Turing's Tofu #9

📰 This Week in AI & SaaS 📰

• Musk sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging contract breach: Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, claiming they strayed from their foundational goal of creating AI for the greater good. Musk, an original co-founder of OpenAI, criticizes their partnership with Microsoft, diverging from their initial mission. He's currently focusing on his own AI venture, xAI. Read more. 

• Reddit is going public with an IPO: After trying in 2021 (but failing) Reddit has finally gone public with an IPO (under the name “RDDT”) seeking a valuation of at least $5B, with details revealing that the top line revenue was $804M in annual sales in 2023 (21% revenue growth from 2022). Although, they didn’t actually make any money from the $804 million. They operated at a $90.8M net losses, Which was better than the 158.6 million loss in 2022. Read more.
  

• NVIDIA shares have blown up: As demand for AI chips soars, NVIDIAs share value has increased by 16.4%, taking its market value to nearly $2 trillion, after reporting quarterly profits of over $12B. NVIDIA is now the 3rd most valuable company in the US (after Microsoft and Apple). Read more.

• Tumblr and WordPress in content contract deal (similar to Reddit) with major AI companies: The owner of Tumblr and Wordpress (Automattic) is about to sell data, scraped from user posts, to OpenAI and Midjourney to help train their AI models, despite an internal leak revealing that an initial data dump contained private data. Read more.
  

• Reading glasses with a custom built-in LLM? It can’t happen… can it? Watch this

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Read of the Week: 

Read through these insightful quotes from McKinsey’s most senior partners about AI, industry and general business progression
Read it

💡 Marketing Moments with Mounier 💡

While everyone wants to have a Growth Marketer on their team, not every company actually needs a Growth Marketer, it really depends on their current company stage.

I was on a podcast a while back where I dove into when and why a company should hire a growth marketer, how a company’s marketing evolves as it grows, and how a company goes from product-market fit to go-to-market fit.

Takeaways:

• The term “growth marketing” comes from the term “growth hacking” which was coined by Sean Ellis and this referred to a very scrappy kind of business. Although poorly defined, growth marketing can be thought of as a more-refined successor of growth hacking.

• Within the pre-revenue stage of a SaaS company’s life, there are two distinct phases 1. Prototype and 2. MVP. During the Prototyping phase, the best marketers will be the company’s founders. In the MVP phase, companies can start exploring bringing in a generalist marketer, but a growth marketer is not needed yet.

• The MVP phase is about figuring out product-market fit and determining if people will actually be willing to pay you for your product. High CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is a hallmark of this phase. Finding product-market fit is really about learning how to price a product.

• From a general marketing perspective, as the company grows from $0-1m in revenue, the focus should be on using one channel consistently, testing, analyzing data, and helping the sales team.

• Once a company attains product-market fit, it can enter the “Go-To-Market-Fit” phase which focuses on learning how to sell its product. This is the point at which a company should hire a growth marketer and think more about scaling.

• B2B marketing has a reputation for being very boring, however, it doesn’t have to be. Many of the fun, effective aspects of B2C marketing can still apply to B2B, but marketers need to balance the fun with the professional tone that will instill trust in the brand.

  Check out the episode below 👇👇

👾 TOFU Quick Bytes: Chili Piper Teardown 👾

Chili Piper Teardown
Launched in 2016, Chili Piper is a SaaS appointment scheduling tool that automates time-consuming, manual processes to help B2B marketing, sales, and customer success teams convert leads into meetings and demos, leading to improved conversion rates. 

Strategy overview: 

Chili Piper’s primary competitor is Calendly, another meeting scheduling tool. Calendly was founded 3 years before Chili Piper, has raised more capital, brings in over 60x the web traffic, and has gained tens of millions of users with their viral freemium product. 

So how does Chili Piper compete with them? 

Keep reading to find out. 

Performance Analysis:

Chili Piper has an impressive list of high-profile clients, including Gong, Monday, Shopify, and Airbnb.  

They have: 

• 45,000 customers 

• raised $54 million in funding 

• 581K of monthly traffic 

• 19.8K backlinks, 1.9k referring domains, and have a Domain Authority rating of 76

How have they achieved this? 

Critical Teardown:
What does Chili Piper do well?

• They regularly used the Five W’s and One H (what, why, when, where, who, and how) framework to discover (and rediscover) their customers needs, fears, and desires, so they can create campaigns that deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time, and connect with them on a deeper level.
  

• As part of the above strategy, the marketing team often attends–or even conducts–sales calls, digs into quarterly business reviews, and prioritizes time with their customers, as much as they can, so they can truly understand them.
  

• They have a results-orientated marketing strategy that utilizes customer data, feedback, and analytics to prioritize and implement measurable marketing activities that contribute to their pipeline or brand awareness objectives. 
  

• They regularly share insights, opinions, and predictions that establish them as experts in their field, setting them apart from the crowd and positioning them as a thought leader who guides and inspires others.
  
  Examples of some of the leadership pieces they’ve created include: 

• Rather than waiting for perfection, if they have a campaign they want to run, they ship it fast, to turn the idea into reality and learn valuable lessons from feedback.
  
  

• They target B2B revenue teams that need more than just meeting scheduling, instead of targeting easy, quick-win users with a free product (like Calendly does) and they spend time honing these relationships for longevity and future expansion.
  
  

• As part of this strategy, instead of focusing their efforts on traditional funnel techniques, which nurture leads through things like email sequences, they focus on the intent of the user and invest their time on users who are actively engaged in them and their product 

What doesn’t Chili Piper do well?

Onboarding: Reviews show that users tend to have problems during the set-up phase, as there is a lot of functionality and interconnectivity between different parts of the product that need more than a demo or single onboarding call. Hosting webinars, online training videos, one-on-one training calls, guidebooks, or in-app prompts would go a long way to helping their users reach their aha moment, and prevent unnecessary churn.

Customer support: Although they have a dedicated ‘support hub’ with plenty of FAQ articles to search through, it’s not easy to see how to contact a real human from Chili Piper directly. This lack of obvious help, understandably, leads to user frustration. I did find the Bibi Bot but it didn’t work while I was visiting. Perhaps that would connect you to a person when it functions correctly.

AI integration

They do use Gemini and ChatGPT to help them brainstorm and create awesome content (which they clearly edit, as their content is personal and relatable and written with a human voice, not a robots, which aligns well with their above marketing strategy). Fun fact: They also use ChatGPT to discover excel formulas! 

They also use Lavender.ai to help them write better sales emails and trellis.ai to help them improve their sales calls, as it provides prompts and suggestions during live calls, which they find helps with objection handling. 

Key takeaways

• Use the ‘Five W’s and One H’ framework to send the right messages, to the right people, at the right time

• Spend as much time as you can getting to know your target market (hop on sales calls, dig into feedback, and talk to customer success) 

• Utilize customer data, feedback, and analytics to create results-orientated strategies that will help you meet objectives 

• Position yourself as a thought leader by sharing insights, predictions and opinions 

• Ship fast, don’t wait for perfection, and utilize feedback to help you improve your MVP

• Target engaged people who need more than just the basics 

• Make sure you have plenty of useful onboarding material to help customers reach their ‘aha moment’ before they churn 

• Make it clear how customers can contact you if they have a problem or a question, and consider integrating a chatbot to take the pressure off your customer support team 

• Consider using ChatGPT for content creation (but always be sure to edit it to retain your brand voice), brainstorming, and Excel formulas
  

• Try AI sales tools to help you improve cold emails and outreach calls 

What campaign or content marketing strategy would you like to see torn apart, next? Let me know! 

Andrew’s Final Thoughts

This edition of Turing's TOFU brought to light the evolving landscape of AI and SaaS, from Musk's legal challenge to OpenAI to the strides in AI-powered solutions like NVIDIA's chip demand surge. As we delve into these narratives, we're reminded of the critical balance between technological advancement and ethical considerations. The insights shared, from Reddit's IPO to Chili Piper's strategic victories, underscore the dynamic nature of our industry. Let's move forward with the mindset of leveraging AI not just for growth but with a keen sense of responsibility and innovation. Here's to another week of pushing boundaries and shaping the future. Stay curious, stay engaged.

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