13 | Arthur Sossin on Leveraging AI to Build Sustainable Tech Startups

In this episode of The AI Market Playbook, Audrey Chia sits down with Arthur, a seasoned professional who transitioned from medical imaging research to building his own AI business. Arthur shares his fascinating journey from Estonia to working in multiple countries, spending over a decade in research before diving into AI entrepreneurship. He discusses the challenges of moving from corporate to entrepreneurship, the importance of personal branding, and how AI founders can refine their positioning. 

Tune in for Arthur's actionable tips on navigating the tech landscape, leveraging AI, and building a sustainable business.

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Transcript

riverside_artur_& audrey _ aug 30, 2024 001_artur_sossin podcas: 0:00

welcome back to the AI Market Playbook, where we cover actionable frameworks to help you leverage AI in business. I'm Audrey Chair, your host, and today I have with me a special guest author who has had incredible journey, spending over a decade of experience now, originally from Estonia. Arthur has made the bold decision in 2011 to leave his small hometown and pursue new opportunities in more than four countries. In fact, he has spent over 10 successful years in medical imaging research. Now, after being a scientist, product owner, team leader, and coach, Arthur has dived headfirst into the world of AI. Thank you for joining us, Arthur. Good to be here, Robin. Good to be here. Now your background story is nothing short of amazing, right? I would love for you to tell us a bit more about yourself and you know, how your journey has been. Yeah, of course Yeah, it's been a long one. Been places, changed roles, learned languages as you pointed out Yeah, where should I start? So yeah, 2011, I left my, my hometown, Tallinn. it's very small, Estonia. You can look it up, peaceful, a lot of greenery, you know. and I started like doing studies and internships because I wanted to dive into the tech world. We didn't have many industry opportunities in my home country. So that was the obvious choice. I've spent two years in Finland, three years in France, basically upgrading my education to PhD level and started working. Then I went to Germany and that's where I spent most of the time of my career. doing medical imaging research. then like last year's more into product, product ownership, coaching. So, basically leading teams, all of that. And a lot of that, like on the technical side was related to AI technologies. We didn't call them AI back then. It was like. Machine learning or, you know, like data science, for example, like that's, that term is still around. Right. So a lot of dads and, but you know, like corporate culture to me was like, you know, like you could, you could hit certain milestones, but I always felt that, you know, I was just using 30 to 50 percent of my potential. So that line, that's a quote right there. All right. All right. Cool. So yeah, so like, and at some point, like, I think like it was 2019. To be honest, like I was in this like a hardcore startup accelerator where we tested one of our projects internally. right here. And I felt that I had, like, basically the mindset and the drive to do something like this on my own, but it was just like a hint and, you know, that grew with me. I learned stuff. I tried a few ideas, but it wasn't really trying. Not really. Not like now. Right. So it was just like fooling around, toying around with, you know, Like a friend or two, you know, we'd do some projects, but we never really took it seriously. And then 23rd, 2023. So last year, layoffs hit like a lot of tech sector, companies got hit, right? ours included and I wasn't laid out, laid off, but, it was a trigger for me, you know, a trigger to think about what do I really want to do in life? Do I really want to stay here? And, you know, if you call that growth. And, or I want to do something for my own, like embrace the unknown, basically get out and really leverage, like my full set of skills. Because I was, as I said, like I was leveraging literally 30 to 50%. And then I started building my brand. That was October, 2023. I struggled. Like it was all new to me. I wasn't good at copywriting. I was good at writing. I wrote books. Tons of stuff, like research articles, presentations, all that stuff. but it was different. So it was a different medium. So I had to learn and I had to take my hits, so to say. Right. also like the niche, like the direction, I chose the IES, but you know, like now looking back, I'm thinking like, that's, that was so tofu, like all of that, like totally awareness content, not like focused on, on an offer. And I think that was a mistake. I didn't have the, let's say anybody who could guide me at that point. Now I'm doing better in that sense. I'm trying to help also other people, particularly I'm focusing on, AI tech founders because like I know a lot of people here locally, and also in my network that kind of like dived in. I mean, there's a lot of funding going on in. The ice piece that's, that's obvious. I mean that you would want to jump in there, you have the skills, but then again, like a lot of them struggle with the business model. A lot of them struggle with marketing, with sales, like basically like making it into something profitable and sustainable on the market. They can build, they have a lot of product experience for sure, but, There's like this gap on the other side. And, and I think also like, especially like market evaluation, like even before we go to product, because like, yeah, I can't, it's not a magic bullet basically. Right. So it's a very sophisticated tool. You know, it, I mean, you advocate for it. I love that about you that you advocate about, the synergy of, you know, human plus AI, I think that is the way basically, right. That's how you got to think about it. You have to find a business opportunity. You got to say like, okay, like, is there a. tangible use case where we get extra ROI, like, or, you know, like time efficiency from AI. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Let's put it in there. That is amazing to hear. And honestly, there was so much to unpack in that just like, you know, the past few minutes, right? So I would love to know a little bit more about basically what was that, you know, push factor? Where you decided like, I am going to build a business for myself instead of joining another company. What made you so confident to take that leap of faith? Cause I know it can be really hard. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you know, I, I, I followed your story and it was one of those stories that inspired me, but, There wasn't one push factor, it just kind of culminated because I'm like this type of person that I absorb a lot of data and then I just make a decision, right? So like I'm, that I'm saying like, okay, this is like 90 percent probability, this is the right choice, something like that, you know, you know, but there was the gut feeling as well, you know, that was part of the factors, but I think like, there are two factors actually. So like, as I said, like when I started and I wasn't sure, like if I was going to keep my job or not, and I did like 40 plus job applications, you know what I saw? I saw the same. Well, I don't want to swear like, let's say same conditions, in other places where I got accepted. I got through to the final interviews and I thought to myself, like, this is so demotivating, like, like, do I really want to do this? You know, so 40 plus job applications. at the same time, I was reading a lot of business book and this one, I really recommend that one really stuck with me in terms of mindset. It was like millionaire fast lane. We're just talked about. Yeah, just talked about the fact that, you know, like you can give your 200 percent or 300 percent at the company, and then you get your 2 3 percent extra salary increase. Is that worth it? You know, is that really worth it? Because, you know, your time on this earth is limited. So, you know, like, and that really stuck with me because I thought to myself, like, I can give 400 500 percent and, you know, is that the point? but it wasn't really about money. It's more about like, you know, freedom to choose because, like, The more I work in corporate, the higher you climb, the more constraints you have on you on on on yourself. Right? So you have less creativity. You have less freedom to choose. You know, what do you do? How do you play it? Like, what what are the tool stack that you're going to use? Like all of that. And I just thought like, yeah, I think like, I don't think entrepreneurship is for everybody, by the way, you know, like I talked with a lot of my friends and I think for some of them that is not the way, but I'm a strong advocate for working, you know, for yourself, like at least being self employed. And I just. You know, kind of like push a little bit, nudge them a little bit, saying like, try the solopreneur Avenue, maybe, because I think we have a lot of tools these days, like they'll give us the leverage to make that pretty much a comfortable way of life. And I think it's, it can be a lot more fulfilling than, than the corporate lifestyle, especially for those people who are basically experts, the specialists in a certain field. Definitely. I think what you said, right? I think the idea of freedom and being able to maximize your potential is what drives many of us here to do what we love, right? I think that idea of being able to chase certain goals that you know you can achieve and then also being able to overcome those challenges. But speaking of challenges, I would love to know a bit more about, you know, your Journey, setting up your own AI business because I, for one have pivoted, I think seven, eight times in the past year, and I would love to know how it has been for yourself. Yeah, yeah, sure. Sure. So, yeah, I mentioned a little bit about that. Like in the beginning, I was with a couple of other friends and we wanted to do an AI startup and, that's a story. And so maybe for another time, but the point is like, I was like trying to validate market at that time, not product, but really market. In parallel with building my brand, in parallel with doing a day job, and that was hard. Like, that was, like, really not sustainable, so, like, I've, I think, like, if I had, like, more focused time, I would have gone to a conclusion where I am now faster, but that doesn't really matter, you know? And, So that was one experiment and we found a few interesting markets, but then at the end of the day, we all had different goals, different life situations. So we kind of expanded at the end. I tried a newsletter, then it kind of like made me niche down to AI content creation, but I thought to myself, like, everybody's doing it like literally, like, this is not like, this is a very broad market. And I thought to myself, like, is this like the, again, like maximizing my potential. so, In parallel, I got better at content creation and generally like conversions outreach, all of that stuff. Like it just like, and then I thought to myself, like, okay, like what would be a good niche, you know, and to start talking to people more and more. I think, I think that that's the key part. Everybody's like few people talk about is that, you know, let's say you said you pivoted. Right. So, I mean, I'm working on my positioning right now. And what I want to do is I want to talk to as many people as possible because everything else is assumptions like even with AI, it's still an assumption. They could give you like a good pre validation, right? These tools, but you have to go out there. And the thing is, like, after the 1st 10 calls. I thought to myself, like, hell, there's more to this than, than what I thought. Right. So, so, and, and then, like, then you start to improve it the way I see it. Like I kind of use the Hormozy model these days, like two months in, like when I really focused on the, let's say lead gen offer, right. what I think about is like, okay, you have a marketing component, you have an outreach or sales component. Right before that you have a product. Okay. You need that full loop first you built, but you do not over focus on any of those components, like until you have that end to end, and then you start iterating across the whole loop. That's why I stopped posting six times a week because it's meaningless. You know, why do I need that? I don't need that. I have enough inbound and outbound to work with. Right. And there's, you know, let's say more of my time needed to work on the actual product. Right. So, or. With customers even better. Right. So, so that part, and then you kind of like loop through that. And I think that that's very, that's very good. And I think that, you know, like a lot of the feed advice is more towards like, yeah, max out your marketing. Right. But if your offer is not there, then, you know, you're going to have a hard time making it into a sustainable business. Because the way I see it is like, you want to get to a point where it's your product, your program, your service, whatever that is. It's so good that people just refer you like, and that's like the dominant place where your leads come from. Like, I think that you have to get there, but to get there, you have to like go through this loop a lot of times. And you know, like, that's why, as I said, like, I think like at some point I'll get back to posting more content. but as of today I'm trying to kind of like, Have this pipeline in place and then just loop through it, you know, as, as soon as I know more, the product gets better than I could say like, okay, like now I can handle more leads. I know enough about the market and I can work more with clients and let's say, spend less time asking about problems and things like that, or learn from the people I'm working with. And, then I could just like increase my marketing funnel, hire people, you know, that's, that's how you scale afterwards. yeah, but so far, so far it's been good in that sense. Like, as you said, like, I, I'm, I don't think I'll pivot drastically. It's more about like tweaking the positioning. Right. To make it even more niche, even more specific, because like I started with tech founders, I went to AI tech founders, and even now I'm thinking like, maybe I'll niche it down even further, because I want to be like the guy for the niche and basically like address like the max amount of their problems possibly, you know, and, and from there, like, once that's nailed down, I could think about, okay, let's broaden this, you know, Up a little bit. The riches are in the niches. And that's probably what you probably want to focus on, right? Even, even for myself, I think, interestingly, like what you say, it was a lot about talking to customers, figuring out where your offer stands. So I started off with trying to build bespoke AI copywriting systems because I thought if it was working for me, it should work for someone else. But then again, when you try to pitch an offer like this to other customers, again, you have your competitors in the market. Are they AI ready? Are they able to embrace that? Do they want to make an investment, right? So there are so many other things where, you know, your solution could be a vitamin instead of a painkiller. And you realize it doesn't really fit well in the market. And that's also why I had to pivot my model, but I wouldn't have known if I didn't have those conversations with my customers. And I think perhaps one interesting thing that you said at the beginning, right. Was how you started posting top or final content tofu at first. And now you sort of move down the funnel to mid of final and bottom of final content. Tell us more about that process and what it means. Well, okay. So funnel wise, right? So you want to close the person, right? You want to sell to them, but the problem is like this is the sale and this is the person who doesn't know about you, right? And between that, there's this chasm of trust that you got to build. Right. And you build that through interactions. You know, there are different models that say it's like what, 15, 21, whatever, like a lot of interactions that you need. But think about it this way. Like I, if you want me to buy from you, I need to consume a lot of your content because like at some point, like for example, if Audrey pitched me something, like I would probably buy, you know, because like, and if I needed it, like that, those are the two things. Like if I need, For example, AI copywriting for a certain aspect of my business. I know Audrey, I'd buy it. Like the, like the close rate would be very high, but to get to that point, you have to basically guide your prospect, through the funnel, what we're just talked about. And to do that, you have to address different stages of awareness. So tofu would be like very high level. Like for me, that would be entrepreneurs, for example, that would be tofu, right? So just. Posting entrepreneurship content. A lot of people, not everybody's matching the ICP. MoFu is more closer to your ICP. It's more about your authority content, about what you can do, what is your unique strength, unique experience, et cetera. And both where you add case studies, you add something actionable, something really valuable. And it's, it should be really ICP targeted, I think. you know, and, and I would even go beyond that to say like, I think what we have on the feed, like in terms of social media posts, I think that is still, you know, weak in terms of Beaufort. And I think you need to go further and go email, to be honest, you know, like I closed my newsletter back in the day, but I am thinking about building a email sequences because that again, kind of nurtures this relationship, then closes this trust gap even further. and you have again, tools, you can do that. It's, it's highly scalable. You can just like create relevant material. You can even personalize it. that's also doable. And I think like that would be like a good, also addition to like the MoFu, like middle of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel parts. Notice that initially when I first started, I was. Aiming more for vanity matrix, right? Also because I wanted to use the vanity matrix that you're following your engagement to build authority quote unquote, right? So I was getting huge amounts of traffic in the beginning But the number of qualified leads were so tiny And then you're just gonna get traffic in but you're not gonna convert them and that's an issue And also like yourself I probably pivoted, to mid and bottom of funnel So, of course my Impressions and engagement would drop with the new kind of content because not as many people are interested But then you realize that people who are actually paying attention are people who are more likely to be your prospects So that is also something that If you are, you know, starting out on LinkedIn and trying to get attention and trying to get leads, you probably need to really think about your funnel and how you want to build your content strategy. And with that author, I would also love to know, you know, what kinds of projects do you normally help your clients with? And if you have an example to show us, that would be amazing. Of course, well, I'm currently like in a beta testing phase of my program. You could say that, I'm doing a lot of free strategy calls to absorb more about the market as well. But like those that I'm working with in the, early stage of the program, like just last, last week, we talked about exactly this point. And he said, like, after two calls and just applying, certain strategies with respect to outreach, with respect to, being visible beyond your own content. And I told, I told him like, just comment, because like, I think he had like 4, 000 following engagement was low. And I told him like, do you engage? No, no, I don't. Okay. That's the first thing, you know, and, and go to the big accounts, you know, drive traffic to yours, drive awareness. And I also told him about strategic outreach, how you could basically, if you know, at least vaguely who your ICP is, you can, make a list, engage a little bit with their content, personalize the outreach message, and you get, it gets you through the door. And he said, like, after seven, seven or eight days, added 120 followers, got two qualified leads, inbound. Yeah. So, yeah, it, it works and he's not, he's not a big account. He's, he's under 4k. So, yeah. And that's what you say. Like, I think like, I remember when I started, I was like, I was looking up to you guys, I was thinking like 20, 30 K, like I got to get there first before actually, you know, like, Getting some business. And that's actually not true. Like, I think like, I think like, you can, you can have even like less than a thousand followers per se, but if you're good at sourcing, potential clients, and if you have a good offer, I would say like, you need to have a good offer, right? you will get leads. Like you will get leads. You just, you just can't get them like inbound purely. Like it's like, it's nice to have that, but to get there, it takes you months. Like. Literally months. but I think, I think like if you start with, with this kind of strategic outbound strategy, work on your offer, refine your offer from those interactions, do some content. Yeah. I also recommend that I say like, you know, do like at least like, I don't know, like if you can do three pieces of content a week, If you can, at least one or two, just to have some kind of portfolio, that'll help prospects you engage with know more about you and build that trust, kind of kind of close that trust gap even further. so yeah, like, and, and I got more examples, like I got another one who was more focused on, interviewing and saying, like, I just like gave him some outreach suggestions and he booked, What was it? Like 30 to 40 interviews, for his new product to kind of conduct market research. Amazing. So, so yeah, and, yeah, and, and I'm, I'm really excited about this because like I'm learning more because like I, I was, I had certain assumptions and now I see like there are gaps in my program and I'm kind of like adding stuff in. Trying to like balance it all out because like I just want to sit down for a month and just create and I know that's the wrong thing to do. That's, that's where I tell myself, no, you know, because I'm a builder at heart and I tell myself, no, you don't do that. You know, you, you, you, you, you push out what you're ashamed of and you, you iterate, you improve it gradually. That's what you do. That's right. It's about learning and optimizing along the way. Right. And the more you put content out, the more feedback you get, you sort of understand how everything works a lot better and then your growth and compounds. And I think you were also mentioning you probably use AI in this process of, you know, creating content or lead qualification, right? Would you be able to show us something, your workflows? Of course, of course. Well, cons is one thing, but I have, the, yeah, the lead qualification process I could share. And this is not scripted at all. Like explicitly, I'm going to do this this way. So we are in for a treat everyone. Yes. Yeah. So I hope this works. but yeah, just to, you could see the process of what you could do. So. what I would do is like, I'm explicitly not using the sales navigator because I think you can get a lot of lead sourced even without sales navigator. If you just like to, searches, add some keywords and filters, and that's what I did here. And I'm just looking for, for founders in certain locations, a certain profile language. And, yeah, I'm just gonna switch the screen so that it's easier for me to look at this. So for those of you who are listening to the podcast and you can't see the screen, what Arthur is showing us is a screen of his LinkedIn page. He is not on Sales Navigator. He's only using the search function where he has filtered people by location in the screen. Of course, Probably title, right? Yep. Yeah, exactly. Awesome. all right. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a small list for us to, to qualify. And Hey, we've got the founder of Hagen here. That's great. So this is how I start sourcing them, right? So I have like, I have one person and he's actually mashing my ICP more or less. The next thing you want to do is you want to go here to the rights. I mean, used to call it similar profiles, but continue exploring. Okay. You just show all what LinkedIn does. It matches people to the person you're currently viewing. And a lot of people don't know this and LinkedIn is a networking platform. They're really good at this. And. So good that you will find, for example, in this case, like, AI founders or co founders in the same location. Right? So like, like it's, it's literally like doing a good job for you. So I'm just going to go and open these profiles up. okay. What, who do you got here? Yeah. Microsoft AI. Okay. Maybe that's a little bit big for me. Let's do this guy. Co founder at Haygen. Okay. We have already have the founder. Codeium. Okay. So that gives us four, let's say this guy. And the thing is like, I don't explicitly want to look at their profiles because you could do that. what I want is just, there are LinkedIn links that I could just put in and, filter, you know? Okay. So I'm gonna switch to relevance over here. And, what I did is I built a tool that would take every one of these, LinkedIn URLs and. Analyze their data. What that means is that it will access their profile. It will get their posts. Well, actually, to be honest, the last post in particular, it will get company info, it will get, funding info if it's available on the company, because that's relevant to your ICP qualification. what else, and then what it's going to do, it's going to use that information to try to qualify the lead because in the knowledge base, it has information about my avatar, very detailed demographics, psychographics, thermographics, all that stuff. It's all there. It also has some information on my offer, and it's going to like, kind of like match that, to that data internally. It's, it's known to the tool. And then it's going to output a summary, a qualification score, and, based on the qualification score, it is going to, is going to add, outreach message. so right now, default wise, I set it to 70, but you know, you can choose whatever you want. 70 percent match, right? And, yeah, let's just do that. I'm just going to go here and just actually get the, you actually gave it a score, right? So you, you have some matrix where you score your prospects. Correct. Correct. Yeah, that's exactly what I have. So this is a little bit manual, but what you could do is like, if you have a CSV, you could just import it, right? But this is just for the sake of the demonstration, right? So Got it. So for those of you who are listening, what Arthur is doing is taking the URLs of the different LinkedIn profiles and popping it into a table on relevance. Now, relevance is an extremely powerful tool. If you're thinking of, you know, building workflows, processes, do check that out. Thank you. Okay. I've got three, four. How long did it take you to view this process after? Well, a couple of hours, but, I'm, well, not to brag, but I'm pretty good at writing prompts by now, you know, just a couple of hours. Yeah. But you, you tweak it. I think like, also like based on my outreach efforts, I tweak the templates that are used in the, outreach messages. Right. So that's important. I think like, that's like, that's a general rule. If you're building AI tools, the more context you put in. The better it gets. So that means like, that's the thing, like we mentioned like AI and magic boat, no, it is not AI is a stupid student. That's what it is. Like the language models are stupid students. And that means the more knowledge, the more of your expertise you put in, the better the output gets. So think of yourself as the teacher who needs to teach the students. So like, if you, if you will just like have a few instructions, It will do okay, but if you have very detailed instructions, loads of examples, right, you're basically like directing the student very specifically, giving it a, a step by step guide, and that will get you a good outputs. Okay. So I'm just going to say generate with tool and I'm going to go lead screener and okay, so URL, and then I'm going to set the threshold. yeah, I said 70, let's stick with 70, confirm, continue. yeah, I'll burn my credits. It's okay. And now, and now it should just run, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah, it's running. Yes, it's running. It'll take, it'll take some time because it, it goes through scrubbing the profiles and, running the prompts. I can maybe just add a few details about this irrelevance. free is pretty generous, I would say. Okay. Because you get like a hundred credits per day and that means like even this tool you could run it 20 times every day. So that means like I could screen 20 leads every day Then you also mentioned while we're waiting right is that AI is like your student right and I have also seen that myself. I don't call AI my student I call it my supercharged intern. So Yeah, what I found as a copywriter is when I teach AI how to think like myself, especially when I break down my copywriting workflows into eight different steps, then it gets me to a much better output than if I were to just ask it to come up with a landing page because it has its own idea of what a good landing page looks like and usually isn't that great. So instead of asking it to like, Hey, write a landing page for me, I give it Eight steps that I personally would go through in order to get there. And the fun thing is, this is beautiful for me because it's exactly the way I think. I think in steps. So I believe that if you're a more structural person and you like thinking, you know, in like, taking a step back to think about how you think, you will realize that AI works pretty well for you. Do you, do you, do you think that that's how it runs for you as well? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's because of the nature of, let's say the models that are under the hood. Like they are like, basically they're predicting the next word. That's, that's what it does. So like you, you have to be very specific and like sequential when you do things. So. So yeah, so I think, yeah, I think steps is good. And as I said, like stupid student example, right? Same thing, right? You just write a really detailed manual and steps, right? that tells it exactly, what it needs to do. So yeah, I could, I could totally relate to that. I could totally relate to that. Okay, I'm going to pause here and put Mark in this clip. Do you think the relevance is not working right now? Because I know sometimes it messes up. No, it's, it's working. It's just, it just takes time. that's what I, I mean, yeah, it's already, Filling up the the deeds you can see it. Okay. Okay. Okay, so I'm gonna mark the clip again And then we will roll from there. So three two one All right, getting some first results. Yeah, it does take time sometimes, but, you could just like go and drink coffee or do something else. I mean, important is just to input the list and that's it. And, yeah, I could see already that some people are not qualified. We could just look, look into that and see why. Okay. So, So what it gives is the scoring results in the cell. This looks like prospect summary. So it's just basically giving me a summary from their profile, what they are, then there's a lead score. And now I can also see why this is like, it says like a location doesn't match target tech hubs, right? Okay. Psychographic fit. Okay. It doesn't have data on that. No mention of technology preferences. Company size falls within a capitalization range. Cultural fit. Okay. It doesn't have the data. Okay. And you see like, that's, and that's something that I've integrated into it as well, like do not invent stuff, right? So like, do not say that, Oh yeah, he's probably a fit because X, Y, Z. Right. and you know, like, and. When I look at this, is that like, I would run through a sample and then I would just like adjust my lead threshold a little bit. And this is still a work in progress in the sense that, you know, some of these are harder to match. Like for example, these things, right. But I think like, here's my hypothesis about this. I think like if, if there's some post history for the prospect, then you can try to infer it from, from that, you know, and, and I, I might actually add that, at a later stage. But in general, it's giving me a pretty good summary. And already here I could say like, well, okay, yeah, I could approach them because they have a firmographic fit. and a financial fit, right? but the demographic fit doesn't match and there's no data for others, right? So I could, I could make that choice myself. let me see like how qualified prospect would look like. Okay. So this is how it looks like when they're qualified, location match, company match, expertise, Aligns with B2B AI tech founder behaviors. Cool. Psychographic fit technograph, like hitting all the right bells and whistles, right? Decision making powers there, right? And key takeaways. It's just, it's also highlighting. some of the, let's say key things, key insights that it's, it's, it's gotten from the profile and company data. All right. And then like, if, if that's the case, then what it does is like, it will craft outreach messages for me that I could just, you know, throw off the bat or after a few interactions. And this is just based on some of like the approaches that I use, you know, like it's, it's, it's all about anchors. like, either I'm anchoring towards the post or I'm anchoring to a place, at the scene. Right. So I haven't been, no, I haven't actually been to San Francisco, so I can actually refer stuff in San Francisco, you know, and I've been to other cities as well. And that, that thing works really, really well. Like it doesn't even have to be. a coffee shop or restaurant. It could also be just an experience or a site that you've seen there. You know, like for example, like I've been to Singapore nine years ago. Like I have tons of stuff I could tell you about Singapore, you know, and I think that's a good anchor because then that puts us on some common ground. Right. the other one you can anchor is, what else do we have? We, the potential generic, okay. Vision. Okay. Yeah. So you can appeal to their experience, your company vision, right. And you're also anchoring in your, their posts, right. what else? Yeah, experience anchor and, and also a reference to a place. And, and I would probably, I would experiment with these, as I said, like, as I move along, but generally this, this is a good start. So basically, like, I never, like. Empty handed when I approach a prospect. So I already have a summary about who they are, what they're about. what kind of messages should I, should I craft in their direction? And I wouldn't always take these off the bat. I could just, you know, take one and then edit it, whatever, you know, and as I said, like, I have some ideas, like how to take this further, you know, you could use this also for when you already qualify the prospect, you're getting on call with them, you can. and what I'm doing is I'm actually like pretty much enhanced it and focused more on, profile, like getting data from their profile and their company. I actually have a matching one like this and it's not qualifying. It's just giving me a very detailed summary, and like matching, parts of their experience or company, et cetera, to what I'm offering and to the avatar so that like I have like a bigger picture, maybe like what they're doing in terms of their posts. So what are they about? And yeah, I just, I don't, every time I use AI tools, I just feel like I'm Iron Man or something, you know, like I'm putting on my armor and like, it's, it's just so cool, you know? And yeah, so like, there's a lot of things you can, you can do with this. You can, you can also think about content, right? You know, you're also all about content. You could think about, like that's an idea I have, like you could think about templatizing, posts, high performing posts, right? Like these days. I use Clia, right, you know, Clia, and I, I just source it from there. It's all manual. You know, I go to a profile, your profile, whoever's profile, but I could use something like this and just like, you know, stream it, have the first draft of templates from high performing posts of selected creators in your niche. And then I could go from there. So that's something I might implement, right? Yeah. I love about this process is that again, you're not just Asking AI to do something for you, you are using it as part of your process and then to reach out to them in a way that's a lot more targeted and in a way that allows you to really create that relevancy, right? Or like, you know, that common ground, which would otherwise be a super manual process where you have to read through their profile, look for, you know, certain things to highlight. And that takes a long time. So I can give you an example. I'm, I was using sales navigator just a few weeks ago. And, again, like you can do it through search, but the point is like you, you scroll through the profile and yeah, that takes time. Let's say you're doing a hundred of those, 200 of those every day. And I think like for 200 profiles, it costs me about 2, 000. Two hours ish, like here, I just, you know, I could just source the links, you know, I could just probably spend 30 minutes sourcing it, let the thing do its job and then come back from my other activity and see, what the results are. And as I said, like, I would probably maybe even suggest like in the beginning, like when you're not sure, you know, what's going on. About, you know, like your avatar, et cetera, that you have a softer threshold, and maybe focus on certain parameters, from your avatar. And, and then like, you know, because like, that's, that's the thing about leads, right? You, you can't think you, you, you can't say like, oh, I'm going to be super strict on this. But then you have a very small pool and in the beginning, you just want to talk to more people, right? So you have to be a little bit more I think like open and like I just put 70 to be strict just to show that Like it can make the strict cut and just to kind of showcase that they're like different components to the qualifying score But in principle, you could just say like, okay. Yeah, just want a 50 percent match That's enough for me. And, we can go from there. So as you can tell, Arthur is a really numbers guy. And from the beginning of the conversation to now, it's really like numbers driven, which I love. I'm more like creative and conceptual, but I absolutely agree that it's great to be able to put a value to what you're looking for so that you can really find what you're looking for. But, you know, beyond this demo, I would also love to know. What other ways do you think business owners can integrate AI into their workflows? What has worked for you, your clients, or what have you seen out there? Oh, well, I mean, we touched upon content creation, right? And this is, this is another system that I also have in the program. And, I see other people doing similar things. what you can do is I think like AI is really good for formatting posts. Right. And, you, like, there are different ways you can go about this. personally, I think like after some time, I recommend you really define your own database of templates, right? What you like essentially. And then like, depending on the post, you would select the template. You would make that decision because like, I actually have a system that does that. For me and it's okay, but I think like I would like to have more freedom in terms of, you know, what template, I would pick, but in general, that's how it works, right? So you have, you have a lot of long form, you can call it, right? So you either research it, but most of the time, like from business owners, you got case studies, you got. Like, you know, customer calls, you got your product info, your blogs, your, I don't know, maybe you're running a newsletter, all of that. And you could take that and you can repurpose that into shorter form, which is social media posts. And for that, AI is pretty good. And if you have templates, that's basically like, a way to reformat and restructure, I think Microsoft Word and, you know, fonts, titles, or whatever, like it's the same thing. you just have to have a good style that you like, or like a set of styles. And then you could just say like, okay, yeah, this is a, I don't know, this is a listicle post. For example, I'm going to put this filter on listicle templates. I'm going to take this template and I'm going to let AI reformat it. And then you're Pretty much 78 percent there. Most of the times. One additional thing that I would love to add is that what you said before, it's the human AI hybrid approach, right? Because if you were to just plug and play AI content, sure. Sometimes, you know, no one can tell, but at the same time. To build a personal brand or a strong one still requires a little bit of that human touch. And I think when you bring in your unique take or your personal story, that's when people remember who you are. And that's how you really build like a stronger, you know, long lasting brand. And with that, I would love to ask if you have any final tips for, you know, entrepreneurs or other founders who are trying to get started on their personal branding journey. What would you advise them? Just, just, just go for it. You know, just, just do as many repetitions as possible and stay disciplined. You know, it's hard. It's hard. It's never easy. You know, you, it's like this, right? But the more iterations you do, the better you get at something, whatever that is. Personal branding included. I would also say that if you, I mean, you want to build a business, talk to people, like literally talk to people, because in the beginning, when we're starting out, we know this much about the problem. When in the reality, the problem is so much bigger, you know? And you know, I would like, again, like challenge the advice on the feed that says put out content. You'll figure it out later. Don't put out content until you've spoken to at least 10 people. You know, that's, that'll be my advice. Like speak to at least 10 people of your hypothetical market, you know, get some insights and then say like, okay, yeah, I think I, I get that. And I think like I can target these people and it might be wrong. You might be pivoting afterwards, like not even like refining, but really pivoting, but you have the experience now. So that means the next time you're going to do it, you're going to have a process. So, Arthur, to wrap things up, can you tell us a bit more about your program and where people can find you? Sure. yeah, so my program helps, B2B AI tech founders, get a sustainable flow of leads through LinkedIn. So it has different elements in it, profile optimization, brand building overall, like brand fundamentals, strategic outreach, content creation strategies, And also tons of AI tools, obviously. And yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. that's the easiest channel to find me on. And, also I'm on there like regularly, so you could pretty much reach out. I'm pretty reactive. Just make sure to add a message. Then you get through guaranteed because like. 90 percent of people just don't write messages that I feel that's really impersonal. It's true though. So be, be sure to write a message and send also a DM and get your B2B AI strategy sorted. So thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure having you on the show and thank you listeners for tuning in. 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