UpYourStack with Laxis

[00:00:00] Welcome to UpYourStack Podcast. I'm Noah Berk, host of the show. I'm also the Co-CEO of Aptitude 8, an elite HubSpot Solutions Partner. Every week we feature some of our favorite developers who've _either_ built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

[00:00:16] And today I have a fantastic guest, Eric, who's with Laxis joining us today to talk about his products. And what he's built in the ecosystem and hint has a lot to do with AI, but we'll get to that in a second. 

[00:00:29] Eric, welcome to the show.

[00:00:31] Sure, thanks for having me, Noah.

[00:00:33] Awesome. And Eric, where I'd like to begin is I know before you were mentioning to me, you had a couple of different products. That's part of the solution that you're building. Can I tell me, how did this all come about in the first place? Why create Laxis and then what are you really solving for these days?

[00:00:46] For sure, that's a great question. So before I was an entrepreneur building Laxis, I was a venture investor. I was most investing in AI software companies in Silicone Valley. At that time, many people feel like a venture investor, you're on [00:01:00] the buy side, right? But my personal experience is, I'm on the sell side.

[00:01:04] I need to do a lot of research about companies, startups, founders, before I decide to reach out to them. And when I reach out to them, having a conversation, I need to take note. And after the meeting, I need to write an investment memos, due diligence report, updating our internal CRM systems. So remember that was back in 2020. So at that time, there's no real AI automation to help me automate the process from research, writing notes, updating our internal CRM systems. So I wanted to build something to solve this problem. And I know, if I build something for investors, it's a too small segment. I won't be successful. I won't be building a big company, right? But I realize it's not just a challenge for investors. It's a challenge for everybody. Dealing with the customers, sales, BDs, consultants, right? We all have the same challenge. Then I believe I can build a large company around this, solving this problem.

[00:01:59] So that's the [00:02:00] initial idea when I started Laxis. Laxis

[00:02:02] I think that's pretty fantastic. I mean, it's a common theme for a lot of the individuals I speak to on this podcast is you're solving it for yourself. So one of the things you mentioned earlier is like, hey, listen, you didn't just want to solve it for the venture community. You want to solve it for a bigger community.

[00:02:16] So who are you targeting? Like, who's, who's now using this product? And I guess who's your ideal customer.

[00:02:23] So when we first started our first product was AI Meeting Assistant. during that time, COVID happened, so we had customers from everywhere. Like, anyone working remotely can use Laxis. Nowadays, we have actually narrowed down in multiple revenue teams. So majority of our customers are sales, BDs, consultants, who are using Laxis to generating lead from their customers, taking note with their conversation with their customers, updating their CRM and follow up.

[00:02:50] So I would say, initially, when we first launched due to COVID, we are kind of broad. Today, we are more and more focusing on the revenue team side.

[00:02:58] Interesting. And, [00:03:00] and what has been the experience of revenue teams? So like before they're using Laxis and then after using Laxis, like what's the impact on the organization or their own efforts?

[00:03:09] For sure, for sure. I think there are two perspectives. So Laxis now has evolved into like a platform or people call it a copilot. We have multiple features, right? So there are two major perspectives. The first perspective is on the AI meeting note taking and CRM update. For example, using Laxis AI Meeting Assistant, we can take meeting notes, generating meeting summary, personalized report. A lot of customers like to define their own report, And updating CRM, nobody wants to update CRM. So we can generate notes, activity, contacts, automatically after each call. So on average, based on our customers feedback, AI Meeting Assistant can save them at least 5 hours per week, And on another product, our new product we launched this year, AI We automatically reach out to your potential customers through AI email, phone calls, right?

[00:03:58] And we can generate more [00:04:00] lead for our customers, for the revenue leaders, with much lower cost. So I would say that's the impact we are bringing to the revenue team.

[00:04:08] Interesting. Okay. And, are we seeing like an uplift in revenue generated? Like are you seeing like 10-percent, 20-percent, 30-percent? Or is it just vary from company to company?

[00:04:17] So I would say vary from company to company, we are seeing more success from like, slightly larger companies. The reason is usually when people already have a playbook or they have already found a product market fit, they just need to scale. Using Laxis is the best. We do have some customers, especially in our early days, there are some smaller company founders with one person to five person to ten person. So they are still trying to find a product market fit. They don't have a marketer to help them write the right message, right? In that case, even an AI can be a little bit struggling, because we can't help you scale, right? Scale helps you reduce tedious work, but sometimes, we still need to find the product market fit, [00:05:00] find the right messaging, the right target, your ICP, in the first place.

[00:05:04] You have like a product market fit and you kind of have maybe that marketing team to help you think through messaging, this is a great fit. Cause then it's a force multiplier for your sales team without them having to think through that messaging. And so it sounds like we're saving a lot of time.

[00:05:17] People who are leveraging this just administrative time within the CRM, no taking everything. Now I have to say, I still take notes on all my calls. Even though I use AI on top of it to be able to take notes. I've learned I retain information better as I type it out. How do you help reps with the retaining of that information?

[00:05:35] You mean retaining information from the notes right?

[00:05:38] Yeah.

[00:05:39] So there are two places. First, all the conversation and meeting summaries automatically saved into Nexus Cloud. That's the first place. Second, the notes, and email activity. So if you're using our AI SDR, we also have this email, phone call. All the conversations are updated into your CRM under contact as an activity. So everything is [00:06:00] saved into your CRM as well.

[00:06:02] That's awesome. So there's obviously a lot of software out there now who does what's called voice recording, AI transcription, like the whole works. How do you really differentiate yourself in this competitive marketplace?

[00:06:15] For sure. There's like you said, there's AI notetaker, right? But we are more than just AI notetaker. So we consider ourselves as AI copilot, from lead generation, getting you more meetings, to help you take notes during meetings, and help you update your CRM and follow up.

[00:06:30] So I would say we are kind of like a one stop shop or end to end solution. Or like an AI copilot. I think that's a more accurate word.

[00:06:39] Yeah. Interesting. So more of a copilot. And how are you saying ahead of the competitors? Like if someone's going to evaluate you versus one of the competitors, why would they pick your solution over one of the competitor solutions?

[00:06:51] For sure. We are seeing two groups of customers. Some customers come to us, say they are mostly focused on AI meeting assistants and taking [00:07:00] notes, right? Those customers usually have a budget because a larger enterprise probably will go for Golong right? Which is more expensive. more, kind of like, more comprehensive.

[00:07:11] But for many SMBs, they don't need that many comprehensive or like more advanced analytics. So Laxis can already save them time by taking notes, updating CRM. So they are happy with a simpler solution. That's one group of customers. The second group of customers, they need more lead, more revenue...

[00:07:29] but they have constraints on the SDR team. They want like a more affordable, more scalable solution. They also come to Laxis. And certainly the alternative is like a tool like Outreach, right? And Apollo, which there's many like tools, but they don't have people in play to operate those tools.

[00:07:47] So Laxis provides them like full automation to just set up once and generating the lead for them. 

[00:07:53] Sounds pretty amazing, Eric, if this just sets up once and starts generating leads for you. It almost seems like a no brainer. [00:08:00] So I guess this brings me into my next question. I understand you guys have integrated with HubSpot. What does this exactly do within the HubSpot platform itself and how does it work?

[00:08:10] For sure. The first place we integrate HubSpot is after you have every meeting, right? Laxis automatically summarize the meeting and you can also create your own template, your own report. Laxis will send this report to your CRM system under each contact. For example, you had a meeting with Customer A. after the call, Customer A will have a new activity including the summary, action items, and under that contact as an activity.

[00:08:38] Also, during the lead generation phase, if you outreach to a potential customer through an email, the email content and the customer reply will also be automatically updated into a CRM under that contact. I would say all the conversations with your customer, either potential customer or existing customer, email, and also the call conversations, right, the script, the [00:09:00] summary, will all be uploaded into your CRM, so you have a full record of your conversation interaction with the customer.

[00:09:06] So, and how long does it take to get this set up?

[00:09:09] we build our system as simple as possible. For AI Meeting System, all you need to do is connect your calendar and your CRM system. That's all you need to have. For our AI SDR lead generation, all you need to provide Laxis is you need to set up once, probably in 10 minutes, to provide the company information, product information, who you are targeting, and also your inbox to receive the positive response.

[00:09:32] I would say setting up everything shouldn't take like more than 20 minutes.

[00:09:36] I mean, that's pretty fantastic, especially if they're going to be able to generate that amount of time savings of being able to leverage such a tool. And then in, in terms of like HubSpot, like, what do you see as their growth and how are you going to compliment that over the years? Cause HubSpot obviously is invested a lot in AI as well. 

[00:09:53] I would say CRM systems like HubSpot is a foundation for any revenue team, right? It's a central place for their knowledge, their [00:10:00] customer data. And we are building on top of it. Certainly HubSpot, Salesforce, and other CRM systems are trying to grow above, evolving into more features, right?

[00:10:09] So I don't think we are competing with HubSpot any time soon. But given what we are building and what they are building, I see more collaboration rather than competing, at least for the next year or two.

[00:10:20] Interesting. Okay. And let's talk a little bit about obviously AI in 2020. It was before the days of ChatGPT coming there. So, you know, perhaps we'll say you were pretty early in the AI space. Obviously, people have been working on for quite some time. What's the future of AI? I mean, obviously, in your own personal experience, building out products that really are foundational, leveraging AI to be able to do what it does. Like, what do you see as the future of AI in general when it comes to sales and marketing activities, and then B) where's your product headed?

[00:10:52] I mean, AI has been popular for the past two to three years, right? And people had a very high expectation for AI. They feel, [00:11:00] some people even feel AI is a magic wand, since they can just use and get what they want. But I would say the hype of AI, I'm not saying it's coming to an end, but people are having a more realistic expectation of AI.

[00:11:12] So finding the right use case, really 10x or even 20x people's productivity is what people will be focusing on in the next, in 2025, I think, because previously people may feel this is something popular, they want to try it. Now people want to see the ROI.

[00:11:29] it's no longer a popular thing.

[00:11:31] They want to see the real return on their investment. I would say that's a major focus for all the AI startups. Just making sure you can bring 10x's or times efficiency and the return to your customer's investment.

[00:11:43] And I think that's a really big thing. And also, I mean, I think it's becoming pretty commonplace that AI is baked into all software. If you're a software company now and you don't have AI somehow baked into it, it'd be like being a, I think I may have said it on this podcast before, it'd be like having a, a word processor like Microsoft Word [00:12:00] or Google Docs and not having spell check. You're not a word processor at that point. If you don't have a spell check, you're not a software company, if you don't have AI baked into what you're doing to improve productivity. Do you kind of see it the same way? Or do you see AI as becoming more standalone?

[00:12:16] I would say when I was a venture investor, AI company is a typical AI company. I won't say typical, I take it back. So at that time, AI companies, they need to train their model, right? They need to raise a lot of funding, clean their data, train their model, hire data engineers. So AI was an entry barrier at that time.

[00:12:35] Nowadays, AI is no longer an entry barrier. Like you said, every software company can build an AI feature. But still, people need to look back to see, is this AI feature really going to help our customer, or is it just a fancy thing to put in your company's website? I do think AI can be plugged into many places, but we also see some surveys, some people saying that they are actually spending more time or they don't see much value from [00:13:00] AI.

[00:13:00] So I would just say, for other startup founders, and I always think about this myself, is this AI feature really going to help our customers, or is it just a fancy thing that I will put put there

[00:13:11] It's simply just window dressing. Or is it actually providing value in the end? 

[00:13:15] So, going from, Eric, from a Investor to a Founder and starting a company, what would you say are kind of the biggest eyeopening experiences that you thought one way, but you learned another way?

[00:13:28] Cause I think now you probably have a lot more empathy for other Founders and perhaps as an Investor.

[00:13:35] I would say before I was a Founder, before I was an Investor, I spent the majority of my career, more than 8 years as an engineer. So deep down in my heart, I'm still a builder, an engineer. One thing I learned during this startup journey is I should start small, I should start early with sales, channels, marketing, rather than building a product.

[00:13:55] That is one mistake I've made. So as we spend early days, [00:14:00] we spend a lot of time refining our product without thinking about channels, go-to-market. And I think that's one thing I made a mistake as a first time Founder. As we see, especially I was investing in A round to C round, usually the company has already figured out that go-to-market strategy, have already found out that perfect market fit.

[00:14:17] when I became a Founder, I kind of have to deal from the very beginning, right, from the very first, from the very zero to one. So when I'm making investment, I usually already see a company as, is being one to a hundred. So when I deal with 1 to 0, I focus too much on building a product rather than go-to-market, sales, marketing.

[00:14:36] Yeah, if I do it, I do it again, I probably will balance a little bit between building a product and go-to-market.

[00:14:42] Well, it's interesting you mention that and perhaps you're aware of kind of the HubSpot story. For the first, I don't know, several years of HubSpot's existence. They were a blog. They didn't have a product. They weren't selling anything. They were a blog and I remember it back in the day cause I used to be in internet marketing sales years and years ago I don't want to date myself too much, [00:15:00] but call it almost 15 years ago. And I remember reading a blog and be like, "This is fantastic information. No one knows about SEO or pay per click or all this stuff. And HubSpot is just freely publishing all this information. Is really fascinating because that's how they started figuring out their market, what they want to build, what they are going to build.

[00:15:16] So, Eric, I think that's really enlightening for individuals going from zero to one is incredibly hard. Like incredibly hard if you're a product company. As they say in professional services "It's easy to get started, harder to scale" versus products, "harder to get started, easier to scale." So it's like, you know, both ways. 

[00:15:35] Yeah, it's a trade off.

[00:15:35] It's a, It's a trade off. And I think a lot of people also forget in the professional services world, your largest companies in the world, the Deloitte's, the Accenture's, they're all professional service organizations. Like there, they're still great business models in the end, but I think you really kind of nailed it.

[00:15:48] And perhaps your product can help. I'm sure you use your product in the beginning as they say, eat your own dog food, I guess, to help you identify that go-to-market. So, essentially. Your advice for other entrepreneurs who are maybe starting a [00:16:00] company is that zero to one. What is your GTM? Focus on your marketing, focus on your sales, perhaps focus on a niche that you can dominate before expanding outwards, which I think is great advice.

[00:16:11] Anything else you have that you'd like to kind of part ways is either words of wisdom or advice for other entrepreneurs or people building on HubSpot or interested in the HubSpot ecosystem?

[00:16:20] Really think about your competitive advantage. So how you are going to build something that is unique, creating value to a customer and you can defense from other competitors?

[00:16:30] I think that's great advice. There is so much. Have you ever seen that Martech Landscape document out there? I encourage you to Google it and you can see the tens of thousands of technologies. Go back 15, 20 years and look at one of those maps and you can easily recognize every logo. Now? They look like pixels not actual logos.

[00:16:48] So Eric, you know, first of all, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It was really great to have the opportunity to talk with you here. Eric, if people are interested in learning more about you or more about Laxis, how do they go about finding [00:17:00] information?

[00:17:00] they can go to our website to check our product, Laxis.com. They can also email me at eric@laxis.com as well. So, yeah, feel free to reach out to me.

[00:17:11] Awesome. Awesome. Eric. Again, thank you for joining us. And then listeners. Thank you for joining us and listening to today's podcast. That wraps it up. Again UpYourStack is a weekly podcast featuring developers who have either built their apps on HubSpot or integrate with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

[00:17:27] And again if you have interest in learning how to get more out of your HubSpot tech stack, or maybe you're looking to implement HubSpot. Feel free to reach out to Aptitude 8, which is a proud sponsor of UpYourStack. They'd be a bit happy to help you. Of course, you can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn here as well.

[00:17:41] Again, thanks for joining and that's a wrap. Thanks.

[00:17:45] Thank you.