Ep. #1, The Future of CRM is No CRM with Justin Belobaba

Christine Spang: Hey everybody, welcome to the show. Today, we have with us a really special guest, Justin Belobaba, who is the CEO at Nowsite.

The inspiration for bringing Justin onto the show today was really a conversation that he and I and some other folks were having recently where he was sharing the vision behind Nowsite, and how it really utilizes cutting-edge AI techniques features in order to make Nowsite, which is an app, a platform, a tool, that allows creators to build their businesses.

It's just super exciting to see his vision for how the tech that we have available today is something that can really bring user experiences to these people that really work for them in a way that wasn't possible before.

And I think he's got just a really exciting and inspiring vision for what the future of all types of CRM apps look like.

So welcome to the show, Justin. It's really great to have you here.

Justin Belobaba: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Christine: Before we kind of launch into the businessy stuff, I wanted to just learn a little bit more about yourself.

Tell us a little about yourself, where you're from, how did you get into building software, what was the magic unlock moment for you?

Like, when did you really see the power of software, and how did that ignite your path?

Justin: Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I remember literally the moment that that happened, and it was like two in the morning in sophomore year in college.

I'm from Toronto originally, living in London today, my family and I, we kind of escaped the COVID lockdowns of Canada.

But yeah, it's been 20 years since of building software companies. Started my first one in college, sophomore year at Harvard.

And up until this, you know, one very kind of poignant moment, I was absolutely on a track to Wall Street trading, investment banking, just like a lot of my friends went on to do, and it was 2001, maybe 2002.

Anyway, it was two in the morning, and a friend of mine, we were playing pool, and he just kind of blurted out, "You know, why don't we just start a tech company?" And it was, you know, dot-com boom.

And it was all new, and it was all exciting, and it was an important moment because up until that point, the thought had never crossed my mind, like at all.

Christine: What were you majoring in in college?

Justin: Economics, and you know, going to New York for the summer for the Goldman Sachs internship. And the thought had never occurred to me, and it was like lightning.

It was that moment, and I'll never forget because it is absolutely true that in that moment, it was like, I had this epiphany of like, "Oh my God, yes, this is exactly what I want to do for the rest of my life."

Christine: Did your friend tell you how he got the idea?

Justin: No, it was just dumb luck. And I think the reason why it was such a profound kind of realization for me was, you know, I was interested in it.

Like you know, we were all following all these companies that were kind of blowing up at the time, but I'd never thought of it as something that I would be interested in or that I could do.

But what I love about it, you know, having still to this day never written a line of code. But you know, having started now, four tech companies, sold three, and now I'm on my fourth.

What I love about it is just the scalability of problem-solving, right? Like, if you can identify a problem, and use your imagination and your creativity to solve that problem in like a simple, elegant way, you can immediately have this massive global impact, and really, like, have done well, you can impact millions of people with a solution to a problem that just makes their life better in some shape or form.

And that is just such a incredibly, you know, intoxicating and wonderful idea for me, right?

That if you can just think hard enough and learn enough about your customer and love your customer enough, you can create something that can help millions of people, and that you can push that solution out in an instant.

Like, where else can you do that? I don't know where else you can have that kind of massive impact.

So it all kind of came together for me in that, you know, kind of drunken two in the morning epiphany, and that's what I've been doing for the last 20 years or so.

Chrstine: That's crazy that, you know, how the smallest things in life will set you on your direction and on your path.

And like, maybe it wasn't something that seemed like it should be super profound or important, but when you look back, it's like, "Well, that's where it all started."

It's also cool for me to hear that the leverage of software was something that was really obvious to you as someone who wasn't coming at it from the technical side of things.

Just sort of being there, while there was a lot of stuff happening in the tech world. What was it really like during the dot-com boom, by the way?

Like, did it seem just like that was where all the action was happening?

Justin: Yeah, it seemed like it, and there was-

Christine: Did you seen a lot of people from your college go and get into the crazy companies at the time.

Justin: Yeah. So I was just kind of bizarrely surrounded by these really neat stories that were happening.

I was in sort of like a frat, at Harvard, they're called Final Clubs, and I was in one called The Phoenix, and a guy who had graduated a couple years earlier, had started a company called govWorks, and there was this incredible documentary that was made about it called startup.com.

And it follows the story of this company from nothing to raising, I don't remember if it was 50 or 100 million, and back to nothing. So there was that just amazing story, on one hand.

You know, if you've seen the movie, "The Social Network," you know, Eduardo was in the Phoenix Club as well. So I don't know, I was just kind of, everywhere I turned, there were just these neat stories that were bubbling up in and around that time.

And I don't know, I was arrogant enough to think why not? Why not me? Like, why couldn't I just go out and try to make a mark, and do something cool, right?

Something, you know, maybe a little bit more fulfilling than finance, right? And that again, like one of my favorite things about starting software companies is, you are not on the sidelines, right?

You are to quote, you know, Teddy Roosevelt, "You're like the man in the arena, right?" Like, you are living and dying every single day, this rollercoaster of incredible highs and terrible lows every day, and I love that.

Like, I love being in the game, like unequivocally being in it, and winning and losing and fighting every day as an entrepreneur. And I can't imagine my life any other way.

In no way do I feel like I made a bad choice, right? Like, not getting into law or finance or venture capital. I've have not one tread of regret, because I haven't really worked a single day, right?

I've never checked the clock, and thought anything remotely like, "Oh my God, is it only two o'clock?" I've never had that experience in my life, right, 20 years later.

And I love it even more now than I did back then, 'cause at least now I feel like, I know what I'm doing kind of, right? Like, we never really do.

But 20 years later, I feel like I'm getting kind of okay at this, and it's more fun than ever.

Isaac Nassimi: So you've been through this quite a few times, right? You're on your fourth successful company. I mean, Nowsite is incredible.

You've been through these kind of cycles and YC calls it often like, the trough of disillusionment, right?

Where you start something, it's incredibly fun, it's very engaging, and then expectation doesn't match reality, and you kind of have this like, oh, period, and slowly, it kind of comes back.

And it sounds like for whatever reason, maybe you've had that and you're maybe looking it through rose-colored glasses, or you know, if you've really never checked the clock, how have you gotten through that trough of disillusionment if that's even happened on your end ever?

Justin: It definitely happens, right? And I don't know if it's daily or monthly or yearly, when I go through that, right?

But of course, I think every entrepreneur, well, I don't know, at least the ones I think they're being honest, have those private moments of serious doubts, right?

I certainly do. I also think that I am irrationally optimistic, and I think that a lot of founders just are that way. And I think that that's in some ways, a prerequisite for starting a tech company.

Like, there's nothing rational about it, right? Like, you know, if you wanted to kind of like secure a solid income, there's a lot better ways to do it, right? There's a lot more like reliable, predictable ways to have a very nice lifestyle. So you have to be a little bit nuts, I think, to start a tech company.

And I'm not talking about like, you know, they always quote like these stats of like, "You know, 60, 70% of small businesses fail, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

I don't buy that because they're talking about traditional small businesses, right? Like, the chance of like a startup really succeeding, is way less than 30% or 35%.

Like, to actually achieve what you guys are trying to achieve, when I'm trying to achieve, like, it's very rare. I mean, how many unicorns have there been in the history of the world?

Like what, like 2,500 ever, right? Like, that's crazy. The odds are very low. So you have to be a little bit nuts to do what we do.

Christine: And you got to like grind that for a really long time, you know? You're at it eight years, on Nowsite, we're at 11 over here at Nylas. It takes time to build something meaningful.

Justin: Yeah, people don't realize that. I mean, you know, the pop culture is like these overnight successes, these "Tech billionaires," who hid it rich overnight, and that's very commonplace. Like that never happens, right?

Like, we can probably name a couple of like, "real,"nothing's overnight, but like, you know, one year, you know, unicorns like, we'll probably name what, five? But like, everybody else is putting in the time.

Isaac: The phrase I've often heard, is the 10-year overnight success, where these people only enter the fray as far as like pop culture is concerned, after 10 years of just completely struggling and being nobodies essentially.

Justin: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, MailChimp, they've been around 20 years. You know, again, I don't know the exact figures, but they did not have a ton of success in their first 10.

Like, they were not this $8 billion acquisition, until very right at the end. Like the first 10 years was slogging away, thankless, hidden from public view, and then hopefully, the hard work pays off.

Christine: Yeah, do you have a go-to person or thing that keeps you going when things are toughest?

Justin: There's a lot of people that I admire, you know, mentors that don't know that they're my mentor, but yeah, I don't know.

I mean, it may be controversial, these days, I really admire Elon. I don't know how he does it, and I don't know how he does it in the face of so much, just incredible criticism constantly every single day.

Like, the guy's a miracle, like an absolute treasure in my opinion. And I know that that's, you know, I guess politically charged to say, but yeah, of anybody, I think he's absolutely incredible.

Isaac: I mean, I think you're right, especially in terms of like, electric cars would not be commonplace, right?

The electric cars existed as long as cars have existed, and you really do have to be a special kind of crazy to be like, "Yep, we're going to drag the whole entire auto industry, kicking and screaming into this next place."

Justin: Well, and then to take on free speech as a side quest, on his way to Mars, and to take on the $2 trillion deficit as another side quest, right?

Like, I mean, to me, it's just unbelievable. Like, it's hard to believe that that person exists.

Isaac: It feels like there's not enough hours in the day.

Justin: Yeah, for me, I feel like that. I can't even imagine.

Isaac: Yeah. I want to shift gears a little bit in this is your fourth business, fourth successful business, and most people struggle to get through one in their entrepreneurial journey, right?

And there's an execution layer that you clearly have figured out that I think we're going to mine well into in a bit. But I think there's also a picking layer, right?

So for example, Nowsite, you guys chose this, it's not even really a niche anymore. Like, this is becoming kind of the mainstream way that people enter business these days, especially young people, which is, you know, these smaller solopreneurs or small entrepreneurs, and trying to get the social media presence right for them, right?

Give them the ability to have that competence. How did you choose that? Because that is something that five years ago, I don't think a lot of people saw coming.

Justin: Yeah, I didn't see that either.

I think one of the things that I've learned to do well over the last 20 years is fail. Like, I would say I am like really, really good at failing. Like, that's probably the thing I'm best at.

Okay, and I think that like, you know, look, we can all kind of share kind of the Instagram version of ourselves, right? Like, the kind of the spiky highlights that we acted, like that's normal, right?

And oh yeah, sure, that's my life, right? Like, we can all do it, but like, you know, my Instagram version would be, "Oh yeah, you know, I went to Harvard and then I ended getting four successful startups, and you know, my life is perfect."

And you know, that's bullshit, right? Because that ignores the other 99% of the time, which is just coming into the office every day, and just failing over and over and over again, right?

And that's like, my life is basically, just one long failure with like these like weird spikes of success, right? That's the truth.

And I think that what I've gotten good at, and I can still get better, but what I've gotten really good at, and I think that this is like really, probably one of the most important skills that you can have as a founder is the ability to fail and iterate really quickly.

And I think that as my career's progressed, I've gotten way faster at learning, like, what's working, what's not. And I think that that's why probably, I'm on a pretty decent overall trajectory.

If I look at my first businesses, I didn't have that skill, that kind of just like, I don't know if it kind of like, this experience, this spidey sense, I kind of think of it as, and I think I was like, there was a lot of ego, and I actually thought that if an idea was good and it was logical, that means that therefore it must work.

That's not true, right? Like, those are necessary but not sufficient states for an idea, right? Like, yes, it has to be a good idea, it has to be logical, but that's just a starting point, right?

Then the real world happens, and you find out all kinds of things, right? Your customers just don't like it for some arbitrary reason that defies logic in my opinion, or the timing's wrong or the tech is wrong, or the implementation's wrong or whatever.

But like, when I was starting, I would cling to ideas that did not work for too long, and I wasted a bunch of time, and I wasted a bunch of money.

And I see that a lot, like, you know, working with kind of young founders, I think that they are not yet good enough at failing. And I don't mean giving up, right?

'Cause that's kind of the paradox of startups, right? It's fail super fast, and learn, and fix, and also never give up, right? So you have to kind of balance those two, somewhat conflicting ideas, right?

But that's what I've learned to do over the last 20 years. I think, today, when we launch something or we have an idea or we try something, I can tell really fast if it's right or if it's not right, or if it needs to be tweaked or fixed or thrown out completely.

So that's what I think I've learned to do through experience, right? And through kind of the daily humiliation of being a founder, right? Like, you get really humble or you should, because it's humbling, right?

It's humbling coming in and failing every day. So to kind of circle back to the question, I definitely did not have that vision when I started this company.

Christine, you may be different, but most of the founders I talked to, they'll probably say that their original vision was different from what they ended up doing.

Christine: Yeah, it's true for us as well.

Justin: Yeah.

Christine: We made a major pivot about four years in.

Justin: Yeah, if I told you that Nowsite started, and okay, this is true, and it's kind of embarrassing, okay?

It started as a health and beauty and fitness rewards program, and it was called Royaltie, royaltie.com with an IE at the end, okay? That's how far from the target I was.

Like, we were not close. Like, it was a bad idea. By the time we even launched, it was already old and tired and boring. We learned, we learned, we learned, right?

We pivoted 1,000 times, and because I think we're willing to fail and willing to learn and willing to adapt, eventually, we found our way to like, yes, this incredible opportunity, like a truly, like for me, I mean, the biggest opportunity I've ever seen.

Like, I can't believe that there are hundreds of millions of aspiring entrepreneurs that are completely underserved, when it comes to their online marketing.

Like, I can't believe that they exist, and that no one else is looking at them in a dedicated way. Anyway, it was only because we are good at failing, that we managed to find this opportunity.

Isaac: I think it makes a lot of sense. On pivoting, though, I think there's something interesting, which is, okay, from the business side, we understand a new direction to go, you know, we have a lot of conviction here.

Whereas before we had conviction somewhere else, and that was shaken based off things we learned. You're non-technical, like you said that yourself, you haven't written a line of code.

And what I'm curious about is how you take these pivots to the team and how you understand how they're going to affect, like, even going down to the code base or the product itself, right?

I am pretty sure, just guessing, that you guys still have lines of code or variable names or things in the database that are still named based off the health and beauty, right?

How do you understand and manage like, where that kind of dead wood is adding up and whatnot?

Justin: Yeah, so I am non-technical officially, but I am technical in the sense that like, I know what's possible, and I know how things work, right?

So as a founder, you know, I have a great CTO who's an actual genius, and I think we collaborate very well.

We are able to have the technical discussion at a level of logic and experience, and I can push him, right?

Because I've been 20 years of being around technology and understanding how things work and how long things should take.

But then his job is build, really like the architecture that's going to be right for the future. But yes, we absolutely have some Easter eggs and bizarre artifacts, right, in the code base.

One of our many pivots, was selling Bluetooth beacons inside the app. So our customer subscriptions, are still called beacon orders, even though we haven't done that in about six years.

Inside our own CRM, there's still beacons for some reason. So yes, that exists. I think that's a pretty normal thing.

And we devote a pretty good amount of time to co-review and technical debt, and you know, a regular spring cleaning, right?

Like, I think that software products are, and you know, there's a million analogies, okay, I'm going to pick a fashion one, all right?

Not that, I mean, I don't know, if you can see me, I'm in the most basic white T-shirt. I know nothing about fashion, okay?

Isaac: That's fashionable right now.

Justin: But here's what I know.

If all you do is go out and acquire the latest styles, right, and you don't look at your closet, pretty soon your closet's going to be full of all kinds of old, dated clothing. And I think that happens in software, right?

Like, as I think, a lot of founders, myself, I'm absolutely guilty of this.

I get so excited about going and buying the latest whatever shirt or jeans or watch, that I don't spend enough time, cleaning out my closet, right?

And so what can happen is my customer sees the closet, and isn't able to see the amazing new outfits that they could create because there's so much old dated crap in there.

So it's not the most fun, and it's not the most glamorous. But, you know, we've tried to adopt a discipline of every six months or so to go back and clean out the closet, right?

Like, what's the data saying? What are our customers using? What are they not using? Are there things that are kind of nice to haves, but they're not core to the value proposition?

What can we get rid of? Like, what are the features that we can just get rid of to allow our customers to focus on the things that are going to create the most value for them?

And again, I think this is a challenge in general. I know it's a challenge for us because we love our product and we love building new features, and we're a little bit feature-obsessed almost to, I'd say, to a fault.

So going back and doing that cleanup, is like a super important discipline.

Isaac: So we're now in the age of AI, supposedly, and I see all of these consumer applications, and especially business applications, adding new AI features every single day, and, you know, who knows how these are going to look in five years or something like that?

But all I know for sure is that whatever is being tried today, 90% of it is going to not work. It's going to get thrown away because we're still figuring out how humans should even interface with this stuff.

And what's your framework going forward of how you try out, for example, these new ways of utilizing AI inside of Nowsite, and recognizing when it is or isn't working, setting the conditions for winning and cleaning those up as you go.

Justin: The big trend that we see right now, and we've been kind of building towards this for the last year is agentic AI. And I think that like, it's more than a trend.

To me, it's the next major evolution of AI that is going to take it from being, for a lot of people right now, it's like, you know, it's a toy, right?

" Oh, I went on ChatGPT, and I asked it to write a poem," like, big deal, right? That's not making your life better.

For a lot of people, AI is a toy. And that makes sense, 'cause it's amazing and it's revolutionary, but it's relatively unsophisticated. And I would say that's sort of like the AI of 2022 to 2024. I think that the big thing that's going to happen this year, and what I am really excited about is AI not as like an assistant waiting for the human to provide instruction, but AI as an expert partner in any number of disciplines, right? Where it is thinking, it's strategizing, it's understanding data, it's researching, and it's proactively suggesting things to me, the dumb human, right?

Suggesting what I can do next to whatever, like, manage my finances or book an amazing trip for my family, or learn something new and build my skills, or in our corner of the world, improve my sales and marketing and build my business.

And I think that the transition that we're going to enter now is AI is going to go from being a cool toy to being something really deeply useful. And I'm here for it.

Like, I am so excited for that. Again, in our corner of the world, that is the best thing that could happen for our customer.

Like, my customer is the, you know, we call a hobbypreneur, solopreneur. They are a lot of folks that have a business as a side hustle, right, gig economy.

So like, that's who we focus on. And you know, maybe they're retired, maybe they're a high school teacher, and they're doing something on the side.

But what is almost universally true is, they don't have a professional background in sales and marketing.

And so while the last couple of years we've given them some incredible tools like here's a website that builds itself, here's a social media post that builds itself, like, here's amazing tools, there's still this reliance fundamentally on the human to ask the AI to do something useful.

And what that requires, and this might be kind of obvious, but it's a big problem. It requires the human to know what to do.

And a lot of people who don't have that experience, they don't know how to grow their social presence, they just don't know what to do so they get stuck, right?

What I think is the big unlock for these hundreds of millions of aspiring entrepreneurs, is an AI expert, this agentic AI, that can look at all of the data, right, that can research online, that can see what's working, what's not working, what's working for your audience, what's working for people exactly with your profile or selling a similar product, and suggest the right activity.

You know, here's exactly what you should do next to have the biggest impact, right? You should do a post about A, B, C, and I've pre-drafted it for you.

And I've researched the latest trending keywords, and I've already included them. And I've researched the most kind of powerful images, and I've generated one to go with it.

So that to me, is absolutely revolutionary. But I think we're going to see that everywhere. But in our part of the world, you know, as a company, our focus, it's massive.

Isaac: I think that trust is really important from the user standpoint.

And when I'm talk about trust, I'm not talking about maybe the way open AI uses the word trust, where we're trying to make sure that ChatGPT won't tell you how to make a Molotov cocktail.

What I'm saying when I say trust is that I, as a user, when I go in and I'm interacting with something on the AI, if my first experience with it, is it telling me something blatantly incorrect?

I'm never going to use it again. You know, it will actually, let's say, well, we'll reset the clock before I'm even willing to use it again, maybe another year out, right?

So from my perspective, really the concern is hit rate. Like, what percentage of the time, does the AI go off the rails?

And on your end, how can you ensure that that's a small percentage, and then you're shipping features that you are okay with not getting to see or be in the middle of that interaction between the AI and the person?

Justin: Yeah, we can really minimize risk in the first 30, 60, 90 days by having tighter guardrails on what the types of activities that the allowed is to do and suggest for that initial period.

Because I agree with you, right? Like, it is, all of our decision making as humans, right, is very quick, right? We like to act like we are these logical, rational beings, but the truth is we're not, right?

Like, we make decisions very quickly, based on emotion, right? And then we use our logic to justify our emotional decision.

So yeah, so we know that we need to provide real tangible value inside two to three minutes, or our customer's gone. Like, that's what we've learned. Like, their tolerance for getting bored and frustrated is so high, so we need to make sure that we deliver our value proposition, we need to tangibly deliver it in the first 120, 180 seconds. Now, that's hard. Then we have to build trust.

And so the way that we think about it at least is, we don't have to deliver what I would consider to be the most mind-blowing 11 out of 10, like knock your socks off capability that we have right away, right?

'Cause there is something like, when you're pushing the envelope like that, yes, there is some risk, right?

If we deliver like a solid eight and then an eight and a half, and then a nine, we can build trust and still do things that are absolutely mind-blowing, right, to our customer who is stuck at a two, or a three, right?

So we think of it like, you know, you have these guardrails that you then over time, allow the AI to have a little bit more independence and be a little bit bolder, and make more potentially provocative suggestions, right, or more aggressive strategies. So that's how we think about it.

Isaac: That's phenomenal. Well, that's kind of like actually building a rapport with a person, right, where you start off with small talk, like, talk about the weather or something like that.

And then, you know, once you've gotten to know each other quite a bit, then you can get into the really intense conversations.

Justin: Yeah.

Isaac: But you wouldn't start with those necessarily. I think that's hilarious.

Justin: And by the way, this concept, I think it's called temperature, right? Like inside, if you go into ChatGPT, it has this concept, and I think they call it temperature, where you can kind of like dial up or dial down how much creativity you want to allow that AI to have.

So I think they've thought about that, but like I think what we've done is, kind of automate the expansion of that window over time.

Isaac: As far as uptake is concerned, are you seeing trends or changes there?

Because I mean, for example, at Nylas, we have on our documentation for developers, maybe like a year and a half ago, we put in like a chat with the docs, and we saw very low engagement with that.

And we have organically seen the percentage of users that engage with that and start typing queries to our documentation increased like fivefold, just with really no big changes on our end. Have you seen anything like that?

Justin: Yeah, like overall, usage of our AI-powered features, it continues to increase, right, like, on a per user basis. Also, things are surprising, right?

Like, there's certain features that we have that, you know, I thought, "Man, this is going to kill, right?"

And then there's other features that we have, which to me, are more just obvious kind of ho-hum features, and it just goes to show like how little I know, right?

The ones that I'm most excited about, sometimes they kind of bomb, right, with my users, and the ones that I'm kind of least excited about because they're maybe less creative, less at the edge, they make more intuitive sense to my customer, right?

They're simpler. And so those are the ones that take off. And so, I mean, yes, of course, like, you can focus-group this, and you can reach out to trusted users, and like, "Hey, what do you think?"

But like, I don't know, I'm always kind of disappointed by how little focus groups match reality. And what I strongly prefer is to provide a new feature to 1,000 users and see what they do with it. Like, just field tested, and you know, opinions are fine, but usage and data is what really matters to me.

Isaac: I agree with that. And I think for the focus group side, especially, you're right, if you sit someone down and you're like, "Would you buy this? Would you use this?" Does not necessarily match up with reality.

Justin: Yeah, and look, you know, what's it, the buyers are liars, right, to say that. Our biggest challenge was with our customer finding where they really are in terms of sophistication. Like, that was the hardest part.

Like if I look at our product evolution, we started with the assumption that these are fairly sophisticated business owners, so we're going to build these, you know, fairly sophisticated business tools, sales funnels, and SMS campaigns, and email drip campaigns, and those types of marketing automations.

And they would say, "Yes, we want that, please." And then they wouldn't use them, or they'd say, "Well now, what do I do with this website, right?"

So our challenge, and the reason I think we've had more success than others is we've done a good job of not listening to what they're telling us, but really observing what they are using and what they are not using, and what they're telling you with their non-usage, right, which is, this is too complicated, this doesn't work for me.

And for us, our business took off about 24 months ago, right? Like, five years into our overnight success, right, when we finally found the bottom.

Like, when we finally figured out that, "Oh my gosh, our customers have no idea what they're doing. They can barely log onto Gmail."

So our most popular feature, which is not a feature that I am like, I don't think it's that cool, like, I'm not like over the moon about it, but our most popular feature, is one button called Surprise Me.

And you click it, and the AI generates a post based on its growing knowledge of your interests and your writing style and things like that.

That's after seven years, our most popular feature is like a one-click instant, authentic, original social media posts.

People are, they love it, and it's simple, and it's beautiful, but if you ask me like whatever blindfolded, which of these features is going to be the biggest winner? I never would've thought that.

Isaac: That kind of reminds me of the I'm Feeling Lucky button that used to exist on Google.

Justin: Yeah.

Isaac: That's awesome.

Justin: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christine: I had a question that was coming to mind about building good AI.

You've talked about your vision for how AI is going to work, and you know, what's resonated most with your users is that the AI should be telling people what they should be doing.

And in order to be able to do that kind of thing, these AI tools need to have a lot of context about what else is happening in the system.

What have you found was the data that you need to feed to your product in order to make those tools useful?

Justin: It's hard to believe, right? We're still not a big company, 40, 50,000 paying users, 100 something thousand total users. I mean, so we're okay, but we're not like huge.

As it turns out, in our sector, we've got more data than anybody. Like, it is so wide open that even though we're a drop in the Pacific, we have better data than anyone.

Like, we've got more, and when I say data, I mean top of funnel, right? So from, I don't have anyone to talk to about my business, to I'm generating leads, to I'm warming up the leads, to they become customers.

As it turns out, no one, there's not a single company in the world that has as good data as we do. So that was nice to discover that we had this kind of this advantage.

I think, I don't know this, of course, but I think that AI is going to become so good that it's going to be ubiquitous and almost irrelevant, because everyone's just going to have amazing AI.

And I don't know if that's two years from now or five years from now, but like, it's going to be so good and it's going to be everywhere that it's not going to be a big differentiator or competitive advantage.

In my opinion, the big differentiator is going to be data. And so where we have, I mean, albeit it's a small advantage today, but this growing advantage is we have the best data about our customers.

You know, we partner with big companies that employ hundreds of thousands or even millions of these hobbypreneurs, right?

Like, in the world of direct sales and affiliate marketing, the numbers are staggering. Like, these companies, some of them have, you know, we have literally a partner that has 2 million sales reps.

Can you imagine? It's like a country. They have no top of funnel data, no one does, right?

So I think our long-term advantage is having more and better data, which will allow us to make better suggestions than any new entrant, and deliver better results.

And that becomes this really nice virtuous cycle where the better results we deliver, the more customers we acquire, the better the data we have, the better results we can deliver, you know, and so on.

And to me, that's the really big opportunity. It's not to be this sales and marketing software. Like, great, that's nice.

It is to be the algorithm that optimizes sales activities for hundreds of millions of aspiring entrepreneurs, right?

That empowers hundreds of millions of people to take the best possible action to build their business. To me, like, that's inspiring. I got all the time in the world for that, right?

Like, to have the opportunity to be really deeply helpful to the small business owner, like, the entrepreneur, and that's in America, it's in Canada, in the UK where I am, but in the developing world, like, oh my gosh, you know, it's amazing the impact that we can have as they kind of build this middle class in Africa and South America, and so on.

You know, it is so gratifying to see the impact that we can have, but we feel like we're just getting started. So data is our long-term advantage, right?

And kind of empowering people with that data is how we think we're going to make a big difference.

Christine: So you're building up this proprietary data set at Nowsite that's like the best data for personalizing actions for creators.

Justin: Yes.

Christine: Is it the same for every creator, or do you have to like further segment it to individuals, and sort of-

Justin: Well, look, I'll give you an example of what's possible today, okay? We have a new feature that we call social to lead, okay?

Most people are meeting prospects on social media. So let's say I meet somebody on whatever, Facebook, what I can do is as a user, I can screenshot their profile, just screenshot, right?

'Cause none of these people are ever going to do any data entry in A CRM, right? Like, we know that.

So take a screenshot, upload it, upload the screenshot to Nowsite, we will create the contact in a CRM, we will use the information in the screenshot to then go research your contact online, find their interests, find their hobbies, find their education, find out more contact information, populate all that inside the CRM.

We use that data to predict very accurately the personality of the prospect. And then we use that to formulate a step-by-step sales plan to best target that prospect, all of that from a screenshot, and we're doing that today.

And this is the beginning of what will be possible, but that's already something that our customers are using now.

Isaac: What do you think the termination point of that is? What do you think the future of CRMs looks like?

Justin: I think the future of CRM is no CRM.

Like, the way today, the way that we think about it, right, whether it's data entry and data analysis, and I've got 17 prospects in stage one, and you know, I'm moving 12 and a half percent to stage two, which is, I send them a proposal.

Like, that's a very kind of human, unsophisticated approach, right? And it's because we only have a capacity for so much nuance, right?

Same thing with personality analysis, right? Like, every model of personality analysis always buckets you into one of 16 personality types or something.

Like, we know that that's all true, right? But it's a helpful model because we can't handle more nuance.

So the best CRM is, in my opinion, one that treats each prospect optimally, that looks at everything we know about the prospect, everything that we know about you as a salesperson, all the data we can possibly get our hands on.

And the AI formulates the best possible plan for that prospect, which might be a little bit different, than the best possible plan for this other prospect, right?

Like, that's my, again, what do I know? That's my opinion. My opinion is that the idea of blocked off stages, is an old idea, and it's going to go away, and it's going to be replaced by a much more nuanced, personalized approach to sales.

And I also think that the idea of asking my customer, right, kind of the hobbypreneur, the volunteer commissioned sales person to use a traditional CRM, that's failed for 50 years, maybe not 50, but it's never succeeded, maybe it's 40, I don't know.

It's never succeeded. The way we deliver our CRM is a chat, imagine like a chat, like our CRM is no CRM. You are chatting with your sales expert AI partner, right?

"What should I do today?"

"Oh, here are the 10 activities that I recommend, right? Here are your top leads, you know, I've assigned a score to each one. You should reach out to Mary and do this. You should reach out to Steve and do that."

And it's all through a chat, right? And you know, soon to be a voice activated conversation, right?

And yes, of course, if I want to see my whole pipeline, of course, we can show you the pipeline. But the day-to-day experience of these clunky stages and data entry, I think that's all going to go away.

Isaac: But all of that is contingent upon having all of the context though, right?

Like, let's say that AI just has access to your phone calls or like the recordings of your phone calls that you make through your dialer or whatever, but you don't have some other channel, right?

Like the SMSs, it won't be able to give you good insights, right?

Justin: 100% agree, 100%, right? So yeah, the more you put in, the more you get out.

Isaac: But now this becomes like an org problem and an engineering problem, right? How do you do so much?

How do you connect to so much and tap into so much? How do you manage that?

Justin: Yeah, no, you're right. And it's a work in progress, right? I mean, you know, this is one one thing we love about you guys, right, Nylas, no, but really, like, that's something that we love, right?

And we want to do more of that to automate the data that is available through email.

Inside our system, we also enable SMS so we can, you know, we don't see your personal SMS, but your business SMS we can see, you know?

The more information we can helpfully access, right, with your consent, the more insights we can deliver to you.

Isaac: So of that communications pie chart, I always think about this way internally, right?

All of these different channels and mediums that you have for communication, do you think you guys are nearing 100% of that communications pie chart?

Justin: No, I don't think so. I think that 50% is more realistic. A lot of this happens over social media.

Isaac: Mm-hmm.

Justin: So again, things that are, to me, not the big kind of like home run, but our customers love.

Like you know, our customers love being able to take a screenshot of a conversation that they're having with a prospect over messenger, over WhatsApp, over Telegram.

So today, what they can do is take a screenshot, give it to their AI sales expert, and the AI sales expert will, one, tell them how to reply, tell them what to say to handle that objection, to move the sale along.

And two, file that screenshot inside that context history, so in the future, it can be called upon, and automatically remembered, right?

So, you know, so much of this is like, how do we take work off of the customer and give that task to the AI expert, right, which again, was not really possible in '23, '24, right?

Like, you know, the AI assistant could like tell you stuff, but it wouldn't really do stuff, right?

And I think kind of the next year or so is going to be a lot more about AI agents doing things independently, right?

Like, updating your calendar for you, doing research for you, like real tasks, we're going to see AI agents doing more and more real world tasks.

Isaac: I absolutely agree, and I think it's going to be a fun year.

I think it's about time to wrap, but first, we do a section called picks where everyone just brings something fun that they found over the last few weeks that they're excited about.

It can be anything. It can be a piece of content, it can be an app that you found, it could be a movie, who cares? And just shares it with the group.

Spang, do you have a pick for this week?

Christine: Yeah, I do. It's kind of weird though. So I recently got an induction stove installed, and a really cool thing has happened, and this is a little nerdy.

But one of the reasons that it's hard for a lot of people to get induction stoves, even they're way better, they're super clean, they boil water super fast, they're really easy to clean, they're just a better cooking experience.

But it's hard for a lot of people to get them because their houses are old, and the wiring is just like not good enough because you need like a high voltage power outlet to put in an induction stove.

And so this is funny to me as like somebody who started a company that built a nice modern API for connecting to crappy old email APIs, is that the big innovation that's happened here is that people are now building induction stoves with a built-in battery, like a lithium ion battery, like you would find in a car.

And it's big, it's like five kilowatt-hours. And this allows you to just install one of these ranges with a normal outlet. And so it's like the API interface for housing infrastructure, that's just drop in.

You know, you've got to meet users where they're at, you got to meet houses where they're at. You got to meet software where it's at.

And I just love this stove, and I thought it was going to be 10 years, before I was going to be able to get one because I live in a very old house.

And I was like, "I'm not going to rip it down to the studs and run all new wiring. I got to get like a main panel upgrade. It's complicated, and really expensive."

So it's made by a company called Copper Home, and it's called the Charlie, and it's literally a drop in range that you can just replace your gas stove with. Way healthier, way better, recommended.

Isaac: And the idea is that you'll always finish cooking, before the battery runs out, basically?

Christine: Yeah, so they only need the high power draw for a very short amount of time.

Isaac: Mm-hmm.

Christine: And actually, the battery's big enough that if you have a power outage, you can cook for an entire day using just the battery, so it's kind of cool.

Justin: That's cool. All right, my pick is, well, you know, we work at a company that makes things for engineers, so I try and code as much as possible.

So I always have an engineering-focused one. My pick this week is Cursor Rules.

This is a new feature that Cursor, which is a code editor that's more AI-focused for developers, this is a feature they came out with that lets you kind of basically write this context for the AI of how your code base works.

And what they've done is let you kind of break it up into a bunch of different files, and the AI programming agent, will automatically select the correct Cursor Rules to apply when it's actually running itself as an agent to have context.

So you can kind of tell it, "Hey, if you're looking to add something to that bar, it's in this file, this is how we register endpoints, things like that."

And this is the best I've seen of an AI actually being able to understand a large code base with this. It's kind of given me a glimpse of the future of not just programming, but just working with AI agents in general, of sort of having like this meta layer of managing the AI agents.

And you know, I think over the past few years, we've seen these ais like improve their coding benchmarks, and it's like, "Oh, GPT or 03 is the 50th best coder in the world."

That's on these little tiny programming problems that are in these short little blocks. It's not on these massive code bases of 500,000 lines of code.

And now, with Cursor Rules, I'm starting to see a glimpse of AI being able to take on these monument, or small tasks in monumental milieus.

And yeah, so if you have an engineering team that you work with, make sure they're using Cursor Rules, they're badass. And you can get the AI agent to write the Cursor Rules for you by looking through your code base, which is kind of cool. That's my pick.

Justin: Love that.

Isaac: Justin, what do you got?

Justin: So I've become a wellness enthusiast, over the last year and a half or so, since I've realized, apparently, I'm not going to live forever.

So anyway, I'm into all the things. I've got all the supplements, and I've got all the, you know, basically, if there's an opportunity for me to try something when it comes to wellness and longevity, like I'm in.

I actually love this new hydrogen-infused water bottle. Have you guys seen this thing?

I'm showing the water bottle, and it infuses like four and a half parts per million or something into the water, and it's antioxidant, good for inflammation. I've noticed a bit more energy, so I love it.

Christine: Wow, that is crazy. Do you do Brian Johnson's "don't die" stuff?

Justin: I mean, I think he's a interesting dude in every sense of the word. I think, he maybe taking it a little bit far, but power to him.

But I do think that there's a lot of information out there about food and wellness, and you know, the food pyramid and just how wrong so much of what we've been taught about food has been, and how to think about longevity and wellness, and the importance of sugar and inflammation.

And so it's become a, you know, I don't think I'm at the Brian Johnson level, but I find it fascinating, and yeah, this is, what is it called, Echo Go.

I think it might be the world's most expensive water bottle, so it's not for the faint of heart, but I really do enjoy it. I think it's good.

Isaac: For those who can't see, it looks pretty badass, I'm not going to lie.

Christine: I hadn't heard that one. And I would also consider myself to be a wellness enthusiast, so you taught me something new today, Justin.

Justin: Awesome.

Christine: Cool. Well, I think that's a wrap for today. Thank you so much, Justin, for joining us and giving us an hour of your time, and hope everybody enjoyed tuning into the show.

Justin: Thanks everybody. It was my pleasure.