Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Now, what did you decide this time around in enterprise versus SME? Where did you position? And did you start with a good, solid positioning and commitment?

RJ Talyor: We’re going right after the mid-market. We’re looking at businesses or retailers, specifically with 100-1,000 employees. We’re looking for people who send two to three emails every week, and that means that they care about email. They have a team of two to four people who are interested in getting better, and they likely have a set of vendors that we understand, and are willing to move quickly. That’s pretty much what we’re interested in.

The thing that you can’t find in a database, or on Crunchbase, or on LinkedIn is attitude: what is their attitude towards startups, what is their attitude toward innovation, are they scared, do they have a scary boss, or are they rewarded for taking risks? That’s what you have to figure out so that we can start with that list of the attributes of the organizations that we wanna work with.

The risk tolerance is what we have to really probe for in our discovery calls. It’s working so far, and we’re able to move pretty quickly. Marketers have budgets in that space that want to be investing in AI, so it’s been a good move for us so far.

Sramana Mitra: The enormous hype around generative AI must have really helped you get into these accounts right now, right?

RJ Talyor: Yes. There’s a lot of misunderstanding too, because people are like, “Well, can’t I just use GPT-3 for that? Or I’m going to wait till Salesforce has this.” There’re still objections in there, but there’s a lot of hype that allows us to get into conversations. That makes it a good time for our platform.

Sramana Mitra: How do you think about the defensibility question for your technology? The truth is that Salesforce should be doing this and your CRM providers should be doing it.

RJ Talyor: On the defensibility side, there’re two components. One is, the data model is based on having two and a half plus years’ worth of data coming from thousands and thousands of marketers’ campaigns. As we think about the legal components, we can do that because we’re an independent entity and it’s publicly available information. Whereas if a big company wanted to do use that data, they would likely have to get permission from many of them who would be their customers. So there’s a defensibility component there.

Then the second piece is around our performance data that we’ve been running for the last two years. That allows us to understand what’s working and what’s not working. Big companies, unfortunately, can’t take their performance data and just make an aggregated model without updating all their legal agreements. That’s been a big sticking point. So from a defensibility standpoint, I think those are the starting components.

Then there’s just a velocity piece, because even with those advances, if a big company wanted to pursue what we were doing, they could, and they would outpace us if they wanted to put their huge team behind it, but I know that they have giant commitments in all sorts of other areas.

Sramana Mitra:  Good. I think the big advantage of startups is always focus, which is why often big companies buy startups to do startups, and that positions you well for a very good acquisition in this field. How many customers do you have? .

RJ Talyor: Right now we have five.

Sramana Mitra: So, are you already at $5 million in revenue?

RJ Talyor: No. We’re not disclosing our revenue numbers at this point, but we’ve got five customers. I’d love to have $5 million in revenue, but no, we’re not there yet.

Sramana Mitra: All right. Very nice story. I like what you’re doing and good luck.

RJ Talyor: Oh, thanks so much for the encouragement. I appreciate it.

Sramana Mitra: Take care. Bye.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89
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