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Nick: You're like, look, I used it. Here are the limitations in the current architecture. It doesn't scale in the way that it's built, but, but we could, right? And I've got four different clients who ran four totally different campaigns and four totally different industries. It's about getting four that look completely different and solving four completely different problems that all feel like personalization ought to have an impact.
Connor: Hello and welcome to the Go To Market with AI, a podcast for sales, marketing, and customer success leaders using AI to scale their growth operations. I'm your host, Connor Jeffers, and in today's episode, we are talking to Nick Zeckets, founder and CEO of Air Traffic Control, an AI platform that helps you use your existing content inside of your marketing automation platform, instead of creating new assets to hyper target your audience.
We talk about Nick's journey to being an AI founder. How he finds the signal through the noise and how GTM leaders can do the same, how he's seeing his customers leverage Air Traffic Control and other AI tools in their go to market motion, and how ATC itself and Nick's team use AI tools to superpower their GTM motion.
Let's get started.
Nick, hello and welcome to the show.
Nick: Well, I'm, I'm pleased to be here, man. Thank you very much for having me.
Connor: I am so excited to learn all of the things about Air Traffic Control, but I think, or I like to start with people and think people's past informs their future. And I think for founders, that's like, especially true, and so let's maybe start with how did you find yourself building and running an AI startup, especially now.
And then we'll kind of get into what Air Traffic Control is and why it's awesome. And maybe some of what you guys are doing also, but how on earth did you find yourself here?
Nick: Yeah, I appreciate the question. It's circuitous eh. I'm, I'm like, I'm old. I've been running it, you know, revenue.
Connor: You don't look old. I talked to some old guys. You don't seem like an old guy.
Nick: Dude, I get this, I get this like reasonably often. I sleep in Tupperware. But I am, I'm having a birthday on, in two days from now and I will officially being in my mid forties.
Connor: Oh, so I'm catching you like, like mid, mid existential midlife crisis, like might have a Ferrari this weekend. Like that's
Nick: where you're at.
Nick: Looking at, looking at car ads that I can't afford and thinking about all the terrible things and decisions that I want to make you know, before I'm unable to physically make them anymore. I, no man, I, you know it's, it's funny so,
I started out my career as a sales guy, inside sales, hammering phones and then managed to get to carry a bag on behalf of some really interesting places.
And then carrying a bag ended up being really cool and gave me an opportunity to start to really find more energy for the marketing and product side of what was happening, right? You know, there's salespeople who will sit there and kind of like, bitch that my product sucks and that's why we're not able to sell, and I always kind of found that the frontline information was actually some of the most useful stuff in order to kind of solve those marketing and product problems. Started a first startup 2011, it was a MarTech for higher ed called Quadrangle. We got acquired in 2018, but the seed.
Connor: You, I did, I did higher ed, ed tech stuff for a while as well. What were you doing?
Nick: So,
Connor: Yeah. I mean, that's how I feel. I would never do it again.
Nick: Sorry higher ed folks who may be listening in. I love you. You're all passionate and wonderful, phenomenal, fun, enjoyable people. You guys take 3 years to buy anything.
Connor: Worst, worst deal cycles of all time.
Nick: Is there an RFP for anything over $12? Like guys, I'm going to need, I need an army of humans to manage this. I've lost money the minute I try to sell something here. No, you know, it was interesting. We, we were selling it to like the alumni and fundraising side of the house, and there was some entrenched vendors. But the deal with Quadrangle was,
you know, recognizing that these were effectively marketing, big marketing operations that had no people and have really limited functionality in their tools. Like Salesforce just kind of started talking to higher ed and it was way too complex for most of the teams in higher ed to do much. HubSpot hadn't talked to anybody yet, right?
This is, you know, again, too early for any of those guys to have started talking to them. And so we built a marketing automation platform, which meant, you know, we were in feature parody hell for the entire seven years that we ran that business. But our theory was that personalization.
Connor: Like selling
into the, like the annual gifting group?
Nick: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So you'd go into.
Connor: I raised, I raised a lot of dollars my first, my first, I don't know. Not my first sales job because I was selling stuff at a young age, but in college, I like did the annual gifting thing and, and called, called a lot of people, raised a lot of money for, you know, building some sports center or something, who knows. But I did a lot of that.
And so I, I was very curious and you were like, oh, yeah, we did this software for that and then I sold them. Did you know Top Hat does that name mean anything to you?
Nick: Sure did.
Connor: So I, I was at Top Hat from like, I don't know, 15 employees to like 200 or something and an SDR, was an AE, ren marketing ops, did a bunch of stuff. But,
like built and did a whole GTM org around selling entire ed at a high velocity and it was terrible. And I don't recommend anyone do it.
Nick: It's it, you know, the thing that I always found remarkable is I mean, look, you can't be in that space without deeply believing in what it is that you're working on. And, and in that way, it was an industry full of largely really passionate people who, who deeply cared about the mission. It just the number of barriers and guardrails and rules and regulations around how those organizations were allowed
to work, right? It's not that the person buying what we had wanted to do an RFP. They had no choice, right? It didn't, it didn't matter. And, um.
Connor: And then when they're like, "Oh yeah, we want this. We're really excited about it. We've added it to the budget three years from now. And at that point in time, we're totally going to buy it from you and pay for it. “And you're like, "What? Like, I need I need deals now! " They're like, "You have one! We were buying."; It's great.
Nick: I just spent $15,000 on this pursuit. This doesn't work for me,
Connor: Exactly. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm getting, I'm getting us derailed. I want to talk about so many other things, but inadvertently found yourself building a marketing automation product in one of the hardest industries to build and sell stuff in and then exited that business.
Nick: Yeah, we ended up getting bought for a Big Mac and a high five and and then I took a little corporate therapy time on somebody else's payroll. But coming out of that, we had done this cool thing there around content and appeal personalization, right? So, like, a school would have all these departments and all this content all over campus and super distributed
nobody knew anything about any of it. We figured out how to, like, centralize it all and then create recommendations for people, right? And so we would make it really much, much easier for an alumni association actually look like they cared about the humans that they were writing to and had capacity. And what we realized when we got out of that, we said, "Well, geez, you know what?
That that engine was actually pretty cool."; Right? Our mistake was building 1000 features on top of it and trying to do anything in higher ed is we just jokingly and lovingly went down painful memory lane. So, so we, we got to the other side and we just kind of toyed with it. We, we left it alone for a little while.
And then started to explore what the API's at, like a MailChimp or a HubSpot or a Marketo, like what do they let you do? And we kind of looked at each other after exploring for, you know, a few weeks and we said, "Oh my God, we could actually do this through other stuff that's already in people's hands.";
That would be so much cooler and the problem is so pervasive across B2B loads of content, big distro problem. Like this is, it makes a lot of sense. So we, so really, you know, kind of, as I think a lot of second time founders will find themselves having significantly more success than in their first run at the game.
The first run taught me a ton and I got to learn something that informed deeply, I think a way better business that's way more interesting and fun to run. So anyway, that's, that's how we
got our start.
Connor: I don't, I don't do a ton of investing. But I'll say that like the things that for me, if I was doing a lot of investing. The things that would check off all boxes for me is like any founder with a sales background is instantly like, cool like, you've been on the front lines. You actually know how to do this.
Like, when you build a feature, you're like, "Yeah, but, but are they going to like care?"; And you're like, "Users are going to love it."; And you're like, "Yeah, maybe, but, but like, can I demo it?"; And they'll be like, "Whoa and if not, why are we building it So that checks off some boxes for me. I think that being the end user and sort of seeing that problem before is also super, super valuable and you sort of understand that piece of it and you maybe built a little bit of it before.
And so where, where did, where did Air Traffic Control maybe start and, and, and sort of where was the product and then tell, tell me about what is it now?
Nick: Yeah, actually, I again painful lessons learned. This time around, you know, look like no one, no truly passionate founder is ever happy with where their products at. It's always, "Shit man there's like three more features. I swear to God, that's a total unlock."; And it's always feeling like that. But early, early, early on, we were so far away from something that someone could walk into and use on their own, but the actual algorithm, the recommendation engine, we actually had that working pretty early. Not in a way that would work at massive scale and over and over again. We could ingest a whole bunch of engagement data from a customer's major marketing automation platform.
We could create an interest graph for the people that we were able to ingest all that data from. So, you open up an email about giraffes and we're like, yo, giraffes are maybe interesting. Then there's a link in there about a hippopotamus and you click the hippopotamus link and we're like, oh, giraffes and hippopotamuses
and in fact, more hippos than giraffes, because that link click is way more interesting than an open. So like on and on and on, and we started to really kind of clean it up and figure it out. And once we knew that the API's were there for us to get that data, and once we knew that we could make those recommendations, at least by pushing some buttons in the back end and get all the customer content and like, create these connections.
We, we actually went out and sold like services deals, right? And they were super tight. We said, look, we want you to do a personalization centric campaign. If that's not something that you want to do, then we're not for you, right? We're not a catch all agency. What we are is just we're a tech enabled, very specific kind of packaged service.
And here's the crux of it, we want to try to really take advantage of the content that you've produced and try to deploy it against a particular problem in your funnel. Early stage, mid-funnel, late funnel, you tell us. But that takes that stuff and starts to do something about it and we'd wrap our arms around it.
What was so awesome is we were building the front end of the product in response to our own experience, trying to get it to work and solve these business problems for customers. Which was the sickest aspect of building this business and I'll never do it any other way ever again. And I wouldn't back anybody to your point about investing.
I wouldn't back anybody who didn't. If you haven't wrapped your arms around the customer's problem and been like, swimming in their tears, you should definitely get out of the kitchen because you don't deserve to be there and you're missing out on all the good shit, right? Which is.
Connor: Something that like, I don't know. I, I, I talked to lots of I talked to lots of founders. I, I read a lot of Reddit and, and acts of people trying to do stuff and everyone's like, how do I find this problem? And like, how do I, and I'm just like, I don't think like the product market fit and the problem to solve, problem should just be, you should be so intimately familiar with exactly what it is
and I think not dissimilar from what you're describing. Like, everything and that will change, I think we have more mature products, but everything that we build on the Hapily side is just us being like, no, no, no, we've we've been the end user. We know the problem. We know exactly how this should work and that is what we are going to build.
And I think to your point, the speed with which you build things of value is just so much faster when you are, not only are you that end user, but you actually understand how somebody using that solution would want it to work.
Nick: Dude, a hundred percent you build for yourself first is really the best place you can come from. It's like, this solves a problem that I am deeply aware of and I don't think I'm the only person who had it. And sure, I mean, you're going to have a few phone calls and be like, alright before I spend 4 months on an
MBP
Connor: Yeah, maybe I am the only guy who wants to do this, like validate that
for
Nick: For
I wonder, does this work for you too? And you're like, "Yeah, dude, that sucks."; And you're like, oh, well, that's 2, right? And then you get to like, 10 out of 12 phone calls all kind of go the same way. And you go, well, alright well, I'll build it for myself. And then let's see if we can use it with some people and wrap ourselves around it.
Which not for nothing is a pretty good way to avoid, you know, needing to raise money early, early on, which is just a brutal time to try to get money. It's like, "I got an idea, do you got $500K to like, see whether or not I'm bat shit crazy?"; And then, you know, you, you kind of get to a place where you're informed.
You're like, look, I used it. Here are the limitations in the current architecture. It doesn't scale in the way that it's built, but, but we could, right? And I've got four different clients who ran four totally different campaigns and four totally different industries. So I'm actually not looking to build an, a classic kind of like, hey, we're the agency for, I don't know construction companies, right?
I'm actually trying to be a little bit inefficient in my go to market motion cause this isn't about getting 50 of these services clients. It's about getting four that look completely different and solving four completely different problems that all feel like personalization ought to have an impact.
And oh my God, it worked, right? We had to make some changes here, learn some stuff here, other impacts here, but like, I've got a pretty solid idea. And then let's try to sell more of it, build, iterate, sell, build, iterate and then finally in November of last year, so this is now being recorded at the end of February 2024.
So November 2023, we finally had an interface where a customer could like, walk into the product, use it. We had 15 sales calls, closed 6 of them in a couple of weeks and we're like, oh that's like.
Connor: That's interesting.
Nick: And felt really.
Connor: Help me understand, so if I, I'm, I come into the product. I'm a HubSpot user. What, what do I, what do I do? And then what are you doing on my behalf? And then how does that actually like manifest into, into some sort of value for me?
Nick: Yeah, man, just. It's, we've tried to make it as elegant as possible. So you come in you connect your HubSpot account. We have HubSpot in part out right now. Marketo is next on the list, but super focused on the HubSpot ecosystem. You just hit connect. There's no like setup. There's, there's not like an integration process.
You don't need to talk to anybody in order to get it set up. It's dead simple. It takes about 90 seconds. At that point, what happens is we go and get, basically everything that lives inside your HubSpot instance, but what we're really focused on is, alright here's this record that comes over and it's Connor.
All right. I got this record, show me every email open, every click, every site visit. Are there notes following sales calls? Give me everything. And what we do is we use all that to build an interest graph. And for anybody who's been to some degree engaged with you, your customers, certainly people who are mid-funnel and down, people who have been like long time newsletter subscribers, we end up picking up, you know, 50 to 150 insights
per person. So we build this really interesting interest graph. There's a secondary piece of the proposition where for people that you maybe don't know very well, maybe they're totally disengaged or they're brand new prospects. We do have a LinkedIn data enrichment package that's inside the product. So these are people I don't know much about, go get their full profile in their last 90 days of post behavior and then, right.
So you can kind of go from cold to hot.
pretty
Connor: Dude, I don't think that's like a sub bullet that that's a, that is very cool.
Nick: Yeah, look, I mean, it's, it's you just got 5,000 SDRs kind right? Like, that's, that's the rip and and that's not my line so I'll give credence to our advisor Mike Weir, who just recently is the CRO over at G2 and the dude, like, is so good at packaging up what it is that we do and saying it to other people, so thank God he's around. So thank you, Mike. But, but that data
all ends up coming back and creating this really interesting interest graph and then we automatically suck in all the customer's content. So blogs, case studies, podcasts, webinars, white papers, whatever they have, right? We go grab it all, the system reads it. So I don't care what you want to use as like a tag taxonomy which is so limiting.
We're using machine learning in order to drive all the subject matter. And we go, well, I, I saw what Connor was engaged with. I know what we've got and that he hasn't seen. And so we connect the dots, and then we make recommendations three of every type of content that you have for every single person that you have in your system, and we stick it back into HubSpot.
We automatically create new properties. And we populate them every night for every person. So you get a headline, a link and an image property for each of those recommended items. So for us, we have blog posts, we have podcasts here too at ATC, and we actually also have a syndicated feed. So we have a syndicated news service that comes into the backend.
So there's ATC blog headline one, ATC blog image one, ATC blog link one. So when I go and I write like an email template or a landing page or a chat bot response. The same way that you're used to using like, you know, hey, first name. There's now alright we've got this really cool stuff, I was thinking a little bit about where you are in the business right now,
I thought this might be useful to you: blog headline one, blog link one, blog image one, maybe a podcast, maybe a webinar, maybe a case study depending upon kind like who you're talking to and when. But that template could go out to 10,000 people and you could end up sending 10,000 completely different emails.
You could have a, an ABM style landing page that's actually unique to the individual who's going there every day, right? So it's like, there's a bunch of really interesting use cases and our customers keep sharing them with us. And what's really cool is, you know, we got a pressure test, you know, God, it was like November-ish, right
when we went out and somebody said, "Can I actually create a list of everybody for whom a piece of content has been recommended?"; I was like, "So you got to say more, what would you do "Well, I want to take the audience and I want to boost the content on LinkedIn."; We're like, "Oh, right.";
Connor: That's so cool! Oh yeah.
Nick: Perfect!
And then, so we put a little button on every content item in your entire, you know, repo that lets you export the content audience in a LinkedIn CSV format. And our customers have been uploading those CSVs, promoting content, and their CPCs are 90 percent lower, literally 90. They're getting clicks for $0.50 on LinkedIn, which is freaking unheard of
so. And over and over again and across industries and content types, it's just, it keeps working. So that's a lot of where we're at right now is our customers really showing us the use cases. And us thinking a lot about, all right, how do we make it easier and easier and easier for more and more people to take advantage of those use cases and deploy more of them more
often
Connor: Are you guys sending, is the email going out from ATC? Or is the email from the mousetrap?
Nick: No, it's going out from HubSpot. This is so incredibly important. We are not a better mousetrap. We are improving the mousetrap you have. HubSpot is great at sending emails. They don't have an email sending capacity problem. They're great at it, right? Pardot sends lots of great emails, can be tough to build one in there, but they're great at sending them.
Marketo does everything. They have landing pages. They're great at hosting websites. Like, we shouldn't do that. These recommendations live in HubSpot because that's where you do your job. Now we have some really cool insights that live in our product. We'll tell you how relevant you are, what topics you need to write about in order to stay competitive and relevant within the audience that you have.
We'll tell you whether or not there's certain content that you really ought to go out there and like boost on LinkedIn because it's got massive audience of super interested people.
Connor: Well, you, you guys can also, I mean, what's super interesting, right? Like is one, so I'll, I'll tell a story and then I'll link it back to what I'm actually saying to you.
But I think one of the things that I found really compelling on like HubSpot's roadmap, for instance, is the idea of they have all this service
conversations and they know all the content that you have both in your knowledge base and your blogs and everything else. As they just basically look at every conversation you're having on the service side and be like, "Hey, by the way, you have tons of people who have a lot of questions about like your Stripe integration and you don't have that much content that answers this.
Like you should go create content that is about this."; And I think very similarly. You guys can look at this and say, here are all the types of things that your audience is really interested in, and we don't have the inventory of the type of content that matters and I think what's really interesting that I think ties to sort of like a macro
thesis about what I think a lot of people are doing in this arena versus what actually drives value is using the AI to create that content is not super interesting and the value of the content you're going to make is just not going to be very high. But the AI can absolutely help you figure out what should you create and what should it look like
and that is super compelling.
Nick: Yeah, dude, I, I mean you're preaching to the choir. Every day you're like, oh, now this is the generative AI tool that's going to actually deliver me stuff that doesn't suck. And you get into it and you're like, oh, man, that sucks too. Right? And you're like, and I just, and I think, and I think it's really an interesting period.
And I, and one of the things that I feel really good about with ATC is if you're a reasonably mature marketing team, you've been around, you've got six, seven, eight, nine people. You've created a few hundred pieces of content across your website. It is highly unlikely you have a content production problem.
Highly unlikely, right? But like all the hype is around the generative stuff and it's gotten so easy to produce more, not produce more good stuff, but produce more.
Connor: Yeah.
Nick: So we kind of like get, get wooed in that direction. We're like, that's so cool. And dude, sorry, it's a freaking parlor trick and that content's going to do jack squat for you.
Right? And, and I, and I think what is really, really compelling here, is getting to say to a marketing team, you've written awesome stuff. If you think the stuff from three years ago is kind of like, you know, crusty and not so great. I don't know what to tell you other than take it off your website or update it";, right?
That's an update problem or I'm embarrassed by a problem and we weren't, we aren't the same business. You should think about, you know, how you're managing the content that's on your site for sure. But if it's out there and representing you, in all likelihood, we find this all the time. Something a company wrote a year and a half ago is like exactly what somebody is going to find compelling right now.
But there is no marketing operation on the planet that has any kind of repeatable way to do that. None whatsoever. It doesn't exist. And we're coming in and saying, guys, you spent the time. You kicked ass. You did the human driven stuff. It's real good. Let's squeeze all the blood out of that rock and then by letting you know topically what you're missing, you know, in order to retain and maintain that level of relevancy. Virtuous cycle, right? Now you can actually, to your point, sit down and spend the time.
Now we do a bunch of reporting on those topics, right? So if you have written, hey, here's the stuff that you do have. We also tell you what is ranking. We tell you what your competitors have written about that subject matter. We tell you what that topic level audience is also interested in. So like your header twos.
So we have one in ours that I'm getting after right now that's, we haven't written about social media and it's really compelling to a lot of our audience for obvious reasons. They're also interested in analytics. They're also interested in marketing automation. They're like, so like having a, a, a cluster of content about social and this, this, this, and this, and these secondary topics.
I know it's worth the time to sit down and do it because I literally have 879 people who need me to. Right? That's 879 people I'm writing for rather than an SDR.
Connor: I'm going to go write something and I hope somebody cares.
Nick: I hope somebody cares. I know they care. In fact, I can guarantee you that if you're leveraging ATC recommendations through your marketing efforts. That content will get activated for any one of these 879 people pretty soon. Right? So like, it just, it really, it really, I think unshackles people from feeling like they've got a volume production problem. And lets them get back to writing for relevancy and quality. And I think that's, that's something that, that marketers are kind of thinking. Like, dude, I don't want to do this LLM stuff.
Like I don't like the output. They don't like it either. But they're searching because they feel like what the problem is, is production and it's not, it just.
Connor: And I think they're also getting like, and I think something I'm curious about is I think everyone's getting immense, what we see, right, is everyone's getting immense pressure. And when I tell all the analysts who are like, "Oh, is the AI stuff like making a difference in what people are doing and hubs?"; I'm like everyone shows up and says, "AI is really important to us.";
And then they're like, "Oh, we have the AI stuff."; And they're like, "Oh, that's great. AI is really important to us."; And then everyone moves on. No one has like, no one knows the use case. No one knows what they're doing. It's all window dressing and sort of boondoggles nothing that actually moves the needle.
What, what are you seeing from like folks that you're talking to? As you were describing this, it was like a lot of customers saying, "Oh, I have a lot of fatigue, I'm doing a lot of this stuff."; Like, what are you hearing is either these are the biggest obstacles, here's why I'm not investing. I don't know that there it's
objections are where people come from and then they're interested in you. Or like how to sort of phrase that. But, but what are you hearing from like being in market and talking to people who are at minimum evaluating this stuff?
Nick: Yeah. I think it's a really interesting question to answer. There are, I believe, a few things that are going on vis-a-vis, you know, AI within the go to market space. So, one, I think there's a pretty strong consensus that there's a there, there, right? But I, I think you've made a really astute observation that people really struggle to kind of talk about what their, use cases have been. And I think the other thing is that really feels I think kind of problematic about AI is that it's, it's so nebulous, right?
And you're like, oh, better words, right? Like I can produce more and better words. But if we're all being honest as businesses, until somebody's in product, everything is words. Right? The whole business is words, which, by the way, everybody should be hiring more, you know, I don't know, English majors or what have you, or former journalists, like, that's what they should be hiring.
But, but they're, they're looking at these LLM's and they feel like, this should help me. But it's just not concrete. It's not coming from a place of, "Hey I have a, like a social media distribution problem. So I'm going to evaluate, you know, the six or seven tools that are out there that helped to push social out there
because I know that my HubSpot social tools are like, they're not bad, but we're kind of like, we've outgrown them and we the next generation of."; That's so clear and they know how to then approach that problem and buy it. But when they go and they start to evaluate the AI stuff, it all kind of feels like I'm learning about what I might buy and do by taking the sales pitches.
Right? And from our perspective, one of the things that we've really been trying to focus on over the course of the last couple of months, frankly, is like, what's the problem that you've named as a business that we solve for? Because buying AI, look, it's accelerating because people have these like weird fungible budgets that have the word AI attached
to
Connor: Yeah.
Nick: So it's actually Someone said, go, go buy half a million dollars of AI tech this year and no one knows what that actually means.
I mean, and it, and it's it's actually happening. Like, in particularly mid-market and larger businesses actually have those, like, I don't know, whatever AI budgets. And then the marketing budget itself is like, you do not check all 74 checkboxes I have on exactly what it is that I need. You're like, come on, man. And so, so there's this for us, we have to be a little opportunistic in terms of how we talk about what we do, but I do think that it's problematic
on some level that those budgets are so flimsy.
And I think the other thing that's really interesting is there are so few, like AI operations people that live inside these businesses. And it's, you know, it's like, it's the same thing with no code. Look, anybody really can kind of learn Zapier. But if you're really going to get the value out of a tool like that, you should have somebody who's like your Zapier stud internally. Like really grocks
how that thing works and how it needs to work. And so, it just feels like a lot of exploration right now. And so, for us in our conversations, we really try to, frankly, not really talk about the AI. We talk about, you've got a content repository, you're doing a lot of complex workflows with a boatload of segments and like tags and all this kind of insane stuff.
You're pulling your hair out, you're exhausted and you're getting like a modicum of improvement in your marketing performance. You're at that tipping point where you're starting to think, do I lean more into brand? Which is extensible and a human can control and push out. Or do I hire a ton more people and try to increase my operational capacity?
And we come in and we go, I can help you get more time for the brand work. And help you actually do better on the thing that you think is a million more people, right? And then they go, "Oh, great."; Right? It's like, that's the moment where it feels like, we really kind of like, strike a chord and people go, okay, let me get my credit card out and start this out.
Connor: So, so not only, not only are you leading an AI organization, you are heavily leveraging AI stuff in, in your GTM journey, whether it is with Air Traffic Control or whether it's with other sorts of things in the stack.
Tell me about what you guys are doing that's like cool, exciting, interesting.
And something I saw behind you is this fun little diagram that for anyone that's just audio, has sort of like site map, how to find it, if yes, go to this direction. And this looks like a GTM journey to me. And I am eager to understand it.
Nick: Yeah you should see how it's translated now over into a big gigantic confluence board and a lot of people poking at it and doing their various jobs and tasks is related to it now.
So, you know, it's really cool. So, so
first there are two tools that I'm wicked excited about right now. One is Clay and the other one is is Copy.ai. So, here's my jam with Clay. For those who don't know, I'll start with the basics and then I'll talk about our use case for it. So, so Clay is.
Connor: For anyone interested, C L A Y just dot com. They, they
Nick: Dot com. Yep.
Connor: So things are going well. If they decided to do that.
Nick: Yes. They they got that website and which is remarkable and, and like super nice, smart people running that thing. Like it's, it's dope. So the way that Clay works and any person who's been in rev ops or marketing ops has kind of had this experience where it's like, we now have our seventh data vendor to help us qualify accounts, people, find them enriched with information. And only in the most advanced well run, you know, operational, you know, GTM operational organizations have I ever seen this kind of work. But they enrich with this and then the next source and then the next source and the next source, but I got to tell you, if you're mid-market and down the vast majority of people are like, I have Apollo and that's it, right?
And there's nothing wrong with Apollo. Apollo's great at what Apollo does, but what if you need awesome technographics? What if you need to do research on what's on the website of the prospective customer? What if you need to get a super strong resolution on particular attributes about somebody's professional profile to qualify them as the right human to talk to?
These are all different data sets. And so you don't want to move on to the second enrichment until you know that the first one is right. So you go, all right, I want to find businesses that have this much revenue, this much headcount, these industries. And now I want to enrich with technographic data from BuiltWith.
Now I want to enrich with site data. So for us, BuiltWith is part of what we use in Clay and Clay brings all these API providers together. And so then you pay them with credits. So, rather than me having 8 or 9 different data relationships. I have 1 with Clay. I pay them, they pay these guys on API consumption model fees, and I get everything in a waterfall kind of, you know, just spreadsheet, right?
Is what it looks like, right? It's just a table. And so, you know, column one is I could create with an open AI search of the internet and be like, find all the companies that you know, were on the SAAS 100. Okay, and it goes and finds all their URLs. Alright, now I want you to tell me which of these URLs also includes HubSpot.
Okay, if they have HubSpot, I want you to go and index their sitemap and tell me how many links they have in their sitemap. Now tell me if any of those links have the terms blog or podcast or webinar,
Connor: I need to do this because we have a, we an event application. And the main thing that we're looking at is like, if your site map has an events tab and you use HubSpot, like we probably want to talk to you.
Nick: Dude, it is so freaking awesome. It's so awesome. And then by the time it's over, and then you go, now I want to find the people, right? And they've got all these email vendors and so on and so forth. And you can bring in your own, you know, API keys if you, you know, have high volume use of certain things, it's actually cheaper to be a direct customer of Apollo and then plug it into here. Which
it's happening more and more, but as a centralization tool, it's phenomenal. And so, you know, that has given us a really remarkable ability to hyper qualify. We know if a company has at least 300 pages, they have more than.
Connor: Are you doing this from like, an outbound segmentation, like informing that? Or are you doing this from a, hey, we're generating leads and then we're figuring out, do we care?
Nick: No. So we've been really quiet, frankly, at ATC in terms of our content volume is low. We haven't been out there trying to like do a bunch of SEO. We haven't launched a lead magnet. Our first big lead magnet goes live next week. We're super excited about it. Basically we have a content utilization metric and our product that tells you how much of your content you've actually leveraged in your marketing efforts in the last three months.
The number is not great for anybody, right? Which is part and parcel as to why we exist is to actually change that, but we're giving it away for free and there's just an easy signup page now for it, which is really cool or there will be next week. So, super excited about that. For us, we've been prepping and building this massive audience, and we've got 17, 000 people who have HubSpot.
They have a sitemap, which indicates that they have content marketing maturity. They have at least 300 content items on their website. They've got more than one kind of marketing content types. They've got at least a blog and white papers or case studies or podcasts or whatever. All these things tell us that they're really investing in and care about their content marketing efforts, and it's all waterfall through and then we use that company list in order to go and find the right people. Right? Tell me who owns content marketing. Tell me who's running demand generation, right? And then what we're doing is taking that audience and we'll start to put them into, you know, a rotational flow of, of various kinds of content items on LinkedIn for a couple of weeks and warm them up.
And then we'll start to hit them in the inbox. But because we've done all this preliminary analytical work, we've also been able to push a lot of it into our own product. And so we can say, "Hey, by the way, this blog post that you wrote on this date is about these topics and that's how we know what people care about is because we're watching that behavior out of your HubSpot instance";, right?
So come connect HubSpot. We'll give you a whole bunch of analytics for free. I'll let you test flight the entire product for a couple of weeks. At the end of that, let me know if you want to keep using it, right? That would be great. And so that's kind of the flow that's coming up, but that, that super crystal clear understanding of not just who the right people are, but what to say to them when we do go out and hit their inboxes.
It completely changes the game. Now, there are some people who are using the open AI integration in there to actually like draft the email or create the opening line. And if it's just one line and you've got inputs from, you know, columns B, you know, D and Q, and you're telling it exactly how to model that opening line, it does a phenomenal job.
What I don't like is this nonsense that spin taxes the bullshit opener email, the whole thing is written and it's like that
Connor: and
Nick: sucks.
Connor: Everyone has an immediate, like, I think, especially with, with emails. I, I always cringe because I feel like the LinkedIn bots have gotten really prolific and you can just like, you can instantly tell, like, it's just like, and it's just so obvious that you're just like, nah, this is this is totally automated and it, and it sort of uncanny valleys and self immediately.
Nick: Yeah, I can't. Yeah, I get, I, I mean, for if anybody follows me on LinkedIn, they see me do this all the time, actually take the garbage emails and LinkedIn invites that I get and I repost on LinkedIn. And I take the person's name
Connor: out Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
Nick: like this.
Connor: Hey Nick, I saw that you were interested in AI technology and I would love to learn more with innovators like you. You're just like, oh my
god.
Nick: Or my favorite, Nick, I can see that you run Air Traffic Control, personalize any marketing, which is like our
tagline.
Connor: Yeah, yeah, yeah the tagline.
Nick: On LinkedIn and you live in Lexington, Mass. It's like, bro, I...
Connor: I love Lexington, Mass.
Nick: Knowing all that.
Connor: We should, we should talk.
Nick: It's God, man, you really did your homework.
Connor: Yeah. Yeah.
Nick: It's so, I don't know. I think that's part of it too, is
it's like the thing that I love about Clay
and that I think is wicked important. Look, regardless of the volume of, if you're mid-funnel, Air Traffic Control can do remarkable things for you. If you're top of funnel. In particular, if you're doing any cold or outbound work, and you don't have a massively data enriched comprehensive understanding of your ICP
you are going to get fractional results to what you should be. But when you know a lot about people at scale, and for the first time ever, even smaller teams like us at Air Traffic Control can use something like a Clay and actually know a ton. And then start to make sense of, what's our pitch here? Why do we matter?
What's the cool thing that I can say? And the cool thing I can say is not, "I did an analysis on your website, let me know if you want it."; Oh, say that to me one more time and I will find you and hurt you, like cut it out. If it's so great, just send the damn thing. I'll let you know if it's worth talking about again.
Like just everybody's got to cut it out, right? Add value, do something cool. But the only way that happens, you got to know a ton. And that's tough to do with skill until, frankly, until Clay.
A we're going to have to get the Clay guys and we'll have them on the show. I think that their another HubSpot ventures portfolio company, so we can probably make something happen
there.
I believe that's
right.
Connor: And B, I'm going to go send you and Clay to our GTM team and be like, "Hey, remember that thing we talked about?
I talked to this guy today and he's doing it and it's pretty sick. And we should check it out. And I'll be the obnoxious, the obnoxious CEO slack. Someone should make it like a Twitter handle, it's just like CEO slacks of like, heard about Clay on podcast, please look like. Like, tag 11:57 PM, like, whatever it is.
Nick: I ping our product team all the time and I'm like, what about this really cool LLM management platform? They're like, dude, just.
stop
Connor: Just stop. Just.
Nick: Do your job. It isn't this, right? You're like, sorry, I'll go back.
Connor: Amazing. CEO woes, man. Well, Nick, thank you so, so much for coming on. At minimum, I've learned that I want to take a look at Air Traffic Control and Clay for all of these things. And I would say if you are a, if you're a marketing automation customer anywhere and you have a lot of content and you're trying to figure out how to use it with your audience.
Like, ergo, like you have a marketing department you should give Air Traffic Control a peek, but thank you for coming on the show. And I, we'll have to set up a demo or something, I'm definitely interested.
Nick: My man, thank you so much. I was happy to be here. This was fun.
Connor: Absolutely. I'll catch up with you soon.
Nick: Cheers.