Propelling Productivity and Growth Over $10M ARR Using GenerativeAI

you want to geek out on geni this is the session for you please tell me welcome to the stage Adam Sandman from [Applause] inflectra thank very much thanks let me make sure I now how to use this cool yeah I mean my background is I was a coder like many people who start companies and it lets you build a product do cool things uh and now we're at this exciting Epoch the next I think yesterday someone mentioned the next age of innovation steam age Stone Age In

Innovation age we've had the you know the internet age uh crypto blockchain and now we're at the the AI age so in my talk I'm going to be talking about oh let me come back to that one I'm going to talk about these three things how we can use AI both from a sales and marketing standpoint which I know we've had some talks around already but also which is actually really cool is how you have to enable AI in your product if you're not doing it your competitors are and they're going to be doing it better and faster than you so you have to marry you know product and sales and marketing

innovate rapidly using the latest Technologies in both now as the previous speaker mentioned uh you know your leaders ought make your company so most of these slides here you know I'll be the one speaking up on stage and I'm the public speaker but two people in the audience uh T and Simon in pink and white uh raise your hands these are the guys who do all the hard work uh everything on the sales and marketing slides is really T doing all the work uh I just talk about what she does that's great Simon is our CTO he does all the amazing Cool Tech stuff hands handles

the a the Amazon web services the IM roles all the stuff that makes me want to pull my remaining hair out um and so it's all down to him so he's he's really good and my clock's not going down so I have infinite time I guess so uh okay a little bit back as Nathan mentioned I'm just going to go back a slide if that's yep uh as a company uh we did about 10 million AR last year 1213 this year depending how the year year flattens out or go goes forward um but we've always

been a tech first company I started the company from my bedroom as a programmer um it was a lifestyle company for the first few years before we pivoted to growth had young family really wanted to do something I could build on my own time at my own pace and that's why I bootstrapped the company uh but as we've grown our journey and you know building this this company uh and we pivoted to growth it's it's been great to have people work at the company who are as passionate as I am about what we're doing okay so let's go into section one how do we be used and how can you use

gen for sales and marketing uh to really improve the performance and efficiency of doing uh you go to market now we have looked internally at using some of these sales tools for like uh outbound email um where they record a video of you and do cool things to your voice so you sound like 10 people or 10 messages uh that didn't really work for us we've mostly been using an inbound strategy and a partner strategy and in my talk in Austin I talked about our go to market motions and how we've done that so I'm going to talk about really around the

inbound marketing use of of gen Ai and this is our you know AI enabled marketing team uh and really what we've been able to do is have a very small team of two or three people but using AI magnify it into something this size so what have we been doing well one of the things we found that really work for us is listicles and I don't if you know what listicles are um they are basically articles that contain lists of content and informative information so it might be like for us it would be the

top 10 project management tools for an agile software project the top 10 software testing tools for testing Salesforce applications so very discret targeted pages that Google has high search intent for and you want to get listed the thing we also found was super interesting if you look at this on the left is that if you search for software testing tool you get a white paper if you search for software testing tools plural Google Google wants to serve you a range of results so listicles have higher search intent so it's really

important to understand what's being searched and serve that content the problem is creating listicles is is hard work and a pain and makes people want to pull their hair out or quit we have an intern last year if I say the word listicle she'll cry because it's so annoying to create something that looks like this a listicle with top 10 uh requirements traceability tools that's one of our highest keywords if you search on it will come up to the top uh that's our product in the number one spot we've got a bunch of competitors in the other spots we use jni to write a

lot of that content we make it unique what's the pros and cons of you know Zebo cooba put them in there and then we can do link exchanges using our SEO company to magnify the impact so we'll find one of those companies and we'll do a link exchange with them on a different piece of content so you can use jna to write this unique content that is you know unique to your business but also somewhat boilerplate speed up the generation so that way we can generate hundreds of different unique pieces of content targeting different Search terms

that put us in that top section of Google because as we know if you look on that top that's not a search result that's a Google helpful content box we're listed there uh third down with there's Target process jir which someone mentioned and then spiral plan that's our product we're listed there because Google is scraping the listicles and now if you're not in that top box no one's even going to go below that to the next link which is us so increasingly Google is servicing AI content over organic search results the only way you're going to compete is to

use AI okay that's one use case we found very successful reduces the pain of listicles which are very painful the next one is rfis we sell a lot to midmarket and Enterprise because our products used in um what I would call regulated Industries like healthcare Life Sciences uh energy companies Telos um other big institutional companies where think of banks insurance companies if things break there's a quality problem people die millions of dollars or billions of dollars get wiped off

stock market values those are our clients so they tend to do a lot of uh formal procurement with these awful things called rfis their spreadsheets and if you ever had to do these we got a small sales team trying to fill out a lot of these rfis quickly is hard it takes a long time and you never know if you're going to win the deal but we're often in the top two or three each of these rfis so we have to do them now in many cases you asked to fill in content that you know very well what we've found it's a great use case for jna because you can say um why is our tool a really

good tool for testing the specific kind of project that's actually the result from uh open AI 4 and we can then use that and you can say even uh why is uh repas a good tool for testing Salesforce in 300 characters or less or 500 words or less which might be what's required so you can use it to generate really tailored content that you can cut and paste obviously there are now tools that will do this systemically you can pay for but even using free gemini or J gbt it's a great resource for answering these Enterprise procurements and

speeding up your response time again there are some tools out there now you can upload an RFP and it will actually populate all the cells for you automatically and there's some really good tool you know they're expensive so if you're doing a lot of rfps look into those tools as well but certainly for the midmarket or if you're a smaller company like us it's perfectly fine to use some of the open source or semi free or at least lowcost AI to do that manually okay next go number two products my favorite part I'm a product person at heart I do like sales and marketing because it's what pays the

bills but ultimately in my heart I like code I like messing about with stuff and a lot as a as a technical founder I still get to you know play around with code and they some much kick me out and say stop doing that Simon make make Sim pull hair's hair out well I'm on travel there apparently on travel there's a rule that he says to T don't let him do any coding when he's on the plane he's like anyway um so what have we done we've done three things I want to talk about I want to talk about an MVP we built uh that was really allowed us to get to Market quickly with AI how we've used it to create some white space in

our industry and then some upsell opportunities we see coming from that so first of all this is our uh what's my water chat gbt MVP so it's a really cool little plug-in and we took we coded it in a couple of weeks and it was originally built for a demo so you go in into our system you type in that thing in the red which is a user story basically what is this functionality and you can use the thing on the right now which is AI driven and it would generate all the stuff that the project manager the the scrum Master would would have to do my

hand takes what would take you know five six hours now takes five or six minutes so a really big productivity saver now at this point it was still kind of demo Weare I mean it's good but it didn't use a ton of insight it's using public llms and anyone who's technical would say ah it's kind of cute but we went to a conference everyone loved it everyone came by our booth uh we we did a we I did a webinar on all our top 10 new features in the new version this was the last thing I showed I showed a bunch of nine really important Mission critical

features that everyone wants but no one cared everyone saw this and went AI in the tool we could have it loved it and what we found is a lot of our customers of people like Banks insurance companies they are super risk adverse they can't actually use this not today but what they needed to be able to show their boss was we've picked a platform that though we can't use this today because our regulatory environment doesn't allow it we're going to at some point allow it and we've chosen a vendor that's already ahead of the curve on this it gave them confidence in us as a company that we

were ahead of the curve so that's really important even if you have to AI ahead of your customers they're going to need it whether they need it now or in the future now the other thing we found is by doing that because we had this AI functionality that we' built using our own uh app framework that was allowed us to know experiment quickly people started scraping this stuff and putting it into their own AI cont content so now we're listed amongst only a few vendors from AI content that found that we are one of the few tools that uses AI so having AI features quickly M moved us

into a different category in our industry instead of being one of a 100 tools that us testing we one of five or six tools that do AI testing so again being in the in the AI Market it's important to be an early mover even if the functionality is basic it's an MVP we have a very mature product but we're adding MVPs using Ai and one of the things that we did to allow that is building a Marketplace internally and plug-in framework so we can actually code in our application without disrupting and Breaking All the really important stuff so having it basically an experimentation framework is really

important and that takes technical work to make that safe okay that's what the result is we can now using our Marketplace we can now have multiple AI Tools in our Marketplace we've written some that you'll see here we've also got Partners now building these are our service SI partners and our Tech Partners they're building AI components themselves which we we can now put on our marketplace now right now they're all free but as you can see on the left hand side we've done some Tam analysis we start to cross sell those start to

both our own tools where we'll get you know full margin or we can start to cross sell or upsell some of our partners products you know we will can be you know keep 20 30% for running the marketplace past the rest through to the partners we can now build our entire Revenue by 7 million AR sorry 6 million AR can't see um combine between the two 4 million for our own apps 2 million for their apps so you can expand Revenue by bringing in your Partners through a marketplace where they can experiment as well as you experimenting okay third section got s

minutes what's going on in devops what's going on in technology now I've talked a lot about our product and our Marketing in the industry we're in for those who are in technology this is the devop cycle it's basically how we build things and AI is everywhere so what we're seeing is you and if your teams are not using AI they should be if your development teams are not using AI your your business analysts your project managers testers AI is everywhere in the software life cycle you know Microsoft's pushing out copile in all of its Visual Studio products all the idees have uh

coding features and if you're not writing code with with a help from a co-pilot you and you're falling behind but what's happening as as as as the AI is everywhere in the development side of things what's happening well the testing who's going to test all this stuff testing has always been uh the the the roadblock to getting functionality out there and people often say oh testing is just a hygiene Factor who cares about testing well the day that that website crashes that the person couldn't you know sign up for a trial on your website that's the day your compellor got another sale so when it comes to

customer experience it isn't just about looking good having the right color buttons you need something that's going to work be reliable it's going to scale testing is critical uh because you know your next competitor is one click away so testing is critical and therefore how do you make sure testing you know will keep up with the speed of development AI is going to need to be there in testing and it's going to change How We Do testing completely it's going to change How We Do development and we sell into the te the technical community ERS and developers use our products if we're not innovating with AI we'll be obsolete

next year so the question is if you've got a mature product like us how do you innovate how do you do this without destroying your business it's this the classic innovator's dilemma so we've had a bit of that so we are embracing AI as fast as we can knowing that the the the way that people develop test deploy software today is going to be different next year and the year after that so one of the things we did is we took advantage to try and understand that future we took advantage of some really good res resources that you probably have access to so we're an AWS customer

we spend about uh 45k a month with them that's our AWS spend uh using a variety of different resources and if you're hosting on Azure or AWS it's amazing what resources they both those companies will provide for you for free so we ended up doing a workshop with AWS from our account manager they flew people in from Texas and other cities to spend a whole day that's a huge investment from them think about that cost to fly in a solution architect a partner solution

architect a m a solution director and an innovation engineer that's three I think was four people spent a whole day with our team innovating with us how can we use AI to come up with the next generation of of our platform to support where testing is going to be where product management is going to be in this AI future and they did this workshop with us and now we've got a road map which we're going to work on with them and we'll be using our team but also AWS is going to give us a lot of resources to help us build that future so if you're a small bootstrap

company like us and you don't know have all the engineering talent in house you don't have you know maybe the the AI expertise or some of the expertise you'll need to build that next Generation you have these free resources that you probably don't even know you have access to um we we had an AWS account manager for about four years you never mentioned it we had a new account manager who was more Innovative and within a week of meeting here she had suggested this so if you don't ask you may not get it but you do have access to it so if you have an Amazon account or an Azure account talk to your account

manager find out what resources that you have access to to in today that you're not using it it was surprising so that's what we came up with with them we did a whole day workshop session and basically we've been working on how do we take this from a concept into a multi you know multi-year project we be releasing over multiple phases we estimate the Tam is about 1.6 billion for this but the reality is there's there's a $5 million AR opportunity even in year one so again doing some sizing analysis how can you use AI to basically make software

development testing and then the compliance of that completely automated using AI to come up with if you're going to release a new piece of software what's the risk of going live what are all the regulatory requirements taking all this unique information that we have and using that as a Next Generation product and again having Amazon or another company come in and help you do that Innovation is really powerful and one of the early kind of pieces that's come out of that is a product that we've been working on this is our automated testing tool so the way software development and testing was done until

this year is something like this right you're going to have a testing of that web page you're going to log in you're going to Ty put some text in something and then you're going to wait for a few seconds and then you're going to know log out that's a test script right that's a very simple one that doesn't take a lot of time but to write test scripts um you know for a large complex Erp application or one of our clients is doing that could take you know you know 10 people 20 people months and months and there are huge Outsource teams right now in the Philippines India Africa and

South America that's what they do they write large amounts of test scripts for companies it's a huge industry that's all going to be disrupted now it's being disrupted as we speak because that is how we you testing today now we can do this that's natural language that's me telling the AI log in to this application wait 5 seconds and log out that doesn't require an army of 20 people Outsource doing this that's a business level person a CEO a founder of a small company doing it themselves writing a natural language does the

testing for you the future of testing is going to be autonomous testing that's going to completely change the entire software Outsourcing industry it's already doing that so you know instead of having an outsourced team from a large consulting firm I might have a very small team of my own using AI costs a fraction of of it brings it all in house that's the future for us for next year if we are not the company delivering that we have no business our entire you know you can have a nice ARR curve and then whoops all gone so that for us that is the future we have to

embrace that or be disrupted out otherwise hopefully we won't reach this future um we believe AI is a Force for good we believe AI will help us but we do believe AI should be responsible and so one of the things we do with our clients is make sure like with the banking customers that I mentioned earlier they are not ready to use AI for these maybe these reasons other reasons and we do work with defense companies so there's some scary stuff we've seen autonomous drones autonomous uh uh what do you call

them things that fly which self actualize targets and self-targeting some really weird and crazy stuff out there and people are using AI in these use cases so hopefully for they're not using our stuff for this but responsible AI is an important thing too so we do have a responsibility but if you don't Embrace AI you don't use it both on your sales and marketing internal processes but also don't make it native to your product you will be Obsolete and 22 seconds left perfect so hopefully I showed you how we're using AI internally for some of our marketing and

some of our sales there's many more sales use cases uh that was just a fraction of the ones uh we use Gemini a lot internally for just general productivity uh how are we using a I to create an initial MVP how we got excitement from our customers how we've moved into the a leader space in from thought experiment thought perspective and then lastly how we're moving to the next generation of our product using uh

AI thank you Adam