Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
083 - Bootstrapping, marketing, branding & ass-kicking, with Tanya Van Gastel (Co-founder of The Multiverse AI)
Curious about the challenges of transitioning from a corporate environment in China to the bustling startup scene in Barcelona? How has she created an AI company and is bootstrapping her way up? How is their marketing strategy? How do you build domain authority for your startup? Join us as Tania Van Gastel, CEO and co-founder of The Multiverse AI, shares her unique journey. Her insights shed light on building a product-driven company amidst the AI frenzy, the significance of transparency, and the art of indie hacking.
Discover how the vibrant startup community in Barcelona, bolstered by events like Startup Grind, fosters innovation and authentic conversations, providing valuable platforms for growth and reflection.
AI, however, couldn't fix Àlex not picking the right microphone for recording nor his mistaking multiverse for metaverse in the middle of the conversation, so there's that.
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Hello everybody, I'm Alex, ceo and founder of MarksFaced, and in this episode of Live on Marks, we bring you Tania Van Gastel, ceo and co-founder of TheMultiverseai. Themultiverseai is a cool company from Barcelona. It's very product-driven, and we contrast her background in Chinese corporates and the new reality of building this new company from the ground up, having to apply everything she learned doing marketing on a global scale at the previous company and now trying it with the new trends where everybody's so hyped up about AI, building community and building a very interesting personal branding. We discussed with Tania the importance of transparency in nowadays bootstrap companies, indie hacking and the tradition of building in public, and also the hurdles of SEO nowadays or marketing in such a cluttered market, and much more.
Speaker 1:We focus on not only the technology, but much more on the marketing, distribution side of things and the question of the day are you using AI in your project already? Is it embedded in the product? Is it you're using it to build it, or there are certain functionalities that use AI? Let us know in the comment section below and, without further ado, let's jump right into the answer. Let's go, tani. How are you doing Nice product placement there?
Speaker 2:Let me just do it again. I'm really good. I'm really good. It's been a long time since we've seen each other, I think since the last Startup Grind event you know the one with the one right after I went on the panel panel which you guys were so graciously to invite me to that must have been june.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it was like may we had the event, like june we had we had. Yeah, uh, that one was good, it's a feel. So it's good to have previous speakers that come as part of the audience. You know, and that's something that I pride myself into, that, because normally events are, you know, invites. You know, normally it's like big companies and c levels and whatnot and and they, they fuck off forever and they never remember your, your name or your event or something like that. I know people I'm like oh, they come for the talk, they leave right after the panel. They don't stay for the networking. At least in StartBrand for 10 years we've always had everybody come before the chat, stay for after the panel for the entire networking. A couple exceptions here and there, but usually people are very generous and they remember, and we've had at least 2,000 people or more I mean 30, 40 speakers, thomas ads in these. Some of them are regular attendees. That's a great KPI for me. So thank you for doing that.
Speaker 2:No, of course, I honestly love going to the Startup Grind events, because I think in Barcelona it's kind of rare to be able to gather that kind of community in such a great space as well. Like, there are some other startup events as well going on, but I think really, startup grind is, you know, very unique in a way that it really does gather people are just super passionate, and I think a lot of the events that I've been to, where you know you always do the introduction and I think you kind of like set the stage for people to be very direct in how they answer you, and that's really nice because it makes the people feel very comfortable. Sometimes it feels like a very intimate event even. I remember when I did the panel and it was with Ray, and so we were very on the topic of bootstrap, because both of our businesses, including yours, are all bootstrapped, and so it was really this time for us to go like okay, let's get real and let's get dirty.
Speaker 2:What are we actually doing? How are we making this happen? Why is there this narrative of it's not possible and how are you breaking those odds? And I really, really enjoyed that because I think, as a business owner, you don't always have so much time to think about. Let's take a step back. What have we actually done and how can we move that forward? But at events like this, I actually almost see it as a kind of like brainstorming, where you know, sometimes the audience asks very smart, very good questions and it really kind of forces you to take a step back and be like, actually that's a really good point, maybe we can do that and and maybe we can think twice about that. So I loved it and I will happily go to any other startup grind event.
Speaker 1:I particularly enjoyed that event. We did something very special because we normally invite people who have got at least 10 million in annual revenue and 100 people in headcount. I made an exception in that event. I do an exception here and there, but I wanted to see whether we could get more intimate conversation and that happened, but I don't know if it was because the size of the companies was smaller or because you fall to a bootstrap, right. Let me rephrase this. Let me rephrase this I usually have got very good conversations with people and I say, oh, you have to be a very good speaker for startup brand.
Speaker 1:They come on stage and they enclose themselves, they just like they don't talk, they don't share monosyllabic answers, maybe because they're nervous, maybe because they cannot share right, but you nervous, maybe because they cannot share right, but you know right, one-to-one, super, super insightful. They go in front of an audience and it's like man, you know pretty bland stuff, and where did we? We got really naked. Like we said, oh look, no, I'm actually not making revenue, or I lost a client last week because of that, or I struggle with this. I've got my mental issues and uh, it was really good. We received the best feedback about that event. So, yeah, yeah, company science or bootstrap. What do you think?
Speaker 2:let's get this started I think it's a bit of both, I mean. So I've worked in corporate I I used to work at oneplus, which is a really big smartphone company android smartphones and so I was in the marketing department, specifically in public relations. So a lot of my job was hey, our CEO, our team lead, our C-level is going out to talk in front of these journalists and what are they going to say? We cannot just let them loose, right? That's not a thing. They need to be briefed on what talking points you can actually share with an audience. How are you going to, like, media train somebody? How are you actually going to let them say things that they are able to say, that they don't expose the organization in some way? You know to like further a narrative about a company.
Speaker 2:And so I think, when you're a really big organization, you should do that. You have to do that because you can't just let everybody you know go out like Elon Musk and like just say whatever comes to his mind. And I think that makes a lot of sense for big organizations because they have a certain kind of responsibility to people who are buying their products or to people who are working with them. And so I think, unless you really have like a super, you know, independent founder or CEO, which in larger organizations is so difficult to maintain. It's really hard for people to just go out there and kind of like share exactly what they want to say. And so in bootstrap, you know, a big thing about bootstrap that I always vouch for is that we have absolute freedom over a lot of our decisions. We don't have investors when it comes to talking about VC world, we don't have to spend time managing those relationships and stuff, and so it makes it a lot easier in that regard. So I think company size for sure can really inhibit a lot of free talking that we like to do at events like that, but also because you know your competition is listening right, you achieve a certain size and everybody's like, ah, how can we gatekeep more information from the competitor?
Speaker 2:When we're bootstrap, I think we have probably had a lot of learnings from the community. Like I'm super embedded in the bootstrap community on Twitter. I mean a lot of Slack channels, discords. It's amazing, it's it's such a great rush to feel like you know, you're sharing your MRR, you're building in public, you're talking about. These are the things that really worked for me and it feels like you're in it together, but then I think you get to a certain size and people stop talking about it because they're like shit, if I can do it and I tell them how to do it, then maybe they're going to do it too and they'll become my competitor, right? So I think it's a weird little loop that we're in, where it's both company size and it makes it really hard for people to be very straightforward. Do you feel the same way with agency?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for instance, when you mentioned that we're able to disclose more information, and I find this our revenue is public. Every year, we publish it and some people are like why do you do that? Some competitors we have an advantage. What competitors? We're an agency. We've got thousands of competitors.
Speaker 1:I'm not having to worry about one competitor that they will be like oh, they have significantly less revenue. Therefore, I can raise more from my investors because I know I'm number one in the market. In this case, we're just a drop in the ocean. Therefore, it makes little to no difference whether we publish this or not. On the contrary, it makes little to no difference whether we publish this or not. On the contrary, it's going to help me. My reasoning is if I publish that my revenue is 2.5 million this year, or projected to hit almost 3 this year, I will not be hit by companies that might inquire to buy me if my revenue is not enough. So put it another way like if I'm private about that, a lot of companies will come. Oh, so let's have a conversation about M&A, for instance, and once you get to the specifics, they find out that your revenue is below 10 million. Then they'll be like oh, we're not interested and you're wasting your time. In this case, I'm just keeping it ahead, also because I'm not interested in M&A or selling, but you know, I'm just saving them and myself time. Just an example.
Speaker 1:There are probably more pros than cons, but at least this one is where I think it's particularly helpful to have open data.
Speaker 1:One thing that is not so good about that and that's going to be another cocktail is a lot of people building in public Not only bootstrap businesses, but all the businesses that they have raised funds and they're open about their revenue and KPIs and metrics and whatnot. They only do it on the way up Because it's cool to show oh yeah, we're drawing 40% year over year, we have this KPIs like here, it's always up to the right, we've accomplished these new goals and whatnot. However, it is very rare that they do these on the way down or when they hit a plateau. I'm saying this because the other day I saw the guys from Buffer. I think the CEO of Buffer published a tweet about that and said like look, the metrics for this year are like this we're still super profitable, we still have a ton of money in the bank, but we get a full show we're not growing and I said promise to you, because nobody does that Once you stop growing, you stop sharing. How do you feel about that? You're still on the way up.
Speaker 2:As far as you know, alex, because I don't know. I know we're fine, we're doing well. I think it's a really valid point to make because, because I think whenever you're being in public, you're always thinking about the narrative. You're always thinking about like okay, what is the next thing? You know that is like happening, that I'm gonna make a linkedin post about a twitter post or whatever. Because I think there's this thing where people, unless they can frame it as a learning, as a lesson.
Speaker 2:I learned from this lesson because I failed, but now I fixed it. I know the solution people don't share, because then they're in that thing. Right, I think the lesson is always so good to share, but I think it's only afterwards. I think that's a solution and I think my take on this honestly is I think, through a lot of trial and error, I have shared a lot more failures and challenges, because I know that makes me the most honest and the most trustworthy. By extension, and I think that is something that I've only really started to value in other people, as I really started to pay attention to these lessons. Because here's the thing, right, if you've never struggled, then what do I have to learn from you? If it was all easy, right. Where's your story about yourself? Where is? How do you see yourself? Are you always the winner? Are you always this, are you always that?
Speaker 2:And I think, after you know being very like, much more embedded in this, in this ecosystem, I learned that you can learn so much more from failure than from from success, and I I genuinely like, I'm very, very serious about that because I think you know a lot of people. They see somebody who is always like on the up, always. All of that. That's a social media narrative. That's a social media narrative designed to gaslight you, and that's okay. That's not a bad thing. I think that's like how a lot of people perceive that as well.
Speaker 2:But I think the true honesty, if you're able to be very clear about you know what was hard, what was challenging, what was difficult and what have you learned from that that is so interesting, because that tells me that you were smart, because you had a problem that you needed to solve and you solved it Right. So I think that's a it's a much more interesting, a much more interesting thing to learn about. And generally, the people who have you know I don't know if, with this, the people who've had the most success have failed the most. And I say that because that means that for you, trying is a habit. It's not something you did once you lost and you didn't persist. You persisted in your failure. I generally believe that people who persist in this and keep trying, at some point it will work out great. It might not be right away, but if you have a habit of not giving up and working really hard to achieve your goals, it will happen. It just will, because that's a time thing, that's a when, not if yeah, it's more like about.
Speaker 1:it's about trying. You say, right, people who are successful are people who drive a lot. As an analogy, for instance, I stopped using GPS when I drive because I realized I couldn't remember the way to places. I was going on autopilot and I was not trying to flex my muscles, mental muscles, like oh, what do I have to do here, why am I heading north when I should be driving east and whatnot? And I realized that I was using it even to drive to places. I knew where to go and how to go, how to get there right.
Speaker 1:And so you become lazy, you outsource that part of the brain and therefore, if you do that, you start doing that with other parts of your life and so you lose capacity. And so for me, that's an analogy, also for business. If you go up the beaten path, then you will exercise other parts of your brain, like how to solve this puzzle, how to overcome an economic downturn, how to fire an employee, how to solve the conflict between partners and whatnot, how to fire an employee, how to solve conflict between partners and whatnot. But if you only do the you know the safe way, chances are you're not going to learn much and in favor of wins. That's okay, but when the headwinds come, you will be struggling a lot or you will not be able to solve even the most basic puzzle. So let's just give some context to the others. We still haven't talked about what you do, your company. So people might be guessing hey, what is this? Because, especially with people listening to the audio version, they haven't seen the coffee mug with a sticker on it.
Speaker 2:Hey, so I'm the co-founder of the Multiverse AI. What we do is we create AI headshots, and so why is this important? Essentially, when you're a business owner whether you're doing agency or you're selling something else maybe you have a sales team, a marketing team. You're probably going to have a landing page or a pitch deck and you probably want to show your team on it, and so those photos are really important because they are a first indication of how you can build trust right. Whether it's your Mars space, you have a team of developers, or you are selling car components and you have a sales team, you want your sales team to look trustworthy, because that's a direct conversion point. And so if you have a team that is remote, like, potentially, mars space does whether that is five people, 50 people or 500 people you have a huge problem. How are you going to get those photos? You can go and send out photographers to each one of those people. It's very expensive, it's very annoying and also it's going to be very difficult to get a cohesive photo right. So you want the same background, you want the same kind of lighting. It's not really feasible to get that through any other means, and so what you need is you need an AI headshot generator. You need to go to themultiverseai and you need to upload 12 photos of yourself, and then we will give you a hundred AI headshots.
Speaker 2:You pick the one that you like. You apply your background to it. You apply the black t-shirt that maybe you want Mars-based staff to wear in their photo. You put the logo in the back. You're done. You apply the black t-shirt that maybe you want Mars-based staff to wear in their photo. You put the logo in the back. You're done. You've created a perfect landing page for your 550 or 500 staff. They all have great background the exact same background, if you want. They all have the same kind of outfit and they all have a really great professional photo of themselves that looks like it was taken in the same place, but actually it wasn't.
Speaker 1:I was laughing because this was exactly a pain point that we experienced a few years ago. For the first five years, most of our people were in Barcelona and so we, whenever we met, it was, like you know, every Wednesday we met in a working space and then eventually we started enlarging the team and we had some people outside Barcelona, but we would get together four times a year, and we still do. We call it the Martian days, but for whatever reason, those days like we were not in a room with a white wall or we didn't have a photographer, right. So then we had the first 10 people in the company had perfect picture of the same day, same lighting, same camera, whatnot and then we had two or three that looked like a patch we did at home.
Speaker 1:It didn't work out and so it was always a problem with the previous website. That's why, on this website, instead of going to AI which we didn't think that was an option we didn't know we said like fuck it, we had seen other companies, staff, more casual pictures of them doing their stuff. Right, we've got a guy doing that weightlifting, another guy just hiking in the mountains and you know, our lady, our head of people, is spinning in a park and stuff like that. You know, maybe it's less, less professional, but it's more humane, like I don't know. It's a balance. It depends on what you want, but it's a real pain point for remote companies. I give you that. I give you that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We know, because we've tested a lot of different pain points in this one. It's because this is the one that people are like, yeah, that it sucks.
Speaker 1:It's this one I'm not like for corporates that they have like larger teams and they require more like structure and they want they want to be corporate like, oh you know, with the king t-shirt.
Speaker 2:Actually it's a lot of startups, because we also do casual photos. It's not necessarily like a suit and tie Again, it can be a t-shirt, can be whatever background you want. The problem is that a lot of people send in photos of themselves that are terrible and are not really presentable, and so it does persist. I will say there are also, you know, I would say personally, for me, the biggest problem is that I hate taking photographs. I hate posing specifically for a photo. I kind of freeze up and I do a very awkward I've been told, very awkward laugh, and so I find it very difficult to pose for a professional photo where I don't look like I. It just looks very strange. I don't prefer it.
Speaker 2:Also, anybody, I think, who's ever gotten professional photos taken? If you're, you know you need it for your LinkedIn or your keynote speaker or whatever. It's a terrible process. It'll probably cost you $400. You'll need a full day. You'll get the photos in like two months. After editing, you need to get professional hair and makeup done.
Speaker 2:If you're a woman, it's a nightmare process, and so for me, I personally love solving this problem because I really think it's something where you know, as you get more in the world of social media and even things like LinkedIn, it becomes a very important thing, the way that you represent yourself online or offline, and so that first impression matters so much, whether you're a job seeker, whatever you are, it's really important. It can really help you a lot, because we've all had that first impression when we go to a LinkedIn profile and we think, oh shit, this person looks so legit. And it's a very short, instinctive thing that we think right, and it's not even necessarily based on the copy or whatever. A lot of the time it's based on that photograph, which is such a primitive lizard brain instinct thing of us, but it does occur, and so being able to have full control over that perception, I think, is something that's super valuable that we are able to give all of our customers. Are you?
Speaker 1:finding, like the, the minute you mentioned the, uh you, you know the the difficulty of finding that good photo. Like you don't like posing. There's like the issue with women having to wear makeup or having to, you know, dress a certain way, or finding the good lighting conditions, and whatnot. Are you finding people who reject the idea of? Like, oh, that doesn't look exactly like me because it's AI? Because I'll tell you something like most people have got a very outdated picture on their website and they don't look like themselves nowadays. So it's just people taking a shit on AI. But like, for instance, I had a picture of me with 10 kilos more, no beard, and I really I think I would look closer to my real self today with an AI version of a picture from two days ago than a picture taken 10 years ago, right? So I don't know, maybe people are just, you know, beating on AI just because it's AI, it's so bad. Do you find that?
Speaker 2:100%. So it happens. So much, alex, it's such a good point. Here's the thing we already introduced self-bias when people upload their photos, because part of our process is that we can't guess what you look like. Our AI model needs to train based on the 12 photos that you input. Guess what kind of photos that people are putting up themselves.
Speaker 1:Super different right or the Tinder pictures.
Speaker 2:So very different, like it's the photos that you think you look best, and so sometimes it's like you were filtered. Sometimes it's like only wedding photos, sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that, and your results look like your input photos. This is the whole base proposition, right, and so people seem to have a very strange idea of what they look like, in some cases where it's like I still found good photos, but these are weird and we show you, tell them, like it's one of your input photos, like one with beer, the other one with sunglasses, the other one like skiing and stuff like that right yeah, it's part of it's.
Speaker 2:Actually, this is one of our first big iterations, because we've done a lot, we've shipped a lot of updates to our product, and one of the key things that we realize is that we really need to guide people through what is a good input photo. How can we help you to upload the exact photos that you need in order to get the best results? And that's a very strong UX thing that you need to think about, because you need to educate your users in a short amount of time and really alleviate that problem, because they don't know it's an issue and you don't have any time to educate them about how AI works. So, yeah, it's a very good point and it's. Yeah, it's interesting how people's interesting, how people will view photos of themselves, whether they are real or are AI, because we've all seen bad photographs of ourselves, where we're like I don't relate to that person, but it is you, so it's very interesting bootstrapping this.
Speaker 1:We briefly covered the topic of bootstrapping earlier in the conversation, but more specifically to your company, when did you realize? Because when you started, ai was already a thing and you probably were leveraging the fact that you're sending these photos to a model and I don't know if you were using third-party libraries or you're using your own models and whatnot. How did you figure out the economics? I can bootstrap this versus I need to raise some funds to train models and whatnot.
Speaker 2:The big key thing here is that we have a super clear, super clear value proposition. You give us money, we give you photos, and so, in that sense, it actually works very it's very clear for the user what they get out of it. We're not a huge platform. We're not a full photo studio for everything that you can imagine. We are AI photography for portraits Super, super, super specific, and that, from a marketing point of view, is much easier to market than anything else. Right? You're talking about the economics of our product specifically.
Speaker 2:We are a one-time service. It costs $29 now, but we actually started from it costing $9 back when we launched last year in April, and we didn't launch like a business, like straight away. We were hoping that, you know, hopefully by end of that year we would have a couple of sales or something like that. But very quickly, you know, after seeding the product with a couple of websites and posting it to Reddit relentlessly, we realized that actually we have a really strong product on our hand because it is super clear, it is really good margins as well, and so it really was something where we as a super small team of like only three people, were able to scale this, which was very surprising, I think, to all of us and, I think, still very surprising to most people who we talked to about this, because people don't understand how many users exist out in the world and you don't understand that unless you get your first hundred or thousand customers that are names that you don't have never, ever heard of. But I still, to this day, get a notification on a Discord channel for every purchase that is made, and so that channel is muted now, but I was following very, very closely and every name you see, you're like I don't know this person, who are they? But they exist out there. People want your product.
Speaker 2:It's really a key of two big things. How will people who need your product because there is a pain point this is not a vitamin, this is a painkiller how can businesses actually get photographs for their staff, for their teams, for themselves as a job seeker, as somebody on LinkedIn or whatever? How can they get that photograph? And then, secondly, how can they find you? So you have to go through the process of if I'm trying to find this kind of service, where am I going to start looking? And then you put your product there wherever they are right, because this is really something where, if you're able to be found and I think a lot of modern day marketing really is about you know that there are users.
Speaker 2:If you have some degree of product market fit now, how will they find you? What are you doing to be found? And we did a lot of things to be found, and that is something that you know. Really, for the first couple of months was super, super strong, still continues to be, because we are still not doing any paid advertising. I'm not of the belief that this actually works very well for a product like ours. And so where are we? Where are we putting ourselves?
Speaker 1:You mentioned Reddit, which is a very good starting point to start talking about growth, right? So most bootstrap businesses are product product-led growth. Basically, they start with with a kind of like a growth campaign a lot of content, inbound marketing and reddit and product hunt seem to be the places to go to right. But the fact that you mentioned this thing about oh, I don't know his name, so I know you know you launch your product the first day. It's all your relatives, your uni friends, your you know industry friends, ex-workers and stuff like that. Fine, but they are a finite number of persons in this set. But eventually you're like who the fuck is this person? Right? I guess that also happens when you launch on Reddit which is like, wow, we got 5,000 downloads today. The next day, zero. Why? Because there are other products out there right.
Speaker 1:So how do you deal with the pressure of? It went really well on day one, day two no signups or no payments. I'm struggling with this because I launched my website today and I know I'm getting like a spike of subscribers today and I know tomorrow I'll have like two instead of hundreds.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that question. Let me tell you how to market your website. All humble, very humble.
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Let's do it let's do it, any consultation. So I think people very easily discredit the, the brainstorm, and so here's what I mean with that. There's two big things that we really did that, uh, helped in an insane amount, and the first of that was to start super seriously on SEO, because anybody worth their salt. If they have a problem, they will Google it. If you're not Googling the problems that you have, you probably don't want them as a consumer, because that means maybe for Mars. Basically, they cannot communicate the kind of thing that they want. So hopefully your clients will be Googling things. Who are your clients? Right? So be very, very specific For multiverse. For who is it important that they look good on a photograph? Who is having these problems? Here are our SEO articles how to look great as a female real estate agent.
Speaker 2:Real estate agents care a lot about their professional representation because they are basically freelancers slash entrepreneurs who have to care a lot about the way that they are represented to their clientele because it's a very personal relationship, specifically in the US, and so this is a very specific target audience, and it's a target audience that we have a lot of success with, because we've created a lot of content around this specific target audience. Second, again how do I create a landing page for my team? How do I create a team gallery? These are all kind of like topics where, if you really think about, I'm a business owner or I need a professional photo what am I Googling? Right, it's not just how do I get an AI headshot. That's not the only thing. There are so many different ways that there are people who need your product and they will go and Google very specific things. It's your job to think about that. You can go and talk to GPT about this. You can ask for a hundred different potential target audiences and you're going to go through that list and you're going to decide that maybe five or 10 of these are worth building each like five or 10 articles around, and then you can go and build that. And that's a very specific thing. And I'm going to tell you it's going to take about four to six months for any SEO traffic to even go through there. But once that starts coming in, once people are actually reading your content and engaging with the content, you're going to see that there's a huge difference in the target audiences that are actually converting into a click-through. And so when I open up my Google Analytics backend, I can see very clearly who are actually the people who care enough, where my hypothesis was correct that they care so much that they'll actually buy something like this.
Speaker 2:The second thing is to be very creative when you have very low budgets. We are very creative when it comes to having absolutely no money to spend on marketing, and so you know, part of that is going out to speaking events and conferences and putting stickers on your mug, on your purse, on your whatever. I was fortunate enough to do a speaking event at the W last week and that was great because we were able to connect with so many people who actually needed something like this. But I think people underestimate very easily the power of the internet, right? I think of the internet as virtual real estate. What positions are being occupied in Google search listings? If I now Google software company Barcelona, will Mars Base come up first? Who will come up first? Is there a list of the top five top 10? If that doesn't exist, can I go and create that top five or top 10? Will other software companies come to me and ask to be put on that top five, top 10? Because that means that I control all of the listings and all of who is being found and who is not being found, and you can charge for those listings as well, and so I think there's a billion things to be done in that world. Here's another kind of tip.
Speaker 2:One of the most, I think, fun things that we've done for SEO is I've created a LinkedIn virtual influencer. His name is Alan. This is not actually a real person. This is me posting under a different profile, and the reason that you want to do that is because websites like LinkedIn, like Medium, they have very high domain authority. Domain authority is how Google determines if a website is great or if a website is shit, and so LinkedIn has built an amazing domain authority.
Speaker 2:The LinkedIn virtual influencer that I use is constantly posting Every week. He's posting about AI headshots, about real estate photography, about photography for business owners, about different target audiences that I won't share, because my competitors are listening to this. Competitors are listening to this, but a lot of different things he's posting about, and he's posting about this specifically, because you go and look at a LinkedIn article and you see this guy and you think this is not created by AI. This is created by a real person. It is.
Speaker 2:It's created by me, though, and it's not on my profile, because all of my audience is going to think this girl is obsessed with real estate and other stuff. Why is she doing this? And so it's a great way to separate that out and still build a great audience and be very high ROI in the way that you're spending your time. So for Mars Base virtual influencer, thinking about your hundred different target audiences, be as niche as you can. Get really really specific, weirdly specific. If you think that it's weird enough, then go and get that, because the more specific that you are, the more that your target audience thinks oh my God, they totally understand me. I am totally looking to build an AI project that combines Ruby on Rails with Python, with this for a project management software. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:These answers are priceless. Thank you for the free consultation. You're paying me with your time, so there's so many great points here. My memory is that of a goldfish, so I'm trying my best to remember everything you said. But earlier in the answer you mentioned that you or you, you assumed that you nailed the ideal customer profile right off the bat, or that's what transpired to me. Right, you said like yeah, we went after this and we marketed for them. We created these specific listicles, articles or how to look great if you're a real estate agent and whatnot, right? I said that's fucking brilliant. But most startups, they don't know who the ideal customer is. They still they haven't figured out the product because they haven't found the real or the definitive customer, right. So in your case, how did you know that was and were you exactly like spot on on the first product iteration? Or was it because you know, your years in corporate marketing helped you to maybe do a more thought up profiling of your icd and then say like I'm going to market for them right off the bat?
Speaker 2:I failed so much, Alex. I really failed so much when it comes to finding the right target audience.
Speaker 1:Got feeling, or was it like I'll?
Speaker 2:tell you exactly why. This is how I data right, because I think most marketing that is being done is honestly being done wrong, because you're not able to distinguish between branding and marketing, and so branding is this very long-term thing, for example and I mean it's not just branding but, like different facets of marketing, are not data-based it's very difficult for you to understand if something's working or not, and if it's very difficult for you to understand if something's working or not, and if it's very difficult for you to understand that it doesn't work for Bootstrap. Bootstrap is about surviving, it's about making money, it's about building a business, and so I don't engage in the part of marketing. That is Sorry. I try to minimize my time on the marketing that is not data-led, that does not result in conversions that I cannot measure. So this is what happens I build out five to 10 different target audiences and I build some content around some of it, and I make a hypothesis that at least one or two of them will work.
Speaker 2:It's trial and error, it's spaghetti method, because the point is you almost never have enough information to know exactly if you're right or not, and so actually, a lot of the time, it's faster to go out and execute, because by the time that you've gathered enough information to know, with 100% interval or 95% interval, that you are correct, you're too late. So I really suggest, like, go out and execute on the thing. You will get the data exactly about whether or not it will work in your Google Analytics backend. I built a team, 10 landing pages or 10 articles for different target audiences. My Google Analytics will tell me which one resulted in a click on the website, in a click on this specific button, in a click on another specific button. By the way, posthog is another amazing analytics platform that I really recommend. That is free, also, just like Google Analytics.
Speaker 2:But no, alex, I've been completely wrong about so many target audiences and I think I may still be wrong about the target audiences that I have right now, because do I think that you know the 30K US revenue that we're at right now is like the upper limit? No, I don't. I'm sure that there's a lot of hidden target audiences that I don't know about, that are just in my periphery, but you know, the biggest challenge in bootstrap is not your strategy, it's time. How can I split myself up in 10 different people and go and reach those target audiences, and so I think, yeah, it's very helpful to have specific data. The only way that you will get specific data and that you can be data-driven is if you go out and execute and if you get the data that it actually works, because nobody can tell you. That's the problem, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:How long did it take to get your first customer, first paid customer?
Speaker 2:That was through Reddit, and the way that we did it through Reddit was I searched for remote. I think it was back then. We weren't B2B yet. We only started being B2B in December and I think back then I searched for a neat professional photo look bad, something like that. Reddit, one of the more popular Reddit posts and then we commented oh, we built this thing, it's called the multiverse, check it out and people actually bought it. It was very interesting.
Speaker 2:The thing with Reddit is you never know how many people, because Reddit doesn't share that. You never know how many people are looking at a specific post. You only know how many people comment on it or upvote, and most people on Reddit are lurkers by far. It's like, I think, the stats. I'm one. I am one, exactly Me too, and you know, in a lot of subreddits I'm not vocal at all.
Speaker 2:I'm there to get information, not share it, and so I think you know people think of the internet as this like vast place. It's not. The internet is a village. You can communicate with anybody and you can see everything in a lot of forums, and I can tell you the amount of you know posts. I can tell you exactly which posts will rise to the top when you Google AI headshot Reddit, because I've commented on every single one of those multiple times, so it's one of those things where it's not a black box. There are SEO platforms like Ahrefs, which I highly recommend, where you can track all of that, and I very specifically track all the rankings that the Multiverse AI is on for a lot of different keywords, and that's very, very important. It's really our main measure of success and main measure of revenue.
Speaker 1:One question I didn't get to ask you on the Startup Plan panel and then it's been kind of like bugging me here for months and I'm like next time I'm going to ask this, and especially now, because we're drilling down on content marketing, right and branding and SEO and authority Yet your company's called the Multiverse AI. Why not avatars or great photos or something like? Something that has got the keywords embedded, yeah, in the domain of your website? Yeah, multiverse, which is something that you know. It was revoked by facebook back in the day. Not saying like multiverse is not a great name, but the association is not direct. Like my brain doesn't lead this to. I'm not. I'm saying the name of your company and there's like, oh, no, it's professional AI and it's like, okay, okay, okay, okay. It's like I don't make the connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Is is because we were we were dumb I'm just gonna go out and say it like we started as wanting to create not just professional photos, but also photos where you could put yourself as a star wars figure, as a marvel figure, and you really wanted to tap into this idea of, like you can see yourself in a multiverse parallel to yours, right? And you were like, oh, this is a great idea, let's you know, see if it's available. The multiverse dot ai, not even the multiverse ai, something else, the multiverse dot ai be extra confusing. I mean, I'm telling you straight there's nothing. There's nothing extra, there's no hidden meaning for this.
Speaker 2:We've thought about changing a name, but because we are also so, because we've also spent so much, you know, time on seo, because that is one of our main strategies, that domain name is actually super valuable, right? So our domain authority is really high. We're like like 50 plus, which is great for a website that has only been in existence for a year and a half and we've exchanged a lot of backlinks. It's really important to us that that domain stays. I also think there's another thing at play here, which is when we started, we decided that we did not want to spend too much time thinking about the name, because, as someone who has thought before about starting a company or has really in the past only been working in corporate, I think it's very easy to get bogged down by details and so no amount of you know extra kind of like thinking about this website name brand.
Speaker 2:All of that was really about shit. Should we spend two more weeks thinking about names, coming up with different ideas, when, to be honest, you already don't know if you're going to make a pivot or not? Right, so you could use something super bland? For us, it didn't work out because we didn't go with the idea of living in a multiverse, except a multiverse where you're more professional and you can take good photos of yourself. But no, there's no SEO, there's no hidden domain thing here at all. Yeah, it's something that we've kind of stuck by, and I'm actually very happy that we did as well, because I'm not opposed to this name and I think, honestly, the whole overthinking about name takes a lot of time away also from the business itself. At some point of the branding perspective sense, though, yeah, 100 and that's what?
Speaker 1:uh, maybe one thing about bootstrap businesses because we're not running short on time, we tend to do more or do to waste more time on mental wonkery like that, because it's like, okay, yeah, we, we don't have a vc pressing us to the leaves and pushing us to waste more time on mental wonkery like that, because it's like, okay, yeah, we don't have a VC pressing us to the knees or pushing us to spend more money and time is not running out. We don't have a countdown timer on the top of our head saying like, oh, in 12 months you're going to die. So we're like, yeah, fine, whatever, we got recurring MRR and we can spend more weeks on the logo or the website, whatever. No, my general advice is always launch and you'll figure out. I built my website in the space of a week. It's the third version of my website.
Speaker 1:We've been together for three years, right, but I wanted to give it a twist. Not only like me, my blog now it's something else. But, as I said yesterday, two days before, I was like I could launch now, but there are so many bugs and I don't have the name and I'm not sure about whether to do like a free versus paid subscription, and yesterday I was like I don't figure out any of these. Fuck it, I'm shipping it. It's like a change of the main on the web and today some people are writing oh there's this bug here, this bug there. I don't understand this. Who's your ideal customer? Like, I don't know, I'm going to figure it out, I don't need it.
Speaker 1:This is a side hustle, you know, but to your point, we oftentimes spend too much time on this, especially for startups, and they're like dude, you just worth the funding.
Speaker 1:You cannot spend a single minute thinking about the name. Of course, the longer you go with the wrong name, it's going to be a hindrance at the end, right, and the longer you take to do a rebranding, if the brand is not spot on, it's going to hurt you. But we'll cross the river. When we get to the river and we're not yet at the river, we don't even see the fucking river yet. We don't even know where we are or if there's a river, right. So in this regard, 100 spot on, and it's it's strange that you have this realization. Coming from corporate, we usually have all the time in the world to do all the mental one career and involve 12 people in the meetings to decide on the branding and postpone these for three months. So like oh, you know we, you know we haven't reached consensus. We need to sign off a wealthy for people. We'll figure out next year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the alignment thing within corporate is such a big issue. You know a lot of people like to ask me don't you think AI is going to take over? Blah, blah, blah. And then I try to ask them like, do you think that companies are only about executing work? I can guarantee you that they are not.
Speaker 2:You think about all the dynamics that are at play. You think about really the question why isn't everybody doing this? Why isn't everybody on the latest generation of technology? Why isn't everybody using Google Sheets? A lot of people are still sending PowerPoints to each other. What is that about? Right? That's a very real thing, right?
Speaker 2:Like it's really interesting to answer that question because you realize two things, which is, first of all, management, honestly, is a very challenging thing to do. You don't just tell somebody what to do and then they do it. That's not how it works. You need leadership, you need teamwork, you need all of those things to actually make something happen, and in large companies, in large organizations, that is an entirely different scale of being. Second of all, people who are very smart in large organizations are really about advancing themselves and getting promoted in that environment and, of course, doing the work of the company but doing the work of the company. In between, having 60 meetings that week and talking to everybody, getting alignment, getting stakeholders buy-in, doing the prep before a meeting to convince a person it's very challenging to get something done.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing that is different, though I worked in a Chinese company in China where I worked 996 hours, and 996 is the idea that you work 9 am till 9 pm six days a week, and so you might think that's a bit crazy. I didn't do 996. I did like 9 am to 10am to 10 or 11pm most days and not on the weekend, and so it wasn't a chill environment where there were no deadlines. It was a super intensity, high pressure environment where you had to move fast, really, really fast. Most people in this environment, by the way, are also under 30, definitely under 35.
Speaker 2:I think there were very little people who were over the age of 35 in the companies that I've worked at, and so I think it's an amazing environment to really learn a lot, soak up a lot of information, because they will give you an insane amount of responsibilities to push you to learn how to manage those, and you do, but it's very, very challenging at first because your learning curve is very steep, especially in your first couple of months, and so it's really something where it's yeah, it's extremely challenging, but you grow through it, and so I think that is something that in Asia they do amazingly well. You learn a lot, you're really challenged to perform. You learn a lot. You're really challenged to perform. I think in Europe a lot of the time it depends we're generalizing at this point but in Europe a lot of the time you only get more responsibility with seniority instead of with performance, and so that's a really big challenge, kind of in terms of like, how organizations see different things, and I will say Chinese organizations does not generally work.
Speaker 1:Especially a Chinese, chinese tech organization does not generally work like the corporate that we are used to I don't want to come across as somebody who takes a sheet on corporates every time I speak, because I'm ex-lawyer and I know I always blame them and I know I always say that's where I learn how to do things, but especially how not to do things. But there's something that we undervalue a lot, which is the fact that you know, even if they are, you know they are not meritocratic, they're slow, they're sluggish, they're, you know, full of politics everywhere and whatnot. They have something that is especially useful, which is they set you up with very big challenges and projects really early on in your career, which you don't. I mean, you take it for granted, but people who have never done corporate, they start a startup. They usually cannot scale a company. Why? Because they don't know politics. They don't know how to scale a ship. They don't know how to manage big budgets. They don't know legal implications. They don't know how to scale a ship. They don't know how to manage big budgets. They don't know legal implications. They don't know how to manage meetings with 12 stakeholders. They don't know how to listen to clients or talk to corporates right, and that's something that you learn when you're 21 years old at freaking Deloitte and then.
Speaker 1:So why most of our competitors have been wiped out by the pandemic? It is because they were extremely tech people, super talented, and most of them they didn't like business. They were just enjoying the favorable winds right, the tailwinds of the industry, and they had a good run for 10 years. And at a certain point they're like oh, I have to figure out. I didn't want to fire people, I didn't know how to manage crisis and stuff like that, or big projects. They got caught up in some kind of corporate bank and maybe they I don't know they were overly optimistic and they overhired. We come from very big consultancies and we learn some stuff there, and so that's why we're ready to take on bigger challenges at Mars Space. So, that being said, I think there's some credit to be given to the corporates and especially. I mean I'm not going to be in favor of these big crunches and like these stupid long shifts and working on the weekends, but yeah, being able to take on really big challenges right off the bat, that's very positive if you have the right mindset, so that's really cool.
Speaker 1:I wanted to switch gears here a little bit to going towards the end of the update set, because we're running short in time, but I want to talk about the future. A lot of you probably face a lot of competition. A lot of big companies can do what you guys do Like to them. You are a feature right Canva, freepic, adobe I'm thinking like off the top of my head. There are disks that they could maybe copy what you're doing. So what's in store for Metaverse AI in the future, for your company, in one, two, five years from now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think for Multiverse, honestly, the best case scenario would be that some of these bigger players start doing AI headshots and I'm not even joking about that and I think at some point and why I say that is because it would help us so much to educate consumers, first of all, and second of all, being in this problem, I know exactly how difficult it is, so I don't really have that many illusions that it would become a main key point for them to excel at this, but I think they could be amazing for education and so I do foresee that happening and I think, honestly, that would be really a huge like growth point for us to go to, I think, secondly. So, first of all, I would say you know the awareness of AIshots, the fact that it's a thing you and I know. You know because you're at the forefront of everything. I know because I'm building it, but really not that many people know that if I need remote headshots, where am I going to go, I think.
Speaker 2:Secondly, we're going to focus a lot more on B2B, and the reason for that is because it's a really, really challenging problem to solve.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of detail required and people need a lot of people need to share a lot of information and are very specific about the type of photos that they want, and so I see a lot of opportunity really in that area. Also, because B2B is really where we can get huge ticket sales right. That will change us from 30K to 300K a month. It's not going to happen with B2C only, so B2B is a huge focusing point on us. And then, thirdly, I think I don't want to say too much about this, but I think there are some really exciting developments in the works right now that you can kind of stay tuned for on our Instagram or our LinkedIn and stuff like that. But I think there's a lot more coming for AI in general, ai photography or videography in the next couple of years, and I think we're in the prime position to jump in on those trends and that's really where we want to be. So that's all I'll say.
Speaker 1:So that's all I'll say. I wanted to hear some parting words on the fact that I think we are entering an era where whenever we see something digital, we know it's going to be fake or edited. Look, with the Apple new iOS that comes with cleanup, every photo will be instantly edited With AI, like remove that person from the background, remove the clouds in the sky, make it brighter, things like that. So the benefit of the doubt will not exist anymore, not in video, nor in pictures, right, which I think is just a change of paradigm, but I don't know. It sort of stares the shit out of me as of paradigm, but I don't know. It sort of scares the shit out of me as a control freak that I don't know the answer to this question. And so what's your perspective on this issue specifically?
Speaker 2:My perspective in general and has been for the last 10 years as somebody who's super online is don't trust the internet. Don't trust the internet, just the internet because of the nigerian prince scam right.
Speaker 2:This is more than that, yes, no, I I think. I say that because I think it's a. It's honestly a generational problem. I think you know I understand what you're saying. I and I totally agree. It becomes harder and harder to trust.
Speaker 2:But I see that as a generational problem because I look at you know, photoshop has been around for so long for our parents versus how we are looking at email, how we are looking at social media, how we are really like observing things on on reels or whatever, we have a completely different approach to this, right, right, and I see that with people who are a lot younger than me too, they have a completely different approach than I do. My mom will send me a video on Instagram and she'll be like, how come this girl is so skinny, what is she doing? I'm like, clearly, this is the video edit, this has been video edited. She doesn't know that video edits exist, but I do know, and so I don't really believe anything that I see online. That value loses a lot. I think, if anything, it really doubles down the necessity of institutions. Right, we need good sources of information, and those good sources of information have never been social media or video or anything like that, and so it becomes all the more important that we really invest and look at good sources. What are your inputs? What are your sources of information? They should have never been Reddit or Quora or anything like that.
Speaker 2:So what is the next? You know what is the next good source of information that you are looking at and that you are paying attention to? And I think you know our generation is already paying a lot of attention to stuff like that. We now, you know, with, like recent politics, have paid a lot more attention to newspapers, to what they are doing, but I think you know our kids and generations after us are going to pay 10 times more attention to that, because they will have a lot of information about AI.
Speaker 2:And so I think, yeah, it's going to become a lot harder, but I think that was always going to happen, whether or not, whether or not we expected it or not, right, and still, now it's it's, it's the best it's ever going to be. In five years, in 10 years, it'll be worse. In 50 years, who knows? You know, we'll have fake holograms of things. So I think I think honestly, it's a generational thing and I think always as soon as you find yourself going to I just had my birthday two weeks ago, so I'm like, ah, I'm aging, all right, I think go there. You understand that this is not the thing that you can solve. This is something that will honestly become instinctive to people who are younger than you and that you need to pay more attention to as we get older.
Speaker 1:Perfect In 30 seconds. How can we help you, Personally or company-wide? Any announcement.
Speaker 2:I am looking for more tech communities in Barcelona or online to be a part of, and I am also looking for people who can mentor me when it comes to startups or marketing. Marketing startups would be amazing.
Speaker 1:There's a. One of the bad thing about bootstrap companies is that we usually don't have any association to belong to. Like startups. They get into incubators, accelerators, they get into a bc batch and therefore they have this sort of natural communities, whereas bootstrap companies were like, fuck it, we're gonna go on our own. And so, yeah, we, if we wanted, we could never leave the cave, we would never meet other people. That's not a long-term strategy, but there are very cool people doing amazing things in Barcelona. You know Duane from Everyday, there's Amir from Duist, there's the guy from Chessable, david. There's all these bootstrap companies. We know each other because we have made this conscious effort to meet, but we wouldn't have known about each other had we not tried right, because we can go on our own alone. So let's make it happen. Let's create these monthly, quarterly meetings of bootstrap companies. Bootstrap only, don't cheat.
Speaker 2:I think that would be amazing. Absolutely, we can do a dinner or something. I'll text you after.
Speaker 1:Exactly All right. Well, thank you very much, Sunny. It's been amazing. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 2:Thanks, alex, have a good one.