Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / Building A Restaurant AI Startup From Zero To 1,000 Customers In A Year

Transcript

Building A Restaurant AI Startup From Zero To 1,000 Customers In A Year · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

• 0:00
  Welcome back to AI for Founders. I'm Ryan Estes.
• 0:03
  Picture a Friday night at your favorite pizza spot.
• 0:06
  The line's out the door, the cooks are yelling, and the phone
• 0:09
  won't stop ringing. 40% of those calls are about to go
• 0:14
  unanswered. That's not just noise.
• 0:16
  That's lost revenue. Enter Christian Wayne's founder
• 0:21
  and CEO of Loman, AIA company that's turning all that chaos
• 0:25
  into cash. His voice AI answers every call,
• 0:29
  knows your favorite order and never calls in sick.
• 0:32
  In just one year his team in Austin has raised 3.5 million on
• 0:37
  boarded over 1000 restaurants and is cutting labor costs by
• 0:41
  nearly 17% all while boosting phone order revenue by more than
• 0:46
  20%. In this episode, we dig into how
• 0:49
  Christian and his Co founder build 1 of the fastest growing
• 0:52
  voice AI startups in America and what every founder can learn
• 0:56
  about timing, product, market fit and the future of.
• 0:59
  Voice is the primary human interface.
• 1:02
  If you're building an AI, SAS or service automation, or you've
• 1:06
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• 1:09
  actually answers the call, this conversation is for you.
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• 3:21
  That's ambient dot US. Christian, welcome to the show.
• 3:41
  Hey, thank you so much for having me, Ryan.
• 3:43
  Excited to have a conversation today.
• 3:44
  Yeah, 100%. I looked at your product, it
• 3:47
  looks beautiful. The website's beautiful.
• 3:50
  As an intro, talk to us about Loman.
• 3:52
  What exactly does your company do?
• 3:55
  Yeah, so Loman is the world's best AI voice AI agent for
• 4:01
  restaurants. So what we do is we answer the
• 4:04
  phone for restaurants that do everything from quick service,
• 4:09
  counter service or full service. So we built an AI generative AI
• 4:14
  agent that can answer the phone for our restaurant and take an
• 4:18
  order, whether it's like a pizza restaurant that needs to take
• 4:20
  phone orders for pick up and delivery.
• 4:23
  We can take reservations, We can answer questions when customers
• 4:26
  have them. We essentially remove the need
• 4:29
  for the front of house employees at a restaurant to answer the
• 4:33
  phone because right now it's this massive kind of
• 4:37
  productivity suck on on anybody on a restaurant.
• 4:42
  If anybody listening has worked in a restaurant, you know
• 4:45
  exactly how problematic phone calls can be.
• 4:49
  You can only do one thing at a time when you're on the phone,
• 4:51
  like you have to get on the phone.
• 4:53
  There's a million things going on in the background.
• 4:55
  You got somebody filling up a soda machine.
• 4:57
  You got somebody handing out food.
• 5:00
  You've got somebody taking the trash out.
• 5:02
  You got somebody at the counter at the register.
• 5:05
  You got this the cooks in the back yelling at you like
• 5:08
  answering the phone during a busy Friday night in a
• 5:11
  restaurant. It's one of the hardest things
• 5:12
  to do, which means that around 40% of phone calls go completely
• 5:17
  unanswered. And then if you add, it's
• 5:20
  somewhere around 40 to 50% go completely unanswered and or put
• 5:23
  on hold. And so if you're a customer
• 5:27
  calling a restaurant or if you want to place an order or get a
• 5:30
  reservation, right, there's a lot of ton of reasons you would
• 5:33
  still call around 30% of people still call the restaurant rather
• 5:37
  than place an order online or come into the restaurant to
• 5:41
  order their food. I think a lot of us younger, I
• 5:43
  mean, I guess I'm not not super young anymore, but a lot of a
• 5:45
  lot of the younger generation, right?
• 5:47
  It would be like nobody ever calls restaurants anymore.
• 5:49
  But actually around 1/3 of all revenue for restaurants still
• 5:53
  comes to the phone. We just make it easy to handle
• 5:56
  for the restaurant and make it make it a better experience for
• 6:00
  the customer on the other end of the phone with tools like
• 6:03
  generative AI, right? And allowing us to use the AP is
• 6:07
  of some of these LMS. Like we can actually turn what
• 6:11
  used to be like a really horrible experience, like
• 6:14
  calling into a restaurant and maybe getting like a, a robot
• 6:17
  IVR. We can turn that into like a
• 6:19
  Michelin star level guest experience where we remember
• 6:22
  your name, we remember your card information.
• 6:25
  We know what you like to eat, we know your dining habits, what
• 6:28
  your family is like, and we can kind of personalize a
• 6:31
  conversation just for you at the restaurant.
• 6:33
  So that's a super long explanation, but I wanted to
• 6:35
  give you as much as I could. No, it's great.
• 6:37
  It's fantastic. And to that point, I mean, a
• 6:39
  couple of things stood out. Yeah.
• 6:40
  When you calling somebody and they're jamming, not only are
• 6:43
  they irritated, but you feel bad.
• 6:45
  You're like, I want to order something, but like now I feel
• 6:47
  like I'm bothering you. And you know, since COVID, to
• 6:50
  your point, like a significant amount of restaurants revenue
• 6:55
  is, is coming from pickups and takeout orders.
• 6:58
  You know, all the good spots in Denver, like if you go in there
• 7:01
  6:00 and you're having dinner, you just see like bags coming
• 7:05
  out of the kitchen to all those DoorDash drivers, you know, so
• 7:09
  those phones are blowing up. Now, to your point, this is kind
• 7:11
  of a solution people have had forever.
• 7:13
  But if you get lost in kind of a phone tree.
• 7:15
  So tell me about like, you know, technically how you're solving
• 7:20
  for for some of the things that may be plagued earlier models
• 7:23
  like latency or like push one for this and push 2 for that.
• 7:28
  Like how? How truly conversational is the
• 7:31
  product? Yeah, sorry I I probably didn't
• 7:34
  explain it well enough in the beginning.
• 7:36
  Like it is not a phone tree or IVR in any sense of the word.
• 7:40
  It's a completely generative AI driven conversation.
• 7:44
  So our agents are built to answer the phone.
• 7:48
  Like let's say you have a pizza place called Ryan's Pizza.
• 7:50
  It would answer the phone and say, hi, this is Ryan's Pizza,
• 7:53
  how can I help you? That's it.
• 7:55
  Or whatever you wanna make it say at the beginning, right?
• 7:58
  And if the person wants to place a pickup order, the AI would go,
• 8:01
  great, what can I get for you today?
• 8:02
  It's literally like speaking to a human, except that that AI
• 8:08
  agent, unlike the human that would have answered that phone
• 8:12
  and the AI agent never gets sick and never calls and never calls
• 8:15
  out of work because I broke up with this boyfriend or
• 8:17
  girlfriend and never has a bad day and an attitude over the
• 8:20
  phone. You as a diner, when you're
• 8:22
  calling into that restaurant, you don't feel bad staying on
• 8:26
  the phone with it for a little bit of time and asking it
• 8:28
  questions about the menu. Maybe you've never been there
• 8:31
  before. Maybe you're wondering what are
• 8:34
  the best things on the menu. What does everybody order?
• 8:36
  Our AI agent, It ingests information about the
• 8:40
  restaurant. So we under we we plug in
• 8:43
  directly into the point of sale system.
• 8:44
  So we integrate directly with Toast spot on Square Clover Sky
• 8:49
  tab open, like just the big kind of POS and reservation
• 8:54
  management systems that allows us to pull a bunch of
• 8:57
  information from the restaurant into our own kind of back end.
• 9:03
  And that that enables us to know the menu.
• 9:06
  We can know like what's called like prep time.
• 9:08
  So like how long it'll take until an order is ready.
• 9:13
  We know when things are 86 or I mean, out of, you know, they go
• 9:16
  out of stock, right? So it's like some, you know, I
• 9:19
  don't know, maybe some ingredient is out of stock.
• 9:21
  So then that pizza is pushed out of stock by the staff in the
• 9:24
  restaurant. Our AI agent knows that in real
• 9:26
  time, so it won't sell it anymore.
• 9:30
  And so it's able to ingest kind of all of that information and
• 9:36
  the latency is like sub 500 millisecond.
• 9:41
  So we're it's, it's almost too fast in some cases like the turn
• 9:45
  switching, like the. So we're working on making that
• 9:48
  action even better because sometimes it's actually too
• 9:51
  quick. People like they can pause when
• 9:54
  they're talking. But yeah, sub 500 millisecond
• 9:57
  latency. We're essentially, you know, the
• 10:01
  AI essentially knows everything it needs to know about the
• 10:02
  restaurant. It can answer any questions that
• 10:04
  the rest of the customer has, not only about the menu, but
• 10:07
  about like, hey, where do I park?
• 10:10
  Or do you show the NFL games on Sunday?
• 10:14
  Whatever it is, we can also take the orders and then we can also
• 10:18
  do reservations and, and it's fully end to end.
• 10:22
  So when we take an order, it goes to the kitchen, it goes to
• 10:24
  the POS, it prints in the kitchen, the food gets made, the
• 10:27
  customer shows up. We can also take a secure
• 10:31
  payment over the phone, so PCI compliant, we could take a
• 10:36
  payment over the phone. So if the customer is like doing
• 10:38
  delivery, for example, we could take the payment up front, send
• 10:43
  the order to the kitchen, and the restaurant driver gets
• 10:46
  dispatched. We have our own internal
• 10:47
  delivery through a third party that's set up.
• 10:51
  So kind of like Uber Eats and DoorDash.
• 10:55
  So yeah, we kind of handle everything you would need end to
• 10:58
  end for any customer that's calling the restaurant.
• 11:01
  Amazing. And you talked about memory.
• 11:03
  So like if I put in it knows my phone number when I call in, so
• 11:06
  it will remember like what my order was last time, it
• 11:09
  remembers that my flight double protein is it?
• 11:13
  It can do that. Yeah, absolutely.
• 11:15
  And remember you by name. What's really cool and kind of
• 11:20
  most interesting about Loman versus maybe some of the other
• 11:23
  solutions on the market is like the inference abilities that
• 11:27
  we've built in. We call it like our inference
• 11:29
  engine, like we're every out of every call, we're saving a bunch
• 11:33
  of information about the caller. So, you know, all of our phone
• 11:38
  calls say like, hey, this call is being recorded for quality
• 11:40
  assurance purposes so that people know that we're recording
• 11:45
  the information and essentially like we are remember your name.
• 11:50
  We'll remember what you've ordered in the past.
• 11:52
  We'll remember we're taking context around the call.
• 11:56
  So it's like we hear things like kids screaming in the background
• 12:01
  or like some other interesting, like outside factors that are
• 12:04
  that maybe aren't just you speaking into the phone.
• 12:07
  We can take all of that into account.
• 12:09
  We build a profile of you as a diner and then we can use that
• 12:13
  to make your experience better on the phone, but also for the
• 12:17
  restaurant. Then we can use that to upsell
• 12:18
  you items that we think that you are more likely to order the
• 12:23
  next time you call. And eventually this isn't
• 12:26
  happening right now, but eventually we can use it to do
• 12:30
  personalized 1 to one marketing and remarketing, you know,
• 12:35
  outreach, get you to come back to the restaurant.
• 12:38
  But right now we're focused 100% on on phones.
• 12:41
  It's great. It's really interesting too,
• 12:43
  because like you said, like, you know, people would be like, why
• 12:46
  would you call a restaurant? But, but truly this is kind of
• 12:49
  like the next Gen. of what AI is going to be, right?
• 12:53
  I mean, like, I, I mean, typing sucks, let's just put it that
• 12:56
  way. I have to go to a website and do
• 12:59
  2 factor authentication and but, but, but, but, but I got to log
• 13:03
  in with my password to download the app.
• 13:05
  Dude, I'm over that. I just want to talk, you know?
• 13:09
  So like if this, this works for ordering food is particularly, I
• 13:12
  mean, this is like a great use case because there's a lot of
• 13:15
  complexities. You know, you call up, it's
• 13:17
  like, oh, my daughter's not eating anything with bread.
• 13:21
  My wife, you know, she's, she's vegan.
• 13:25
  I personally want sneak on everything.
• 13:27
  What's something I can order? You know what I mean?
• 13:29
  Like, it's pretty complicated to the point that I, if I really
• 13:32
  got intentional, I would feel guilty of like laying out
• 13:37
  dietary restrictions to a person.
• 13:38
  Usually I'm just going to be like, dude, you tell me what to
• 13:40
  get, man. I just want what's good, you
• 13:42
  know? So people are saying like, hey,
• 13:44
  why would people call a restaurant?
• 13:45
  But I think that like more and more people are going to be
• 13:48
  using their voice for everything interacting with AII.
• 13:51
  Completely agree with this. I mean, part of the reason we
• 13:53
  started the company. Like I'm a big believer in voice
• 13:58
  as a modality for interacting with the digital world, like
• 14:01
  just in general, like it's so I use everything I like.
• 14:05
  I'm the guy that's like talking into my phone to like click,
• 14:07
  send a text message rather than like pushing, like typing with
• 14:11
  my thumbs, right? I also like use whisper flow,
• 14:14
  which is like this tool where you can just like speak into
• 14:16
  your keyboard, right? And so like, or the computer
• 14:19
  that and I'll just type and I'll remember like the way that
• 14:23
  you've written emails in the past and like format directly.
• 14:25
  Like I use voice for everything. It's a much faster more there's
• 14:31
  more context built into it. It's faster and more it's just
• 14:36
  more effective and efficient modality for interacting with
• 14:40
  each other. I mean, that's why we're doing
• 14:42
  this right now. Video and voice, right?
• 14:45
  It would be this is much more interesting.
• 14:47
  You get much more of the contacts.
• 14:49
  You'd learn much more as a viewer of the of of this podcast
• 14:53
  than you would if me and you were just sending emails back
• 14:56
  and forth, right. Like, one of the things I always
• 14:58
  think about is like, I don't know if you've ever seen on
• 15:01
  Twitter those, like, old tech emails, like, like Steve Jobs
• 15:06
  sending an e-mail to, like, wants to act or like Elon
• 15:09
  sending an e-mail to, like, Sam Altman or something.
• 15:12
  Like, yeah, we see the e-mail. Oh, could you imagine if we
• 15:15
  were, like, actually be able to see, like, Elon speaking those
• 15:19
  words to him or something? Like, you just get so much more
• 15:23
  of what's going on with voice than you do through typing until
• 15:29
  we get telepathy down. Like voice is definitely the
• 15:32
  best modality, yeah. OK, everyone loves to talk about
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  vision, the pitch, the funding round.
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  But you know what gets 0 love? The actual product build.
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  That magical, terrifying phase where nothing works, the docs
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  Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's to the point that
• 17:45
  like during COVID I was attending like, like Zen sitting
• 17:51
  sessions And you know, Zen is an interesting tradition because it
• 17:56
  has disciplic succession. You know what I mean?
• 17:59
  Like you need a teacher that to like want to do you, because
• 18:02
  there's not like, it's not like you go to the end zone and dunk
• 18:04
  on Zen. You know what I mean?
• 18:05
  There, there's this to it. You have to have people kind of
• 18:08
  keeping an eye on you, but kind of what you found out over zoom
• 18:11
  calls, like you can actually, there's a, a kind of a
• 18:15
  transmission is possible. You know what I mean?
• 18:17
  Over space and time because you still, there's still something
• 18:20
  extra, you know, with the video and the, the voice, the
• 18:24
  inflection. There's there's so much to it.
• 18:27
  And now I'm kind of hung up because I want to be all in.
• 18:30
  I got whisper flow. I was trying to use it, but
• 18:33
  like, I'm also embarrassed with my, with my requests and chat
• 18:37
  histories. If I'm talking to GPT or
• 18:38
  whatever, you know, like if I'm like whispering into my phone,
• 18:41
  you know, give me the price comparison of five different
• 18:44
  inflatable pools. You know, my wife should be
• 18:47
  like, what, what are you doing over there?
• 18:48
  And it's like, dude, I, I don't want to explain it to you, you
• 18:51
  know? So like, I end up typing a lot
• 18:53
  because I'm always doing weird stuff online and I don't want
• 18:57
  people overhearing what I'm up to, you know, I mean.
• 19:02
  Yeah, for sure. Like there's there's definitely
• 19:05
  what's beautiful about this is like there's definitely, it's
• 19:07
  situational, right? Like if you're looking for a
• 19:10
  gift for your wife for her birthday and you're sitting next
• 19:12
  to her on the couch, like you're not going to be speaking into
• 19:15
  your phone, like, hey, find me a diamond necklace, whatever it
• 19:18
  is, right? Like, yeah, you're going to
• 19:22
  that's what's beautiful is you can then go and like use your
• 19:24
  fingers. I'm not saying never use your,
• 19:27
  you know, type, never type. I just think I would much rather
• 19:32
  right, I would much at least when I'm communicating with
• 19:36
  another human or communicating with, I guess in this case an AI
• 19:43
  like what? And I expect it to be a human,
• 19:45
  right? Like what if I'm calling a
• 19:46
  restaurant and, and this is a beautiful thing.
• 19:49
  Like we, we have some metrics that show about 40% of our
• 19:51
  customers, the diners that call our customers for other
• 19:54
  restaurants, they don't know they're speaking to an AI
• 19:57
  because it's that good at. What's the courtesy around that?
• 20:01
  Is there AI courtesy that you should what?
• 20:03
  What's your take on that? That you should announce that it
• 20:05
  is AI or not. You know, I don't think so.
• 20:08
  I mean, I I would say it it drops humans have pre conceived
• 20:14
  notion. This is, This is why you
• 20:15
  shouldn't from a, from kind of a technical standpoint, like
• 20:21
  humans have preconceived notions and one of the things we fight
• 20:24
  against as a company about what a robot on the phone is like
• 20:31
  right when you call. I just had, like, I wrote a
• 20:33
  LinkedIn post about this a while ago.
• 20:34
  Like I had probably the most frustrating interaction I've had
• 20:41
  in like years with a phone, a bot with CBS like 2 weeks ago.
• 20:48
  It was one of those phone trees, right?
• 20:49
  Press 1 for this, press 2 for that.
• 20:52
  Like speak into it. But like doesn't really like to
• 20:55
  have anything. I took literally like 28 minutes
• 20:57
  on the phone and I could not get to the pharmacist that I needed
• 21:01
  to speak to. And so I am not so mad.
• 21:03
  And so humans have this like really preconceived this, this,
• 21:06
  this bad preconceived notion of what it's like to talk to a
• 21:09
  robot on the phone. It's going to take them a while
• 21:13
  to learn like, oh, wait, like this is like a conversational AI
• 21:17
  that I can talk to. It's not just as it's going to
• 21:20
  take them a while to start using ChatGPT over over Google, right?
• 21:23
  Like, and, and, and how they need to prompt ChatGPT a
• 21:29
  different way than they would if they were searching Google for
• 21:32
  something. You need to prompt an AI voice
• 21:35
  agent a little bit different and speak to it more naturally, like
• 21:38
  as if you were speaking to a human, then you would if you're
• 21:41
  speaking to AIVR, that's like, hey, you know, I was talking to
• 21:47
  1 yesterday for like I have an auto glass claim, right?
• 21:50
  I mean all that I got a crack in our windshield.
• 21:52
  It's like, please name like where on the windshield the
• 21:54
  class is cracked. And I was like top right.
• 21:56
  You know, if I was talking to a human, I would I would I would
• 21:59
  do it differently. I'm getting a little bit off
• 22:01
  topic, but basically, I don't think it lends itself well to
• 22:08
  making a smooth transition into a world where we're actually
• 22:11
  using these tools from a privacy perspective.
• 22:15
  I don't really think there's a ton there either.
• 22:18
  Like it's not, it's not that like, and it's not like we are
• 22:23
  using your data to like inform this next conversation as much,
• 22:27
  right? Like it's not like, hey, Ryan
• 22:30
  ordered this yesterday. So if I'm talking to Stacy, you
• 22:34
  know, hey, we have a customer named Ryan, he ordered these
• 22:36
  three things yesterday. Like we would never do that,
• 22:38
  right? So I don't think there's privacy
• 22:40
  concerns too much around it. And I also take with 40% of
• 22:44
  people don't know that they're speaking to an AI like they're
• 22:49
  not what they're going to be willing to divulge to a human is
• 22:52
  probably similar if not more to an AI.
• 22:56
  That's kind of how I think about it.
• 22:58
  Yeah, that's interesting, because I would, I would do the
• 23:01
  different, the opposite. Like if it's good, I'd be like,
• 23:06
  oh, sweet. OK, you know, like now I really
• 23:09
  want to know, you know, some serious inside baseball.
• 23:12
  You know, I'll be like, OK. When was the last time you got
• 23:14
  the, the, the, the the seafood, you know, shipment.
• 23:17
  Did you get it this morning? OK, great.
• 23:18
  What's your favorite? Should I get the snapper?
• 23:20
  Should I get the bass? You know, you sorry, you're not.
• 23:24
  You're not hearing the judgement from the, the staff because you
• 23:28
  know, I don't know, like if I'm going to like a nice restaurant
• 23:31
  calling in, I'm, I'm getting reservations, I'm picking up
• 23:34
  take out, whatever I'm doing. I want them to like me.
• 23:37
  You know what I mean? And I'm not knowing.
• 23:40
  And, and then I might also, you know, if somebody's like, how
• 23:42
  spicy do you want it? And then I, me personally, it's
• 23:45
  a challenge. So I'm like as spicy as you got,
• 23:48
  you know, But really, I want medium, you know what I mean?
• 23:51
  So if I'm talking to AI, I'll be like, OK, I actually, I wanted
• 23:55
  medium. I I'd be more comfortable.
• 23:56
  I don't feel like threatened and challenged by the robot.
• 24:00
  Yeah, OK. I, I think IA 100% get where
• 24:03
  you're coming from here. It's I think the 60 to 70% of
• 24:08
  customers that when they're calling our agents, they
• 24:12
  understand that they're speaking to a quote robot or AI, right?
• 24:18
  It's really interesting to see how the conversation changes and
• 24:22
  how many more questions they ask and what they're willing to
• 24:25
  divulge. I still think the the, the
• 24:32
  frequency kind of notion that people have about robots on the
• 24:36
  phone, they're much more willing to bypass an AI, even if it like
• 24:41
  not give it a chance. I would say if they know it's AI
• 24:45
  upfront versus just coming in thinking it's a human.
• 24:48
  So I totally get where you're coming from there too.
• 24:50
  Can you do it? You know, I mean like for I had
• 24:53
  the exact same thing. I got stuck on a phone tree for
• 24:55
  the Red Cross. I'm trying to sign up for a
• 24:57
  blood donation, you know, and it's like they can't find the
• 25:00
  the thing I'm you know, so I just end up shouting into the
• 25:04
  the phone talk to human talk to like if I did that on here on
• 25:10
  lowman, would I be able to talk to a human or you just that's
• 25:13
  your only option. No, we, we 100, we do absolutely
• 25:17
  give diners the ability to get through to a because there's,
• 25:21
  there's a lot of situations where you, if you're not in the
• 25:24
  restaurant, you cannot know what's going on, right?
• 25:27
  So let's, let's say I'm a employee at Ryan's Pizza and I'm
• 25:32
  30 minutes late for my shift, right?
• 25:34
  Like if I'm tolling into the restaurant to get to the manager
• 25:38
  and AI, like sure, we could build something that could relay
• 25:41
  from the AI to the manager. That's someone that's going to
• 25:44
  be late. But the easier option is to hey,
• 25:47
  I need the manager, OK, we'll transfer to the manager's number
• 25:50
  or hey, I have a complaint. We will.
• 25:53
  We will. In some cases, a lot of our
• 25:54
  restaurants will take that down with the AI and then we can
• 25:56
  relay it to them through text. But some of our restaurants want
• 26:00
  to handle those complaints directly with a human.
• 26:02
  So yes, there are, there's transfer.
• 26:04
  We set up transfers where you where if a customer does really
• 26:07
  need to speak to a human, we absolutely allow them to if and
• 26:12
  most of our customers want some form of that, right?
• 26:15
  So totally. And it's been built into the
• 26:17
  product from the beginning. Cool.
• 26:19
  I love it, man. I mean, yeah, it's interesting
• 26:21
  because I get very irritated from the antiquated phone trees
• 26:26
  and stuff. But I, I love talking to AII,
• 26:30
  find myself being much more creative and like wanting to
• 26:33
  push the boundaries and just like looping things together to
• 26:36
  kind of test the boundaries, you know?
• 26:39
  So it, it, you know, it's like a cool way to kind of discover a
• 26:43
  lot about a restaurant. If you have the time and and
• 26:45
  you're not taking anybody's time up, you know, you can call, Hey,
• 26:48
  what's the special, you know, what's the most popular thing on
• 26:51
  the item? What's you've seen my order
• 26:53
  history? What do you think I should get?
• 26:54
  You know, like those kind of interactions is like perfect for
• 26:57
  AI, right? And let's talk about the AI,
• 27:00
  your tech stack, like what are you using right now to kind of
• 27:04
  to, to feed, to feed your tool? Yeah.
• 27:07
  I mean, we use all the foundation models or have used
• 27:11
  like, it's not like we're using all of them at the same time,
• 27:13
  but we use, we've used and tested basically every
• 27:16
  foundation model you can think of.
• 27:18
  And we've, you know, we've tried open AI, we've tried anthropics
• 27:21
  models, we've tried Gemini, we've used open source models.
• 27:25
  You know, we've, we used different foundation models for
• 27:28
  different use cases and we fine-tuned them.
• 27:31
  So that's kind of and then, yeah, there's other tools that
• 27:34
  we use, right, like Twilio and and like for voice, like for
• 27:40
  some of the voice infrastructure that we're using and you know,
• 27:44
  live get deep gram, stuff like that.
• 27:47
  I'm not going to go too deep into our exact tech stack, but
• 27:49
  like those are some of the tools that we use.
• 27:52
  When it comes to foundation models, though, what we found
• 27:54
  the best is test everything and specific use cases are good for
• 28:01
  specific models are good for specific use cases and then we
• 28:05
  fine tune them. Yeah, I mean like some of that
• 28:09
  early entrance into this this game it's kind of like phone AI
• 28:16
  for restaurants game. Like there were some there were
• 28:18
  some tools like 3 years before ChatGPT came out.
• 28:23
  We luckily timed it like, you know, two months or something
• 28:27
  after BPT 3 came out and I can't remember exactly.
• 28:32
  It was just like right after I got good enough, I think GPT 3.5
• 28:37
  and but these guys were literally building their own
• 28:41
  models for customers, right? And like, and they would work
• 28:45
  horribly too, which is crazy. So it's a funny thing about
• 28:48
  timing in this industry, man. Like I see all these AI
• 28:51
  companies and like you kind of have to get lucky with the
• 28:54
  timing, right? Like you're if you're trying to
• 28:59
  build AI, but you don't and and an LLM can do the the action
• 29:04
  that you needed to do, but you were three years early.
• 29:06
  So you're trying to use some other deep learning
• 29:09
  reinforcement. Like I had something like else
• 29:12
  that's different. Like you're probably really
• 29:14
  behind the 8 ball and you probably spent a ton of money
• 29:16
  trying to do something when you could have just, you had no
• 29:20
  idea, but you could have just waited three years.
• 29:22
  And then you have an API that costs, you know, whatever it
• 29:25
  does to use chess, GPTS or open AI.
• 29:27
  So yeah, tech tech wise, like we're using a lot of the, the,
• 29:31
  we use the the foundation models, a lot of really cool
• 29:35
  stuff out there for voice AI though.
• 29:37
  I mean, Cartesia is cool. Like we've been testing that
• 29:39
  like there's TRP, a couple of labs.
• 29:42
  Those guys. Yeah, exactly 11 labs we found
• 29:46
  like Deep Cram, right. Like we have some former Deep
• 29:48
  Cram people working here. And yeah, it's been, it's been
• 29:53
  fun. It's been like a mix of like how
• 29:56
  we've kind of got like on the go to market side, like it's like
• 29:59
  all like former restaurant people like like first five
• 30:03
  sales guy at DoorDash top president's club over the last
• 30:07
  five years at Toast, like first salesperson at the talk like.
• 30:12
  And then on the, on the tech side, it's much more like come
• 30:16
  like people that have come from the voice AI world like that
• 30:19
  I've worked at like like a deep cram and like 11 labs and stuff
• 30:24
  like that. So it's it's been a fun like
• 30:28
  process bringing everybody together and getting this team
• 30:30
  rolling well. Yeah, those, those legacy
• 30:33
  restaurant integrations are not exactly super tech forward, is
• 30:36
  it? How's that been like working
• 30:39
  into those things? I mean, it was hard from the
• 30:41
  beginning. Like luckily now we have like
• 30:46
  the the like the partnerships with Toast and the spot ONS and
• 30:51
  the squares and the Clover like the big ones and the OpenTable
• 30:54
  finally like and but in the beginning it was like almost
• 30:59
  impossible. Like we kind of thought about it
• 31:01
  like I was like, oh, should we build this like stand alone
• 31:04
  solution from the point of sale system?
• 31:07
  This is what this is how bad people wanted Loman or if they
• 31:11
  still want Loman, a lot of times what will happen is somebody
• 31:13
  will come to us and they'll use some point of sale system.
• 31:16
  I've never heard of, right? The point of sale system market
• 31:18
  is crazy. There's literally over 500
• 31:22
  companies competing, right? And you know, there's four that
• 31:25
  make up the top 60% of the market, right?
• 31:29
  Toast makes up like 20% of the market.
• 31:31
  Clover Square spot on. Like the big ones they make up,
• 31:34
  you know, the other 40% or whatever it is.
• 31:36
  But customer will come to us and say, hey, I want to use you for
• 31:41
  my 4 pizza places or my 4 sandwich shops.
• 31:44
  I use XYVPOS, never heard of it. We don't integrate with it.
• 31:50
  My sales team would be like, look, we don't have an
• 31:52
  integration there. Like unfortunately, like we have
• 31:55
  to work with the POS to make it work now.
• 31:59
  I used to hear this all the time.
• 32:01
  People would just go, can you e-mail me the orders?
• 32:04
  Can you fax? I have what I said.
• 32:06
  Can you fax me the order? Can you text me the orders?
• 32:09
  I was like, this is I mean, not only is it amazing like that
• 32:13
  people are literally willing like like Eric think that that's
• 32:16
  an option, but that people we one beautiful thing that I've
• 32:21
  noticed about Loman and like the quality of our solution versus
• 32:25
  some of the other solutions on the market.
• 32:27
  One of the things that like really solidified for me like
• 32:30
  that this is like something worth continuing to build and
• 32:35
  just like making a, a mission around 20% of our customers, I
• 32:40
  would say it's, it's actually closer to 15% of our customers.
• 32:44
  They switch the point of sale that they use because they want
• 32:46
  to use Loman. So they'll they'll go out and
• 32:49
  buy a $20,000 toast system because they want to use the
• 32:52
  best voice AI on the market for restaurants and.
• 32:56
  What an endorsement that. Right.
• 32:58
  It's huge. It's humongous.
• 33:00
  Like I had a guy, I, yeah, I had a guy do this super early on.
• 33:04
  Like he was like our 10th customer and I was like, Are you
• 33:06
  sure? Like that's like you can also
• 33:08
  get like something that's cheaper.
• 33:09
  And he's like, no, if I want to do this, I'm going to do it
• 33:11
  right. I want to use you guys like,
• 33:14
  tell me what to get. And I'm like, look, Toast is
• 33:16
  going to be your best friend, like, And so now we have a good
• 33:18
  relationship with the Toast team, you know.
• 33:22
  Yeah, it's the integrations. Getting in there in the
• 33:25
  beginning was not simple. Like you really have to push
• 33:30
  hard on the right levers and you just kind of have to know the
• 33:35
  right people that it's, it's not a simple answer.
• 33:40
  Like, you know, we built some hacky solutions in the
• 33:43
  beginning, but we really quickly were able to actually get the
• 33:45
  integrations luckily. And now we actually have like
• 33:49
  the partnerships, which is what really matters to us.
• 33:53
  But yeah, it wasn't easy at 1st. And like these these BOSS, the
• 33:57
  restaurant industry, the restaurant industry is love it
• 34:00
  or hate it. Like it's, it's probably decade
• 34:03
  behind. And like from a technology
• 34:05
  perspective, I worked my whole life like in like in AI
• 34:08
  companies or like cyber security companies working with like
• 34:11
  large enterprise Oregon SAS. These guys are always on like
• 34:14
  sort of like the cutting edge or like sort of of like what's
• 34:17
  going on. Restaurants tend to be like, 10
• 34:21
  years behind. So a good example of this is
• 34:24
  like, I've heard several owners tell me, yeah, like, we didn't
• 34:28
  even, like online ordering, wasn't even like, really
• 34:31
  established until COVID. So if you think about that,
• 34:34
  like, these websites didn't have a way to order food until 20/21.
• 34:38
  I know. And now it's like every day
• 34:40
  we're like, like, I just go on this guy's website and press,
• 34:43
  like, order something. It wasn't like that five years
• 34:46
  ago. Four years ago.
• 34:49
  Interesting. Yeah.
• 34:49
  It's funny to hear you talk about in the beginning, like you
• 34:51
  guys are a million years old. You You were founded in the
• 34:55
  summer of 2024. And yeah, yeah, I know it.
• 34:58
  Looks like you raised three and a half million in August, so
• 35:01
  like this has happened very quickly.
• 35:05
  Yeah, I mean, well, I look we're we're we're lucky enough to have
• 35:08
  like like some really amazing gross.
• 35:13
  I you know, in all of it's inbound, which is like the
• 35:17
  craziest part in the beginning. It was not right.
• 35:19
  Like me and my Co founders started the company in early 20
• 35:24
  like early summer of 2024. So I think it was like April,
• 35:27
  May, April was like the first customer kind of design
• 35:30
  customer. We got like a little bit about,
• 35:35
  about me. Like I, I worked in restaurants
• 35:38
  from the time I was like not even allowed to work.
• 35:40
  So like 6th grade, I had an aunt and uncle that owned a
• 35:43
  restaurant and a couple other family members that owned a
• 35:45
  restaurant. I was living in Southern
• 35:47
  California. My sister was working at this
• 35:49
  restaurant. She's like, you can come work
• 35:50
  here if you want. Like my mom and dad want me to
• 35:52
  get out of the house for, for the summer and I had already
• 35:54
  finished basketball camp and I was like, I don't want to buy
• 35:58
  any surfboard. Like, can I make money?
• 36:01
  And so like, they let me go out there and wash dishes.
• 36:04
  So I, I worked at this restaurant and I'm from like the
• 36:07
  Central Coast of California for like basically from the time I
• 36:10
  was in 6th grade every summer and break until I left until I
• 36:15
  had a sophomore year of college. Then I had like an internship or
• 36:18
  something and I saw like the problems of this kind of like
• 36:23
  first hand. And so when we, me and my Co
• 36:28
  founders saw like a demo of this voice AI stuff in early 2024, it
• 36:36
  was like pretty obvious to me up front like that is that we
• 36:39
  wanted like this was going to be a good idea.
• 36:42
  Like it just made sense. I had seen the problem first
• 36:45
  hand. I had felt the problem first
• 36:47
  hand. So often we would unplug the
• 36:51
  phone from the wall in the summer because it's a beach
• 36:53
  town. Like it was just nuts.
• 36:55
  Like people were always calling us.
• 36:57
  We would literally take the phone off the hook.
• 36:59
  I would say Friday, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
• 37:02
  Like that was like a almost a sure thing.
• 37:06
  And so I posted on this like small business Facebook group
• 37:14
  like in like the middle of 2020, like like I think it's like, and
• 37:19
  I said April of 2024 and I said, hey, we built this thing.
• 37:25
  Like, is anybody interested in using it?
• 37:27
  Like trying it, I kid you not, within 30 minutes, it might even
• 37:32
  have been less I, but definitely within 30 minutes, 3 restaurant
• 37:35
  owners had commented on my post and we're like, yes, like how do
• 37:40
  I like, how do I get my restaurant on this?
• 37:42
  And I was like, OK, Ding, Ding, Ding.
• 37:44
  One of those people became our first customer in the, our
• 37:48
  design customer. He's added all three of his
• 37:50
  locations today. He's been using us now for
• 37:53
  whatever a year and a half or a year and a little 18 months,
• 37:56
  whatever. The first six months.
• 38:00
  Like I just sold my 2 Co founders built not the first six
• 38:03
  months, like the first three months, sorry.
• 38:05
  Like I, I built a scraper, scraped every single restaurant
• 38:09
  I could in my local area and and every restaurant that was using
• 38:13
  like the specific point of sale system that we integrated with.
• 38:18
  I cold called, called, emailed and I although I'm a go to
• 38:22
  market person. So all the while I was kind of
• 38:25
  like laying the foundation for go to market.
• 38:29
  And now we are getting now all like we have a team of five
• 38:37
  salespeople. They're like we get, I'm not
• 38:41
  going to say the exact number, but we get enough, we get a, we
• 38:44
  get a hundreds and hundreds, almost thousands of inbound
• 38:47
  leads every month for the system.
• 38:50
  Yeah, we really did a good job of laying the foundation on the
• 38:53
  go to market side. We're starting to work with a
• 38:56
  lot bigger brands like talking to some of the the Ihops and the
• 39:00
  Church's Chicken and the bigger brands, you know.
• 39:03
  And yeah, it's been really fun. We raised a little bit of money
• 39:06
  from Antler 500K in December of 2024 and then we raised like a
• 39:14
  seed in a few months ago, three or four months ago from a
• 39:18
  partner out here Next Coast Ventures and 10110 who was in LA
• 39:23
  And it's been fun, man. It's been like a crazy ride.
• 39:28
  We're not slowing down like, and we're growing like crazy hiring
• 39:32
  new people. We just went on our first
• 39:34
  company retreat last month, which is really fun to see
• 39:36
  everybody together. Yeah, it's been a, it's been AI
• 39:40
  Think these like these AI companies are like on such an
• 39:43
  accelerated timeline. Now, some of the stuff I see is
• 39:48
  ridiculous, like, hey, I'm at like 500 million of ARR in three
• 39:53
  days. It's like you're not making ARR.
• 39:57
  That's just not true. Yeah, we're a traditional.
• 40:03
  The cool thing about us though, is like we are a traditional B
• 40:06
  to B SAS. Like follow the salesperson,
• 40:10
  like do a demo, close the deal. Same day in this day, same day,
• 40:14
  luckily. We're not like a self-service
• 40:17
  platform yet. Maybe something in the future
• 40:20
  will happen like that. So we don't, we don't have those
• 40:21
  crazy cursor like ARR numbers yet, but but it's fit fun and
• 40:25
  our pipeline is just bursting at the sea as we feel really good
• 40:28
  about where we are. Dude, Congrats, it's amazing.
• 40:30
  What is the secret sauce to this GTM that dumps a hundreds of
• 40:35
  inbound leads your way? I'm off.
• 40:37
  Yeah, I'm, I'm not going to I'll I'll still a little bit like I
• 40:41
  would say here, here's what I'd say.
• 40:42
  I mean, if not one thing for sure, like I, I laid a ton of
• 40:45
  foundation for us to be like awesome when it comes to LLMS.
• 40:50
  Also an SEOI think, I think a lot of people forget that they
• 40:55
  need to do SEO in the beginning of the company, like because it
• 40:59
  because it doesn't like do anything for you upfront.
• 41:02
  Like it's, it takes a while before you start seeing results.
• 41:06
  I started doing SEO from the day we started the company day I
• 41:10
  built the website. And it's, you know, we got about
• 41:13
  1/4 of our leads right now from SEO.
• 41:19
  But one thing I would say though, is if you like people
• 41:24
  like to like, if you truly OK here here's here's a secret is
• 41:31
  20% of our leads come from referrals from our own
• 41:34
  customers. We really have a referral
• 41:35
  program, Bill. It's because we build the best
• 41:38
  product on the market that people want to talk and support
• 41:41
  your customers, right? Like really, really support your
• 41:43
  customers. Like be there for them when they
• 41:46
  need something like I had AI got off the phone with a customer
• 41:50
  just a few minutes ago. They have like 8 locations with
• 41:53
  us. He's like, there are two
• 41:54
  companies I will never give up Like these guys are like they
• 41:57
  tried to invest in our last round, right?
• 42:00
  Like if you truly build relationships with your
• 42:03
  customers and like hang out with them at the show, you know, go
• 42:08
  out for a beer with them after you go and meet them like you
• 42:12
  can, you can, if you can win over, you have to have the
• 42:16
  product first, like the product got to work and be the best
• 42:18
  number one. But if you could truly build the
• 42:20
  best relationship with your customers too you, you've got
• 42:22
  customers for life. And then the last thing I would
• 42:25
  say is tell the story and and and show it.
• 42:29
  So we do a really good job of telling our customers stories
• 42:34
  about what it was like before they used Loman, asking them
• 42:36
  straight up, hey, what's it like now, right?
• 42:40
  And going and filming that and then putting that on camera.
• 42:44
  That's probably been our biggest win so far, right?
• 42:49
  Like it's just using telling our tell.
• 42:51
  Tell customer stories, put them on video and show them to the
• 42:53
  world, right? That's platforms.
• 42:56
  Is that like YouTube and Facebook, Instagram, all of
• 42:59
  them? Yeah, I mean, what's cool about
• 43:01
  like digital media today, man, is like you can you shoot, if
• 43:06
  you know what you're doing, you shoot like a long form YouTube
• 43:09
  video. It's not to be long form.
• 43:11
  I mean, like 5 to 10 minutes, let's say 5 to 10 minutes,
• 43:14
  right? You go out and make sure there's
• 43:17
  an interview, got a bunch of B rolls, right?
• 43:21
  We do that for YouTube. Then you could split it up and
• 43:23
  turn it into shorts on across every platform.
• 43:27
  And then that can turn into Coke cards and then that can turn
• 43:29
  into a blog like multi. Like when you're a small
• 43:32
  company, you don't have a marketing team.
• 43:34
  I am the market. There's no marketing people
• 43:35
  here. It's me.
• 43:38
  I, you know, I outsource the video creation.
• 43:40
  But other than that, like it's me.
• 43:42
  Like you have to learn how to repurpose.
• 43:45
  And so we do a really good job of that.
• 43:46
  But yeah, we put it on Meta like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
• 43:51
  Shorts, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn.
• 43:55
  You never know where you're going to hit.
• 43:57
  The other thing I would say is like know where your ICP is and
• 44:00
  stop investing where it's not right.
• 44:02
  Like if your ICP is SMB business owners and all you're doing is
• 44:08
  going on LinkedIn and posting like you're not going to find
• 44:12
  the people you need to find. It's just not going to work.
• 44:15
  Like it's nobody wants to see. They're in the restaurant,
• 44:18
  they're not on LinkedIn. Exactly.
• 44:21
  Yeah, or they're on Facebook, right?
• 44:23
  Like it just depends like like know your ICP and like really, I
• 44:27
  think that's incredibly important.
• 44:29
  People forget about that a lot of times.
• 44:30
  But multi pronged approach, tell customers stories, know where
• 44:34
  your ICP is and feed them what they don't let you do the
• 44:38
  talking, let your customers do the talking and your results do
• 44:42
  the talking and people will believe you, right.
• 44:44
  Like an inherently untrustworthy set of business owners are
• 44:48
  restaurant owners. Like they're very much like not
• 44:52
  in line to like help you, but when one.
• 44:57
  But but when 20% of them are coming to us saying, hey, my
• 45:00
  buddy Brian told me, like, you guys are the best on the market.
• 45:03
  Like there's nothing you have to do.
• 45:05
  You just you just say, yeah, hey, Brian's awesome.
• 45:09
  Just saw him last week. Whatever.
• 45:11
  You know it. It makes it really easy, which
• 45:13
  is nice. Well, you got some crazy
• 45:15
  numbers. I mean, if a successful
• 45:16
  restaurant is running 3 to 5% margins, profit margins and you
• 45:20
  know, looking at at what, what GBT is telling me about you is
• 45:24
  talking about, you know, cutting labor costs as much as 17%,
• 45:28
  improving, you know, take out margins, you know, 22% or more.
• 45:33
  Like this is the difference between, you know, you know, a
• 45:35
  restaurant owner's kids going to college out of state or going to
• 45:39
  Community College. You know, nothing wrong with
• 45:41
  Community College, but like this, this is big, big money.
• 45:44
  Yeah. I mean, look it and it depends
• 45:46
  on how much volume your restaurant is doing.
• 45:48
  But there's three real big benefits of Loman, right?
• 45:52
  It's number. There's two of them are about
• 45:55
  revenue and one of them is about labor.
• 45:56
  And then all the other stuff is intangible and like, but we're
• 46:00
  going to make you more money because you're missing 30% of
• 46:03
  your calls. And we're going to, we're going
• 46:06
  to answer every single one of those calls.
• 46:07
  You can answer multiple calls at one time.
• 46:09
  We're always going to pick up, right.
• 46:12
  You're, you're missing calls or putting people on hold, you're
• 46:14
  clearly missing orders. We're going to answer all of
• 46:17
  those. So that's like an obvious like
• 46:19
  recapturing of about 30% of the revenue from those from calls.
• 46:23
  The second thing that we're going to increase average order
• 46:25
  value every single time we do take an order on average because
• 46:30
  we are upselling every time, right?
• 46:33
  So your staff might upsell 5 to 8% of the time and AI is going
• 46:39
  to upsell every single time, 100% of the time, even if it
• 46:44
  only hits 30% of people. I mean, that's a huge list in
• 46:48
  average order of value. So those two on the revenue side
• 46:53
  are beautiful. The third is labor, right?
• 46:55
  So there's two ways to look at this.
• 46:57
  One, you could save money on labor.
• 46:59
  Like the pizza place I was talking about before that I was
• 47:02
  talking on the phone said I'll never get rid of Loaman is like
• 47:04
  they're saving about 2700 bucks in labor a month from using
• 47:08
  Loaman at each location. Now I have other customers that
• 47:12
  just repurpose the labor and that if they're able to provide
• 47:15
  better hospitality because there are people aren't answering the
• 47:17
  phone anymore. They are just help.
• 47:19
  They are they can get their full attention.
• 47:21
  Nobody is ever standing around waiting for a napkin or ask like
• 47:26
  you know, you've seen it. You've done this probably before
• 47:29
  at a restaurant where you go up to the counter and you're like,
• 47:30
  hey, anybody around, like can I talk to somebody?
• 47:34
  You know, that never happens at a Lohman restaurant because we
• 47:37
  always. And if it does, you need to fire
• 47:39
  the people that are sitting there because they're not doing
• 47:41
  anything other than running the food out, taking some orders
• 47:44
  from people inside, just they're able to focus a lot more.
• 47:49
  So those are kind of like the big benefits that we lead with
• 47:52
  when we talked about Lohman. And then our customers are
• 47:54
  seeing and the numbers bear it out like we're making them more
• 47:56
  money, we're making them their ticket size go up and we're
• 48:02
  reducing labor or making hospitality just that much
• 48:05
  better. Amazing.
• 48:06
  It's so cool. What percentage of your your
• 48:10
  customers are like mom and pop restaurants?
• 48:12
  What percent are like kind of like concepts or like chains for
• 48:15
  like another word? It's like 67030 like 7030 are
• 48:21
  like the one to five location, 70% is like one to five location
• 48:25
  and then 30% are like the like 5 or sorry like 6 plus you know,
• 48:31
  we have some bigger customers as well than at like 20-30 forty 50
• 48:36
  customer or units. Yeah, but lot of lot of SMBs,
• 48:40
  right. Like what's what's interesting
• 48:42
  is since everything is inbound, we have one we have one sales
• 48:47
  first or sorry one SDR that is solely focused on multi units
• 48:53
  right now. So we're one of the. 55 sales
• 48:58
  guys, how big's the rest of the team?
• 49:01
  Sorry, it's actually about four AES and one SDR, so it's 5
• 49:07
  total. Yeah, our team total, there were
• 49:10
  4-14 people total as a team. 14 people total.
• 49:14
  How many paying clients? I'll just say we're north.
• 49:20
  We're just about 1000. 1000 So if I just do this napkin math
• 49:24
  here, we're 2 N of $250,000 MRR. Oh, you've already.
• 49:30
  Yeah, We're I'm not going to give you the exact number that
• 49:33
  we don't. We don't talk about numbers,
• 49:34
  probably come on, but we're. Giving the give us the details.
• 49:37
  We are doing, we are doing very well and I'll just say that and
• 49:41
  we're moving really, really quickly.
• 49:43
  Dude, Yeah, yeah, cool. I love it.
• 49:47
  Now one thing came up to like, I love that you appreciated SEO
• 49:51
  early on. When you're thinking about SEO,
• 49:53
  are you? Are you optimizing keywords like
• 49:56
  restaurant AI? Are you going a little bit more
• 49:58
  deep into pain points, which is like, you know, how to make
• 50:01
  restaurants more profitable? How to make like trying to think
• 50:05
  of the psychology of like where your ICP is going to be asking
• 50:09
  Google. Yeah, it's all it's bowls,
• 50:13
  right? Like you have to do long and
• 50:14
  short tail keywords, right? Like people talk about a ISEO
• 50:18
  and LLMS, but really it's just the same thing kind of like, but
• 50:24
  when it comes to regular SEO, we have to do both.
• 50:26
  You need the, you need the short tail keywords that are like
• 50:30
  restaurant phony AI phone agent, right?
• 50:33
  Like that's like their main focus.
• 50:35
  But then there's tons of long tail stuff that you need to
• 50:37
  focus on. In this case, it's stuff like
• 50:41
  like, you know, I don't have enough staff, like my staff
• 50:46
  can't answer the phone or like there's, there's like weird
• 50:49
  keywords that we target that are a long tail that they'll get
• 50:52
  nearly as much traffic, but we dominate.
• 50:55
  There's an also a lot of Duke, there's a lot of tools out
• 50:58
  there, AI tools that you can use for SEO these days, like both
• 51:06
  are writing content and for measuring effectiveness.
• 51:11
  So we use a lot of those as well.
• 51:14
  We have some really great tools that we've used in the past like
• 51:17
  automating automated writing tools like, you know, backlink
• 51:22
  stuff. Like I would say that's probably
• 51:25
  the one thing that a lot of people, unless you're in just
• 51:28
  like a crazy crowded SEO market, like a form builder tool, right,
• 51:33
  where there's like 7000 of them. If you're not thinking about SEO
• 51:38
  from the very beginning and you're not on a rocket, like
• 51:41
  you're not growing super fast like you should be, that's like
• 51:43
  the one thing it's, it's actually not hard because
• 51:46
  there's so many tools you can just automate it with or, or go
• 51:50
  pay somebody to do it. Like if you don't know how to do
• 51:53
  it yourself, like pay somebody to do it, it will come back.
• 51:57
  Especially in these early AI, like these AI agent use cases
• 52:03
  that it's such a Greenfield for SEO that like if you're not
• 52:08
  thinking about it, you're just going to fall behind, right?
• 52:10
  Like it's not like we're selling an e-commerce product like
• 52:12
  protein where there's a zillion different things.
• 52:14
  Like this is like a grab, like go out and grab it market.
• 52:19
  So I would say if you're using, if you're building an AI like
• 52:22
  and you're not doing SEO right now, you're just screwing
• 52:25
  yourself. Yeah, I love it.
• 52:28
  Christian, this has been so fun. One last question.
• 52:32
  Half the people I. Talk to are in Austin.
• 52:34
  It's like you could throw a piece of BBQ out the window and
• 52:37
  it would bounce off 2 AI founders.
• 52:41
  That's so funny. Who are some of your your
• 52:44
  favorite CEOs entrepreneurs in Austin right now?
• 52:48
  Oh man, there's so many there. I mean, I'm a big like I'm a big
• 52:53
  defense guy, right? Like not defense guy.
• 52:55
  I just love watching. Like I don't, I don't build
• 52:58
  anything in defense. I just love the companies.
• 53:01
  I don't necessarily need to say like entrepreneurs, but like I
• 53:05
  would say companies. There's a good syndicate of
• 53:09
  voice AI companies coming here. There's like from defense.
• 53:11
  We've got like the Allen control systems like stuff out here.
• 53:15
  There's this really cool, there's this God, what's the
• 53:19
  name of it? There's a lot of hardware stuff,
• 53:22
  like there's the base energy, like, like there's that there's,
• 53:27
  there's a lot of really cool, like not software products here,
• 53:30
  you know, like hardware stuff. Yeah.
• 53:33
  Like there's a, there's like a few people that I've met as well
• 53:38
  that are like doing like modular home building.
• 53:43
  They're like trying to save like America, like from the housing
• 53:48
  crisis. And I'm like, Dang, like that's
• 53:50
  a pretty noble pursuit. Yeah.
• 53:53
  There's a company called the American Housing Corporation.
• 53:55
  And I, I met the founder, which is a really cool company.
• 53:58
  There's like that base energy company.
• 53:59
  I I think that's super awesome. I've met a few founders in the
• 54:05
  Boise high space here that it, it's funny.
• 54:08
  Like some of them, like I think there's a, there's a lot of
• 54:13
  people trying to do it. And so far I, I can't put my
• 54:19
  finger on what it is that makes the ones that are in the end up
• 54:22
  actually like rising from like the cream, like the cream of the
• 54:25
  crop or become, you know, rising up like that actually end up be
• 54:28
  a building something. I can't really tell what the
• 54:30
  difference is, but there have been quite a few good voice AI
• 54:33
  companies here in Austin. I would say there's one called
• 54:35
  Mia that does it for car dealerships, auto dealerships.
• 54:41
  Thanks a lot, man. It's hard to it's so hard.
• 54:44
  But what I would say is like Austin is like to me, the home
• 54:47
  of like the like non traditional software, right?
• 54:50
  Like it's not just software. It's like we're building like
• 54:53
  power grids and like homes, but like doing it like a start up
• 54:57
  and I love stuff like that. Boxables out there.
• 55:02
  Boxable's a good buddy of mine. So yeah, to your point, modular
• 55:06
  housing and like all kinds of next level stuff.
• 55:08
  Austin's so cool. You know, being in Denver, I've
• 55:11
  always felt like Austin and Denver kind of cousin cities,
• 55:14
  you know? It's pretty cool.
• 55:19
  I agree. I agree man.
• 55:21
  Amazing. This has been so fun.
• 55:23
  Ladies and gentlemen, it's loman dot AI part of me.
• 55:27
  Let me get this right. Loman dot AI to check out more
• 55:31
  about congratulations man on the rocket ship.
• 55:34
  You know, I love the category. I think probably a big
• 55:36
  differentiator is just like the ease of use, you know?
• 55:40
  I mean, like there's so many things I want to ask a
• 55:42
  restaurant, but I don't, you know?
• 55:44
  But if I'm telling somebody and they've got Loman, I'm just
• 55:46
  going to be like, dude, I got like 80 bucks.
• 55:48
  I'm trying to feed a family of four.
• 55:49
  You tell me what to get. That's really how do it, you
• 55:53
  know what I mean? Yeah, man, I totally agree.
• 55:57
  And we won't go any longer. But like that is how I do it at
• 56:00
  A at a new restaurant. That is exactly how I do it.
• 56:03
  I'm like, hey, me and my wife. So I've never eaten here.
• 56:06
  Like, what is the best thing on the menu?
• 56:09
  And like, I, I swear 60%, maybe 70% of the time it's just a kid
• 56:14
  on the other end of the phone. They're like, oh, you know.
• 56:16
  That's pretty good. I don't know.
• 56:18
  It's like, OK, thanks for the help.
• 56:21
  You know exactly. But anyways, yeah man.
• 56:25
  I want to give a shout out to Austin Humane Society as well
• 56:28
  today at austinhumanesociety.org.
• 56:31
  If you're in that area, go adopt yourself a little doggy or Kitty
• 56:35
  from Austin Humane Society Christian.
• 56:37
  What's the best place for people to connect with you online?
• 56:41
  Yeah, just you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
• 56:44
  My my name is Christian WIENS is my last name.
• 56:48
  Feel free to go and me over there happy to happy to chat
• 56:51
  with anyone, man. I love meeting new founders, new
• 56:54
  new people in the space and it's been a pleasure, pleasure
• 56:57
  chatting with you. Yeah.
• 56:58
  Thanks so much, man. Appreciate it.
• 57:01
  Have a good one. Bye.
• 57:04
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