Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Well, either it’s going to go there or your product is going to be able to handle this kind of dynamic pricing model check where you can determine at what price point can you still be profitable and can cater and if that’s viable ROI-wise for your customer? If you can do that dynamic negotiation at scale, that could be a dynamic pricing at scale, and that would work as well. 

What are we talking in terms of average deal size? How much does a campaign generate revenue, lead wise.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Now, do you also do the A/B testing on landing page optimization and things like that? Because that would be part of your lead generation process, right?

João Aroso: That’s a very clever question and a part of our roadmap because that obviously affects the end result. However, currently we rely only on the customer’s landing page.

Sramana Mitra: Where is the lead collected? Is it collected on the customer’s website?

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How do you do your own lead generation? Can you walk me through  a use case and use your own situation to explain how your technology works? How you do your own lead generation using your technology?

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At the point at which this switch is happening, what are the dynamics of the company? Do you have customers? Are you still operating with that 1.5M in financing?

João Aroso: We’re still operating with the 1.5M in financing, but we’re starting a new fundraise. We have some early customers in Portugal and Italy. We were trying to figure out where to go in terms of differentiation when we realized that with GPT-3, we wouldn’t be scalable. So, we were trying to figure out where we wanted to go in that moment. That’s when we realized from a business standpoint that the only thing that matters to our end customer is what business the campaign is generating.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So then how long did you do this business? And what kind of revenue levels or what kind of scale were you able to achieve?

João Aroso: We did that business for two years and one of my co-founders from my first startup is still there today. I left, but the company is still very healthy.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 1)

João is a serial entrepreneur who has built several businesses from Portugal. His current company has found its path to scalability with the advent of Generative AI. He discusses challenges of business models and pricing in great depth.

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Two questions. One is, who came up with this technology?

RJ Talyor: It’s a big combination of things. My co-founder, Jeff Cunning, and I kind of dreamed it up.

Sramana Mitra: That’s the management part of it. You positioned the product and you kind of envisioned the product. But somebody still has to do the algorithm.

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So let’s go to the point where you’re starting the first company. Tell me what was going on in the market, what product angle did you take, and why?

RJ Talyor: At that time, there was a huge proliferation of social channels. We had Facebook and then Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit. Then there were all these other social channels that were coming out, and marketers were trying to experiment with their dollars. At the time, there weren’t any rapid experimentation tools on the market to help marketers figure out which ones worked and what messaging worked.