take their money they're gonna wanna use this for themselves. So then that you know they're gonna want all. Can we make this exclusive? Essentially, can you build this for us and then when you say no, then they try to acquire you. And then you still say no and then you build it and it turns into a $10 billion company. But if you don't say no at one of those two stages, if you take their money, then they want it for themselves and it's a smaller thing, right, but you got more security. Now, if they say no, we don't wanna buy it yet, or you say no, we don't want you to do that, then they try to buy your whole company and just bring you in to make it a tool for them. Because you gotta understand the big four or the, you know the big. You know big companies like what he's talking about with McKinsey and there's several others. They will. They compete against each other and these guys make tons and tons and tons of money and it's ridiculous how much they charge for some of the research and stuff that they do this, what you have, I mean it's a strategic thing, it's a very. If I owned this, it gives me a strategic advantage over these other consulting firms and I can go and I can pitch something and say, hey, proctor and Gamble, before you hire us, take a look at this thing we got. You know who doesn't have this? Ey, ey doesn't have this, we have it. So I mean, it's something that it's hard. When you have a startup, you have to make a lot of these decisions. When you have a successful company which it appears that you guys already do and you're in a great space, so talk a little bit about that, Talk a little bit about some of the things. You don't have to be specific about any offers that you've gotten, but you know, kind of trying to avoid some of these issues that startups typically have.

Speaker 4: 27:39

Yeah, so it's in. Our CEO, you know, handles a lot of this stuff. But, like, you got to decide if you want to be have any type of exclusivity or not with partners. And if you're gonna be the like, you know one of what we aspire to be like the next sales force of advertising, for example. You have to be really careful about the different angles you take. And you know we have we're venture funded, not from like a big, a big four consulting company, but from a venture backed, you know, san Francisco based thing and we're continuing that route. But there's a number of different ways you can go about it. We've built some really strong partnerships through the last stage of our growth. That's been the biggest mechanism of growth is finding partners that are in complementary industries and that need our type of service in their offering and then them reselling it, and there's a ton out there as the product that matures. And then there's another element of funding that you know we run into a lot is because we help with this is crowdfunding, so companies can go to the crowd to drive investments for their startup. We don't do this, but we advertise for that. We help businesses tell their story to drive investments into their company and there's a lot of different platforms that do that. I don't know if you've followed crowdfunding very much.

Speaker 3: 28:57

It's a lot of them out there. That's where tokenization is going. It's going to be a liquidity avenue for crowdfunding.

Speaker 2: 29:06

That is one industry. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, that's a good point. So regulations.

Speaker 3: 29:09

C the regulations, whatever is C.

Speaker 4: 29:13

Reg C F. Reg A. Reg A yeah, there's multiple that people go through.

Speaker 2: 29:18

Yeah, so talk a little bit about the company. It's OmniKey, but it's OMNEKYcom, if any. You know, for the people that are listening, they do have a demo here. Talk about some of these products under your dropdown. You've got Creative Brief, creative Insights, approven Launch. Creative Generation Pro. Product Generation Pro.

Speaker 4: 29:37

Yeah, so all those are kind of compliments of each other in our platform today. And so just imagine if you're a company and you partner with OmniKey. There's a couple of first steps. So first you register on our website and then you connect your advertising data. So the first thing, immediately we start looking at advertising data, looking what's been leading to any sales or leads in the past. We can pull out insights from that with a tool called Computer Vision and help figure out what are some of the elements that have been driving your success. So that's step one and that helps to feed generative AI. The second is we collect in all the assets fonts, logos, brand guidelines, things like that what you mentioned earlier, kyle, where you were saying like you're concerned about outputs. Well, these are the guardrails for starting point. Ai can learn from all that. And then those different products like Content Generation Pro or Creative Generation Pro is the tool for scaling image and video generation across all the different mediums you could. So you could be just advertising on websites Facebook, google, tiktok they all have different dimension requirements and basically OmniKey takes the plugins for the different things we mentioned earlier. What's the audience, what's the product, what's the location or geography, what are your goals and then it generates outputs for all those platforms With like basically a click of a button, it automates most of that image generation process.

Speaker 2: 31:09

That's a pain in the butt, by the way, if you're doing it in Photoshop, like having to design every single one of those ads and then send them off to your developers and have them develop every single one of those ads. Pain in the butt Like the ladies feet with the shoes. Yeah, like all that dude. Like it's yeah, right here, right, here's the ladies feet with the shoes. Like I'd have to run copy on top, put copy on top of that and I'd have to make it work for all these different aspect ratios. So a tall, skinny aspect ratio. You know, if I'm doing like a 160 by 600 tall ad, like that would suck. To have to change a leaderboard ad, which is the tall like the short, skinny, long ad, to one of these tall like skyscraper ads, that would be a pain in the butt to have to do.

Speaker 4: 31:50

Yeah, so that's a huge challenge. We've heard like through thousands and thousands of businesses. They have their team copying a hundred different versions of it and trying to figure out how to you know do it. The other one you mentioned was creative brief. So you just how you use chat GPT. We built our own custom algorithms on top of the creative process where you just put your inputs in there. That first 10% we mentioned who's the audience. It scrapes the website, it looks at product images and stuff and then it will generate a ton of ad concepts for each platform. So like it will put ad concepts for meta, google, tiktok, whatever the platform is, and you could put like do you want different emotional appeals, do you want a different tone? Things like that. And instead of having to like know what to prompt. It makes it much easier and this is used by our customers, but also our internal teams are using these tools as well for that final creative output. And then, finally, we have this like approval dashboard that allows brands or agencies to have multiple people review everything, annotate. Nothing goes live until it has got the stamp of approval from the customer. On Kyle's point, everything has to be reviewed. That last 10%, and then we're automating as much as we can. And then, from a video standpoint, this is exciting. So you see a lot of the competitors out there. They're focusing on maybe one aspect of it. Well, multivariate, creative testing requires images and videos. It requires different types of testing. Well, video is pretty exciting because we mentioned earlier, but AI can help fuel the scripts for user generated content, but also now there's AI avatars, so you've seen it with Synthesia and different. But you can train AI on any person within your company and then instantly feed that AI a script and within minutes you have a production level content. You can go take it on Facebook for organic or ads and then what we do is we create that and then we brand it. We do a branded experience and make it really simple to turn around content.

Speaker 2: 33:55

Yeah, you guys are at the edge, the cutting edge man. I mean it sounds like you have like an adaptive learning model kind of built into this thing too. So the longer you're using something like this, the more it starts to understand your company, understand your client. It can produce higher quality ads. Maybe some of that 10%, maybe that 10% of you actually doing it moves down to 8%, moves down to 7% over time. Oh yeah, so because it understands you, it understands you, it understands your brand, it understands you know, and for you guys it sounds like you're working a lot with agencies and you know the agencies are going to have multiple clients. Now, when you guys put this together, is there a, is there a pricing model for how much space you're taking on the platform? Is there a number of clients you can put in the platform? Like, how do you guys do the pricing in? You know, because you're going to have some clients that use it less, some clients that use it more.

Speaker 4: 34:45

Yeah, we have a annual platform fee per brand, with agencies and the or if it's a larger company, it's a platform. Annual platform fee gives you access to all the analytics and a lot of the generative AI tools, and then creative output. The variable is creative output. So how many creatives are you taking, you know, to market across the different platforms? And that's the, basically a creative subscription. Nice, so two components, two different components cool. And now involves a lot as video changes. You know video is still more expensive in many cases and a lot of it, like images, can be completely automated almost today. Just imagine as video continues like. We look at video in a couple of different ways. One is you have UGC AI avatars. The other is all the production level assets a big brand or a company has. They could have hours of B roll film of stuff that could be using ads. Well, AI can scan those videos and learn from them and then you piece it together in a smaller, smaller versions and then you use them in performance marketing. So that's kind of the other avenue, that is, AI plus human, for us today that we're looking to figure out how to automate.

Speaker 2: 35:49

Yeah, and you mentioned multi-variate testing, which is AI A B testing. So you have one version, you put it out there. You put a separate version out there, maybe the different picture on it. You see which one does better. If that one, if B, does better, then you make two more versions of B right, just coming from, like clicks and interaction. Yeah, exactly, but a lot of times you'll use tools advertising tools to figure out exactly how those ads are working. So how do you integrate with some of the tools like a HubSpot that people are already using, or Google, etc.

Speaker 4: 36:24

Yeah, so we built. We have integrations today with all the advertising platforms, so MetaGoogle, tiktok, direct integrations. We pull in data HubSpot we're building out right now but we do use HubSpot all the time. Where HubSpot gives you lots of great data in where it's mostly valuable is that into the funnel conversions. So it tells you a lot of the attributes of what they looked at on your website before they submitted a lead and all these other things. So that's where HubSpot comes in very detailed and you can get a little bit further on what are the attributes of that customer, like where's the business located, where's whatever attributes data, depending on how enriched it is. I mean that's the other challenge. Like some companies have very lots of data sources, you can pull a lot more, but HubSpot gives you another step further into the buying journey of your customers and that can be used in ads.

Speaker 2: 37:15

Well, and people want to know hey, I created these ads, I tested them. Which one did better? Okay, version A does better. At the end of the day, I put that up on Google, I put it up on Facebook and then maybe they're using a HubSpot and I want to know how many people click from that ad into this. You know squeeze page I created on my website that has a form on it. What's a squeeze page? Explain, go ahead, matt.

Speaker 4: 37:45

Yeah, so you. One of the biggest challenges too and sales flipped we talked about. My early days were leading like outbound sales. I'm so big on inbound. Now you drive people to your landing page and then you screen them from your landing page if they're a good fit. So basically, it's whatever forms you have on your website to drive in the leads. Is that's what you're talking about, right, right, adam?

Speaker 2: 38:07

Yeah, yeah, landing page. You know, people come to the landing page from an ad and it tries to sell them, but it's specific to whatever that ad was. So you may sell 10 different things, right, but the person clicked on the thing three the nude underwear yeah, the nude underwear. Right Didn't click on the brawls, he clicked on the underwear. Right Clicks on the underwear or the pants, the shorts, whatever goes into the site. This page is all about shorts. It's not about bras, it's not about hats, it's not about shoes, it's just about shorts. You want these shorts? Here you go, we're going to give you an awesome discount. You click on it, boom, you know. So there's these landing pages that HubSpot lets you set up and then it tracks a whole bunch of information on those landing pages, like where did that traffic come from? You know, did it come from here? Did it come from there? And then, that way, you know, do I spend more money on Google ads next month? Or do I spend more money on Facebook ads next month? Or radio, I mean, god, some of these things you can connect with. You know, all kinds of older industries, even television, etc etc.

Speaker 3: 39:03

Yeah, television, AM radio.

Speaker 4: 39:05

And you've got to start like in multivariate, like when you talk about creative testing, ai, like some of our future would be landing pages as well, because, like developing multiple landing pages for each of those that recognize just like, just like in hat, like the ads get delivered to someone because it's a good fit, but the landing page would change based on you know your likes. Yeah, but one of the funnest parts for us, like learning the whole process digital ads is one of our largest lead generation mechanisms and just figuring out the whole process of how to keep changing the landing pages, to change what leads are coming in and also who you're meeting with, because, like at a startup, you have limited resources. Originally we were meeting with almost every customer that came to Omniki. Now we have. We direct different customer types to different places based on if we could sell to them or not today. And then the rest we nurture. You know, if we can't, we nurture it and then follow back up as the product matures and nurturing.

Speaker 2: 40:02

I got your name and email address because you wanted to download this top 10 reasons you should use Omniki. But you weren't ready to buy yet, but already got your name and email address. So now I'm going to you know, and you opted into my newsletter, so now I send you newsletters about all this cool AI stuff we're doing. And, oh wow, now you don't even have to use HubSpot. Now Omniki's integrated a content marketing platform or a marketing platform, marketing automation platform into the stud these ads. Oh wow, that just added a whole bunch more value. Maybe I'll just dump this $5,000 a month HubSpot account that I've got and use the Omniki one, because I'm already using Omniki to build my ads in AI. And oh, now they've incorporated this AI. It's a lot easier for companies like yours, matt, to integrate something like an AI into what you're doing than it is for a HubSpot, because HubSpot software its code base is probably older. I mean, it's been around for what 20 years now at this point, maybe longer. You know, for them to incorporate something like this takes a lot of engineering time. You have to take people off other projects, put them on this thing. These guys can build whatever they want right now. That's the benefit.

Speaker 4: 41:07

Yeah, it's wild. I remember one of the earlier releases of Dolly. We built it into our product over a weekend, like Friday it came out. It was amazing. We built it into our product and it was a lot. People were able to test it on Monday. The benefits of how agile startups can be is it's pretty crazy in the early days, you know, and then it gets harder and harder, I'm sure, as you move on to the later stages of growth.

Speaker 2: 41:29

The more you grow, the more HR directors you got, the more compliance people you have to. You have to start hiring compliance people. Legal gets in the way of everything. Oh man, it becomes a pain in the butt and you're going to need a lot of support people. That's the problem, right. Like with a startup, you have to hire people that aren't necessarily making you any money. They're just a straight up expense and you know they're in there drinking your coffee in your offices in San Francisco and they're eating your snacks that you provide them because you got to Well in San Francisco.

Speaker 3: 41:57

They've got like these high end buffets that they have to get to have lunch at. Oh, they got all kinds of stuff in these guys. These guys got to compete with Google and Facebook and all these other guys from employees and all that other, oh you're taking naps at two o'clock.

Speaker 2: 42:09

Yeah, why not? Yeah, why not? Yeah, they're paying me, you know, 350 grand a year. I'll take a nap.

Speaker 3: 42:14

And you get the guys that are in the startup and they're like burning both ends of the candle and they're like no yeah, I'm going to do that.

Speaker 2: 42:20

Oh, it's tough man, it's real tough it's going to be. But here's the thing Just as somebody who's done this before and worked with some people who were just absolute killers my co-founders, you know, if you, you just got to keep going at it and you're already past the hardest part, you've already got a product, you've got customers, the site's up, I mean you got a nice looking brand. I mean it's, you've done the hard part. You've got you raised a great.

Speaker 3: 42:44

I mean I'm not going to say the details but he raised around. Yeah, he's kind of like already in the FU money. I mean move the Pittsburgh just for a hell of it. Oh no boy Pittsburgh.

Speaker 2: 42:52

There are some good things about Pittsburgh, but their football team and their fans. I don't want to lose any Pittsburgh listeners right now? I didn't know we had it. Yeah, maybe not. What? Yeah, what do?

Speaker 4: 43:03

you do, like you said, with the co-founders, though like so the CEO. After getting to work around a lot of the startup community, they're the most driven, ambitious people you've ever worked around, even at large companies. Like you see that the CEO or CEO founder, he's the most driven person. Excellent leader works. You have to get so uncomfortable Just like we said in the early days of sales of being told no and getting knocked down to have those a couple of good days. It's just, it's remarkable you get really. You have to be so tenacious. It's such a crazy grind of work where, like, good things happen and a bunch of bad things happen. Then all of a sudden you take a step up and then you're like, oh, regroup, regroup, what's the next gift?

Speaker 2: 43:49

Yeah Well, Kyle's never going to leave the job he's currently at because they treat him well and he was like the 40th employee or something, and now they're worth billions and billions of billions of dollars.

Speaker 3: 43:59

Yeah, they allow me to do my thing, but what I was going to say is like what he was talking about. Like you got to, you get to, you talk to so many people that you're just like that person's stupid. They told me no, that person's. You got to have that mentality that the other person's stupid.

Speaker 2: 44:14

Yeah, they're just uneducated.

Speaker 3: 44:16

We've thought this through. We believe in this product. We're going to dominate the world with this product and every time they tell you no, you were like, well, this person's stupid, this person's stupid. And eventually you get to like 500 people being stupid and you start thinking perhaps I'm stupid. But then you got to go back, you got to keep the faith. You got to keep going and going and going. Eventually you land a, you land Zilla or whoever, and then you look at everybody and no, motherfuckers, you were stupid. I told you that all five, all five thousand of you.

Speaker 2: 44:47

You're dumb. There's a lot of investors in town. We would like to. They probably realized that they had made a mistake at one point and hopefully, matt, you have that same problem at some point where you're. You know you want to tell them, guess what you did.

Speaker 3: 45:00

You have to up, but call from your Ferrari yacht or your Lamborghini yacht or whatever.

Speaker 2: 45:04

Yeah, that's right. Hey Bob investor, you remember when I called you a while ago? Listen to this. Crank the engine and just off you go. That's not.

Speaker 3: 45:12

AI motherfucker.

Speaker 2: 45:13

Yeah, it's noon and I'm deep sea fishing in my yacht.

Speaker 4: 45:17

Yeah, you look at it kind of like sports. You know it's like the underdogs always fund a route for it. It's a, it's a, it's a hard. It's a fun thing to be part of. And then some at some point you hope to be on the other end of like the Golden State thing where you used to root for Golden State and then now they're on. You know you can still root for them, but now they were so good for so many years, it's kind of like we're tired. I want someone else to be good at basketball.

Speaker 2: 45:36

Yes, I had that same problem with the blue Jays when I was a kid. They weren't good for. They were kind of on the. They were always just outside of the playoffs, so they'd lose in the first round or something. Then they won those back to back.

Speaker 3: 45:46

Well, serious, but they're a leaf.

Speaker 2: 45:47

With Joe Carter. They were super elite, dude, yeah. And then I was just like, ah, they won, I don't, I don't care about them anymore, this, this has nothing to do with podcast, but it's a funny story.

Speaker 3: 45:55

So after playing together on the blue Jays, ricky Henderson got traded to the Mets for a little bit. John Olerud was playing first base Amazing first baseman, yes. And Ricky Henderson came up to him and said hey man, you wear a helmet on your head in defense he was. I played with a guy in Toronto that did the same exact thing and Olerud was an all-star and led the league of batting one year and looked at you and goes yeah, no, ricky, that was me. We won a world series together. Oh, that's what you need, you need you need to mind you need to mind say, like Ricky Henderson, that's how you become successful.

Speaker 2: 46:25

Right, that is man Tune it all out, man Tune everything else out. Well, matt, this is awesome. Man, tell people how to and I know I said it earlier in the podcast here but tell people how they can find you and just quickly a little, maybe a little pitch on on why they should work with you.

Speaker 4: 46:41

Yeah, so you can find us at wwwomnekycom, you can find me at Matt at Omnikeycom, or I'm on LinkedIn is Matt Matt Swally. And why you need to come to Omnikey is simplify that advertising challenge you have for content, have it backed by data and start being able to test a whole bunch of new things with you know less people.

Speaker 3: 47:05

I love it, Matt Efficiency and focus. It just seems like it makes too much sense. It does make too much sense. It's like exactly what you want. You don't want to overspend in advertising. You want to get the money. You want to get the message to the people who are going to spend the most money.

Speaker 2: 47:18

That's right. That's right. Well, matt man, I really appreciate you coming on here, you know. I just want to let people know. If you're thinking about doing a startup, check Matt out. Matt's rocking it out right now. They raised a big round. They're they're. They're killing it right now. They've got a product. It's just take. You got to take the first step, matt. That's what you got to do. You got to one foot forward, like if you're going to climb a mountain. You got to take the first step and you guys are probably halfway up that mountain now.

Speaker 4: 47:41

That's right. I taking that risk out of a large company to a startup was the best decision I ever made. And then you know, I wish I probably would have done a little bit sooner.

Speaker 2: 47:50

Matt. I appreciate it. Man, Thanks for being on the show. Sir, thank you so much. Have a great day. Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests. Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.