The AI Marketer's Playbook
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The AI Marketer's Playbook
38 | Eugene Woo on AI Design Tools for Non-Designers
In this episode of The AI Marketers Playbook, Audrey Chia talks to Eugene Woo, CEO of Venngage, about transforming how businesses approach design. Eugene shares his journey from engineer to founder and explains how AI is reshaping visual content creation. They cover prompt engineering, using AI to scale design assets, building for internal communications, and why staying focused on your niche might be the smartest business move in an age of constant disruption.
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Hello and welcome back to the AI Marketers Playbook, where we cover actionable frameworks to help you leverage AI and marketing strategies in your business. I'm Audrey Chia and today I have with me Eugene Woo the founder and CEO of Venngage an AI powered platform, empowering non-designers to create professional visuals with. Eased now. Eugene has a background in engineering and a deep love for storytelling. Combining them both to eliminate creative friction by making design accessible with the smart use of ai. I am super excited to dive into today's conversation. Welcome to the show, Eugene.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Thank you very much, Audrey. it's a pleasure to be here.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:I took a peek at your LinkedIn profile, and I know you have a wealth of experience in, you know, a couple of different areas. Would love to know a bit more about your journey before starting this company and your, I think 13 years right at Venngage Yes. sure. I mean, like, like to to give, you know, long story short, I have a background in engineering and software engineering. that my first job. I have a degree in computer electrical engineering. and I had a, you know, and from my job as a professional software developer engineer, I kind of just, I had a very traditional career path I worked for, started out, my, my first job was with Motorola. It may not even be in LinkedIn anymore'cause so long ago. And I kind of just went from big company. I did some stints in some smaller companies, had some stints in some startups, and then eventually, you know, went out and tried to do my own startup. I failed and then essentially went back getting a job, which is a very interesting experience. A lot entrepreneurs don't talk about that. and I think it's a good experience. people think it's the end of the world. It's not. I just went back and got a job again, and thankfully because there were lots of jobs as software developer, it was not an issue at all. and then I started again, I had a agency, I had a mobile app agency back in 2009, I wanna say maybe 10, when the mobile App store started and all that. So I was on that quote unquote Gold Rush. did some apps, and then eventually moved on to, infographics and design and you know, before I built Vanggage I built another tool called Visualize Me. was a resume tool that took your LinkedIn profile and just, connect your LinkedIn profile and it would visualize your experience. it would give you this infographic resume. Like it would be a timeline for your experience. There would be graphs for your scales. It was really cool. and I actually sold that company as a larger company called, Parchman. and then moved on to Venngage after that, which is the infographic and design, tool suite that I continue to run after 12 years. Wow. And that's like a super colorful background. I am so curious. How did you make the leap from, someone with an engineering background to design? Like there's such a big gap between both roles. how did that come about?
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:I get that question a lot. I get that question from my brother because he's the creative. I'm a twin, and my brother is actually a movie director. He's based in Southeast Asia, but he was based in Malaysia for a while. I'm from Malaysia originally, he always asks me, you are like the nerdy guy, like, how did you get into design? But long story short, I actually have not breached a gap yet. I'm not a designer, I'm not a professional designer, but I built tools for people like me who are non-designers. So Venngage is, kind of like Canva, we we're like a niche Canva. essentially it's a tool for non-designers. It's a simple to use tool, and I essentially. Bridge that gap by building a tool for my, for someone like me who didn't want to learn how to use like Adobe tools like the Illustrator and the Photoshops, which was very, very complicated. I mean, I learned a little bit about it, but I was like, wow, this tool is way too complicated. We need something a lot easier to build, you know, and back then I was building infographics. we need something and I can solve it with code. and, you know, with a, with a simple, you know, wizzywig editor. So, so I would say like, I definitely haven't breached a gap completely. I cannot design things like a professional designer, but I can get there with, well, especially now with templates and AI tools, you can get pretty far with, with design.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah. Wow. And since you've spent like 13 years, I'm sure. I'm sure the design landscape and the creative landscape must have changed a lot. Right? So, so how has that journey been for, you know, yourself as the founder of a company? like have, do you have to evolve the tool, you know, as times evolve? are there new needs in the market that you tried to address? What was it like?
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think when we started, so we started in one category. We started in infographics. That was like the only thing we did. and then, and then obviously, you know, like Canva came out and came, we actually started around the same time as Canva. Like it's, you know, and, and they've obviously blown up, like to be this massive company and they, you know, I think they started in social media and then they just went to every other category that you can think of. and we saw that, and as they were going, we were like, oh yeah, we should expand. So I think one is the expansion into adjacent categories. So we are in, we're not in many categories, but we're in like posters. Brochures mainly in business, I would say B2B business categories. more of the, the more boring design stuff. Like we do a lot of like, reports, plans, training, training, type things'cause they're closely related to infographics. So I'd say number one is that like evolving with the market, and. In the last few years, things have been moving from like more of a template base, tool. So, you know, like Canva and Ven Gauge and a, and a lot of our tools in this category, or mainly they're template based, right? You pick a template, the template looks nice, and then you just, you know, change the template, change the color, change the images. So in the last year or so, you, you're seeing this change from a template. Pretty much a template based design tool to more of a prompt based AI based tool where people now are, you know, instead of, and I can show you later on, like you're basically just prompting, and then whether we pick the template for you or we actually create the layouts. with ai there's different implementations depending on the, depending on what you're actually trying to create. we're now seeing that change where. You know, it goes from a template to an ai. And then same with, the, the assets in that design. So the icons and the images. Before it was all very stock. You know, people still use stock images and stock, don't get me wrong, it's still widely used, but there's definitely a shift now to generate, you know, image generation, right? Like, of assets and, and it's great for branding because it's a lot easier. Well, we can go into branding if you want, like. It's a lot easier to generate a set of icons that are branded as opposed to going and look for stock icons or stock photos. Everyone's gonna look different, like if you do, and that was one of the big problems we had before. So now with ai, the workflow is becoming like instead of going out and trying to look for things that match your brand, you can just generate it. Right? So, so I would say the workflow is slowly shifting into that and we've shifted our tools. Quite a fair bit. Like we build out a lot of AI tools and, and a, a, I would say AI pages slash tools, to sort of cater to that, to that change in, in the workflow.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah, I think it's very interesting, right? Because, with, you know, the evolution of tech and with new capabilities, I think people are starting to also be a lot more comfortable, exploring tools and then integrating these tools into their workflows. So perhaps in the past, what. A team might do is to outsource it to a creative industry. Now they are, they can do it in-house and they have maybe even non-designers being able to build out brand guides, being able to build out visuals that are still brand compliant. I think what is also interesting that what you said was the use of AI to generate things that are. perhaps a little bit more specific to your brand because other than like picking different icons, you can generate new icons, you can generate visuals that look and feel like your brand, which I think is interesting. What other kinds of, like maybe creative developments have you noticed, you know, over the past few years?
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:I think the, the, like if you look at the workflow of a designer, like a lot of times the first step is they. It's sort of the inspiration step where, you know, you go to Pinterest or you go to some other, you know, you get your mood bought out, you get, you know, you look at different, like you go to Behan and, or whatever it is. Look at other people's examples. I think if you start from that, even that process, the first step, now a lot of times the first step is, oh, I just go to image Generation N. And type in what I, what I want. Like let's say I want a, you know, a poster for, my birthday party or whatever. I'm just giving you an example. Instead of like looking for inspiration, now I'm looking for inspiration with image generation and I'm generating maybe four or five different examples and I can just change it. I'll go like, I want it to be look a bit more like playful, like change the color. You know, like I want the colors to be like more vibrant, for example. And you can do that. I wouldn't say it replaces the other process, but I, I'm seeing more and more of that, like even for me, like we're seeing more and more of that now. and in fact, we're building a, we're building a website, generator, a website builder that does that. So the inspiration stage is we generate a bunch of examples for you based on your prompt, and then you, you pick the style that you want and then we can generate more examples. And it sort of acts as that mood board. So, so I would say even at the inspiration stage, it's great for inspiration stage right now. It, it still doesn't replace the professional designer. So I would say along the way you still need, good design skills, but definitely inspiration and simple designs, like logos, like, you know, simple things I think AI can do, can get you like 80%, 90% of the way.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah. I think one interesting thing that maybe people don't realize is, a lot of people think that copy and design is easy. I am a copywriter, so I've heard that it's just words, right? Like, how hard can it
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah. Yeah.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Of an image and a font, how hard can it be? But what I don't realize is there's so much thought that goes behind making a piece of work stand out. and on a design front, because I work with so many designers, sometimes when the founder says. Just changing. Isn't it easy? And then they go Like, oh, you don't understand how much work went into that design. And I think as much as we love ai, that human eye for that design is still perhaps important in the process, especially in the, the ideation part. But what do you think would be perhaps, you know, a better ai, human workflow? Like in your opinion, what is that What is that ideal creative model or process look like?
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:So I think you, you are very right that. A lot of people, especially on social media, they're like, oh yeah, you know, like, Desi, you know, Figma is dead. You can just like design a whole, you know, you can just design everything, with AI right now or whatever the big claim is. I, I think you are absolutely right. The. You still need skills. So even that example I give about like, oh, you're getting, you're generating examples for inspiration. You still need good taste. Like you said, you still need to know if you're a brand like designer, if you want branding, you still need to know what is on brand, off brand, right? You still need to know like what I would say you, you know. The skills that a good designer or a good, copywriter has, it's still necessary. You can generate as much text as you want, but if you cannot pick, you know, you cannot choose and curate it. It's still useless as far as I'm concerned. Right. and we see that a lot. We see people generating the same thing or what. I mean, I can tell when a. Images generated on chat, GPT, they all kind of look the same right now. Now, for example, studio G GLI is like on, on everyone's generating. Like I know, like I, you exact, you can recognize it. Like, okay, that's just generated. They didn't put a lot of thought in it. And they didn't really, you know, the prompt is very simple and they certainly don't have good taste because they're just generating, well, studio glee stuff all looks nice, but if they were generating without that prompt, you can tell like, yeah, this, you know, it's, you know, it's just a normal person generating I, and I wouldn't use these images on my website. No way. So, so I think the workflow is still. The, the professional copywriter or the designer still necessary, and they're just working with a tool like the AI as a tool. you can't just, you know, un, unless you have a pers you're a person with very good taste and who has those skills, you still cannot go in and just generate like your whole brand kit and all your brand assets, for example. Right. You can, you can theoretically do it, but it probably won't look very nice.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah,
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Just as, yeah. yeah.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:I think like like what you see, like. Maybe you can still write copy and you can still design some stuff, but is it gonna look great? Is it gonna read well? Is it gonna convert? I guess that's another like, big question, but what do you think perhaps, you know, with like what you said, the studio guilty kind of images with chat GPT-4 oh image gen right now, AI is making it even more accessible to more people out there. Do you think it's going to disrupt the creative industry? Because I know that, a lot of creators out there are also a little bit nervous. About what AI can do. and I think four oh Image gen feels like chat GPT for a copy when it first launch. So when I first, tried chat GPT when it first launched as a copywriter, there was that sense of like, what am I gonna do now? And then, and then this moment felt the same for chat GPT-4 oh Image and for I guess many designers. yeah. So what are your thoughts on perhaps how creatives can. You know, work around this. and what, what what kind of like tensions are there?
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:I mean, I would love your, actually, your point, like what has changed, and I mean, it's been like two years since chat GPT come up. Like obviously you still have a good business and, and even, I mean, I would, I would guess you have probably more demand and less than less demand now. Am I right,
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah, so I think interestingly what AI has enabled me to do is. I work so much faster than before, so perhaps last time my capacity was this much. Now it's triple. because I work so quickly and now I can like, delegate tasks to my GPTs or my mini interns, and that has helped a lot. But I also recognize that chat GPT has evolved so much that in the past, I would say it used to be a new intern at a, an agency. Right now it's. Easily a midway copywriter
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Right, right,
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:prompt, and that's just the two years. That's at least what I've
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah. But so, so I think I would say it's very similar in design that you still need to know how to prompt. So I always emphasize, I always say this like most people when they use a tool, they just put in the most basic prompt and they'll go like, yeah, the results aren't great. Then they'll go to someone who knows how to prompt like you or like me. Who knows? Like I, you know, I do a lot of image generation prompting. Any kind of prompting, are you? And I would like, yeah, that prompt is too basic. Like I will prompt engineer, I will test. know, a lot of different prompts. I would test different models. I, I, you know, like in our work, we test multiple models. We test multiple prompts. Our prompt engineering is, you know, sophisticated, not like a normal person. Like I, you know, and
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:and I think that is still a skill, that skill. It's still something that, you know, the, the, the GPTs don't, don't do. It's, it's something that professionals do really well, like you said, like you were, you know, we, we are using similar tools, but we're using them in a different way, in a more sophisticated way, and we're getting better results. So, for the creatives out there, yeah. If you're not using. ai, then yeah, they're gonna be left behind like a hundred percent. They like you, you know, they're not gonna be able to keep up with the designers who are using ai. So I think designers who are using AI will flourish. They will learn like how to prompt better. They will learn how to use different models. They'll learn how to edit faster. and, and they will evolve. And those who don't, I mean, you know, like they're gonna, if they're stuck with the old model, then, then they're in trouble. For sure. I think there will be a a, a group of designers who will be, yeah, they'll just be in trouble, you know, because, you know, they'll fall behind for sure.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah. And I think it's interesting that even you highlighted that, right? Of course. there are two camps of people that I've seen so far, people who perhaps, are open to using ai and there are people who are like, no, AI isn't creative. I refuse to use it. But at the same time, then they are not realizing that businesses themselves are evolving. So. If you are, you know, not an agency and you are a company, you will start thinking about how do I build internal capabilities So. that I don't have to pay an agency? And If you are an agency, then it's like high time that you consider your own model, of how you want to integrate AI because. In the past, agencies used to charge clients by the hour. and that is not gonna be possible with, you know, the use of AI moving forward. I think things have to evolve quite a bit, you know, in the next few years.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. Like the hour, you know. the The, this is the problem we face too, because in, in the, in our design, in, you know, in our design tool. The, the faster we solve the problem, the less money we get paid.'cause people will churn faster. We used to say, yeah, if we solve the problem really fast, they, they, they'll churn faster.'cause they don't need to use the tool for like a month to design something. They spend a day and they're done. You know, and then, and they may be creating like many, many things. So I think, any tool, especially AI sort of compresses that where you're no longer charging for time anymore, but you have to charge for value, right? You have to say, this is how I price, I price. You know, it's a logo. Maybe it took only five seconds for the AI to generate, but I had to do it, you know, but it's, it's, you know, like you said, it's like you have the skill, you know how to prompt you, you know, it's on brand, it's, it, it's something that you, yourself, you know, the client wouldn't be able to do by themselves. and you're gonna charge, you know, whatever you charge for, for, for coming up with that brand. I mean, I don't know, I would say minimum a few thousand dollars. Maybe it only took a few seconds to generate it. Right. But, but you're charging, the pricing has to change for sure.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah, and it would be interesting to see how we shift from a more like time-based economy to a more value-based economy, because time is no longer the best measure perhaps, of the work that you're delivering. You mentioned something Eugene, about, testing different AI models and different forms. Can you walk us through that process? because not everyone is familiar with prompting and not everyone's familiar with prompting for a design.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Sure, Sure, So I'll talk about, image generation in general because I think like we do a lot of prompting on chat, GBT as well'cause we write code and all that. But in image generation, most people will just do. Simple thing like, oh, can I, you know, let's say you want to create a, you know, like you want to create a, a, a photo for your website, like I, you know, create a photo for, they'll do something very generic like that. Create a photo for my marketing agency. you know, maybe some people, and then you'll get a generic, you'll get some generic like image. It'll look good.'cause you know, for the most part, most image generations would look good. But what we usually do is we, we have an intermediate step where we get, we'll use chat GPT on LLM to create prompts for us to actually create the prompts. So we'll say like, okay, in a marketing agency, create some, image generation prompts. And then we put in the brand aspects like, you know, it's a professional, whatever setting, may, maybe it's local, maybe they only do more, local SEO for what, whatever we put in there and we'll say like, create some scenarios. for us, or some scenes, in prompts. So, so then Chad G PD will create a whole bunch of, I would say, fairly detailed prompts that describe the scenes. Maybe it's like a group of people in a meeting, you know, a person on a whiteboard. I mean, I'm giving you like pretty cheesy, sometimes you get some good ones, some pretty cheesy right images, but essentially that's what. what it, what it creates, we call those magic prompts or, enhanced prompts. So instead of a one sentence prompt, it is usually like, pretty long, like a paragraph, maybe like five, six sentences, sometimes even longer, depending on how detailed it is. and, and sometimes we get stuff like, okay, well you can use some metaphors and symbols. You know, if you wanna, if you have an abstract concept, like strategic marketing, let's say it's so abstract, like how. If I type in generated image for strategic marketing, you will get like random stuff. You'll get probably, I would say, maybe a, a word that says, you know, you'll get something like that. But if I say, Hey, generate something that symbolizes, or an object or a scene that can symbolize this, and then the, and then charge G PD will generate a longer prom. So we use that prom and then we put it into the image generation. So there's. Intermediate steps, usually one or two steps before we even go to the image generation. And in the image generation, we use a variety, well, four oh is pretty good now, but four is actually really slow from an API point of view. I don't know if you've used it like even on your app, it's slow. So in production, we actually use flux, which is which is stable diffusion. So everyone remembers stable diffusion. Basically stable diffusion evolved into flux. FLUX. They, they, they're a lot faster. I would say. They're not as, they're probably as I would hard to compare, depending on your needs, but they're as good as, as four oh, maybe not as good as some of, at some stuff, but better in a lot of stuff than four. Oh, even, even their all models are just as good. Nope. Nobody uses flux a lot. but, but, but we use Flux. we also use Ideogram, which is, another, image generation, company. and we use recraft. Sometimes recraft is, you know, just to test the models. So we would test it on like at least four different models and see, hey, which one gives us the, which one gives us the best result? And it, and it varies on, it varies on use cases. Sometimes, for example, like, oh, logo generation, you know, flux is good enough. It's like a simple thing. And if you want like photorealistic thing, maybe four O is better, but if, you know, but it takes like a long, long time. oh. And we use Gemini too, sorry, but we've also used Gemini to test Gemini for the most part. You know, I hate to say this, but they're. They're okay. They, I, they're not the best. They're okay. and, and so that's the process. We would get the prompt engineering done, and then we would try a bunch of, generation. And for us, because it's production, we don't just look at quality, we look at speed as well. So, so 4.0 is really slow. I mean, if you, you can use it right now, it's just no one's gonna wait two minutes for an image. Like, it just kills the process. Especially if you wanna create like 10 images for your website, it's just gonna kill. You are gonna sit there for 20 minutes. Right. And it may be okay for an individual doing it, but if you're waiting on a tool, it's too slow. So we need something a lot faster. We need something like that can generate in like five, six, you know, maximum 10 seconds.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah. I think it's a couple of interesting points you see, right? So one is like the speed of generation. most people don't consider that, but like what you said, when you're building a tool, you don't want customers to churn, to drop off, you needed to load, and they expect things right? now. So I think even four oh is like really slow for most people. and I can see why. And I think the second thing you say is. Being able to test different, models for different use cases. So I've noticed a similar thing for copywriting. even CLA for example, is better for, for example, for long form human like copy. but GBT could be better for content strategy and figuring out, you know, a step by step process. So even that, right, there are some. Nuances in using the different AI models, and you only know it if you try it and you only know it if you if you test it and you spend time testing it.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Correct. Yeah. And most people don't do that, right? like chat, GPT, there's so many models. 4 0 0 1, 0 3, 4 0.5, and I have the, I, I have the biggest, I, I bought Pro,
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Wow. Power user right there.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:I'm not, I would say like I barely use any pro features, like they have
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Really
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:And I find operator is really slow. It's clunky. And, and I think all one with, with, with search, like performs better than than operator. Yeah. And I, and deep research, I'm not a researcher. I, I, I've used deep res research, not only a few times, so I probably will cancel pro. And I used, and I, you know, I, I, I got it just to try it out. But even Chad, GIA, back to the point, there's so many different models and I'll be honest, even I. I know which ones are good for coding, but for like copy and all that, I don't know which one's the best. Like I, you know, sometimes pick four. Oh for, because it's the default one. Sometimes I pick oh one. yeah, it's, it's, I don't know. I think that's,
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:and, and you really have to spend time, like even, even though 4.5 is supposed to be good for writing, I sometimes think that four oh performs a lot better. I'm not sure why, but the output, the output is a lot better. And sometimes I toggle between four oh and, some of the thinking models because I wanted to think about certain things first before writing it. and again, these are things you only know when you put it to the test and you try it daily and you put like that rigor behind that work, right? but that's also what separates, you know, an AI powered designer versus someone who is just using ai, you know, once in a while or. For fun. There is gonna be a distinction and it's good to learn some skillsets. Now, Eugene, I would love For you to show us perhaps a quick demo of what the platform does, and then walk us through some of that behind the scenes process so we understand how it works.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Sure. Sure. Okay, so let me share my screen. Okay, so this is the Vantage website. and in here, if you go to products, there's a bunch of AI tools. So we have a, a whole bunch of AI tools. for the most part we're known for infographics. And I can show you this infographic, generator, but I'm just gonna use this. The, we also have a generic generator. It just generates a whole bunch of stuff. I'm just gonna use one of these prompts just because, so we we're making, this is a very simple prompt. It's infographic about effective social marketing. Strategies. And what we're doing behind the scenes is we're obviously using like chat, GPT, to create the copy or the outline. And then, And once that's done, there are two different ways where we create the template. One is where we, we actually just pick a template. And then we put the content in there. The other, when the other one is, we actually generate the template, and it depends on your prompt. So if your prompt is really easy, we typically just pick a template for you if you, if you copy and paste an entire outline, and you can do that, we will actually, use dynamically generate the layout for you. And so, so, so it's generated this, and if I click on, I'll just, I'll just click on customize. So if you click on customize. They'll take you to the editor. so this is our editor. like I said, it's, you know, drag and drop. it's like Canva. It's pretty easy. and oh, so, so what we do here behind the scenes, we not only, we not only do the copy, we also figure out the, the, the icons. You can see sometimes the match isn't great. Like, I think this one looks fine. This one looks fine. Tracker performance looks fine. Engagement is okay. Yeah, I don't know why they, a content, I guess that's a pencil and I'm not
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Tag target Audience is cute. It looks like a, A cup.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah, I don't know why this one was picked. So as you, as you can see, sometimes the, the icon, generator or, or the icon picker also, you know, makes mistakes. And so, so that, Yeah.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:ai.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah. So, so that is a, you know, that is a, there's a very quick example of what our tool does and, and you know, in our tool, you know, you can, you can, there, there's a bunch of stuff. You can do, like, you can brand it. I'm just branding it, sorry, I'm branding it to Van Gauge branding. This, this is our colors. and then, you know, you can edit it like a normal. I think the advantage of Vantage gauge over an image generation tool is with an image generation tool, you're kind of stuck. You cannot really edit. I mean, it is what it is. And with this I can, I can, I can edit it, right? Like I can say, I wanna replace this. With a, what would I replace this with? I don't even know what a good target audience is.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:How about like, you know, like the bulls I
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:ah,
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:yeah. Yes. Yes,
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:There you go.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:that's right.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:so I can do that. so, so so this allows you to kind of customize it, to, to, to your liking, and, and the generation and the ai. It becomes like an assistant, like you said, it's kind of like your junior designer or even your intermediate designer. I. and then you still have a, you still have full control of what, what you want to change and what you want to do, so, so that's an example of a very simple, a simple generation.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Wow. And I wanted to ask, right, so AI also generates the copy on the infographics for you.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Correct. Also the copy as well. Yeah. Yeah, so all of this is like, you know, I think the, what was the original? I, it was infographic effective social media, marketing strategies. Yeah. So it, it generates the copy as well. So if I put in something like, don't know, like you, you can, you know, it, it will generate a different copy if I put in something else.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Wow, so interesting. So, so basically you're getting, you, you have a simple prompt, which you get another prompt to flesh out that simple prompt, and then you now put that more complex prompt into the tool, and then it generates the visual and the copy for you in like a customizable layout.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Correct. And it then it also, generates the icons picks. In this case, I think it's just picking an icon. I'm, I'm. Quite sure it picked the icon. It could be, could be generated as well. So there's various, there's various tools that we use, you know, tools as in the tools that the AI that our AI uses. Sometimes it's generating icons, sometimes it's just picking icons from our, stock li from our stock library. And, and it, and it just depends, like, I, I actually don't know for these look like they're not generated. They look like they are actual icons from our library. But they could also be generated. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Some I cannot tell with simple things like icons, I cannot tell with, to be honest. So we generate the icons, and then we remove the background and then we convert it to an SVG. So it's exactly like a stock, like something we would get from a, from our Icon provider. So we have an icon provider, icons eight, that provide, we have several icon providers, but. They provide us these, you know, lots and lots of, actually I can tell if I put rocket in there, if I see the same one. yeah. So it's the same one. So this is actually from our stock library. It's not,
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Interesting.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:it's not generated, but it's hard to tell. Now with a simple line icon like that, it's really, really hard to tell whether it's generated or it's from a stock library
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yes, and the stock library could easily have generated the first version of icons as well. You never know.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and, And, we are, we haven't added it in here yet, but we are gonna add our icon, generator in, in the, in the search bar as well, so that you can just generate it as opposed to like, searching for it, I guess.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:cool. How about like, what other, features you have besides infographics? Like what other kinds of like assets do people normally create?
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:so I mean, like you can see, like we have, we have a lot of brochures,
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:a very good use case.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:So we do, I mean, we do infographic, brochures, posters, a lot of, things like charts and even our presentations are very, because we're, our background is in, in infographics, things like charts, presentations, Have a lot of charts in them. There are a lot of data in them.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yes.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:so we, you know, essentially do, we also do a bunch of marketing stuff, and more business related things like reports, so, so a lot of B2B cases like reports, proposals, business like plans
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yes.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:and a lot of internal communications. So we are, we're mainly, so you're saying like, Hey, how does, how are we. Very different. How are we different or, or how do we differentiate from someone like a Canva? Like we mainly focus a lot on internal communications, although some of it is external, but, but I would say that was our biggest one, and we are more of a B2B. Our customers are more B2B as opposed to B2C type customer.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:makes sense. Yeah, and I think the use cases, for example, your chart generators, you know, creating brochures, right? These are very specific for a company, and I think for like a company that does a lot of comms, right, you probably need to generate like tons of this every year. So. Obviously leveraging AI is a, is is like a no-brainer kind of option for them.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Yeah. And, and you know, and we're coming up with, like I said, we're coming up with a website generator now, so there's a few different, things where we are and we're, and we're exploring. We're exploring AI agents, I'm sure you're familiar with that topic. So we're exploring AI agents, not just a design agent. So the design agents sort of built into, will be built into the, it's sort of built into the editor right now. The editor is this, this thing over here. and what we are gonna be exploring now with the things that happen after you. So, so we're trying to figure out, like, for example, email is one of those things we're trying to figure out. We do newsletters a fair bit, so we're trying to figure out like, can we just get an agent to do a newsletter for you every month or every week or whatever it is, and, you know, generate the copy, generate the, all the visuals, and including the email itself, like sending, you know, and then integrating with an email provider and just, you know, sending it out. Just so that's like an example of like. Moving a, moving towards a sort of agentic workflow as opposed to just design and then I'm done. But now it's like design and then distribute as well. Design and distribution as well.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah, and I think it's a very interesting topic. Itself. Right. So, you know, with everyone slowly moving towards the more like energetic kind of like workflows, right? I, I know it will take a while, but I have already seen a couple of businesses and founders really trying to build on this. What, what do you think the future of work is gonna be when, when that happens? it's such a hard question to answer.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:It's it's a very hard question to answer. I do think that we will be working beside agents just like we will be work, just like how we're working beside, like humans now. And I think like in on your slack. So we use slack on, on our, on our work, for example, on our slack. We would have both humans and agents in there, and you would just be like. Chatting with them the same way. That's how I think it would work. And let's say you have an email marketer agent, just using my example of email marketing, and you'll just say like, Hey, can you, you know, make an email newsletter this week for me, on, and the agent knows all the context. You know, Hey, we wanna send it to this segment of the customers and. You know, make it, you know, highlight this or like, send out a discount code, you know, there's a sale and, and then it'll just do it for you. And then it'll send, and then it'll reply and say, yeah, it's done. Oh, do you want, do you wanna check it? Do you wanna check the K in? I'm like, no, I don't wanna check it. Or you check it and then you fix it. Or if you don't want to check it, you just go, yep, just go ahead and send it. Right? Just do it. Right. And it's kind of like how I would communicate to my market, you know, to my marketer right now, except that it's actually an agent doing it. I think that's gonna happen. eventually where you, it's hard to distinguish whether the agent is a human or not. And you know, we'll have a name for that agent as well. So it'll be like, Hey, Andy, you know, and it's an agent like, update, update this campaign for me and, you know, and send it out. I think that's how it's gonna work. It feels like that's, that's how it's gonna, it's gonna play out. and then, but back to what you said, I think you still, humans are still gonna be required to. You're still curating, you're still, you know, making decisions. You're still putting the strategy in. And then, you know, any original content still has to be produced by humans, right? Because at the end of the day, you know, LLM, the, the LLMs and the image generators, they are just, you know, mish matching existing content. Yes, they can create new content, but it's limited to what they know. So anything new. It still, I think, has to be generated by humans. I think so. I mean, if I'm wrong, then yeah, then maybe we don't need humans. But I think the humans are still necessary to, you know, it's, it's like, you know, people say like, oh, SEO is dead, content is dead. I'm like, but where will LMS learn? How will LMS learn if humans aren't generating content on the web that the LLMs scrape. And add and, and learn from. Right? So you still, humans still need to do work. It's not like they don't have to do work. They're still adding to the knowledge base and they're adding to the creative, you know, base for images and all of that.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah. And I think in the world where in the future where it's a lot more AI powered, right? there will be a sea of content that probably looks a lot more similar, and that's also when that human. Like, you know, creativity that newness or like their rawness could eventually be the thing that makes a brand stand out so much more than other brands you, you never know, right? But for now, because you're in the early stages, I highly recommend you to start picking up AI so you can bridge that gap from the human to AI phase, and then you eventually get from the AI back to the human phase. I see as like a wave of change that we are on. Yeah. And maybe Eugene, like before we wrap up, I would love to know maybe one, perhaps key learning that you have from running your own company for the past 13 years. I know it's a big question, but I always think it's interesting to pick the brains of, you know, a founder.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:So I think to me, one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that you. Don't have to do something new, to you. In fact, most of the time as founders, we love, you know, the new shiny objects. We love like to jump on trends, you know, like, you know, and we, we, we always think like, the grass is greener. We gotta try this because it's working somewhere else. But I think what I've learned is that you should just. Do the thing that already works and do more of it and do it better. Like, it's a very boring advice to founders. and, and even to myself, a lot of times I'm like, oh, we have to do this new thing because it's, you know, oh, look at, you know, our competitor like doing this and this. Let's do all of these new features. But the end of the day. When I go and look at the data, and we've done that before, so, and we'll see like, yeah, the, you know, for whatever reason it didn't work, but you know, what's working when we put more focus on our core categories, our core customers, and it's bo that's boring.'cause you know, like, like I've been doing infographics for 13, 14. If you add my previous company, like 15 years now, been doing in, for the most part, doing designing, you know, tools for infographics for like 15 years. Same problem. I am like. Quite bored. I'm not saying bored with it, but I could be quite bored with it and there were moments when I'm very bored with it, but, but at the end of the day, I, you know, you can get a lot more leverage by just focusing on the thing that you already know and the thing that you're good at where you already have customers, you just double down on it. That would be my advice to most people. Instead of chasing the fomo, new shiny object thing that you know is on the internet right now.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:I love that. Like AI or just joking, but
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:I mean, AI for sure, for sure go into ai, but, but use AI to, you know, to, to stick to your niche, right? Like, as opposed to, you know, I don't know, like what's, what's, what's, what's, you know, whatever is in, in, you know, like, whatever is like in vogue in AI now, like generating apps in AI now with, you know, all these new tools that's in vogue right now. Like, don't build another tool like that if you don't have experience there. use AI to do something. You have experience with.
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Yeah, I think like what you said, in wrapping it up, right, like for me, I adopted AI to then figure out how to best leverage my skills as a copywriter. I didn't learn AI for like finance or something, or I could, but I don't have interest nor expertise. So I would double down on what I know best. And I think that actually really helps you to maximize your full potential, and helps you to build like a business that then is. Sustainable and something, that really is true to your core, your skill sets, your expertise. that you can do for the long term. So have a think. and Eugene, thank you so much. Where can our listeners find you and who should be reaching out to you?
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:so you can find me on LinkedIn, you know, to search Jin Woo or, vantage, on Twitter or Instagram. Or, you know, you can send me an email like, I'm just eugene@baggage.com. So, I, I do answer, I don't get a lot of emails, so I do answer something. Yes, for the
riverside_audrey_chia_raw-audio_podcast_0051:Eugene an infograph if you want to. But thank you so much for sharing your insights, Eugene, and thank you folks for tuning in. Don't forget to hit the bell for more actionable AI and marketing insights. We will see you next week. Take care.
riverside_eugene_woo_raw-audio_podcast_0050:Thanks a lot, Audrey.