Latest / Profit With A Plan / EP322: Inside Growth 2.0: How AI, GEO & Vibe Coding Are Changing Everything

Transcript

EP322: Inside Growth 2.0: How AI, GEO & Vibe Coding Are Changing Everything · Profit With A Plan

• 0:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Want to know what's actually working for growth right now? Well, Raj Singh, VP of Product at Mozilla, and a repeat founder with multiple successful exits, joins Profit with a Plan today to share proven growth tactics every entrepreneur should know.
• 0:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: From the future of growth in a vibe-coded world of programmic TikTok campaigns, and historical growth stories that still matter today, you'll walk away with actionable insights to fuel your business.
• 0:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So if you're curious about how Gen AI is changing the product growth, and what hacks are actually working for small businesses today, this episode is packed with practical strategies.
• 0:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So don't miss it. Tune in to Profit with a Plan, and discover the same playingbook that has driven Raj's startups from zero to acquisition.
• 1:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Let me make sure… there we go.
• 1:10
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little? Well, welcome to Profit with a Plan podcast, where we help you scale smarter, increase profitability, and build a business that's worth more, whether you keep it or sell it.
• 1:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Reiner, Business Growth Strategist and the profit booster behind Infinite Profit. I've helped countless entrepreneurs to turn
• 1:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hang on.
• 1:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This is hanging… sorry.
• 1:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm gonna edit this out here.
• 1:40
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Golly.
• 1:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It just totally went out. Hang on.
• 1:46
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: There we go, that's so bad.
• 1:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little profit? Well, welcome to Profit with a Plan Podcast, where we help you scale smarter, increase profitability, and build a business that's worth more, whether you keep it or sell it.
• 2:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Reiner, business growth strategist and the profit booster behind Infinite Profit. I've helped countless entrepreneurs to turn their businesses into highly profitable and sale-ready assets, so they enjoy more income now and a bigger payday later.
• 2:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So join me for practical strategies, expert insights, and proven steps to make your business more profitable, more valuable, and built to last.
• 2:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: By the way, today's episode is sponsored by Infinite Profit, where we don't just talk profit, we deliver it.
• 2:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But before we dive in, I've got something special for you. If you're tired of flat revenue or marketing that just doesn't pay off, the new Profit Booster Growth Map might be for you. In just a few minutes, it'll show you exactly how to bring in more qualified clients and plug the profit leaks that are eating away at your cash.
• 2:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Get your growth map now at ProfitBooster.biz, and start turning missed revenue into real money.
• 2:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Raj Singh is the VI… or the VP of Product at Mozilla. He's also a VIP, where he leads the new 0 to 1 product for small businesses.
• 3:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: He joined Mozilla in 2022 through the acquisition of his startup, Pulse.
• 3:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Which, built AI meeting, summarization models.
• 3:24
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: A repeat founder, Raj, was the co-founder and CEO of Tempo AI, a smart calendar
• 3:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Salesforce, and co-founded the, All the Cooks, the largest recipe community for Android, before it was acquired by Cookpad. He also served as the VP of Business Development at Skyfire, and a mobile browser acquired by Opera.
• 3:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And he has launched and exited several startups in consumer tech. Wow, quite a resume there.
• 3:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: He regularly writes about AI, product management, and growth, and is based in the Bay Area with a degree in computer engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo! Welcome, Raj! I'm so excited to have you on the podcast.
• 4:09
  Raj Singh: Thank you, Marcia. Looking forward to conversation.
• 4:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah! So, great! I mean, AI seems like, you know, for a lot of us, people out there, that it just happened, like, in 2021, right? We're all wrong with that. We know AI has been around since, you know, filling in in the 80s with all the great stuff that it did, but what was really attractive for you to get into that space?
• 4:32
  Raj Singh: You know, I've been doing,
• 4:35
  Raj Singh: I guess some form of AI things for a long time, so…
• 4:39
  Raj Singh: people think of AI, they think of maybe the last two years, and there's always this, like, this… this has been with every sector, whether it's mobile, or whether it's, like, location, or whether it's, you know,
• 4:52
  Raj Singh: cloud, SaaS, on-demand, etc. It's like, is this the year of AI? Is this the year of mobile, right? It's something people used to always ask, I remember when mobile first came out, is this the year of mobile?
• 5:01
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right? I remember the brick phones, so okay, I'm dating myself, but yeah.
• 5:05
  Raj Singh: Yeah, and, you know,
• 5:07
  Raj Singh: I was trying to do computer vision photo categorization in 2004, 2003 timeframe, which obviously is now, like, standard experience, you know, iPhone and Google Cloud, etc. But we didn't necessarily call it AI, we called it computer vision, right? And if you were doing AI in, like.
• 5:25
  Raj Singh: 2000 timeframe, it was probably very rules-based. You'd probably call it, like, heuristics, or rules engine, or something like that. You didn't call it AI, right? Later in 2009, 2010,
• 5:38
  Raj Singh: I was doing, semantic analysis type work. Again, we didn't really call it AI. We called it, named entity recognition, we called it semantic analysis, so it is kind of interesting.
• 5:49
  Raj Singh: how that has sort of, taken its own, language.
• 5:54
  Raj Singh: I, I guess my, my, my approach has always been.
• 5:58
  Raj Singh: build stuff that I need to fix for myself, and then… Fix your own property?
• 6:04
  Raj Singh: Yeah, and then figure out what was the best tech to make it work. And sometimes that's using AI or not. Now, obviously, the hot word is AI.
• 6:11
  Raj Singh: for what it's worth, I was actually the first .ai domain, in 2011, and I have a great story about that, 2010 timeframe, where I had to literally call the Anguilla Islands, because they didn't allow third-party domain registrations for .ai, and they set up a…
• 6:26
  Raj Singh: DNS server to enable this for me in a room in a library.
• 6:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Get outta here.
• 6:33
  Raj Singh: become, like, part of their industry, like, because .ai is just such a big domain register.
• 6:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow, that's funny. I, you know, yeah, it does make sense.com is U.S, you know, you've got .co, and then you've got, you know, AUS, I mean, you've got all the countries that base their domain registrations, but I didn't even think of AI being an island.
• 6:53
  Raj Singh: Yeah, no, yeah, it's, it's fun.
• 6:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Are they making money off of it?
• 6:57
  Raj Singh: at that time, you could only have, there was only government sites with Anguilla.ai domains, because nobody… I mean, well, I shouldn't say nobody visits Anguilla Islands, it's just, it's a small, small, small country, or a small region. I'm not sure… I'm not… don't quote me on that. But, but, and so in any case, I remember
• 7:14
  Raj Singh: calling them, spending a bunch of time on the phone, and then they set this up, it took, like, a week, and then all of a sudden we had the first .ai domain, and then it sort of…
• 7:21
  Raj Singh: was very low popularity at the time. I mean, I probably should have done a lot more domain squatting.
• 7:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right?
• 7:26
  Raj Singh: Really took off, like, 2014, 2015 time frame.
• 7:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow, that's fantastic, that's fantastic. Okay, so, when we're talking about AI today, I mean, like you mentioned a thousand times, it's a super hot word right now, and people are using it, and in it, but how does it really, I guess the basis of this conversation is really, how does it factor into the growth of the company, right?
• 7:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I know that there's so many different areas we can focus on, but where do you think is the most important, impact that AI drives?
• 7:57
  Raj Singh: So…
• 7:58
  Raj Singh: I think when you're thinking about growth, historically, like, if you think of a growth team, right, so you build a product.
• 8:04
  Raj Singh: organizations will sometimes create a growth team. This growth team is doing multiple things. They might be doing…
• 8:09
  Raj Singh: SEO, they might be doing, programmatic content, they might be doing drip campaigns, they might be doing cold email outreach, you name it, right? The whole sort of laundry list of different tactics. Historically, like, each of these
• 8:22
  Raj Singh: each of these tactics, whether it's lifecycle marketing, whether it's, like, inside, sales, like AI SDR stuff, or, like, you know, programmatic SDR stuff, whether it's content marketing, they're, like, almost different teams. They'd be like, you know, one person would be managing a copywriting team, putting together… looking at people's competitors' sitemaps, drafting content.
• 8:42
  Raj Singh: publishing that out to a blog. Another team…
• 8:45
  Raj Singh: would be, getting… buying lead lists, qualifying them at some level, doing cold email outreach, designing that sort of drip campaign. I think what's interesting now is…
• 8:57
  Raj Singh: The fact that we can…
• 8:59
  Raj Singh: do this ourself. Like, a single person in a growth team can use vibe coding
• 9:05
  Raj Singh: and build automation internally, where they can almost automate a lot of this, and we… we've… the scale that's being created now is insane, whereas previously, this may have required multiple people, because a lot of it is operations and execution. It's not actually, like, core engineering, right? And it's interesting.
• 9:24
  Raj Singh: there's even, you know, growth in many ways became, like, growth engineering. And then, and then later, you know, now I'm,
• 9:31
  Raj Singh: now I'm hearing, it being titled the GTM engineer, as sort of the new job function or job title, for the growth kind of function. So I think Gen AI has just become democrat… you know, democratized knowledge, but also has, like, 10x'd
• 9:46
  Raj Singh: scale, and the thing about Vibe-coated products is they don't need to be perfect, so they're very well suited, you know, because it's very difficult to do high-scale production app, right? They get you 80% of the way there, but that's very well suited, for the type of work that's involved for growth.
• 10:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So, so let's, let's define, let's define that first. So, vibe coding. So, just so that way…
• 10:09
  Raj Singh: Yeah, yeah, no, so vibe coding, so I'm sure, you know, everyone's probably, at this point, played with Google Gemini or ChatGPT or something of that nature, right? And…
• 10:19
  Raj Singh: If you've played with those tools, you type in and describe what you want, and then it responds, right? That's a prompt-based… they call… so they call that a prompt. You ask a question, it replies, and you have a chat discussion.
• 10:31
  Raj Singh: this notion of, like, prompting to have a discussion, is effectively a new modality. For many years, people have talked about chat-based interfaces, but they always underperform, right? So we've got the keyboard, we have the mouse, we have the touchscreen, we had voice, kind of with Siri, but it was an underperforming experience, right? But now, we have chat.
• 10:50
  Raj Singh: Right, which actually works really well, and it's delightful, right?
• 10:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It is. I swear I'm dating Chad, you know, if I had a ring on my hand, it would be because, you know, of my relationship with my Chad.
• 11:02
  Raj Singh: Yeah, so, so, the theme here is that, that modality is called VIBE.
• 11:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Got it. That's a vibe modality, and what we're seeing across a range of applications, particularly applications where you create content.
• 11:15
  Raj Singh: And when I mean create content, I don't necessarily mean an article. I mean, you're creating a product design, you're creating a song, you're creating anything, you know, a visual design, a medicine design, whatever. All of these are opportunities to apply a vibe interface on top of that.
• 11:33
  Raj Singh: To basically create some, you know, a new modality for creating that sort of content.
• 11:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it. For me, it's so exciting, you know, because I am a super creative in my mind, right? And I've always been held back by my ability to only use my own mind, where now I can use the talent of computers and this artificial intelligence to help me fine-tune something and really bring it
• 11:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to life, right? In so many different ways, whether, like you said, if it's…
• 12:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you know, visual, or audio, or in copy, or in product form, right? It's no longer just me. It becomes this
• 12:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: this intelligence that helps me look bigger and better, which goes back to your team, too, because now, like you said, one person can manage this if done well, and they understand the Vibe coding. They can really, truly take to market something that used to take a whole team.
• 12:30
  Raj Singh: Exactly, yeah, no, so Vibe coding is basically the notion of using a Vibe-style interface to create applications.
• 12:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: No, this is fantastic. So, you know, when we're looking at, I look at profitability a lot, with my clients, and it's like, okay, we gotta make the numbers make sense, as well as having the product and the offer and everything else.
• 12:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But, knowing this, let's take kind of a negative viewpoint on it from the, you know, the human capital industry, right? They're fearing that AI is going to take over their jobs, number one, which I don't believe, and, you know, I mean, how do we address that in the growth space?
• 13:10
  Raj Singh: Yeah, so…
• 13:11
  Raj Singh: I think the way to think about what's happening is Gen AI has unleashed, like, human creativity. So, everyone has ideas of things that they wanted to build. It could be in any form factor.
• 13:24
  Raj Singh: But they didn't have experts that they could go talk to to help them design that. I want to design a car, I want to design, you know, whatever. A toy, you know, a storybook.
• 13:33
  Raj Singh: GenAI has democratized all this sort of fractional expertise. What we're seeing in organizations now is individuals are just… their productivity is being boosted, you know, on the orders of, like, 2x to 10x, right, depending on the function. So much of the work
• 13:48
  Raj Singh: that you do, depending on your role, is blocked by certain fractional expertise that you need to speak with. And those fractional expertise, you have them in the organization, but it may require setting up a meeting. It may require, communication offline in different hours, whatnot, right? Now you have that at your fingertips, and so you can move faster.
• 14:07
  Raj Singh: And so, I really, you know, there's a term for this that I've been, parroting, it's not my term, it's called the Super IC, the super individual contributor.
• 14:17
  Raj Singh: is, you know, we're all sort of becoming ICs, but now we need to become super ICs. And the objective of a super IC is to effectively replace our low-leverage work with Gen AI, so we can focus on high-leverage things, right? We become the conductor, or the tastemaker, but not the person who necessarily is doing the operational execution. We're outsourcing that to Gen AI.
• 14:37
  Raj Singh: My perspective on this question, regarding, you know, how is this going to impact the labor market.
• 14:44
  Raj Singh: the tech sector, in particular, where I work, has always been very hyperbolic. They tend to… they tend to look in the most extreme scenarios, so everybody's gonna be replaced, right? I'm not in that bucket at all.
• 14:57
  Raj Singh: The way I look at this is Gen AI is massively boosting productivity, and so companies are going to aspire to be even larger. They're no longer chasing billion-dollar outcomes, they're chasing trillion-dollar outcomes.
• 15:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow.
• 15:08
  Raj Singh: When you start having that sort of perspective, they're gonna hire more. Where I would be concerned is not Gen AI replacing humans, it's replacing the humans that aren't using Gen AI in their work.
• 15:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Exactly, exactly. You know, you can take this back to, you know, the automotive industry, right? Where they're working on a line, and they're building, so you needed to have someone screw in the lug nut, right? Well, now you've got computers that do it, and you need people to manage and watch the computers that do it, right? So if you're not retooling.
• 15:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: and getting on board with this, then you're going to be left behind. And I think there's always going to be a space for those that actually have to do manual labor and physical stuff, or tactical stuff that requires
• 15:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: A human, you know, touch.
• 15:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But I think that, like you said, this super IC that we're developing is so exciting. For me, it's just lit me up over the past couple years with the creativity that I can do, and I can help my clients that much more, and I can give my clients tools to help them be much more than they were before. So, I love it as a growth platform, and I'm glad you didn't take it as a negative piece.
• 16:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But I know that there's a lot of naysayers out there going, you know.
• 16:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: they're gonna, they're gonna take over our, our job, right? I think even,
• 16:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Tesla just announced that they got a robot that's gonna help you, you know, around the house, right? And I'm like, oh my gosh, the AI movie with Will Smith is gonna… is coming true!
• 16:37
  Raj Singh: Yeah, no, I, you know, I mean, Industrial Revolution, we had a lot of that. You know, there's always the doomers and that sort of perspective, but my opinion has always been consistent here. This is just an accelerant, so now the question is how we can leverage it to move faster.
• 16:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right, and with the profitability of it, you know, 2020, you know, businesses were having to not work from their office and work from home, and that kind of environment created the opportunity to cut costs, right? And so, if we're looking at this in one person or a smaller committee.
• 17:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: of people can manage this to grow faster than the largest payroll, or the largest expense in our business, which is payroll, just got reduced, right? And I can still compete and deliver on so many new areas. So I love that for it. All right, so let's talk about some fun stuff. You have been in many, many different places, from cooking to
• 17:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: creating software, to creating all these neat things. Where do you think the new space for, Gen AI is heading? Where do you think that that, like, kind of…
• 17:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: New, exciting place is gonna be.
• 17:44
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And products.
• 17:46
  Raj Singh: Yeah, you know, it's been really interesting. I'd say there's two trends that I think are really interesting, looking at Gen AI. And, you know, most everything I've done has been consumer-facing, so I'm always looking at, like, direct-to-consumer. Within the world of SaaS and enterprise, there's so much interesting stuff happening around verticals.
• 18:02
  Raj Singh: I think the first is around this whole notion of vibe that we talked about earlier. So, imagine every…
• 18:07
  Raj Singh: creation… creator experience on the web. Every sort of application, whether you're doing an architectural diagram, whether you're doing a design, whether you're designing a landscape.
• 18:16
  Raj Singh: fashion, whatever, now has a vibe modality, right? So that's one area we're seeing a lot of investment. We're also seeing just a number of startups emerging, particularly in very vertical applications, like using Gen AI
• 18:28
  Raj Singh: to do, HVAC planning in your house, right? Using GenAI, you know, used by, you know, specialized contractors, right? So it's not just the VIBE modality, it's the VIBE modality, but you still have all the other workflows around it.
• 18:41
  Raj Singh: I think the second bucket, for better or for worse, is more of a cultural phenomenon, and I think that's very much around
• 18:49
  Raj Singh: people conversing with people. And so we are seeing…
• 18:54
  Raj Singh: A number of applications that are reinforcing a common behavior, which is…
• 19:00
  Raj Singh: people are increasingly more comfortable communicating with AI than they might be communicating with real people themselves. And what sort of opportunities does that create? So I'll give you some examples. We're seeing Waymo
• 19:12
  Raj Singh: just, grow astronomically, right? It might… I think it's already overtaken Lyft, in San Francisco at least, you know, and it's on path to eventually overtake Uber.
• 19:23
  Raj Singh: Why is that? People are paying more for a Waymo than they're paying for an Uber, but there's nobody in there, right?
• 19:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We have Zucks here in Vegas.
• 19:30
  Raj Singh: there's that social anxiety around, like, oh, there's somebody there, I have to be presentable, you know, just the fact that there's a physical person there, right? Within the sales arena.
• 19:38
  Raj Singh: Jason Lemkin, who runs Saster, on one of his podcasts, was literally talking about some of the work they've done with AI Chat on their website, and what they found was the people who are engaging with AI Chat love it.
• 19:50
  Raj Singh: Why? They can ask all sorts of questions, both the business-related questions as well as technical questions, where normally you'd have to go and say, I'd get back to you on that. Two, it's always available. And three, it's very easy to say no.
• 20:02
  Raj Singh: like, you're not worried about hurting someone's feeling, right? And so, very sort of interesting seeing that, and you're seeing that also apply in the voice modality, right? Then you're seeing things like character AI,
• 20:13
  Raj Singh: Where it's now probably a top 20 visited destination in the world, which is effectively a place where you can communicate with chatbots, and people are building relationships with chatbots, and people are, reinventing, or maybe… maybe that's not the right word.
• 20:28
  Raj Singh: I was gonna say revitalizing, but, you know, they're grandparents. Maybe that's not the right word either, right? But they're effectively having these conversations. Now, I'm not judging, by the way, I'm just sort of calling out a macro-cultural trend that I'm seeing. Sure.
• 20:41
  Raj Singh: But it's fascinating to see, in three different arenas, people increasingly engaging with AI, and then on the flip side, we're also seeing increasing comfort around AI-generated content. So, you think of Netflix, a lot of that's obviously
• 20:55
  Raj Singh: AI-assisted, but human-generated sort of content, but you're starting to see content, for example, in TikTok that's purely AI-generated. You're seeing Google adapt their algorithm where they used to previously penalize AI-generated content, and now they're saying we're penalizing low-quality content. So it could be AI-generated.
• 21:15
  Raj Singh: But if it's high quality, it's okay, because there's enough human content produced by human content farms overseas, purely for trying to play the SEO game. They're actually really low quality. So it's very interesting, watching this, evolution.
• 21:30
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I think that's amazing. There's so many tools. I'm in a community that… that just brings us tools every, every other week, you know. Oh, you gotta try this, you know, oh, take this thing here. But the whole idea is, how do we, you know, clone ourselves, right? In a way that we can do more, and be more, and… and be more interesting, and it's, it's really exciting, the…
• 21:53
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you know, the hey gens and the companies that can really allow you to duplicate yourself or your voice or something, right? To act as an AI employee, so when someone's trolling your website at 2 in the morning, because they're up with that, you know, famous what-keeps-you-awake-at-night problem.
• 22:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: then your AI that you've trained can answer that, and they get immediate questions, and you don't lose them, right? The same with the HVAC company, you know, have an opportunity to have AI be cloned as one of them to be able to take the call when they're out servicing a client, right? I mean, these kind of tools, for me.
• 22:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: make complete sense, because they're allowing us to be more in more places than we were before. But then again, if you remember the negative side of it, the call tree, right? How many… how many ones and twos and click buttons that we had to call to reach somebody, you know?
• 22:50
  Raj Singh: Yeah, I mean, I think this is where…
• 22:53
  Raj Singh: Two parts to this. One, I think,
• 22:59
  Raj Singh: we're definitely seeing… you know, I'm not in the camp that AI is fully replacing. I'm definitely in the camp that…
• 23:04
  Raj Singh: AI's there, but humans need to provide taste. Humans still need to provide judgment, sensibility, right? All that sort of stuff that's involved in product sense, right? They still need to have conviction, they still need to have a perspective, they still need to have a design…
• 23:17
  Raj Singh: sense, right? AI's there giving you feedback, and it's helping you accelerate, and in many ways, it's helping you with probably one of the most critical things, is
• 23:25
  Raj Singh: it's helping you ask the right questions, right? But you still have to communicate, you still have to gather the herd, you still have to bring consensus, you still have to, pull it together, and AI can become
• 23:36
  Raj Singh: your, you know, fractional execution partner, but there's still places you're involved. And it'll improve, but I do continue to be in the camp that it's gonna improve, but under… with an understanding that it's gonna be 80, 95% of the way there, right? It's not perfect, and so if it's not perfect, humans need to remain in the loop, to the point that
• 23:53
  Raj Singh: They even call it HITL, Human in the Loop, right? And you're seeing a lot of startups that raised on the back of ChatGPT with promises of fully replacing workflows, revisiting that, because they can't get past the last 3 or 4%, and now they're revisiting the overall ROI with a human in the Loop.
• 24:09
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right.
• 24:09
  Raj Singh: even in that model, it's a massive boost to productivity, and a lot of it… frankly, for a lot of people, the issue is not, how can I be more productive, they just simply don't know where to start. And this is where I often tell people.
• 24:20
  Raj Singh: you know, write out your day, like, in 10-minute blocks, and then go ask AI, how can you help me with this? Right? And it'll give you ideas of ways that you can become more efficient. Go find peers that do similar functional work to you.
• 24:31
  Raj Singh: and ask them how they're using AI, because so much of this is discovery. Discover, you'll have a better sense. But yeah, so I'm definitely not in that camp. But, you know, your comment about having your AI concierge answer your calls
• 24:43
  Raj Singh: and capture the lead for you. Interestingly, one of the products we haven't launched that I do manage is that exact product. It's called Penciled. It hasn't launched yet, part of the suite of products that we're building at Mozilla focused on small business.
• 24:56
  Raj Singh: Specifically for service providers, you know, you're a plumber, you're doing work, you get a call, you don't want to lose the lead, talk to my AI assistant.
• 25:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Sure, let me answer questions. What do you have? Oh, if it's this, have you turned off the water at the street corner, right? You know, do you need me tonight? I can be here, here, you know, let's schedule a call. It's the capabilities.
• 25:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: if a well-trained AI can really utilize that. And in the space I play in, we talk a lot about that.
• 25:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: For so many different things, even if it's just frequently asked questions, but it's the whole idea of
• 25:32
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: People are in…
• 25:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: the buyer is in an Amazon space, right? I want it yesterday, I want it free, and I want it on my doorstep, right? And so, if I want it like that, then your customer is wanting answers from you like that.
• 25:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And you need to… you need to match your customer's space, and what better way to do it when it's, you know, 3 in the morning, and you should be sleeping?
• 25:56
  Raj Singh: I'll add…
• 25:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: AI can answer that.
• 25:58
  Raj Singh: second-order effects that you don't even think about. So, for example, my team members have been playing with one of these products internally. Now the AI receptionist is very effective at putting them on do-not-call lists.
• 26:12
  Raj Singh: So every time somebody calls trying to sell something, it says, hey, so-and-so's not interested in these kinds of promotions, can you please remove them from the list? So his AIs effectively become the unsubscribe button.
• 26:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's… I love it. I love it. Well, that gives the consumer the safe space to go quit bugging me, right? I mean, I'm getting tons of calls this last week and a half from random numbers that it's a call center, and I'm like, stop, right? You know, if I can get AI to answer the phone call for me and say, and what do you want to talk to Marcia about today, right? That they can go, nope, she's not interested, bye click, right? That would be a really great one.
• 26:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: terrible for us marketers, but great for the consumer to be able to control what's coming into their space, right? Lots of ideas that we can do and train, and that's why it's so darn exciting for me.
• 27:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, I just, like I said before, I get all lit up, going, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 27:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Because it's so fun. I don't have the technical experience to write the code, right? Or develop the things that you do, but gosh, you know, I've been able to write some code by just asking GPT, how can you write the code for me, right? To develop this software piece that I wanted to add to my website. And it's been… it's been amazing that I don't need to have.
• 27:28
  Raj Singh: I don't need to know how to do it now. And that's where the vibe modality is really, really unlocking the human potential.
• 27:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, it's fantastic. So, tell me, besides the idea of where Mozilla's going with, you know, the AI employee, what else is Mozilla doing that's interesting?
• 27:45
  Raj Singh: We're doing a lot of… I mean, we're doing a lot of interesting stuff. Obviously, the browser industry or space has been stagnant for many years. People didn't think of it as a competitive surface, and all of a sudden, in the last 2-3 years, with the emergence of ChatGPT and others.
• 27:58
  Raj Singh: everyone's interested in browsers again, so it's been really interesting to watch, and we're, like, right in the middle of it. My teams in particular, and just given the focus of this podcast around growth.
• 28:09
  Raj Singh: We're doing so many interesting tactics. I don't know if you've heard the term AEO or GEO around…
• 28:15
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Thank you, yeah.
• 28:16
  Raj Singh: optimization, yeah, I mean, we've, we now have, what we've realized, for a while, we were trying to figure this out, right? Everyone in the industry is trying to figure this out, like SEO versus GEO, and…
• 28:27
  Raj Singh: what we've concluded is they're distinctly different. Like, SL is very much about high-authority domains.
• 28:33
  Raj Singh: GEO, we call it High Authority UGC. So what we're finding is that LLMs are crawling these sites, but they don't really want to surface information from slop, so they don't want to surface information from AI-generated content. So they prioritize data sources where it's most likely human-authored. And so if you start thinking about that.
• 28:50
  Raj Singh: what places on the internet have the moderation in place that most likely is human-authored content. And that's why, from a GEO perspective, it's more important to be on Reddit and on Wikipedia than it is to be on CNN and Forbes.
• 29:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Really? That is completely interesting. I never thought of that, and I didn't think that the AI discriminated against its own content, right, of sort?
• 29:15
  Raj Singh: Well, yeah, so AI is not using Google search rankings, right? So if you look at Google search rankings, they're very much based on high authority domains. So if you get inbounds from BBC, and, you know, CBS, and Fox, whatever.
• 29:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: lengthen.
• 29:26
  Raj Singh: your high-authority domain, right? But in GEO, the backlinks it's looking at are from affiliate sites, where the reviews are probably most likely human.
• 29:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's bomb.
• 29:35
  Raj Singh: review sites, it's from Wikipedia, where there's a notability requirement to be listed, it's from Reddit, it's from Quora, where it's most likely to be human-authored versus AI-authored. So it's very interesting seeing, that delta.
• 29:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Interesting. Well, that could be a whole other conversation of how you tap into those kind of platforms to be able to rank you on AI.
• 29:57
  Raj Singh: I mean, on that note, we're doing so many things with different tactics around driving growth. GEO, programmatic TikTok, programmatic blog, AI SDR, a lot of these former tactics that people used to use, as I mentioned at the top of our call, with humans, but now with AI.
• 30:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love it, I love it.
• 30:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So yeah, that's… that's always the interesting thing, you know, to… to… what used to be good yesterday is no longer good today, so you've got to constantly evolve with it, and I remember way back when, you know, when you built a landing page, and it was, yes, you know, it took months to build, and there it was, it was done, right? Now it has to evolve, like, almost every other month, or every month, to be able to stay current with everything that you've got going on.
• 30:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And so the need for people, you know, in that space that can create and follow and track with the ideas that are coming at lightning speed that AI is bringing us, I think it's ever more important to align yourself with the right team, for sure.
• 30:59
  Raj Singh: Yeah, I mean, I think StatSig was reporting something like, when it comes to landing pages, because they're that A-B testing platform.
• 31:05
  Raj Singh: you know, the large companies. So for a startup, A-B testing is a privileged position, because you usually don't have the resources to do that test. It takes time to even get the results, and you have a limited runway, and you don't have enough of an audience where you can.
• 31:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: validated.
• 31:20
  Raj Singh: a cohort, right? Like, I only want to serve this version to 1-2%. But StatSig was saying something like, there are large customers that are getting, you know, millions of, or, you know, almost billions of page views a month or whatnot. You know, they're doing
• 31:31
  Raj Singh: hundreds of homepage A-B tests, a day. Wow.
• 31:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Wow, that's… that's insane, you know? But…
• 31:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But not to scare the everyday audience, right? The everyday business owner, you don't even have to be in that space, you just have to be aware of it and use some of the tools, because visibility is everything.
• 31:52
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Right? Especially in a high-flying market where we're in today. I love the idea that even on any of the search engines now, you know, whether it's Mozilla or the Googles or whatever, you know, that when you type in something, AI is answering.
• 32:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And it's not even going through the ranking that it used to go in, and it's giving you answers, or at least, you know, something you can check into.
• 32:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But, we need to learn how to be… how to participate so we can be found and seen by that space. And I think that's the purpose of this conversation. In order to grow, you need to be seen, you need to attract and repel, right? And you need to close and convert and make money on the bottom line. So, to do all that, it all starts with the visibility, and if you're not using the AI to
• 32:37
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: have your visibility in your marketing space, or use it to manage your team, to make them more productive, then you're just… the bottom line is getting hit everywhere. And… and that's why I love this conversation on growth with you today. So, Raj, you've been a wealth of information. Obviously, you've got just tremendous experience in the industry.
• 32:57
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Where can listeners find out more about you, about Mozilla, about the products that you guys are having in play that would help small business owners?
• 33:05
  Raj Singh: Yeah, so, you know, I'm on X and Threads, at Mobile Raj, you can find me there. I'm on LinkedIn, as you'd expect. And then, you know, I manage new products for small business at Mozilla.
• 33:18
  Raj Singh: So I'm gonna shout out, Solo, which is an AI website builder, soloist.ai, that's definitely something they can definitely check out. And then Mozilla, of course, you know, we make Firefox, and we're doing a lot of interesting things, and we're probably, not probably, we are the most user-centric browsing experience, you know, we're not here to…
• 33:36
  Raj Singh: monetize your data, so to speak, you know?
• 33:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Thank you.
• 33:40
  Raj Singh: and whatnot, and so, definitely a lot of great innovation happening there. So, multiple touchpoints for myself and Mozilla.
• 33:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Love it, love it. Well, you know, as business owners, we need to look, and we need to stay ahead of the curve, and when you can find partners like Mozilla that can actually help you grow your business and get the visibility without actually hurting your business at the same time, I think it's a great tool to look into.
• 34:05
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, thanks so much for listening today. I hope you've picked up a few valuable insights and actionable ideas that will help you bank your business more profitable.
• 34:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But before we go, if you're ready to bring in more of the right customers and earn more or keep more of what you've earned, go grab a free Profit Booster Growth Map, and it pinpoints the top 3 moves that grow revenue and stop profit leaks fast. Go get it anytime at ProfitBooster.biz.
• 34:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And while you're at it, don't forget to subscribe. You don't want to miss future shows. You can always find Profit with a Plan on any of your favorite podcast platforms. We're looking forward to sharing more profitable strategies with you on next week's show. So until then, make your plans and profit with them. Thanks so much, Raj!
• 34:53
  Raj Singh: Thank you, Marcia.