Latest / Unstuck Pod / Built by Operators for Operators (Will Meinhardt and Jamie Schneiderman)
Transcript
- Jamie: Hey, Will, welcome for everybody listening, watching. Can you do me a favor, introduce yourself more about Mach 1 AI? And yeah, would be great to start there. Will Meinhardt: Awesome. Jay makes much for having me. I'm Will Meijer, head of sales at Mach1 AI. We partner with business operators to introduce AI into their operations. we do lot of customer facing AI agents and also lot of agents on the backend to handle processing data between different types of systems. just partnering with operators introduce AI. Jamie: And is there ⁓ type of operator? company size, focus areas? Where you focused Will Meinhardt: For sure. I'll just share a quick background before I jump into that. I'll just share a quick background on how Mock One was actually founded. Mock One was actually started within a company called TraceUp.com. And what TraceUp.com does is they actually sell cameras for you sports games. they sell the cameras and they have really advanced AI technology on the back of those cameras to basically break down the video footage and then allow parents to basically share those videos around with. other parents and basically, I you have the problem of there's 11 girls on the field or how many girls in the field that look very similar. You have to figure out which one of them is which. they have super advanced AI. What they to do is basically take those team of AI engineers and allow them to what they call an internal AI operations layer inside their business to sales, customer support, customer success. That implementation went extremely well for them. They completely transformed their business. As a result, they spun the technology out into Mach 1. that's actually how we were founded. And then to get to your question, Jamie, of the types of use cases, types of operators we work with, we really specialize. We think there's a lot of great tools, of in coding and the engineering side. And engineers are very good at going and playing around with different tools, the hottest tools, et cetera. We really think there's ⁓ a lot of room for business operators to adopt into their business. We really focus on customer success, customer support, sales, and that can really look different depending on who our customer is. for example, some customers want to automate a lot of their customer-facing interactions and sales. And depending on the company, they can do this to varying degrees. if you have a direct consumer company where there's a ton of different transactions happening, people are just making small purchases on their website under $100, $200, we can automate a lot of those customer interactions. because you're not rolling out the red carpet. You don't need an actual sales rep assigned to the account or the person. They just need a question answered. They need value from the AI. That's all they care about. But when you have an enterprise type deal where you're working the prospect, you're building a relationship with the prospect, we think we can still help out with that. We do a lot of of top of funnel discovery. We do outbound emails. We can even help reps process calls. figure out best next steps, update the CRM, things like that. But we do think, of course, there's still a lot of room for sales reps in the enterprise. And then when it comes to customer success, we've actually been doing a lot of what we call signal-based customer success. we find that a lot of customer success leaders really want to be proactive in keeping their existing customer base engaged, making sure they're happy, making sure they're using the platform in the best way possible. we'll do things Of course, automatic check-ins after 45 days are many days, but what we've seen a lot of value in is really being able to take different types of signals. maybe someone hasn't logged into the platform in 45 days and one of our customers wants to reach out to their customer and say, hey, you haven't logged in the platform 45 days. We know you have this product. Here's some videos on how to actually improve your usage of this product and how to use it. Jamie: Yeah. Will Meinhardt: And we can actually make an outreach to those customers in way that's hyper tailored to their experience with the product. It's not some templated thing. And then finally, customer support. A lot of people know AI is great at customer support. It's great at answering Jamie: Okay. Will Meinhardt: back and forth questions. We're able to actually update internal systems, pull actual relevant information from their internal systems and basically pull that information and inform the agent in the question that it's answering. We're not just a back and forth conversational agent. We're able to take actions inside of the business and pull of live feedback and. information from their data sources. Jamie: So sounds awesome. and those, There's many use cases. there's many ways could be used and everybody wants to get into it. Help me with how do you start a conversation with a customer? Or I should say does a customer find you, you find the customer? how do you do that? And then what does that look like? Will Meinhardt: That's a great question. basically the advantage we have at Mach 1 is that our founding team is a team of operators. And I'm not on the founding team, I'm just our head of sales. And our founder actually built Mach 1 inside of Trace and he is an extremely experienced operator who's been building workflows within different types of tools for 15, 20 years. Jamie: Thank Will Meinhardt: We have an extremely experienced team who's very good at introducing AI into businesses. lot of it comes with first really leading with our credibility. I we have credibility transforming our customers' businesses through AI. First it was Trace, now it's ⁓ kind of, we about 18, 20 customers on the platform and a lot of them have seen tremendous results with Mach 1. we're starting to build a fan base of our product and a lot of Jamie: Yeah. No more. Will Meinhardt: reputability in the space. So it's less people using our tool, just picking up our tool off the shelf. We're more really partnering with our customers to introduce these technologies. it's really kind the sales motion looks we're outreach, we do outreach to a lot of people. We get some inbound leads, referrals from our existing customers, referring people. But it's really just starts with looking at their business, figuring out where is the place in their business where they can see the most value. We talked to really two different people. One set of people is led by a CEO who is extremely AI first. They think AI is going to transform everything. And they're just hey, you guys go in and just do the same thing you did at Trace, just transform the business. Other people really want to start a lot smaller. And in those cases, we're totally fine to start smaller too. We can start with say a call transcript review, or we can do drafting emails, things like that. there's this continuum of people who to start small, baby steps, and then also people who want to do everything with AI. But what we've seen in the market is that everyone believes AI is going to transform business to some degree. there's not really any headwind we're facing along the lines of trying to convince people AI is going to be useful. Jamie: Yeah. it's great, it's obviously a great place to be. Everybody wants it. what I, it's funny, cause what I've seen is, uh, what you said, Which is that the tailwind has been super strong. It's really helping. It's really pushing. the question I have for you is okay, there's the initial set. You talked about 18, 20 customers, which is fantastic, People who are using it. you got there from ⁓ relationships, past experience when people who knew you and did what's the... What's the next piece, a lot of times when we're talking here, there's the initial set of and then it's the, what took you to the next level or how will you get to the next level? And a lot of the folks that are here are struggling to make that move to the next place. ⁓ what's working for you or what do you see working for you as look forward? Will Meinhardt: Yeah, that's a great question. So over the course of the last year, and we spun out the technology, our founders spun out the technology in early 2025. we've been actually selling the product in the market for about a year. And over the last year, it's been a lot of relationship driven sales, a lot of just outreach the traditional way. But we also, of course, have a tool that we can really weaponize our sales team with. Jamie: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Will Meinhardt: What we've been doing is building this out in baby steps, but first we really need to figure out what even is our sales motion. How do we want to go to market? And I made actually recent post on LinkedIn about this, but I myself have been toying some of the tools, exploring how to introduce AI for our own sales process. And I found some success with automating lower hanging fruit, so to speak. But when it comes to, and an interesting thing is lot of these AI tools can make Everyone feel an engineer, but I think there's a lot of levels to it for example kind of in our off-site a couple of weeks ago We've really decided to go all in on hey How can we build out the most AI native go-to-market that exists in the world? And can we take our team and really weaponize our good market? starting this year, we're really treating our own go-to-market ⁓ as kind a customer We're treating our go-to-market the same way we would any of our Jamie: Yeah. Will Meinhardt: and we're really building out this full automated sales motion. we think that a lot of people are sick of demos. People don't really want to get on a demo anymore and spend 30 minutes. Everyone's pitching AI to them. They really want to just see, this tool going to work for me? Is it going to add value? They just want to see the tool as soon as possible. our of new go-to-market strategy is going to be really revolving around that. We think now is a great time to lean into that as well. Jamie: ⁓ huh. Will Meinhardt: And then of course, exploring some other marketing techniques along the lines of advertising and a variety things along those lines. Jamie: Okay, let's say if you were ⁓ at that going you're looking at what you're doing going forward, you've got lots of activities and plans for how you do it. you say that you ⁓ crystal as you this about who exactly you're trying to get to and why they're buying from you? Will Meinhardt: It's a great question. about six months ago, we were not crystal clear on what that was. Now we are relatively crystal clear on who we should be going after. And what we found is really useful. We looked at all of our customers from last year and figured out how did these all start. And a very common pattern is a CEO who is looking to drive $500,000 or ⁓ more OPEX reduction over the course of a quarter. Jamie: Right. Yeah. More one. Will Meinhardt: and continue to just drive value through AI. And it's really these top-down initiatives that we found a lot of success in. Another thing that our CEO is really excited about and has seen a lot of value in is the ability to basically take a process that wasn't possible to be done when you had to worry about the economics of hiring humans. now it's actually possible because you can introduce AI. There's a lot of CEOs you find who have Jamie: Yeah. Will Meinhardt: these pet projects, things they've always wanted to do with AI, with things they've always wanted to do. And now they're actually possible to be done with AI. it's really finding those CEOs and those COOs, CFOs who are excited about those types of things. And then basically just having them introduce us to their operator who's in charge of the process. And then we basically go ahead and meet with the operator. We introduce AI. into their specific sector of the business, whether it's customer success, support, or sales. And then oftentimes, person becomes ⁓ a little of a hero in the business because they're just driving much value with the tool. And then the CEO says, hey, this is amazing. And they go point someone else, bring them into the equation, and now we're handling their customer success and their customer support. that's really our motion now. is starting with those CEO, COOs because a lot of the individual operators, if you find an operator who's not in a business where the CEO is driving transformation, there's no point in talking to them because they're not gonna, they're not getting pressure to adopt these tools and the organizational change is dramatic from a pre-AI company to a post-AI company. it really needs to be driven. from the top down. Jamie: Yeah, and it's interesting that you're describing it because you're linking, one of the themes that I always talk about is the linkage between the three components, which are what problem are you solving and is that problem? Significant. is it large and is it urgent? and then does the person who's buying it or looking at it feel that way? Right. So, cause everybody likes to talk about their product, but no one really cares about your product, not your product, but I, but what saying? They want to solve their problems. That's exactly what you're getting at. And I feel you guys are getting to a good linkage between those two ideas. Right. You gotta have. Will Meinhardt: Exactly, Yeah, yeah. Jamie: CEO bought into major change by AI and right and and then that's ⁓ and picking spots it's land and expand right but it's land and expand by moving the needle real impact in business right away is what you're saying Will Meinhardt: 100%. 100%. that is exactly right that we have advisors and our executive chairman, for example, he's on a good amount of boards for SaaS companies. And what he's seen is that, to your point, the companies with a lot of pressure to really introduce AI drive a lot of efficiencies. Those are the ones really leading the charge on introducing AI in a way that actually drives value. some of these companies who are super venture backed, have a ton of cash they're sitting on, they're not as pressured, their backs not as much against the wall to really drive value with AI, and they're just being a lot more lackadaisical about it. that's really an interesting point that you just made. Jamie: ⁓ is there for the guys that are not naturally feeling urgency, is there anything that you're doing to change ⁓ how look at it or are just focusing Does it changing who you focus on? Will Meinhardt: we spent lot of time trying to convince people of the value of AI last year, but we realized there's really no point in doing that. There's so many headlines ⁓ talking about how AI can drive If they're not already convinced, we're not gonna sit here and try to convince them. There's plenty of people who realize the value of AI. We can just go to them and transform their business. we're now trying be a lot more aggressive in who we actually talk to and making sure that we're not wasting time. people who don't see the value in AI. For example, we've talked to some people who are they're just thinking very small in terms of what they can automate. And those we spent with trying to convince, hey, we can do this more and more. But in the future, we're going spend less time on those types of people. Jamie: All right. I can focus on the people who really want it and need it and are, they'll have to convince you then it's probably an issue. ⁓ Yeah, makes a lot of sense to me. Makes a lot of sense to me. ⁓ Okay, do a favor. for everybody who is listening, watching, how can they find you, follow you, learn more about what you're doing? Will Meinhardt: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. For sure, if you could just connect with me on LinkedIn, it's Will Meinhart on LinkedIn. also mock1ai.com, numerical one, ai.com. if you follow on we post a lot of content. We're soon gonna be releasing our agent to the website where we can talk to the agent. It's gonna basically get you suited up for the mock one plan and what recommend for your given situation, so. We'll be releasing a lot of tools on our website to provide value to our potential customers and then also allow them to explore Mach 1. we post all that LinkedIn and share additional ways you can with us. Jamie: ⁓ And so, and the other thing, thank you, that's great. And one other question if you can, is there advice you'd give to... Will Meinhardt: Yeah. Jamie: founders out there people who are building something new you're both part of it and seeing companies this all the time that about pushing through driving and generating growth any any ideas or advice? Yeah Will Meinhardt: Yeah, I feel a little uncomfortable giving advice, but one thing I do say is that I actually have the benefit of sitting on calls with our CEO and our chairman a lot. They have a lot of experience in business operations. And a lot of what I hear from them is really just kind of, get started with AI, start playing around with tooling. For example, I heard a story of someone who they were building an custom ERP. There were five coding ERP. And they probably weren't going to be releasing that into their company for actual use. But some of my view that as a waste of time, we actually would view that type of thing as really healthy because you're learning where are the limits of these models? Where can we actually introduce AI? there's a study, 95 % of pilots are failing. We think that's really because a lot of people sometimes take on, try to take on too much with AI. You might have a workflow. try to automate the entire thing. you push AI too far, you could automate 90 % of it and get 90 % of the value and save 90 % of your time. really figuring out what are the limits of AI, where can we it, where are humans still really necessary, but really just having it as part of your business. One final thing is that we hear a lot of people who just give their employees subscriptions to LLMs and think that's going to solve everything for them. ⁓ That almost never works because it ends up just being a Jamie: Awesome. Thank you. For sure. Dr. Ba-Kwon, for sure. All right. Well, thank you, ⁓ what I'll do is I'll make sure I add links, some links in the description people can find you. And thank you, everybody. Will Meinhardt: Hey, review this email. They just go to it out of impulse. But it really needs to be kind of done in a methodical way from what we've seen. And talk to Mach 1. Come talk to Mach 1. Yeah. Yeah. Jamie: for listening, watching, appreciate it. And until next time. Will Meinhardt: Amazing.