Ep. #1078 - Building An AI Business with ChatGPT

Matt Watson 00:00
And we’re back for another episode of the Startup Hustle. This is your host today, Matt Watson. And I’m always super excited to be joined by another Matt. So, today, we have Matthew Curtis with his company, Insight Voice, doing some really cool stuff with ChatGPT and AI. I ran across him, I guess, about three weeks ago on LinkedIn. And I really loved what he was doing. I’m excited to have him on the show today and show off some cool stuff that he’s doing. Before we get started, I do wanna remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is powered by FullScale.io. Hiring software developers is difficult. Full Scale can help you build a software team quickly and affordably and has the platform to help you manage that team. Visit fullscale.io to learn more. Matthew, welcome to the show.

Matthew Curtis 00:42
Hey, Matt, thanks so much for having me on. My first, like, 12 customers for it was previously named Ask-Answer, but now it’s Insight Voice. My first 12 customers either had the name Matt or had my last name, Curtis. So I felt like it was some sort of conspiracy. So I’m very glad to join another Matt on the show.

Matt Watson 01:01
How did that work out? They’re just really random people.

Matthew Curtis 01:03
Some of them were, like, last name Curtis. And I like to call other family members to be like, wait for a second, just like some distant relative I don’t know about. I think people, you know, early customers, you just gotta get the hook anywhere. Sometimes, people just want to be around people like them with the same name. And you just gotta take calls and get on there and talk to him about the product.

Matt Watson 01:25
Weird. Well, so do you ever go by Matt at all? Are you just going, Matthew?

Matthew Curtis 01:30
Yeah, mostly Matthew. But I go by either. I don’t know.

Matt Watson 01:36
Well, thank you so much for being on the show today. And as I said, it was cool. We first met. Has it been a month now? I don’t know if that has been that long. You randomly posted on LinkedIn. You’re like, hey, I started this AI company, and you guys just check it out, basically, and I checked it out. In my head, this is really cool. And I reached out to you and, like, hey, you should be on the show. And I’ve been playing with what you’re building. And before we talk more about that, though, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background? Because you’ve done some interesting things before this as well.

Matthew Curtis 02:07
Yeah, so I started off, you know, into entrepreneurship a little bit later. I was, you know, 23-24, I had been teaching at a school, I had studied philosophy, I wanted to save the world and do everything like that, and understand truth and reality. And made the transition into starting companies. And I went all in and like I didn’t know at all what I was doing. So you know, this show is really great, because it talks about founder journeys. I was like banging on doors in Chicago, like DEV shops, and trying to convince people to come work with me, like, very early on, start doing a bunch of ventures that didn’t work out. I tried to venture with, like doing b2b scrap metal, which was interesting, and a lot of fun. I eventually got into a lot of healthcare. So I’ve done stuff with early-stage cancer detection. I worked with a team that litigated over whether a stem cell is an organ or not. And we then build up a marketplace for the sale of peripheral blood stem cells. And that was really interesting. Guy was fortunate enough to get into YC twice for that company. And then for another company that was really working on the litigation of being able to, like, a competitor to state lotteries, which was a lot of fun. None of those were really successful but pivoted, and I spent the last two and a half years leading strategy in new products for a company called H one, which has done their Series C round and, yeah, wants to start something else.

Matt Watson 03:39
Well, I think it’s pretty cool. You’ve been through Y Combinator twice. I’ve never met anybody who’s been through it twice. I think we’ve had a few guests that have been through it before. But being through Y Combinator twice is super interesting to me. I’m curious as somebody has been through it, you know, do you recommend it? I mean, what is your kind of feedback about that experience?

Matthew Curtis 03:58
Yeah. So I mean, it’s great, right. So like, the best part of it is, is that you get to spend 12 weeks with 200 other startup founders who are working as hard as possible on their ventures. And each day they’re learning, and we get this between you and me that we get to talk about, Hey, what’s this new thing you’re learning? What’s this new thing you’re working on? You get along with other people who are in a similar position. And that’s, and that’s really great. The long-term benefit is that you’ve got a network of YC that gets pegged a lot for funding b2b companies or b2b companies. But that’s because you can sell into the network really well. So there’s an internal database we have called Book face, where, you know, we can reach other founders. It’s great for early sales for companies and finding people to work with. So I’d recommend it. I don’t think I’d do it again, just because I do think there’s a lot of value to living in, like, you know, spending those 12 weeks in San Francisco. And I’m older. So I’ve got a farm, and I’ve got a wife, and we’re not moving to San Francisco.

Matt Watson 05:09
And chickens and everything else to take care of.

Matthew Curtis 05:12
We got chickens and goats. They’re very excited.

Matt Watson 05:15
Actually, you know, your best entrepreneurial play recently might have been selling eggs.

Matthew Curtis 05:20
Oh my gosh, we’re crushing it. So we’re getting about a dozen a day right now. And five bucks, five bucks an egg back to the eggs. I wish I could put it on my revenue statement for my new startup.

Matt Watson 05:32
So, I love that. You literally have a scrappy startup story. I love that, by the way.

Matthew Curtis 05:41
Oh my gosh, I started off, I started off kicking up. I tried to make a deal with equity residential, which is one of the biggest, biggest real estate holders in the country, to pick up all of their, like reused refrigerators. And I had like no plan for this or how to execute it. But I started off in Chicago, and I would just take up all of their Chicago. But the unit economics of it didn’t work out at all.

Matt Watson 06:07
I love the true scrappy startups or scrapping refrigerators.

Matthew Curtis 06:12
I love it. That’s awesome. I read this book called junkyard planet, and for any listeners, you should definitely read it. But it goes through the economic geography of scrap metal. And it’s a really interesting story. Scrap Metal is our second largest export. In terms of weight value, our crops are our biggest because we export a lot of corn. But it’s just a huge industry. And it was a lot of fun. The people in the scrap industry are awesome.

Matt Watson 06:43
Well, so a few weeks ago, right? You started this company to ask for an answer. And it has now pivoted to Insight Voice, and I want to talk about that story. So tell us kind of the backstory of where the question started. And kind of when you started that a few weeks ago, or however long it’s been now, yeah, so ask the answer starting the first of December.

Matthew Curtis 07:01
And I’ve been thinking about this for a while. And the problem that the answer was trying to solve is that, like, you know, as you met, like, I go to bed listening, or at least when I was single, I went to bed, listening to podcasts. And so I have like a very, you have a very intimate relationship with Dan Carlin or Matt Watson or, you know, pick your favorite. I love Bishop Baron. Pick your favorite podcaster. So like, I would listen to them, and I would have questions for them. I would like a feedback loop to be able to ask them a question. But I said, What if I go out and build a video service because it’s gonna be important to their shows? Where fans can submit questions, and then the host can receive those questions answered back. And you know, we’ll start there. I always think of startups if you start with a hunch. And then you go talk to people, and then you realize what’s true. So I went out and talked to a bunch of podcasters and business owners. And generally, like, everyone’s interested in answering their users’ questions like, like, if you can get me people to ask questions like I’m in some people are like, way too busy. So it’s not valuable for them. But so I signed up 250 people, and like a very short thing, like a month and a half, right? And so I met people using it, but no one asked any questions, right? Like, like, the frequency of questions was like, really, really low. So I sat back and said, you know, we could fight for this. And we could really get to that narrow niche of users who are probably the people who could get paid to answer questions. You can think of this as an AMA cameo is what the answer could have been. But I said, Hey, there’s this really cool thing. ChatGPT is amazing, right? So I was sitting around that night one night, and I just said, what if I transcribed one of these answers and then wrote a blog with it? And so I just played around with it and took one of the answers of one of my customers and wrote a blog with it. And it was amazing. It was like it, it was so good, right it like, they took their thoughts that they had in one to two minutes and just formatted them in an entirely different format. And they said, Okay, what if I asked her to write a LinkedIn post for this? And there it was, it was a LinkedIn post written on this very specific question. And I said to myself, Well, why don’t we do that for everybody? Why don’t we take their answers and have them run with that? So that’s sort of how it started.

Matt Watson 09:23
Well, and I love you know, the idea of asking for an answer is awesome. And by the way, this is one of my favorite things about tick tock because I post videos on Tiktok almost every day, and there’s a lot of engagement. People ask a lot of questions on Tik Tok. And as a creator, you could spend almost forever just answering people’s questions. You just answer questions, and then people ask other questions, and you can just kind of keep going, which is great for a content creator. It helps prompt you to know more content to create. But you know, when I probably remember, but I think the first LinkedIn post you posted, you posted something about, I don’t know, like you had no job, and you were married, and you had four weeks to build this thing or something like that. What? What was it that you posted on LinkedIn that I think caught my attention?

Matthew Curtis 10:10
Yeah. So it’s really just telling the story. And, like, I haven’t done a whole lot of content marketing. So I’ve been learning to tell my story as well. And so, you know, newly married, got married five months ago, six months ago, I should know that, what exact July 29, I don’t know how long ago that was. But, you know, we went through a transition out of my old job. I got laid off during the, you know, the tech companies were laying off. And I went to my wife. The first day, I said, look, like I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, you know, we’ve got plenty of resources to be able to give this a shot. But can I have a month to do this? And I think that this is something that YC really taught me as well is that you sort of have to give forced deadlines for execution. Because otherwise, you come up with all the excuses in the world to not get things done and get them moving. And to launch publicly, right. And so you got to get your thing out, whatever you’re building, you got to get it out in public quickly. And you got to get feedback because you don’t know until you get feedback and really start doing there. So I told the story. I said look in. And this relates to posting, well, you gotta make it, you got to give the people who might be listening to you something that they can relate to and said, I got married four months ago, and then I lost my job. Like everyone’s interested at that point, I posted a picture of my wife and myself at our wedding. Everyone can relate to that. It doesn’t matter what job you’re in, like, you want to know how this ends. And like my wife, my wife, Katrina, like, amazing, she’s like, back to me at every step, you know, we talked about it throughout the process. And that’s something new, being married and having a startup. And, you know, we pivoted in a month, in a month and a half, started this new thing. Starting to pick up traction, like we had a lot of customers, and then decided, even though we have customers, this isn’t the hill to die on. So yeah, just as a founder, everyone’s interested, right? There’s nothing more American than starting something.

Matt Watson 12:20
And so that’s like, that’s something you can do as a founder is just talk about the ups and downs, the changes the unique parts of it, to help get early customers well, and so there’s a couple of key points of this that I brought this up for that I want to I want to dig into, because first off, it’s that posting on LinkedIn, and other social stuff really works. Like that’s how you and I met. And that’s why you and I are kind of working together a little bit now. And it’s all from that social selling. And so with what you’re doing now with Insight Voice is largely focused on that, right? You’re trying to help people, founders and other people create content that they can post on LinkedIn, Twitter, their blog, wherever they want to post content to, and it works. It absolutely works. And I have, that’s how we met. And I have my own success story. I had somebody reach out to me today from LinkedIn, from my content. And they’re like, Hey, I’ve been falling, I had no idea who this guy was. He’s like, have been following me on LinkedIn for like three or four months, I love your content. And I think he’ll end up being a customer for us at Full Scale. And again, it’s just social selling, I just post on LinkedIn every day. And it works like posting the social content absolutely works. And the hard part is for people, a lot of times they don’t know what to post, like, what do I post, right. And I think that’s the key here. And that’s part of the problem you’re trying to solve, like, you know, I don’t. I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert content marketing person, but I’ve been doing it for a long time. And I feel very natural at it. And, I enjoy it. And it’s something I like to do on a daily basis. But there’s a lot of people that are like, You know what, I know I should be doing this thing. But I don’t know what to do. And I think that’s the problem you’re trying to solve. Right?

Matthew Curtis 13:56
Yeah. And that’s in that sort of like the, you know, because I’ve been a founder of so many companies, I’ve always like you always hear it, whether you’re a founder, whether you’re a CEO, whether you’re a marketing team, you hear from everyone you should be doing content marketing, you should be writing this many blogs, you should be answering this many questions. There’s no next step for what you do. So where we really start at our company, is we start with three critical elements. One is who your customer is. So their user persona, specifically you come in, you enter who that is. For me, I’m selling to founders in the marketing team. So I enter that in then to what are their problems? founders, marketing teams have a hard time building and executing a content marketing strategy, right? And they have this for three reasons. One, they don’t know which questions they should be answering for their users. And that’s critical because it doesn’t matter how much you post. If you’re not speaking to your customers’ needs, it doesn’t matter. And then too, they can’t do it in a timely manner that’s affordable. And then we’re building a platform to solve that. So what Insight Voice does is it spits out, here’s the top 10 topics from an SEO perspective that your users need to trust you to answer in order for them to buy from you. Right? So that’s really simple. Math for FullScale.io is going to be a little bit different. It’s going to be about how do I get how I work well with overseas developers? How do I qualify developers, all that sort of stuff? And then, once you’re there, once you have your topics, we give you questions. And then when you log in every morning, you just come in, you say, Hello. Okay, that sounds like a question my customer would like to answer like an answer for, or that is a question my customers answer me for. And you just give a one to two minute answer on video. And then the program spits it out as your LinkedIn posts, your blog posts, everything like that. So well, yeah, it’s that cold. No, go ahead.

Matt Watson 15:48
And I love it. Because so you’re using ChatGPT, you know, and you’re using AI, right? And we’re gonna talk. We’ll talk more, more and more about that as we go on here. But, you know, you’re able to use that to help drive these questions, right. So I went in, I signed up and I put in, you know, Full Scale, we do offshore development. And I also pick software development teams like software development related topics. And so I’ll give you a couple of examples that, you know, chat, GBT spit out right says, Do you offer support services after the completion of a project? How have prior projects using offshore development gone? Is there an option to hire additional developers if needed during a project timeline? Like so it just gives you all these kinds of questions, right, which you’re getting from the API, which is awesome, because it just helps me, like, Fine, if I’m going to use this great content, it gives me talking points, right. And I think that’s what’s cool about what you’re doing is then the founder or salespeople marketing people that are using the product. Now, it’s like, hey, we can go in and we can record a video and do this and it just takes like, five minutes a day. And AI is helping serve up like the talk, like what I should create content around. And then it helps create the content and like, makes it really easy. So I really like it. I think it’s super cool. And it’s a great example of AI and really cool things that AI is enabling us to do.

Matthew Curtis 17:08
Yeah, it should, it should do two things for you. One, it should just enhance your voice, right? So there’s a lot of platforms and a lot of people use ChatGPT like this, to just answer questions or write a blog for you. That doesn’t work from a social selling perspective. Because Matt, you know, this really well your posts on social selling are all about your customers problems, right. And so you don’t just mention Full Scale, every, every post, you don’t put a CTA in there, you just continually in their feed, speak to their problems. And that’s the thing about selling always is that if you can unlock the trust that someone is really concerned about your problem, they’ll buy from you eventually, right? They’re going to come to you and they’re going to trust you, they’re going to buy from your friends that you recommend. And so we really want to focus on making sure that your voice as it founder, because it’s really hard to get sucked into, you know, just telling about you and telling about how cool the company you’re building and all this stuff is you need to get sucked into telling about what the customers problems is, so that they can relate back to you. Right? And so that’s, that’s really what we want to focus on. And that’s something I’ve done poorly in the past, I go out there and I hammer my LinkedIn messages. And I say, I’m a founder of a book of meetings, you know, buy this, sell this, but it doesn’t work. Like you have to, you have to speak to the problem of the customer.

Matt Watson 18:34
Yeah, you want people to see your content multiple times. And they’re like, hey, you know, I like this person. I like what they have to say. And you kind of build a relationship with them. Right? And the guy I met with today, it was kind of funny. When we started the video chat. He’s like, you know, it’s kind of weird being on video with you after I’ve seen all these videos of you. I’ve read all this content you’ve done. It’s like, you’re a real life person. Yeah.

Matthew Curtis 18:58
I went to bed every night. Yeah, it’s like this content marketing works, right.

Matt Watson 19:01
And it’s like, you know, it’s like, all of a sudden, you’re talking to somebody that you’ve, you know, seen through like this, you know, viewpoint through all their content. So it’s pretty cool. So, I do wanna remind everybody that today’s episode of Startup Hustle is sponsored by FullScale.io. If you need help hiring software developers, definitely check out our website, FullScale.io. So tell me more about what it’s like working with GBT. And so I also but first of all, I think it’s important to note that your background isn’t necessarily as a software developer, right?

Matthew Curtis 19:39
Correct. Yeah, so my background is like I’m a software developer, as a result of not wanting to be competent in the world of software engineering. Like, most of my stuff has involved hacking things together. I’m like an MVP plus developer. No one wants to see my code if you didn’t go to school. If you didn’t go, oh, no, I know I studied philosophy, I worked as a senior engineer for a while, and like, got promoted out of that job to a project manager. But those are the skills that I brought to the table work engineering, and just happened to be the role I was in. No, I learned, I learned software to write code, by convincing a co-founder to start a company with me, and then like picking the smallest tasks for them to do and continuing to do that. But ya know, my competence isn’t that I actually held two team members from Full Scale. And the first thing I’m having them do is just clean up the code so that it’s actually understandable by anybody. So they’ve got the backend done in about two days. They’re excellent. The documentation is $1,200. Better.

Matt Watson 20:59
And so yeah, so not not a software engineer by training, working with ash really, really incredible, right? So it’s not, but it’s not like, I just love by the way that you were self taught, you know, to some degree over the last however many years, and then you did build the MVP of this whole thing by yourself, which kudos to you. I just wanted to point out, I think it was super cool that you were able to do this and make it work and build and build the MVP of it.

Matthew Curtis 21:18
So yeah, and that’s really the critical part, right? So like, needed to overcome that and be able to move it because I built three MVPs actually in three months. So I actually built three different products along the way. All terrible code, don’t worry about your code, don’t document Don’t worry about your security keys, don’t worry about anything, when you’re getting started just like write the code, get it out there. People don’t care. It doesn’t. It doesn’t matter. You haven’t wasted your time. Yet, it is a lot of fun. It is good enough to try things when the AI is really cool. I was not on the AI train, right? Like, I haven’t been on the Bitcoin train. I wasn’t on the AI train. Just because I couldn’t see the value in myself. And for me, like software is always about business value. How does this unlock my potential? What does this allow me to do? That I wasn’t able to do before. And like before this, you know, there were some limited applications where AI really worked. ChatGPT really changed things. It opened it up so that there’s a whole bunch of different business cases that can be improved anywhere, there’s a knowledge stream in the new economy. You know, I was talking to a consultant the other day. They’re building a ChatGPT model to help build models for places like McKenzie to better understand their data. There’s, you know, my wife uses Canva all the time, like to use Canva too, like building images is amazing. And I said, What is something related to what I’m doing, you know, content creation, that has this sort of model to it. But using the prompts is really, really important. The answers you get are like, sometimes wild, right? And so like, you really just have to refine the language of the outcome. And just keep telling ChatGPT what to do, just like using ChatGPT to the browser. But just doing it in code and saying, if I give it this transcript, and I asked for these certain things, what is the range of outputs I want to get, and then sort of narrowing that, expanding that and just sort of tweaking it, like an English major would crush it as a as a prompt writer?

Matt Watson 23:29
Well, in the past, when I thought of using machine learning or AI, I thought of it as intimidating. It feels like oh, there’s F to build, like all these weird models. And after right in some weird programming language called R, you know, sometimes you can use Python or other stuff. But it seemed like there was, it seemed like an intimidating thing to learn how to do, you know, because in my previous company, we wanted to build something like anomaly detection is like, man, I don’t know how to build something to do that and train the model. And like all these things just seemed like an intimidating thing. But using ChatGPT is fairly easy and straightforward, right? It’s a pretty simple API, you just give it the prompt, and it gives us the answers back and, uh, you know, in the API, right, yeah.

Matthew Curtis 24:12
So I mean, like, it is reducing the barrier to get in to get where I am, which is like, being able to build an MVP and test a product, like ChatGPT has, like completely eliminating those barriers, one within the building models from an API perspective. Yeah, you just you just it’s very similar to writing into ChatGPT. If you’re using the DaVinci model, or even the ChatGPT for the model, it’s really simple. Once you get it set up, you’re ready to go. But also, like in writing code, it’s increased my speed by four or five times in writing the code. I will use Copilot to write code and give it directions using copilots, a product of GitHub that I use in my VS code. In it, I’ll write this function that does X, Y, and Z And then I’ll actually copy and paste it back into GBT and say, Okay, do all the error handling and clean this up, and then I’ll copy and paste it back in there. So like the models. Yeah, I would agree the models used to be something that was daunting, you had to be really smart for you had to be xy and z for.

Matt Watson 25:24
But now it’s like, if I can understand how to write a sentence, I can get to an early product of us getting up, co-pilot is pretty cool. I was using it yesterday, for it’s really cool for some programming stuff I was doing and it is pretty slick. It’s another AI making our lives easier.

Matthew Curtis 25:36
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, like, they just have such a, like, they have all the code, right? They have all the training and all the models. Engineers are really expensive. And like, for early stage companies, especially, you’ve got to use some sort of nexus of using tax GPT to speed up coding, hiring offshore with really good developers. You just can’t be burning through all of your money and your investors money you’ve got to be, you got to be more conscious of that.

Matt Watson 26:06
So tell us more about your insight on using GPT. And, you know, building a business around it. You know, I? It seems like I don’t know, what do you think there’s seems like everybody’s using it, right? So you hear announcements like, Slack is integrating it. And all these different people are integrating it to do different things. Like I use a tool called Tap Leo, for LinkedIn. And then they have another one called tweet Hunter. And they’re really cool tools. If you do content marketing on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, or Twitter, but they have like a generation stuff. And then too, they’ll go through and find trending topics, and it’ll help you do some writing and stuff like that. And they added ChatGPT support, like a week ago. So it’s like, you know, everybody is on this train now. Right. And so I think we’re gonna see proliferation of ChatGPT being built into all sorts of different things. You know, I think the use case of the Insight Voice your company is doing is super cool. What other really cool use cases? Have you seen ChatGPT? You know, over the last year or?

Matthew Curtis 27:15
So, anything coding related? I don’t answer that specifically. And then we’ll broaden it out. Anything coding related is like, it’s over the moon. It’s like it’s changing the way developers are working. And it really allows developers to focus on what is the business job to be done that needs to be done, and then how do I make sure that that’s implemented correctly? I think that that is going to change it. You know, I’m really blown away by anything that can help me make less decisions in my life. Like that’s, that’s, I don’t want to make a whole bunch of decisions. So like, things that can tell me, like the ones that can go scan your room, I don’t remember the name of it, but you can scan your room, and it tells you what the design should be for that. That’s like a really cool one. I don’t worry about that, personally, but it’s a lot of fun. And then Chad GPD itself, like, I go to it, to ask all sorts of questions, and to help me out in my daily life. Like, that’s, that’s probably the best one. I think about the business. You know, I used to teach at Notre Dame at their entrepreneurship program. And I had a bunch of alumni reach out to me and say, Oh, I see you’re doing this ChatGPT thing, like, so cool, blah, blah. I’m thinking about building a ChatGPT app, you know, just in general, how should I think about it? And I don’t think that the fundamental way we should think about it is any different though, we should always start with, like, I love click Great. Clayton Christensen. And it’s like, we should always start with what job needs to be done. What is the business problem that we actually have? And then like, What Are any of the tools that we need to apply for it to actually unlock a lot for us? And we should definitely be like that, that should be in our tool set. But it’s not going to do everything for us and like, there’s going to be a whole bunch of froth around ChatGPT. That, you know, people will try to implement it for things that don’t really relate to jobs like blockchain. I think that personally, I think the blockchain was all froth. But it’s like a Ponzi scheme wrapped in froth. But I will, you know, feel very vindicated recently.

Matt Watson 29:16
But it could be like blockchain your point, right, where it’s like, we didn’t need blockchain for this thing, but we use it anyways. And like, it seems, it’s definitely seemed like over the last 10 years, like every startup there has claimed that they were using AI for some way or another, whether or not they were not, who knows. But now they’ll really be saying that because of ChatGPT even if it just helps, like fill in one text box on a form somewhere.

Matthew Curtis 29:40
Yeah, and like, yeah, it’s all sales and marketing from that perspective. But the question is always like short term, you can get away with that. You can sign up a couple customers because of you know, quitting blockchain or checking GPT or whatever, but they’re going to churn if you’re not providing real value for them. If you’re not, if you’re not making what their day was before to what it could be in the future, your business isn’t gonna last. So I do think that there’s a lot of knowledge workflows, where you can make processes a lot easier. And that’s what SAS businesses are. They’re just process improvements that you charge a monthly fee for. And there’s a lot of opportunity for that, but it doesn’t do everything and there’s going to be a whole bunch of froth.

Matt Watson 30:24
Well, I’m super excited to see what happens. I think to your point, it’s like it becomes a normal tool. So it’s like, yeah, of course, people use this, like, it’s not a big deal. It’s just a thing that we do, right? It’d be like, run around now, everybody, and like, oh, we use no SQL databases. But that was a big thing, like 10 years ago, or whatever. It’s like, oh, we’re using MongoDB. Like, we’re so much better than everyone else. Because we’re using MongoDB.

Matthew Curtis 30:50
And now everybody is like, oh, we’re using an iPhone. We use an iPhone, right? Like, yeah, we have. We have a supercomputer in our hands. Like, that’s magical. But 10 years ago, it didn’t, or 15 years ago, it didn’t exist.

Matt Watson 31:00
Yeah. Yeah, we’ll quickly get to a point where it’s like, okay, yeah, no, everybody does this thing. It’s not, it’s not a big deal. So what, what are, what else do you think about ChatGPT, and how it can impact business from, from your perspective.

Matthew Curtis 31:18
I think that it helps narrow decision trees in a lot of ways. And I think that like, just like we’re trying to do with Insight Voice, is we’re trying to narrow your decision. So you could write about anything, you could post about anything, but we just sort of walked you through a workflow and said, we’re gonna force you, we’re gonna limit you and force you to write about things that your customers actually care about, right? Instead of writing about the news, or like, whatever random topic you think your customers want, we’re gonna force you to answer the things that you actually need to be working on. And I think that there’s a lot of applications for that. Those are probably the ones I’m personally most excited about. They’re kind of the boring ones, in that they, you know, they don’t tell you to do everything they tell you, you know, here are the very limited things you should be doing. And there’s, there’s those that work closely hard, by the way.

Matt Watson 32:05
And what’s funny? Well, it’s hard from the perspective of like, following through with that advice, because, you know, as a content creator, it’s hard to have a very defined strategy, and a very defined plan, and then like, really stick to it that way. I mean, first of all, it’s hard to even come up with a plan or a strategy that makes any sense. But then even if you do come up with a good strategy and a plan, it’s hard to stick to it. And that’s a struggle I have, like, I could come up with 10 different content ideas a day. But they don’t necessarily map back to some plan.

Matthew Curtis 32:40
Yeah. And yeah, or like, or like a tactic for execution.

Matt Watson 32:44
Yeah. And so to your point, it’s, you know, part of the value that you that your tool can help provide, and, you know, other marketing firms and agencies that work with people, right, is helping them refine their strategy, like, what is the strategy, right? So, you know, if your tool can help them with like, okay, these are the things you really should be talking about, that really tees it up, if that kind of creates, like a baseline strategy for people.

Matthew Curtis 33:09
Yeah, and what and what we’re really working on and we’re really excited about, you know, as we’ve gone through the journey of defining this is that you should really have a strategy for each user persona that you want to work with, because it really helps form just a conceptual framework. As a founder, I’m starting a new product I may have worked in, in this field before, I may not like scrap metal, we’re just jumping in. And like, I need to, like, it forces me to even think about the questions that my users might be asking, that’s so important for when I have conversations for them. Because early doesn’t matter how good your product is, early on, you’ve got to talk to your customers, and you’ve got to get them to buy, you’ve got to get them to get your feedback. So just like prep from a sales perspective, we got a lot of salespeople using the product. And they like it for a similar reason.

Matt Watson 33:58
Well, and, you know, you and I talked about this before, I think in regards to social selling, I think it’s awesome for executives to do social selling, and, and all of that, but that’s also different than, say, a product team that could use it, they want to post on LinkedIn and stuff about you know, these are new enhancements that are outcome coming or case studies or other kinds of topics are like why do we have this feature or whatever, right? Like that would be totally different than maybe the CEO or founder or whatever would want to post the same thing with customer success. It’s like oh, this is how we help this customer solve these problems.

Matthew Curtis 34:34
And what an inviting culture wouldn’t wouldn’t you want to go work there if someone’s like out there talking about like, just just sharing thoughts on their customers problems all the time and sharing thoughts on product improvements like that, like I you know, if I didn’t wasn’t doing this, I quit my job and go work for that company.

Matt Watson 34:54
Yeah, I mean, you build a lot of trust, right? You’re like, man, these guys are on top of it. You know, they’re obviously a thought leader. At ers, you know, I, you know, you love hearing and seeing all that. And you know, the good news and the bad news about LinkedIn is there can be a lot of noise there, right? And people post a lot of junk. But people read it. And to some degree, marketing is all about making noise. And it absolutely works. And I’ve had a lot of success with it over the last 90 days that I’ve been really focused on it. And by the way, Matt Watson, come and follow me on LinkedIn, you can find me talking about everything.

Matthew Curtis 35:30
You’ve only been doing this, like 90 days.

Matt Watson 35:33
Yeah, well, I’ve done it before in the past, but I’d like our hard core to do it for maybe four months now. I’ve been pretty hardcore about it’s like a daily thing.

Matthew Curtis 35:45
You know, you look like a pro.

Matt Watson 35:49
But I’ve done it in the past, but it was like always in different spurts. And I decided around Thanksgiving, to really, really focus on it.

Matthew Curtis 35:59
So yeah, and I think that like, yes. So it was, you know, whether it’s a blog, whether it’s a TikTok, whether it’s, you know, whatever it is, right, you can hook some people by just having anything out there. But like, true friends, true relationships, true customers, like they’re gonna see through that. And they’re gonna like it, it’s consistent, it’s continuing to talk about their story. And like, people weed themselves out, this happens in podcasts, this happens in, you know, in everything, that the quality rises to the top of the ventral, right? Yeah, true. Not initially, not initially. But eventually, yeah, being truly authentic and in what you’re doing.

Matt Watson 36:35
Well, I’m really excited to see how ChatGPT evolves. And, you know, one thing, one thing I was talking to somebody about the other day, so I feel like when, when I’m about I’m 41 years old. And so I feel like, you know, my parents, they didn’t really grow up with Google and search engines, right. And so, you know, you and I, you’re a little younger than me, but about the same age. You know, we grew up with search engines, and it became very ingrained into us that, like, I can go to Google and I ask it to do a lot of things like what is the weather or you know, how to do math, like literally anything, and to be good at your job to met, you really have to be kind of good at using Google, right? Like you. I always tell people, like you don’t have to know anything these days, you just have to know where to find the answer. And I feel like even for software developers, it’s like, my test for software developers should be like, how fast can they Google something and then implement that answer?

Matthew Curtis 37:34
How good are they at Stack Overflow?

Matt Watson 37:36
Yeah. Now, my point is, I feel like now we’re at a generational shift. So now all of a sudden not generate a generational shift. But like a technology shift here, where AI becomes the next thing. It’s like, I didn’t use Google and got really good at Google. And then you got this next generation of people that are like, really good at using tools like ChatGPT. That’s my point. So you know, my oldest son is 13. He’s gonna grow up now. Like using tools like Chet GPT all the time. And you know, somebody like me, you’ll be like, I didn’t know it could do this. I didn’t know it could do that. Whatever, right. But, people, yeah, so my point is like, this next generation is going to have to grow up becoming experts at how to use AI and ChatGPT to make their lives easier. And you know, in business, personal life, everything. One of my favorite things is like, you can go to it and be like, how do I make homemade ice cream? And it just gives you the recipe, right? Like, there are literally so many uses for it. It’s crazy. Like last night, my wife was going around debating about how big the curtain should be. How wide should the curtain be based on the width of the window? And of course, I keep telling her I’m like, Did you Google it? Did you Google it? Did you Google it? No, she didn’t. Even though she’s younger, she didn’t really grow up with search engines and computers and technology. But even though she likes the idea of using AI, it is probably not something she will ever be an expert at. But the younger people today are going to master it and that will change things a lot. I believe it’s my point.

Matthew Curtis 39:09
Yeah, it’s gonna like, overnight, it’s gonna change. Like, I feel really good for the founders of Stack Overflow. They sold their company a few months before. ChatGPT came out.

Matt Watson 39:21
Oh, really? I didn’t know they sold it.

Matthew Curtis 39:23
Yeah. It was a big conglomerate. And like my usage of StackOverflow went from, you know, when I’m writing code to every from every 1015 minutes to nothing like I don’t even use it anymore.

Matt Watson 39:41
So $1.8 billion.

Matthew Curtis 39:44
It’s probably worth $200,000 today. Maybe?

Matt Watson 39:48
That is absolutely unbelievable, because yeah, they just sold a company that ChatGPT. I don’t want to say it replaces it but eliminates a lot. Emily, oh my goodness, massive change. And the only funnier story that I have about that was that StubHub was acquired right before the pandemic, which is for concert tickets, all that stuff. Yeah. And so then whoever acquired it basically acquired StubHub and then had to give everybody refunds from all the concert tickets.

Matthew Curtis 40:20
I hope it was not a big debt deal. I hope it was all cash.

Matt Watson 40:24
And then there were no events like the next year. That was a total disaster for whoever required that.

Matthew Curtis 40:32
Wow, we’re all old.

Matt Watson 40:36
Yeah, so I mean, last summer.

Matthew Curtis 40:37
And I wonder if they knew, I wonder if it was just good timing. Or if they’re like, we see what’s around the corner, because they’re definitely actually anyone else?

Matt Watson 40:43
So actually, it was 2021. So it was 18.

Matthew Curtis 40:47
Okay. Okay. But still, yeah.

Matt Watson 40:49
But yeah, for sure that like this, like, Stack Overflow. That was a great example of something that ChatGPT has definitely dramatically changed overnight, the horizon of it. And even what I mentioned earlier, like recipes and things like that, like, there’s all these websites that make ad revenue from recipes, and all sorts of things that really don’t feel their role for eight hours.

Matthew Curtis 41:11
In order to get my recipe, I would use a real, like, I’m over scrolling for eight hours. I don’t care about your life. Like I know, it’s interesting and all of that. I don’t have to read about it.

Matt Watson 41:25
Yeah, yeah. Yep. Well, if you need to hire software engineers, testers or leaders Full Scale can help. We have the people and the platform to help you build and manage a team of experts. When you visit FullScale.io. All you need to do is answer a few questions on our platform and match you up with our fully vetted team of engineers. At Full Scale, we specialize in building a long term team that works only for you to learn more when you visit FullScale.io. Well, Matthew, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Matthew Curtis 41:52
Thank you, this has been really incredible.

Matt Watson 41:56
So as we wrap up the show, I always like to ask if you have any final tips, words of wisdom out there for other entrepreneurs to get started fast and change quickly, right?

Matthew Curtis 42:04
Like and really focus on the customers’ problems. If there’s ever a thought in your mind that you’re like, What should I do? The answer is go talk to customers. Because you just don’t know. And a good way to do that, I’ll pitch my own company. Go to InsightVoice.ai because I would use it if I’m an early stage founder like in this is before you hit the paywall, I would use it to figure out what my customers’ questions are and what topics they would need to know about. And I would just go in there and enter in like, what I think my business is going to be, what I think my customers’ problems are, and just see what it spits out and try a couple answers. But it should give you that first initial space and then use it to share it on LinkedIn, use it to share it in other places, you’ll get to meet cool people like Matt, and get on podcasts like this. So it does work. And it should be a short term and long term strategy of talking about what your customers’ problems are, and really how you’re thinking about solving them. And then how you’re actually solving them. Once your products are ready.

Matt Watson 43:10
Well another topic, I wanted to talk about something that I forgot to cover earlier. I’m going to mention real fast on the way out here. You know you also, we’re not working in stealth mode and being afraid to tell people about your business and your idea which a lot of people do, right? And you are posting right out there on LinkedIn, you’re like, Hey, I just started this thing. It’s like an alpha version. It sort of barely works. But I’m here, please try it and write like you’re out there. From the very beginning, where some people are scared. Like they don’t want to tell anything, anybody about anything until it’s perfect, or they’re worried that people are going to steal their ideas. But kudos to you did the opposite, right? You’re like, Hey, I’m gonna tell everybody about this thing.

Matthew Curtis 43:54
Well, we met. I need advocates. I need people who like, like, the hardest thing, like one of the hardest things as a founder, especially a solo founder, is that you get down on your idea. You don’t believe in it enough? Right? You get out and talk to a couple customers like the first couple days, I always say I have to talk to at least four customers because I have to know how this is going to change their life in a real way because I can wake up in the morning I can go 16 hours a day for that. I can’t go 16 hours a day for an idea that’s in my head. That might not be true. I started getting shaky about what I started getting worried about, so I almost needed that positive reinforcement.

Matt Watson 44:26
Yeah. Well, I just want to say kudos to you for being so focused on customers and getting out there and talking to people because so many people are scared to tell everybody about their idea. And you will be way more successful, and you’re living proof of this by just going out there and telling literally everybody.

Matthew Curtis 44:43
Yeah, and you’ll be wrong, and you’ll permeate. It’ll change, but I really appreciate that, Matt. That’s an important complement.

Matt Watson 44:51
Well, everybody. This was Matthew Curtis. We love them out again. By the way, his company is InsightVoice.ai. Check them out. And they’re doing some really cool stuff for other entrepreneurs. It’s a great, great tool to help you do social selling and content generation that you can post on LinkedIn, your blog, and all this kind of stuff. So definitely check it out. All right, well, thank you so much.

Matthew Curtis 45:16
Thank you. Thank you for doing that. And if you want me to help you get set up on the page. I love talking to founders. So email me at Matthew at Insight Voice.ai, and we’ll walk you through the onboarding and just really, really dig into your company and how it can be helped in general, but also how we can help you.

Matt Watson 45:35
Alright, thank you so much. Thanks, man.