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The End of Search As We Know It: Building for the AI Discovery Era with Jon Mest
23 Plays25 days ago
AI is fundamentally changing how companies are discovered online and Jon Mest is building at the center of that shift.
In this episode, we sit down with Jon Mest, Founder and CEO of ChatRank, an AI-driven platform helping companies improve how they appear in AI-powered search results. A former Wall Street investment banker turned operator and entrepreneur, Jon brings a grounded, practical perspective to one of the biggest transformations happening in marketing and search today.
We talk about Jon’s leap from finance into entrepreneurship, the decision to bootstrap ChatRank while raising a growing family, and why building the product first for internal use shaped the company’s rapid growth trajectory. Jon also shares his philosophy on sustainable growth, long-term value creation, and why he believes the future of marketing will require a more human-led approach even in an increasingly agentic AI world.
From AI search disruption to founder conviction and modern brand strategy, this conversation explores what it really takes to build thoughtfully in a landscape changing faster than ever.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Session and Guest
00:00:15
Speaker
I super fired up to kick off our recording of fractional frequency this afternoon. Today we have John Mest joining us. um John is the founder and CEO of ChatRank, an AI-driven platform helping companies improve how they show up in AI-powered search results. A former Wall Street investment banker and current operator of PR our software platform JustReachOut.
00:00:40
Speaker
John brings a practical operator first perspective to the rapidly changing search landscape.
ChatRank: Innovation and Origins
00:00:46
Speaker
His latest venture chat rank has seen rapid growth and recently won an innovation showcase backed by ARK Invest as he continues to bootstrap the company with a focus on long-term value over venture backed speed.
00:00:59
Speaker
So we'll get into John's decision to build his philosophy on growth and how agentic AI is redefining how brands are discovered today. Welcome John. Really happy to be here.
00:01:11
Speaker
We are so interested to dig into your story. We learned a little bit about this last time we we talked, but I'm excited to learn more today. um So how, let's get right into it. How did the origin story of ChatRank kind of kick off building it for internal needs first and then kind of shaping it to go to market product?
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah. um So
Adapting to AI Search Changes
00:01:36
Speaker
like a a lot of businesses today, there was this kind of moment in time where you realized things were changing in, it's called online discoverability in general. For us, it was very stark. It was August, 2024. We own and operate ah ah a PR software called Just Reach Out. It does really well. We eat our own dog food there and do a ton of work with SEO and have a really good content marketing strategy. So most of our you know sales pipeline is inbound.
00:01:59
Speaker
We spent money on ads. And so all of a sudden it was August of 2024. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, Google hasn't charged my credit card in a while for ads. And I was like, something must be broken. They go in my ads account. and I was like, oh no.
00:02:10
Speaker
It's only spent about $4 in the last three weeks. Like something's broken. Again, nothing was broken. And I finally, I was like, oh, let me just go through our sales like funnel and realize, oh, but if I search our core search areas, they Google stuck a massive AI overview on top of our core search terms.
00:02:25
Speaker
And so my number one blue link we worked so hard for and our ad even was buried so far below the fold, nobody's clicking on
Developing ChatRank with Customer Feedback
00:02:31
Speaker
it. And in that moment, I was like, if Google is giving up my ad dollars to like show this ad overview because they're scared of ChatGPT at the time, something's happening, like something real is changing here.
00:02:40
Speaker
And so in that moment, we're like, well, oh crap, how do we fix this? But more importantly, how do I get into this AI overview? Because if I feel like I can get my company into that answer, we don't have to fight for the blue ink anymore. We don't have to pay for that ad. I feel like I can just get the the traffic back.
00:02:53
Speaker
And so we kind of went on this journey to reverse engineer how to get into that. It worked for us. All of a sudden we're getting referral in from Claude, Perplexity, ChatGBT every single day by just kind of optimizing our brand for how AI likes to retrieve information to provide answers in those search results.
00:03:09
Speaker
So we're like, well, this is interesting. We have this whole suite of customers here from Just to Reach Out. Maybe somebody else be interested in learning about this too. Started betaing it, kind of started, I mean, we started developing the open. We were just posting on like LinkedIn and all our socials. Like anybody interested in this? This is what we're doing. is what we're seeing. And eventually we got enough of a ah beta group that we kind of started building and then kind of led to there. And that I mean, then people started paying and then people started paying more and more. And it turned into a whole business. So we spun it out of Just Reach Out and then that's now its own business, it's ChatRank. But it was really built on a need for ourselves.
00:03:37
Speaker
And the reason why that's so important is that we are not building this space because it's like a sexy, cool space. There are hundreds of companies building the space because they think it's cool or interesting. We built it for ourselves first. Everything we build in ChatRank, we use ourselves because we use it all for our own businesses. And so I can tell you that there is no like fancy bells and whistles, no things that don't matter in the software. Everything in there is exactly what we need to actually grow our own revenue. And that's we that's why our customers love the tool.
Personal and Professional Balance
00:04:02
Speaker
I love that You can almost like hear the passion in your voice as you talk about it. It's, you know, it doesn't feel like a pitch. It feels a lot more like something that um is your baby or or your sister baby. And so um i I just love that.
00:04:17
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about your your personal origin story too. So while this is all happening, um what was happening for you personally outside of work? So as ChatRank became more of less of an idea, more of like, I think there's a business here.
00:04:32
Speaker
We were also having our second kid. So I always like make the joke, like never start your second business while you're having your second child. My beautiful daughter is amazing and she's wonderful. But like though there was not a lot of sleep going on those early days as we're trying to like onboard customers and and develop work with companies and then also like bring on a new child. Now, luckily she's almost a year old now, um which is beautiful and amazing. And the company is doing great, but yes, there was um some stressful times. This is why don't know if we'll get to it today. Like you need a good partner. and Every founder and entrepreneur needs a good partner. My wife is phenomenal and amazing. And she supports me through all this. And like, yeah it's just, it's been, it was like it was a really wild ride. And last summer, I can't tell you like,
00:05:08
Speaker
yeah there's not like a strict paternity leave when you work for yourself and you're running a couple of businesses, but there was like, how can I be helpful? Well, that meant that like I was working during naps. That was that's mine that was my ah my work times, which was just tough, but you know, that that out that happens. And you know, this is kind of just in life, usually they do these cards, you kind of deal with it. And this is, it was just fortuitous. I mean, honestly, I think it was, it made us even better and stronger. Mm-hmm.
00:05:30
Speaker
I ah couldn't agree more. I think there's something about you know being forced to balance and you have to ruthlessly prioritize what you'll spend your time on. and And likely in the end, you're spending your time on the things that matter most because you have to, not not as a luxury. so So wait, just curious, who was named first, ChatRank or your daughter?
00:05:51
Speaker
ChatRank was named first. My daughter was
Bootstrapped vs. Venture-backed Startups
00:05:54
Speaker
named afterwards. So my daughter's not named ChatRank. No, sure. I'm going to clarify, that was one. Yes. I mean, it's it's funny because like it it really is in these moments. You're right, that um Aaron. Like for us, all sudden you have another kid. It's a great one. Now I have a second business I'm running and you're trying to figure out what to balance, what to prioritize. It's like,
00:06:12
Speaker
I love, like, like I don't know, I love doing the yard work in my yard. My wife's like, we're hiring somebody. You do not have time to do the yard work anymore. Sorry. It's like, oh, well, like, I love cooking dinner. It's like well, fine, you can keep cooking dinner because, you know, that's something that's important to you and what you put in your body is important to me and everything is important to our family. So this balance is really important.
00:06:27
Speaker
I'd say sleep is the thing that's lost on this. my my Actually, like, to her credit, my wife makes me wear a whoop now. No free ads, but, like, I wear my whoop to kind of track, am I, like, dying right now? Do I need to go to sleep early in the night? It really does help. So that really is just kind of, like, maintaining some balance and order and kind of, like,
00:06:42
Speaker
Yes, while it is really fun to work till 3 in the morning on a customer's problem, it is sometimes got to get some sleep too. Totally, totally. We talked a lot last time about the decision to seek funding. So through like ah a venture backed sort of a relationship versus bootstrap and you have worked in both environments. And so I'd love to spend a little bit of time on that. Share with us a little bit about your experience working in venture backed startup and and then conversely working in a bootstrapped environment.
00:07:18
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm going to come across as pretty passionate about one side versus the other. I think you can probably guess which side it's going to be, but I promise I'm not anti-VC. I just think the VC model is going to have to change given where we are and right now in 2026 and beyond. Unless you're building like a foundational model company or you're building robotics or something that's really like capital intensive.
00:07:40
Speaker
Venture going to have a struggle, like kind of having like some struggles going forward with like how to fund successful businesses that aren't necessarily called the 100x returns that they're usually expecting or looking for. So we'll get to that in a second, but I'll answer your first question first, Aaron, which is like, what are the differences and what what drove me to each one of them?
00:07:55
Speaker
And so I can tell you, having been a part of a venture a pretty high profile venture backed startup, um being the first employee there, kind of being one of the founders of that team, um I can tell you that it is fun, exciting, and amazing.
00:08:09
Speaker
we were able to take the funding we got and go immediately hire a team, of really impressive team of engineers, of different people from go to market and chief of staff, all these different roles, and just go, go, go, go go as fast as possible.
00:08:23
Speaker
So we went from a PowerPoint slide of an idea, raised some money on that, and then took that and actually had a working product with revenue in about like like six or seven months is like unbelievable. Like that was just like such a fun, fast journey. We were in New York City. You can just like hire, go, go. It was it was like it was incredible.
00:08:42
Speaker
And I also saw all the the fuzzy warts that come along with that. You're just wasting money left and right. You're not really being thoughtful about what you're going after. Your investors are saying, just spend it all as fast as possible because we want you to just get this going as fast as possible so can keep growing. Where the reality is, like we need to just get this thing right. Why keep spending more money? Why keep going after doing different things? why we Why are we wasting our time on things that just don't matter? what we need to do is like find a customer, find them what they really need,
00:09:10
Speaker
build that thing, make sure that we are like, if we found the true product market fit. And it was just like these core philosophies I believe in and how to like grow a smart business that just were not exactly aligned with when you raise a bunch of venture, how do you do that? um Conversely, having worked in some some really incredible bootstrap companies, I worked for a company called 1010 Data in New York.
00:09:30
Speaker
They were founded in 2000. And then, i mean, the time is kind of amazing. They were doing cloud-based like big data analytics it's starting in 2000. Their first customer was the New York Stock Exchange. Like truly like the early, early days of like these concepts are now so obvious, but in 25 years ago we were like completely new. And they were like, you know what, why would I go raise money when at the time, you know, UBS was willing to pay for their core like development. Like, you know, they got the New York Stock Exchange as a customer and they realized they could build customer by customer, one by one, get paid for their work
00:10:00
Speaker
And then they didn't have to go raise venture. They didn't have to raise money. And they were able to build the thing the customer actually needed and then go figure out what, how other customers could use that. And did it take them 15 years to have an exit? Yes.
00:10:11
Speaker
Was that exit for $500 million? dollars And did they get to pocket all of it instead of giving it all their VC investors? Yeah. So that was
Customer-Centric Product Development
00:10:17
Speaker
probably the greatest party I've ever been to. when when When you sell for half a billion dollars and most 90% of it isn't going to be like to VC's, it's going to the employees and the founders pockets. It's unbelievable.
00:10:27
Speaker
And so like I've seen both sides of that. And for us and our team, what we really believed in this philosophy of like why go fast and burn like kind of the the tri the true additional VC model when you don't really have to anymore. And I'm sure we'll get into this eventually. and I'll give you a chance to respond. But Right now, as development costs are going way, way down, as the idea of how to build product completely fundamentally changes in the world of Agentec why go raise all this money for things that you could probably do just building smartly and and and on cash flow like we're doing? And so I have many more opinions on this, but I guess I'll pause for a second and kind of just give it, give it space for, to to talk.
00:11:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's ah incredible sort of juxtaposition. As you think about, so you've you've chosen to bootstrap chat rank, of course. What is, what do you think that means in terms of like your long-term vision or what is different about your long-term vision for the company as a bootstrapped model compared to if you were VC backed?
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah. So one is definitely, i mean, we like not having LPs on our balance sheet or not having a boss. Like we get to build what we want to build smartly for what we want to do. um So does that mean, quick do we want to keep growing and do well? Of course. It's not like we don't want to like make this as big as it can possibly be. But what we realize is that understanding what why, what would we do with the money?
00:11:47
Speaker
So I asked my my co-founder, my CTO, Joe, all the time, like if I give you a million dollars tomorrow, what would you do? And his response is like, um I'd probably be cheap, like less cheap about DevOps tools. Like, I guess I yelled at him when he pays pays too money for too much money for like these like little DevOps tools, like these little dinky dinks, like subscriptions. But that's like that's about it. i I don't need the money. Like there's nothing I would do with the money. Like we're building at the speed that our customers need.
00:12:08
Speaker
We could go, like we have a roadmap out of things we want to build, but what we do is we just go to our customers and say, what do you want next? or if we're in a sales process where the customer, like what would make you choose us over somebody else? And they go, oh, well, we need this. Well, actually that was on our roadmap for Q3. We'll pull it forward and do it now. And we'll just get, if you' if you'll agree to sign up and we'll do it. These are the conversations we can have with our customers.
00:12:27
Speaker
It allows us to be smarter, but what we're building. Now, if we had raised all this money, we we I mean, we were approached by pretty much every mid-tier to then tier A VC to about funding in the early days of this. We weren't the first people to come up with this like you know idea of chat rank at the time with us and a few others. And so we were kind of early on. We've approached by pretty much every one of these VCs and we've just told them, like um that we're not interested. we we don' like We need the money maybe one day, but we we don't need the money. like People are paying for us to just do the work and build on the thing they want.
00:12:57
Speaker
So for us, it's really been like listening to the customer, understanding what they need, building that. And if we had done all this a year ago, when people were offered us the money, I bet we'd have built the wrong thing. And I'm not going to name names here because I don't like poopooing competitors, but like we see some of our competitive products from customers, customers that come to us and and cancel them. And we see like, wow, you built the wrong thing.
00:13:16
Speaker
Probably because you built it a year ago before the customer the the the market was mature enough. So you built the thing you thought people needed, but actually this is what they need. And what we need, what we realize is that by waiting and being like more thoughtful over time,
00:13:27
Speaker
We built the product of the customer actually needed. And now, I call it fast forward, we're now growing really, really quickly. So maybe would have grown quicker earlier with the other model, but we would be stalling out and churning right now if people realize it's not actually what people need. This is what people want. And so I guess it's a long-winded way of saying this is like by bootstrapping in this industry, especially as things are changing so rapidly and like as as like things are going forward, we're realizing more and more, find really good, high quality partners early on work with them, have them give you the feedback you need, and then use that to your advantage and go use them to help resell the next one, or the next one, the next one.
00:14:04
Speaker
That mindset and mentality has been really, really effective for us. Would it be nice to have more money in the bank account that we can just burn off of? Sure, like i like that would be really nice. I mean, at the same time, we I'd much rather be in the position we're in where our balance sheet our capital structure is phenomenal. We're good, but we don't and we don't need the money to go invest and grow any far any faster. I think we're really doing really well.
00:14:26
Speaker
It's I had heard a few times i I wish remember the source exactly but about the reason that startups succeed or failed being about timing to market over basically anything else and I had never thought about the relationship between timing to market and the conditions that have to be true to be successful as a bootstrapped.
00:14:48
Speaker
startup and getting some edge there, but it makes a lot of sense when you when you lay it out like that. You're forced to listen more intently to your customer and prioritize what they need. And in turn, what you come up with and the product that you build will be sharper and more relevant as you as you release it. That's super interesting.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, I watched some of our competitors as they as they did raise a lot of this money. I mean, some of them have raised hundreds of millions of dollars um in the same space that we're in. And as they raise that money, I'm like, what are they doing? Again, I don't really care about our competitors. We keep our heads down and just like build what we want to build and build what we think is right. And we're we're doing very well with that.
00:15:23
Speaker
like, what are they what are they doing? I've looked, they're hiring salespeople. So when you hire a lot more salespeople, you're going to do more sales. Great. They're not actually hiring a lot of engineers or hiring a lot of salespeople, which is, again, that's that's a separate conversation for just can you pump enough money into a couple of companies and basically guarantee success by just giving them such a leg up that nobody else can win? It's called king making these days. They're calling it and in the ai were and like the VC world. So if every single major VC just puts their money into the same one or two companies and like you've just decided who wins.
00:15:50
Speaker
um And you basically get to pay yourselves your own money back, which is kind of crazy, but that's kind of how it's working a lot of these VC world these days. But so we're seeing like, what are they they doing? They're going to but out there and acquiring a bunch of, you know, very expensive account executives. And all of a sudden you're getting all, then now you're getting a like an absolute floodgate of of feedback of what they need and what they want from the customer. It's like, hey, i got to close this deal, build this thing. I got to close this deal, build this thing.
00:16:11
Speaker
We see that they're building all these things that don't matter because there's no thought to it. there's no like, you know, process. there's no actually like, does this make the product better? It's just,
Optimizing for AI Search
00:16:18
Speaker
I'm gonna close this deal. We'll build this feature. Well, then when you do that, all of a sudden your product stinks because it's actually confusing. Nobody knows how to use it. It's at all these like added things that don't matter because there's one customer wanted it.
00:16:28
Speaker
And now of a sudden, like a year later, you're like wait, what did we build? Is this even relevant? Is it our customers are even happy with this? And all of a sudden, yeah, it it was a good idea and it smart to like think about it this way from the beginning.
00:16:38
Speaker
But then now you've kind of built this Frankenstein that who knows, this is like the the Salesforce problem, the Slack problem as you get so mature. Salesforce is amazing CRM, but it's so freaking confusing because like it's added so many things to it. Like nobody knows how to use it.
00:16:52
Speaker
So at a certain point, you kind have to step back and be like is this the right thing to do? And so for us, we never had that problem, I guess, because we just like, when people would tell us we want to build this thing, we you're the only one ever said that. We're not doing that. We'll just like, sorry, if that means we lose a deal, we'll move on to the other one. We don't have time to do but all these things. We all have so many engineering hours in the day with our team.
00:17:09
Speaker
So we we kind of declined some of those things. Now we had to have a good, really strong thesis about what what what did matter. And so we won't just build anything, but if as long as it's like in our like vicinity, if we've thought about this and think it's relevant, well we'll just like either pull things up in a roadmap or add things on be like, hey, we're not we're not ready now, but come back to us in a couple months and we're like, well, I think we'll be ready for you. Like that that that messaging really works if you deliver on it.
00:17:31
Speaker
Well, and I think that's a ah perfect segue into telling our listeners, what are you building at ChatRink? Yeah. so um With ChatRank, we have kind of evolved over time as well, I'll be honest, about like what we are really focusing on for our customers. Initially, it was sort of like the SEO for the AI world. How do you get your brand to just show up and ranked well yeah in AI search?
00:17:55
Speaker
That is still very much a component of what we do. That's like got the acronym GEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it these days. It's like the idea of helping your brand show up and rank in AI search.
00:18:06
Speaker
um Now that is really good and we do help our brands do that. But what really doing is we're helping build a brand. You're helping your brand be discovered and understood by the AI. So ChatRank does a couple core things.
00:18:18
Speaker
So first it audits your brand and figures out who are you as a brand? Not according to us at ChatRank, according to the AI models themselves. Who are you? And we we say, this is who you are. This is the target market you're going after. These are your niches. These are your ICPs. This is everything you need to know about your company.
00:18:33
Speaker
And if you look at that and you say, cool, that's us, then go. We're kind of like, we're good for for the first step. If you think yourself, that is not at all who you are. we're trying to We think we're this. And ah why does it say we're this? That's a problem. Now we realize that the AI thinks you're something that you're not.
00:18:47
Speaker
We need to go fix that. So kind of first step is auditing the brand and figuring out what you are. Now, once you've adjusted that information, that metadata, um you can then say, okay, well, what should you care about?
00:18:57
Speaker
We translate your brand into what are the things that you should be caring about? So they they call it the search intent of the user. So it's not like SEO keywords, you're not going to track 5,000 things in chat rank. You're to track maybe 30, 60, a hundred, whatever the number is of different, you know search intents of the user that are like, Hey, I care about this general idea, this thing.
00:19:15
Speaker
um Cause no, They are all, um everything is kind of like that long tail keyword. So what we do is the same thing that the AI models do. When you type a long paragraph into ChatGPT, it says like, okay, what does this actually mean? What are they trying to tell us to search for? The AI models can go search that thing, do like a live search of that thing and then come back with, you know,
00:19:34
Speaker
um some answers So that's the second thing we do is we figure out what you should care about as a brand to like succeed. We then run a ton of data on that. We run simulations and samples to figure out what it is you're actually doing to win.
00:19:47
Speaker
And so like what are those things that you're doing that are doing really well? Where are the areas that you're hurting and you're being you're losing against your competitors? And we track all that as well and see where are you winning and losing and why? What are the AI models telling us is the reasons why you're showing up here and not there. Why are you more visible over here more there?
00:20:02
Speaker
And then that data layer underlying that is, you know, includes all the citations and references, includes socials, it includes like your website hygiene, or you do have good technical SEO on your website, all that kind of feeds into what is like, like, how are you doing as a brand?
00:20:16
Speaker
And then from there, that's where a lot of the called the traditional GEO tools stop and say, okay, here's the data, here's the information. But we've then built an entire recommendations engine on top of that. So our AI will actually, our agents will actually go through the different components of the data layer, identify ah core areas of improvement, where it's almost like you have good opportunity here. It's a low competitive like area. You're losing where you should really be winning. Your competitors that are beating you are not really that strong on this topic. Go after this with this like playbook.
00:20:43
Speaker
whether that's create new content, whether that's credit, kind do more socials, get more reviews, go get some external brand mentions, go get like the Wall Street Journal to write about you, like all the different things that I'll kind of recommend for you, they'll do this playbook.
00:20:54
Speaker
Those recommendations, you kind of complete those recommendations week over week. We call it one hour per week marketing. Can you spend a week every, like an hour every week completing your tasks for the week? kind of like aligning to our playbook that we're providing for you and then watch you as you go grow and grow. And like obviously if you want to see you being cited more and then also see you getting conversions and rep referral in from these these sources. And so there is a constant feedback loop of, is it what we're doing working? And if yes, continue doing more of that. If not, it'll pivot.
00:21:17
Speaker
Who knows to do all that. So, I mean, to, to, to summarize it's identifying who you are as a brand, making sure that aligns with how the AI thinks of you, translating you, figuring out what the data is, figuring out your opportunities and your gaps, then filling in those gaps by following our playbook.
00:21:32
Speaker
So it's your very own brand ambassador. We're toying with terms here. Brand ambassador, I like it. We started with like rest startedted with like the brand command center. It doesn't sound right. I don't know. wherere We're going with different things here, but it really is turning more into like a brand. It's ah almost like branding for AI. I think overall, right, as the world is changing to each company having also their own brand, like you said, right, and figuring out what that means, <unk> AI is obviously evolving too, right? So what do you feel is changing about how brands are being discovered?
00:22:01
Speaker
today with respect to the entry you know of ai Absolutely. So what what we realize and we're seeing more and more is that the AI has almost unlimited access to information.
00:22:13
Speaker
So it has so much information that's out there that's saved from whether it's books or research or whatever that might be. So the, there's almost like, like I said, an overload of information about topics and ideas and areas, but it doesn't have is like that human sentiment, like the the kind of the validation and verification that you are what you say you are, and that you are good at those things.
00:22:33
Speaker
And so for us, what we're trying to explain to our customers is, okay, so imagine like you have a great blog, you have a great website, you have great research, you' have all these things, which is really, really good. Do you have good customer reviews?
00:22:45
Speaker
Do you have really really high quality mentions in these these areas that have been known to be kind of validated as, authority signals to the AI tools, places like Reddit, like YouTube, like like other socials that are kind of like, again, real humans talking about your brand. That is what most of our brands are are realizing that is missing from their kind of overall strategy is they think, oh, if I just write amazing blog posts, it'll just work. Like, no, that that's not, that's one piece of it. Yes, you need to be able to explain your information and show that you are an authority on a topic, but having topical relevance in other areas is super important too. So having others talking about you as well is is really, really, really valuable.
00:23:20
Speaker
And so I always like to joke with our customers now that because there's so much information, imagine you're like Coca-Cola in the 1950s. If you wanted to advertise, what are you doing? Taking out a full page ad and in the in the paper and you get like one image in like five words. Like what is your brand? Like if you can't explain your brand like you could at the Coca-Cola then you can't really kind of show that to the
Adapting to AI's Market Perception
00:23:40
Speaker
AI and to everybody else. Like, what is it you're trying to be?
00:23:42
Speaker
That thing, make sure that everybody's talking about that. You're talking about it like specifically. So again, like not your marketing team and your CEO and your ah sales team talking about different things. No, are you all focused on the same areas as well as are your other customers and your people that are out there talking about you and your G2 reviews or Trustpilot reviews or Yelp reviews, whatever those are, are there's a line two um those top, those kind of core areas.
00:24:04
Speaker
So that's kind of the big piece that's missing from a lot of people. and they realize like, what is AI search different than call it you know, traditional search. Right. It's a completely different way of thinking about this problem statement. We have a lot of clients who are very focused on their talent brand, for example, as a part of how they show up to market, how they attract good people.
00:24:24
Speaker
And it used to be that you could just go pay for, you know, like a career page or whatever on on a LinkedIn or a Glassdoor. And then you you spend some ad dollars in SEO and drive people to that and like check. you're done and that's not how it works anymore.
00:24:41
Speaker
So you really have to flip your thinking and and just out of pure curiosity, I have to know, does ChatRank also include that concept like employee value proposition and talent brand or is it more like business brand focused?
00:24:56
Speaker
Um, it's ah amazing. A lot of both. we we have many different customers that they use us for many different things. Um, a lot of our core, like kind of customer is I want to get more users, more customers, more patients, more like revenue, basically to, to, to, I'm using this channel for that.
00:25:12
Speaker
We have customers. We have one that just came to us recently and they are in the call, the online lottery, online gaming space. And their problem is that they're a legitimate business with legitimate, you know, it's everything's completely like buttoned up and fine.
00:25:27
Speaker
But if you go to AI search or like a chat GPT and say, is this company a fraud? Is this company like not real? The answer is like, yeah, they're potentially a fraud. They're youre almost using it for like PR. They're almost using it for like, is this like a real thing? They need to like, we need to undo what the AI thinks about us. Cause we are legitimate, we are real, but maybe a couple of reviews were left that like people were upset about it. All of a sudden you have like all this bad news. And now chat GPT is saying you're like,
00:25:49
Speaker
fraud or you're like not real. Um, there's that component of it. Or there's like, as a bit as business, we have working with one right now. It's sort of like a brand, a complete brand pivot. So there's a FinTech, they were really big in the cannabis payment space, but now they wanna be in like the B2B payment space. And you they're just in the e-commerce or like other other areas.
00:26:07
Speaker
Well, if AI only thinks you do cannabis. They're never gonna ever recommend you for other things. Cause like, no, you're the best at cannabis. Why would you also be good at this thing? So the same thing applies to your workforce to when you're hiring everything else, people gonna be like, oh, well they they're saying they're doing this, but AI is telling me that they're like a cannabis company. I was like, wait, what? Like, what do you what do you mean?
00:26:23
Speaker
these brand pivots are super important as well. And so you have to make sure that AI understands you and understands what you're trying to go after. That's not an overnight change. It's going to take time to kind of move the that needle on that. So would you say, though, that a human led marketing team is still essential for company success?
00:26:44
Speaker
I would say that is the most essential thing um because we work with a lot of companies that have no marketing team. So our best customers have you know like content teams and engineering teams. They have all these things, of course. like Those are our core conmote power users. But we find with ChatRank, why we've been so successful at ChatRank is because we've built the UX of our product to work for anybody that just has no marketing background at all, no content background at all.
00:27:07
Speaker
We try to make it super easy for you to kind be fed these recommendations. Say, it says, here's your gap. you have you You should be doing better in this area. X competitor is doing much better than you.
00:27:18
Speaker
You have a massive gap in, say, your content. So here is a piece of content we're writing for you. Oh, oh by the way, here's the first draft. If you wanted to take this content and post it, it might be okay, but we really needed some really unique insights from you.
00:27:29
Speaker
So I need to know why are you so good at this thing? What makes you better than your competitor across the street? What is this thing that you do really well? I need a quote from your CEO and I need some data points to back it up. You give us those five or six data points, those five or six things, we then feed that into our AI, so it then uses that and includes it in your content that it's writing.
00:27:47
Speaker
Now, of a sudden, you're not just you know writing AI-generated content. You're writing like highly authoritative signaling to the AI that you know what you're talking about because you have data to back it up. You have novel information you've never seen before. That's what matters.
00:27:58
Speaker
You don't have to be a content strategist or like a marketing person to do that. We work with like medical practices. The doctor themselves just filling in these details and they they're the marketing team. Like they they they don't want to focus on marketing. They want to treat patients, but they know the need to do marketing. We help them do it really easily and quickly and efficiently on a week-to-week basis and get results.
AI and Human Insights in Marketing
00:28:15
Speaker
And so for us, it's funny enough, like the human is the most important part of this. The AI can do actually a lot of the, call it,
00:28:22
Speaker
marketing tasks that marketing doesn't even want to do the data analysis, the figuring out what's going on. What we do is we need the human, that real brand to undercut, give us an insight that I would never know. Makes sense. And extremely crucial for those teams. Like you said, that don't have marketing, right?
00:28:36
Speaker
Um, you kind of touched on this a little bit earlier, but just to expand upon it some more, um, How will companies need to think differently about you know their marketing approach to stay you know relevant as the landscape evolves?
00:28:54
Speaker
I think the one thing you can be doing, and you don't need any tool for this, you don't need a chat rank to do this, is just pay attention to what is moving the needle in your industry. what What are people doing or saying or thinking? This is as simple as like, i you know people put like a Google alert on their name or on their company name, but like that's a simple version of this. But just go to ChatGPT, do a temporary chat so it's not influenced by any sort of past history or or anything like that, and just start searching around different areas about your business, about what you you care about you know about.
00:29:19
Speaker
see what see what they're saying see who's being doing well see what they're kind of going after all a sudden because what's happening is we at chat ring we check on all these like different like model tuning and changes in the way like these different tools are reacting to information so one week chat gbt might tune their model to be really receptive to like reddit content being the the deciding factor what what what works and a couple weeks later they'll turn it back and it won't be as relevant anymore We'll keep track of that. We know all this. We kind of import it and like inform our brands about this, but you as a company like should just be kind of at least aware of what is driving the needle for these different tools and these different models.
00:29:51
Speaker
So something that people don't really realize probably is that when somebody goes to a chat, GBT, they're getting fed different answers than they might go if they go to a Claude or or a Gemini, not because like they're fundamentally like different in the way that the models are structured. Frankly, these companies have different business relationships with different companies. Google and Gemini is going to recommend YouTube content way more because they own YouTube. um Like, for example, we found that chat GPT, every small business has been told, build your Google business profile, because that's all that matters for like like winning an SEO.
00:30:20
Speaker
That's true. But ChatGBT doesn't use Google Maps. They use MapQuest when they do a lot of their mapping and like seeing who's where and who's relevant in places. So if you've only ever focused on your Google Maps profile, you've not actually like thought in your map pack and never thought about, you know, like other sources, you might just not be showing up as well at ChatGBT. It's frankly, OpenAI doesn't want to pay Google for that information. So there's like these weird business relationships that's driving what's happening in these different answers that most people probably never would think about or don't want to think about.
00:30:47
Speaker
But you can actually see some of this if you just start going through and doing things. Like I said, like, who is the best at blank? Why did you say that? Why didn't you include me? Why did you include me? Let's be your citations and sources. Like those kinds of inquiries into the AI search tools will help you kind of learn a little bit more about how they're making decisions.
Critical Analysis of AI Information
00:31:02
Speaker
You don't need a like a tool like Chatring to do that. That's just like simple, basic stuff you can do as as as a business owner. I totally agree. I don't think so many, I don't think many people know that at all. That was just like a very big wow moment.
00:31:18
Speaker
Claude won't scrape Instagram because Claude Meta don't have a great relationship, like anthropic. It's just, and what weird there's a weird stuff where like there's some things that just are super neat. It's easy. Some things are not. And if you don't realize that, you' you're not an expert, you're not living and breathing this every day like we do, you might not realize that. And so like, these are things that you can kind of just like play around with and toy with and see what's working, what's not you.
00:31:37
Speaker
I think it's a good um a good reminder about how this all works too and and a reminder for people to turn their brain on and you don't just take whatever the LLM you're interacting with feeds you at face value. like Think about it and try to understand where it's sourced from or what that means, challenge it. and Um, I think, you know, to your point, people will, will come up with better ideas and and make better decisions accordingly.
Authenticity in Brand Positioning
00:32:04
Speaker
Yeah. So we've got a couple of, of closing questions, kind of quick hit advice for you, John. So, um, we'll, we'll rapid fire these.
00:32:12
Speaker
Um, what is one thing that you think founders should prioritize when it comes to positioning their brand for discovery and revenue growth in this new world?
00:32:24
Speaker
The one thing I always tell all of our customers, whether they're actually paying us or they're just kind of coming into our our prospect funnel is you have to start somewhere. So people come to us and they think this is this massive project to undertake. it's going to take me months and years to get it right. the answer is maybe. i don't I can't tell you for sure. What I can tell you is if you don't start, you're never going to get there.
00:32:43
Speaker
So what I'll say is if you don't know what you want to do yet, go write a blog post. You can have ai to help you do it, but go write a blog post about the core of what you do and why you are the best at doing it. And then after that, go record a YouTube video. It doesn't have to be high tech. doesn't have to be like crazy complicated. Just get ah like ah ah an iPhone or like a camera, like it doesn't record yourself explaining that in video format and explaining it to everybody and post it to YouTube.
00:33:06
Speaker
And then go on like different socials and kind of see where people are commenting on things adjacent to your industry and just start commenting on it. I don't know if that's going to immediately get you to a million in revenue tomorrow. Like I can't promise anything, but I can promise you is that these small things add up.
00:33:19
Speaker
And so for somebody that's thinking about this channel or there's this idea, what I can say for sure is the traditional search, like as far as like getting traffic to your website is going down. Like the the idea of traffic to your site is not really the metric you should be caring about anymore.
00:33:32
Speaker
It is the people that do land on my site, do they purchase, do they engage, do they sign up for a demo, do they like kind of work with me? That is what really matters. And as business owner, you can start tracking that through like various different tools. But really it's just like, if you want to start approaching this channel as like a new way of getting organic, like traffic into your, like your funnel or to your, what you're trying to do or whatever you're trying to accomplish.
Engaging Early with Customers
00:33:51
Speaker
Start somewhere. and that's like the first thing i could share. And like I said, you don't have to be perfect, but it has to be the information that shows these authority signals to the AI that you know what you're talking about. That's all that really matters to start.
00:34:02
Speaker
Yeah. It makes a ton of sense. Um, second one. So for leaders who are choosing to bootstrap either a company or an idea, what's one piece of advice that you'd have for that audience or one thing that you wish you'd learned sooner?
00:34:20
Speaker
I think they're the same answer to what I rob recommend and what I wish I'd learned sooner is you have to just go talk to customers or potential customers. I hear so many people telling me, oh, I'm going to do this thing. i'm bootstrapping it. I'm going to just spend the next two months heads down building this product. It's like,
00:34:36
Speaker
Why? do you even know if anybody cares about it? Do you like know if it's worthy? Do you know if that's what they really want? Have you thought at all about like what this would mean for, like no. Go talk to 30 customers or potential customers first, hear what they need, and then go actually they' build that thing that they need. Maybe it's just one person needs it. I know by the way, whoever says they'll put a credit card down and pay, that's one you start with. Like start with that person and build that.
00:34:57
Speaker
And then from there, build another one, another one. And when you have, i don't know, if people argue with this number if it's five or 10, but like once you have 10 customers paying for the same thing, I feel pretty good. you can probably go lean into that more and explore that and actually go like do that more and more and more. But like, don't just go build and then hope for customers later.
00:35:15
Speaker
That's a, if you have a burn and you have like a bunch of money in your bank account, like if you're venture funded, you can like kind of get away with that a little bit more and maybe make a little more, a few more of those mistakes. But like, frankly, if you're boot shopping this, you have to be sure somebody's going to pay for it. Otherwise you're not going to really exist for very long because it's, you got to put food on the table.
Conclusion and Closing Remarks
00:35:32
Speaker
And so for us, I think it's really important to just always remind ourselves and remind everybody we talk to and people I've i've talked to in other industries and that are kind of starting trying to start a company is,
00:35:41
Speaker
Go talk to customers. I have people that say it's gotta to be three to five a day. You gotta to just be like hustling. Anybody you can find that'll talk to you, even if they're not their perfect customer, what are their problems? What do they need to see? What do they, how would they think about this thing?
00:35:53
Speaker
The more and more you hear that, the more you realize you're gonna find a lot of patterns in those answers. And you're going to probably have a pretty good sense of what you should build based on that. Yeah, I think that's great advice and and it's advice I wish that we had had heard sooner launching Strativist. So thank you for for sharing that. yeah and John, it has been so fun to chat with you again. Thank you so much for spending your afternoon with us. If listeners want to learn more or follow you, where can they learn more about you or ChatRank?
00:36:22
Speaker
Yeah, please absolutely. Go check us out at chatrank.ai. It's C-H-A-T-R-A-N-K.ai. That's our website. all information's on there about what we do, who we service, kind of the different industries we play in. um It's been a really fun space to build in. So we're really excited about that. um Also check us out. You can check out me. We also, like i said, own JustReachOut. That's JustReachOut.io. Again, very related digital PR business around these ideas of getting those external brand mentions as well.
00:36:48
Speaker
And yeah, like we're really excited. we built our Our team, these are our two businesses right now. who There's nothing to say we're go not going to have a third later this year. that no no no hints at that, but like We're always building and trying to find new things again, by talking to so many customers, we realize there's common pain points. And so we as a team have kind of like a a separate entity that that incubates ideas and things like that. And so we're always kind of coming up with new things. And so for those, just kind of pay attention to learn more about how those as they they come up.
00:37:14
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks so much, John. I'm sure we'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Aaron. Thanks, Jenna.