The 5 best episodes on how investors use AI to evaluate startups

00:00Everybody has the same problem and then like, how has nobody solved the fact that you have to have a social media agency to put out content that works and that actually gets you customers? So how can we automate this with AI but also not make it sound like, you know, sloth that you just asked ChatGPT for? Hello, founders and investors. Welcome back to NEXT Round Ready. I'm your host, Chris. Today we have some very special guests, Shane and Ari from Creator Genius connected with these founders recently, a couple weeks ago. And it's one of those platforms that I'm believing in very, very early on. I think it's going to continue to shape the world that we live in and really impact companies going forward. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Chris. So I'm excited to hear just how you got to this point because I'll tell you this, I'm somebody that's been in AB to B space.

01:06I've been a creator for, I don't know man, since like 2012, 2013. So I've seen a lot of this stuff just evolved day by day over the years and it's been amazing. How has it been for you on the product side? How did you get to this point? I think that there's been like several points in this process where we pushed ourselves with our own limits of, you know, what we know about technology and like learning things. And there's like a aha moment like every few weeks now. I mean, Shane today he's like, check out this skill that I made and it's like, it's just unbelievable where AI is going. And so like from a person who I always tell people like, I'm not an engineer, but I'm like technical enough to be dangerous. And so when you have people like that, that like just needed some tools. I mean, I remember back in the day I was using Dreamweaver and you know, it. And I just this is like a dream come true. The time that we're in right now for people who were like semi technical could get more technical. And really it's just like, how do we get here? We everybody has the same problem. And then like, how has nobody solved the fact that you have to have a social media agency to put out content that works and that actually gets you customers? So how can we automate this with AI but also not make it sound like, you know, slop that you just asked ChatGPT for? So that's kind of, and I always feel like what's that the hair, the hair loss company or the hair growth is like, I'm not just the founder, I'm also a client. It's kind of like that for me, right? It's like I'm not just the founder, like I'm actually testing this with my own content and it's just getting better and better every day.

02:57That's such a big deal because I think that's what scares a lot of business owners off from using AI in any way with their content, because we saw it first in the writing on LinkedIn or newsletters, and it's easy to tune it out. When you see the writing that AI puts out, a lot of times you can immediately tell from some of the phrases if you use AI enough. And I think that people who see that just immediately turn out like, I'm not even listening anymore. And so how did you get around that with this video? Like cuz that's just such, that's a whole different beast. I would say that and Shane, so Shane and I, by the way, met through Sora on Open AI, had this video app that I think that was the first time where I was like, wow, everybody doesn't have 6 fingers and they're moving properly. And that was like the a big aha moment for me. I discovered some of the biggest Tik Tokers in the world. And I remember when TikTok first came on the scene, people were like, I don't see, yeah, you know, but I saw how many people were on like viewing the the content. And I thought, OK, Sora is going to be like the next TikTok. And so Shane was one of these creators that was kind of like AJ Alvarez or like real content creators that like jump out of planes and all this.

04:11But Shane was doing it on Sora with like, you know, lions in the background and in in medieval times. And it looked like he was on Game of Thrones and all this stuff. And I was like, oh, this is this is going to be the next TikTok star. So I reached out to Shane. And Shane, you can kind of tell a little bit about your background because I think it's super. I think it really is part of what led to the product that we have today. Yeah, so going back to what Ari was saying, my backgrounds in content creation and social media, but when Sora came out, I saw there was an opportunity to do something that's never been done before, create real content that I've always wanted to make my whole life. Jumping out of planes like she was saying. I had a content house called the Sora House. Everything was made of jello. Just fun little accents to videos that make it have that touch to go viral. It looked real. It wasn't like, yeah, it was like, whoa, it looks real. But then Ari and I started talking through the Sora DMS and she reached out and was like, do you need a manager?

05:13And so that's how our relationship started and then grew into a friendship. And then I started working for Creator Genius. But the the aha moment that we have in Sora and kind of translated to this day, you can make AI video. Sure, you can give someone the tools to make a good video, but adding the human expression and the realism to it. Now that's something that you can't just program yet. And you need a very specific data set of do's and don'ts that are replicatable across every different platform to make it right, to make it relatable and expressive for the individual. So that's where we fine tune what we're doing in Creator Genius to be extremely relatable to the creator, to the industry so that this AI AI video doesn't look so AI anymore. You know, you start to get human expression, you build parasocial relationships with the creator. Those are some of the subjects that we're working on. That's so important because I think I got to mention this. I have to mention this because you just made me think about it. Do you remember the Will Smith spaghetti video?

06:13Like I think that will serve as like the worst AI video ever. So like, everything has to build on that. And like, I just always think back to that moment when that video kind of hit the Internet and how it took off. So everything you do from now has to be better than that, right? And it just continues to improve. But that's like that was such a turning point for our like, generation. I think in 100 years people are going to look back at AI video and say that was like the first one that really like set things off. Yeah. And I think that like so that that those screenshots of the old videos of the Will Smith with the spaghetti are in our why now part of our pitch deck because that is part of the why now. But in addition to that, you have a lot of these big companies, Higgs Field and Hagen and all this that are they are solving some video aspects of it, but they don't solve the what to post problem. So even if you were like a great graphic designer, a great creator, you still have to figure out what to post.

07:18And I think that that's like going back to, you know, really our target audience as we launch this thing is like people like plastic surgeons, lawyers, companies, landscapers, like people who understand that if you are posting everyday a video on social media and then you can push those to ads, you can really improve your business because the competition isn't able to do that. Most small businesses are not able to, like, post a video a day. And even if they were, they don't know if those videos, you know, would actually work. We had my dad's friends with a veterinarian and they had a gal working for them. They got some videos to go viral, but they're like, we've never had somebody come into the veterinary clinic and say we found you on TikTok or we found you on Instagram. So I went and audited their social media and well, what do you know? There's no SEO search engine optimization in their captions. There's no even telling that this is like hashtag dog, hashtag cleaning dog's ears.

08:22It's like there's there would be some small changes that that assistant or social media person would need to make to make that go viral. And so I think that or not even go viral to make that work for the actual business owner to get people in the door. Most business owners don't care if something goes viral if they actually don't make any money from it, right. So the what to post problem. And that's really digging into our proprietary breakdowns of the ICP, the actual persona that you're, you're trying to, you know, reach and make sure that the content is written for them. I always see content from real Realtors, which I think is really funny that is made for other Realtors. They're like complaining about like a client doing this one thing. And I'm like, why would you? I get it? I get that it gets views, but unless you're marketing to other Realtors, why are you posting that content just. Because I tell founders that I try to tell founders that all the time. Like you have to create conversion content if you're going to make it like make want to buy from you.

09:24Don't just make content because it sounds good to other founders. Like that is going to be fun. It might give you some views and clicks and stuff, but it's not going to impact the bank account at all. Like none. And you're going to realize you wasted a lot of time. So I'm curious to know, you know, where the business is now. Like how are things going so far this year? Things are going pretty well. So we are about to have our initial product like ready for internal use. So kind of how we've been working is we have a service agency business that's profitable right now and then we have we're building the tech side. So without even having launched the internal tech, we're Shane. You can tell him a little bit about kind of Shane's taking on sales, so. Yeah. So kind of transitioning into our beta testing of we have the product being built and it's almost ready internally and then we're going to move on to the next step, shipping it out to public. Transitioning through the cycle of beta. We've got this large list of leads that we're going through that we're starting to take on. So we're bringing on clients, starting to try some of our new software and tools on them, trying to provide Revolt results and drive traffic to actual conversions through our social media.

10:38So we're going through this list right now and starting to bring on clients. So we're already profitable. As a. Traditional, yeah, we're over the 17 KMRR that we talked about before, Chris. And what's cool is I think that we were at like a 95% close rate and we've retained most of our, you know, we haven't that the goal has been to be quality. We don't want to lose anybody by scaling too fast. I I understand that a lot of other founders aren't, you know, they're not especially in the tech space, like they're not expected to get an MRR, you know, right off the bat. But I, I feel like I've been inspired by companies like Arcads Higgs field, like doing a billion ARR already. I mean my North star is Canva. I always tell investors like, I think the Canvas story is really interesting and similar, hopefully in the way that, like before Canva, if you wanted to use Adobe Photoshop, you would have to hire a graphic designer to make a flyer for you. And they would use Photoshop. And what Canva did was they eliminated that middleman by giving like a teacher the opportunity to post a flyer, you know, at school.

11:46And the same thing is happening right now. Most people can't afford a social media agency to post a video a day, let alone like those people sometimes when they get hired don't have the experience and background. And and not just that, even somebody like me, right? I have, I would say I'm like a one of one type of person that has experienced content from small businesses, big huge creators like Charlie d'emilio, Addison Rae, Mr. Beast, Britney Spears, like I've done, you know, projects with these types of people, big brands like L'Oreal, GoDaddy, MasterCard, and then all the way back to small business owners. But like, let's say that you're an orthodontist, unless I only worked with orthodontist, like I'm not probably going to know what content converts. So that's what the technology does is it's able to be like a master social media person and a master marketing person in your industry because of all the data that's coming in. And then what our technology does is essentially organizes that data in a way that like doesn't forget things because like, even if you built a skill, right, and you said, I wanted to talk like Chris, I'm going to transcribe everything you've ever said in your, in your videos, I'm going to, it's going to forget stuff because the context window, you know, usually with the people are using it on Claude or whatever is too, It's just too much data for it to remember. And then on top of that, our ICP, like our orthodontist, they're never going to get on Claude and do they? Never.

13:21They're not even thinking about it at all. Yeah, they don't even want to use Canva to be honest, because Canva doesn't tell you what kind of flyer to make. It doesn't have the data of everything in your business to do it. So but I mean, I think Canvas doing like 3 billion ARR as well like you know, so I think that we can get there. That's the the North star for me is Canva Higgs field. But I but I think Canvas like our typical user and then we can do enterprise, we can do so many things with once you have that data in there, like think about what you could do with it, right? It just, it just will continue to expand. It's going to just keep going like they won't really stop. A question I have for Shane. I would love your feedback on this. What do you say to the business owners who don't want to use AI, who were in a sense you can say scared of it? I meet a lot of business owners, like founders who are terrified of using AI before their image and likeness. They don't want to put their voice in there, all that stuff because they feel just, they're just worried about what the future holds.

14:21But I guess this kind of goes into another question of how do you guys use the data? How do you protect the data that your clients actually give you? Yeah, So a lot of what we're doing right now has that white glove human aspect. We want to hold their hand walking through the process as we scale out because we notice that you can't just have trust immediately be built up to onboard into into AI. We have to prove that we are valuable and prove that we do have AI that's going to take the tasks on and do it very well. So part of that is walking them through the process right now because of a lot of our features are brand new. They've never seen stuff like this, but the. That's true. The the reaction that they get, you know, when they see their digital twin for the first time, it's usually like a talk like that that's pretty cool you know and it looks so good where where they're able to start building this trust example the. Technology also like it it, it provides blueprints. So if you want to just use the teleprompter to report, to read the script, there's we've done a bunch of content that they can film.

15:22So a blueprint is essentially like a storyboard of like super easy to follow guide of like, OK, now record this, now record this. And so we have, you know, IRL content that we are using for so like you don't have to use your AI twin. But what we've found is that that when they start to see like our content and they they say, oh, wow, she's saving so much time. And it really looks like Ari, they kind of get FOMO and they're like, can I do my AI twin like you? I was surprised. I thought like there's no way orthodontist plastic surgeons, but for, I mean, obviously we're not using the AI to make their facelift client pictures. We're using real B roll and the app will scan your content, your B roll content in there. But for the talking head, we're we're actually calling it a stunt double. I acquired Stunt double.com and we're trademarking Stunt Double for our proprietary like AI twin capability.

16:24But yeah, I didn't mean to jump in there, Shane, but I wanted to to also share that like, you don't have to do the AI Twin. But what we found is once they see the stunt Double capability, they're like, hey, I want one of those. Yeah, I think the the example that I give is, you know, you have to develop this trust over time and you know, trust is what's in the way of adoption. But once they see what we can do, that trust is starting to get built where they love the output, they love the time that they're saving with the AI twin, but they have the option to do it in person. One example that I like to give is my mom was terrified of Tesla's, thought it was the scariest thing ever. She did not like the concept of the self driving at all. She ended up getting one and just a couple weeks ago I went back and I checked her usage and she was using autopilot 97% of the time. So. There's an adoption curve with technology. And it's the. Customer in the market.

17:24I think that will be part of the process, you know, for the next three to five years. There will be some people who are like the early adopters of like electricity, You know, I'm pretty sure back when electricity first take the streets, there were some people like, no, I'll stay with my candles while the people across street had their lights on. I think that's where we are with AI right now. It's going to slowly, slowly add more people to be using it, subscribers and all of that stuff. I was just curious as to how your clients respond to that. So let's talk about, you know, what you're raising and what the goals are for the company. What does that look like right now? So we're raising 1.8 million on a safe at the $18 million cap. We're we've raised at least 700,000 some of the that's being funded in right now. And we think that we'll be able to close this round within the next month or so. And we've got some like pretty big, I would say like leaders in social media and marketing and tech that we have access to and who are actually really good friends and things like that. But what I was kind of hoping is look, everybody's like this, if it works, this thing is going to print, you know, like everybody's like, but Ken does it work right. So we're so close to the first part of it. What I'd like to do before we meet with those like kind of big dog, big name celebrity type people is like have have at least the back end working so we can actually show them like, hey, try it out.

18:49But you know, those are kind of like nice to have people that I think you know, are good name, but I don't even what's really cool is that we have a business that's running that kind of like, you know, it ensures that the that the investors money is if we don't have the tech fully finished and this is a profitable company. Now imagine when the tech is built so that we can scale, because right now we have customers that are coming to us being like, Hey, can we do 100 videos a month? Can we do 1000 videos a month? And when our tech is ready, Absolutely you can, because the hardest part is really like, but what are you going to post? So putting all those blueprints, if you can do 1000 blueprints, there's a lot of different campaigns and stuff out there. And so, yeah, I'm excited about the fact that we have a business that that's running profitably right now. Yeah, that's better than raising from a place of like desperation, which I think a lot of founders are a lot of the time where they're, I mean, I just have to get this dollar in tomorrow. And you're like, yeah, we had a service. It's already going. I love that setup that you have, man.

19:50This is this is exciting. I'm really happy for you. I'm excited for this because I think we need a change and a shift in this world. And I could just imagine seeing all the LinkedIn people, all those people post nonstop. They will be the ones that will love this. You know, the ones that actually post everyday and they post a long crazy stories and that is just going to put those same stories up but in video format of themselves. That's going to be pretty funny to watch. What's really cool too is that we have like, imagine most like social media agencies, right? Like they would never give you a free week's worth of content or free month's worth of content because most of the time it's going to take them a lot of time to onboard you. Like it just wouldn't back out. But what we have the ability to do is to do that, even if we have the ability to do it now. So imagine when the tech launches. But I think I offered this to you before and I think we should do it, Chris, is we should like run some videos, some short form videos for you and give you some blueprints. And if you're up for it, we can do the AI twin, the the stunt double.

20:51I got to keep calling that since we're trade marking that. But yeah, I think it would be, it would be cool if you're up for it. And then people can that could be. Fun whether? They can tell if it's your stunt double or not. So I got a, this is a just like a creative question because I think about this a lot when I do batch record content, I'm one of those people that like, I will bring the whole like half the wardrobe into my office and like change shirts and all of that. Like can you change that kind of stuff with your stunt double as well? Like let's say I want to always haven't had have a hat on or something. Like can I always make that a part of my persona too? Oh, absolutely, yeah. One of our clients, for example, you know, we got all the base assets that we needed for his stump double and he sent us, I kid you not, 100 photos, all his favorite T-shirts lined up on his bed. He's like, I like this one the best. I like this. We went through. Individual one and turned them into separate stunt double s for him. Yeah, and you have a closet. You'll have a closet. And you're saying yeah, you. Can fit, that's dope. And that right there. I like that because I just think if I post 100 videos on a month and I have the same exact thing on every time, it'd be kind of stale, you know, But if it changes up and it's my same style and how I usually dress, I think that gives a stunt double even more validity from the viewers and their watchers, you know, see, I love this tool. It's funny running into so many tools that I like. This is a good one.

22:13It's going to be fun. Like I remember when I first started making content and stuff, editing podcasts, I used to do like I use Audacity and I would edit second by second. And like now with AI, all the stuff that you just take me like two or three hours is done within not even minutes. It's just it's immediate. And I think with this part, this tool right here, creator genius is going to be that thing that takes it to that next level with video. Because right now I'm one of the people that I literally set aside the entire day to just shoot videos and I record like 15 or 20 in a day. Like I'm one of those people, you know, it's just I'm going to record for three hours straight. Don't bother me. And I just go, then I need my time to edit. And all of that stuff and it's a pain when you commit to the process. You know, so I can see you guys when I can definitely see it. Let investors know where they can find you, how they can get in contact with you. Check out our website andyeahcreatorgenius.com. We're we're on all the social medias. I'm Little Miss Jacob. So we actually haven't fully launched our own services on ourselves because we have so much interest that people are on a waiting list to get on boarded to our service.

23:24So if people are like, oh, how come their social media isn't popping yet? Well, it's because like, we actually want to make sure that we deliver good product before we launch. But they can see on my page, I post every single day. And then Shane set up a page that like, does AI stuff. So yeah, check out our social media. And then if people reach out to us, we have a whole private website where we've posted everything that we've made. So they can check out all the videos. They can say, oh, like, you know, are these videos working? I want to see all the different niches. And we're happy to show that too. Interested investors or partners? All right, sounds good. Well, Ari, Shane, thank you so much for being here, being amazing guests, and I wish you the best. Thank you so much so much. Thank you, Chris.