Transcript
WEBVTT
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A relationship with the right referral partner
could be a game changer for any be
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to be company. So what if
you could reverse engineer these relationships at a
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moment's notice, start a podcast,
invite potential referral partners to be guests on
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your show and grow your referral network
faster than ever? Learn more. At
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Sweet Fish Mediacom you're listening to be
tob growth, a daily podcast for B
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TOB leaders. We've interviewed names you've
probably heard before, like Gary Vander truck
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and Simon Senek, but you've probably
never heard from the majority of our guests.
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That's because the bulk of our interviews
aren't with professional speakers and authors.
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Most of our guests are in the
trenches leading sales and marketing teams. They're
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implementing strategy, they're experimenting with tactics, they're building the fastest growing BTB companies
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in the world. My name is
James Carberry. I'm the founder of sweet
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fish media, a podcast agency for
BB brands, and I'm also one of
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the CO hosts of this show.
When we're not interviewing sales and marketing leaders,
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you'll hear stories from behind the scenes
of our own business, will share
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the ups and downs of our journey
as we attempt to take over the world.
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Just kidding. Well, maybe let's
get into the show. Welcome back
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to be tob growth. I am
your host for today's so Nikki Ivy,
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with sweet fish media guys. I've
got with me today Michaelsinguish, who is
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co founder is eeo of La type. Michael, how you doing today?
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I'm doing good, Nikki. Thanks
for having us. Good. I'm super
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excited to have this conversation because it's
not a topic I've covered on the show
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before. We're going to be talking
about messaging platforms like flat and m steams
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and just really digging into how folks
can leverage those and how to set yourself
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up for success with with them.
But before we get into all of that,
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Michael, I would love it if
you would just give us a little
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bit of background on you yourself and
what you we, the folks that Ella
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type, have been up to these
days. Great. Well, kind of
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quick background of myself. I got
into marketing technology and MARTEC about, you
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know, eight or nine years ago, and I got into Martec from the
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technology side, not the marketing side. So I kind of bring a software
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developer and Engineering Perspective on marketing technology, and one of things we really believe
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here at l type is that that
part is is really needed now in two
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thousand and nineteen. I mean,
there's a lot of different marketing technology platforms
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out there and I think this rise
of the marketing technologists as someone who can
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help connect these platforms together to actually
make these marketing text acts work the way
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they were designed to, is in
high demand right now and we try to
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do that and the applications that were
building an l type. We've taken a
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messaging first approach to marketing tech technology
and we have created a intelligent assistant that
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monitors all of your search, social
and email marketing campaigns and we provide that
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functionality through slack. We are slack
APP and you can find us in the
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slack APP directory. I love it. I love everything that you just said.
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I mean it's where things are going
and if you're if you are,
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I think it's just a smart thing
to do. Man, if you're creating
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an APP, making it a slack
APP is, you know, pretty smart.
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So so I'm a fan and and
that's why I wanted you to be
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on the show. To Talk to
us about this particular topic. So leg
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I said at the top of the
the top of the show, these messaging
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platforms are taken over. Everybody knows
what they are, but he uses them,
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likely more than they're using email.
Do they talk to us, Michael,
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about how we got here? Yeah, well, slack in particular is
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the fastest growing enterprise software ever.
It got its start in the devops community,
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so it was, you know,
kind of came up through the engineering
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ranks and the software developer ranks.
That's how we got in touch with it
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and we started using it and when
we were building technology, we realize that
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a lot of our customers were using
it and they were using it daytoday,
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more so than email. And if
that's where the teams are, and then,
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in our case, marketing teams,
we thought couldn't we deliver our technology,
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you know, directly to where the
teams are, without creating another log
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in, you know, or another
ashboard or another product have to go check
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out because you know, as you
know, and I think a lot of
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the audience knows, I mean marketing
technology is highly fragmented. So a lot
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of tools out there and if your
start up like we are building new marketing
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technology. The idea of introducing yet
another tool into that mix is a pretty
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big ask when you go to a
marketing agency. But if the Marketing Agency
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was already using slack and we can
kind of slip in as a BOT and
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slip in behind the scenes, people
go yeah, I get that, that
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fits in with my workflow. So
we were experimenting with different ways to deliver
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our solution and we kind of landed
on slack because that's what we liked and
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that's what we were using and we
found a lot of customers who were going
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yeah, that makes sense to us. And I spoke at an agency conference
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about back in the spring and we
surveyed the audience and we found that ninety
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five percent of the agencies that were
there you'd slack. And we're like,
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well, I think we got this
one pretty close. And the other the
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only other standout is Microsoft teams,
and Microsoft has made a really big push
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into the space, understandably because this
is kind of an area where you'd think
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Microsoft Wood and should have a big
presence and I think they got caught off
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guard a little bit about by what
slack was providing, and so Microsoft did
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a great job building Microsoft teams.
It's a great product. It looks very
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similar to slack, and that's because
slacked in a lot of things right.
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But micro off teams is out there
too, and you see that in certain
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settings, or we see it in
certain settings that we're running into. But
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those are really the two big players
and right now there's only those that that's
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really the only two in the space. Yeah, well, you just put
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me up on game. I maybe
I should be embarrassed to say I hadn't
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actually heard of Microsoft teams until you
just mentioned to hear. I thought there
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was only slack. The things for
that that little overview of what this real
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landscape is right now and why it
would make sense for to be where,
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like you said, to be where
the teams are. And so, once
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you figure that out right, once
you've understood how we got here and at
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the point is to be where the
teams are, talk about what it looks
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like to effectively leverage something like what
you're talking about, a sort of native
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slack APP. Yeah, well,
before you adopt anything kind of like as
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a slack APP, before you actually
get involved in, you know, using
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and leveraging the the slack act APP
ecosystem, which is where we deliver our
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product. Getting your team comfortable with
slack and getting it implemented properly is really
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important, and I think a big
part of that is understanding that this is
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a generational shift and how we work, and it's not. This is not
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a new concept, right. This
goes back to even like in the S,
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right, where, you know,
everything you know became that we were
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on PC's and then pretty quickly things
went online and that was a big shift,
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you know, and how we do
business. You know, things were
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getting done online rather than necessarily on
the desktop, and the web was kind
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of a big thing and that was
like the beginnings of the Internet. And
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then that lasted for about ten years
until we started to get APPs right,
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and apps on the phone, especially
on an iphone. That was new and
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unheard of. You know, how
do I deliver my product? You deliver
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it as an APP. Where do
you put it? You put it in
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the the APP store. That that
was a big thing. You know,
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that was very that was new.
Now it seems commonplace. But now,
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as you get into kind of two
thousand and nineteen, two thousand and twenty,
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messaging has become a new way to
collaborate it's become a new way to
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do work and, frankly, I
think it improves on a lot of the
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problems that we had with traditional ways
of communicating. And it is very generational.
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And it's generational in the sense that
kind of whether it's the millennial or
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the Gen Z generation, they didn't
grow up like it through your careers using
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email. They didn't grow up in
conference calls and meetings and their remote,
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highly remote workforces where people have flexible
schedules, where these type of team based,
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kind of collaborative tools are what is
needed in order to run today's types
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of businesses. And with those constraints, you see messaging being the way in
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which people want to collaborate and communicate
and, frankly, the the current new
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generation of employees find email very tedious. So that I know of. I
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don't know that I engage with any
acts in flat. Is that by design?
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So are flag APPs supposed to just
sort of run behind the thenes and
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you don't know that you're using them
but sort of they this within flak,
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or are they just not very many
of them yet? Well, I think
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there's over one five hundred different slack
apps out there right now. I think
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the slack APP directory, if I
check, has probably been out for the
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last two or three years. I
think it's a new way in which to
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deliver products and if your product is
if the use case that you're designed for,
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works well in messaging, then delivering
it as a slack Bot or a
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slack application makes sense. And that's
that's the same thing for any type of
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medium. Right. Certain mediums are
good for certain things and when we think
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about messaging, messaging is really great, at least in our world at all
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type we'd use messaging for is for
monitoring, alerting and notifications, and if
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that's the core value that you're bringing, then messaging is a great way to
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deliver it. Messaging doesn't work great
for a lot of things. That's a
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very limited medium. It's a very
constrained medium. If you don't have all
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of the interactivity that you have on
a smartphone or a tablet, you don't
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have all of the screen real estate
that you have in a browser, you
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don't have the kind of the rich
interfaces that you see in other mediums.
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But what you do have, if
you have the attention of the team,
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give the attention of individual people,
you can have conversations with them in a
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way that makes a lot of sense
and it's ideal for things like chat bots,
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voice spots, monitoring, alerting,
anything that is timely and has a
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layer of ai in it. It's
great for AI solutions and you see that
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manifesting itself in Chat Bots, customer
service Bots, voice spots, because you
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know, voice is a type of
messaging as well. You certainly see that
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with Alexa. So when I talk
to folks about not only what we're building
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but, you know, how can
you take advantage of tools like slack and
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Microsoft teams, is to remember that
it's a new medium and it's a medium
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that has a lot of constraints,
but sometimes constraints, constraints, can really
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refine what you're trying to deliver and
to think about the use cases and see
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if your solution can take advantage of
messaging, and I think our solution does,
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and I think there's a lot of
great digital assistance and bots and other
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forms of kind of messaging ai out
there and I think it's just a new
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way to build applications and I think
that's where the trend is moving right now
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and it's every bit as transformational as
what we saw with the browser and the
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web and then what we saw ten
years later with mobile and the APP store,
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and I think now we're living in
this messaging first kind of world and
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it's a good spot to be.
It's a great spot to build tech G
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for sure. Thanks for Lana out
for so like I said, I knew
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I was going to learn something.
There's others called day. Apparently I need
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to give up the program if I
don't know that I'm engaging within the indies
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ass. I don't mind. I
don't mind being the ADA here in these
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conversations. So I would like if
I'm the one who knows the least in
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the room, then I think I'm
doing something right. Yeah, but now
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that I've successfully, Michael, picked
your brain and see what I could get
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out of it, it's time for
you to tell us about what you are
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putting in it. So talk to
us about a learningly source that you know
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that you've been engaging with, that
it's either in forming your approach or maybe
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this just thought you excited these days. Yeah. Well, I'll do a
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couple kind of shoutouts here. I
guess really for some folks that and in
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our ecosystem that we work with in
Atlanta. We have put together a group
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of companies who are building in messaging
platforms and there's a lot of folks out
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there that are doing things with chat
bots, customer service spots or building within
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other messaging platforms. There's some great
companies here in Atlanta. We have a
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little group that we get together,
we do meetups. We talked about how
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to build chat in their faces,
interfaces, conversational assistance, conversational Ai,
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and we see some really great things
going on. So anybody WHO's in Atlanta,
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please reach out let me know.
We can kind of add you to
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our group. And there's some great
companies here that are doing some stuff inside
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the slack ecosystem and the other one
that's really big as intercom. I don't
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know if you're familiar with intercom.
How Intercom actually puts digital assistance on the
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web and creates chatter interfaces. There
are friends over at user feed have a
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great podcast called made with grit and
I'd encourage everybody to check that out.
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User feed builds their product inside of
the intercom ecosystem and there an intercom APP.
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We're slack APP, and so we
work with these guys a lot just
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on how the best practices are for
developing these type of conversational interfaces and messaging
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applications. So I'd encourage you guys
to check that out, but otherwise to
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keep up in touch with what we're
building at La type, you can go
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to Llo typecom news. We write
a weekly brought blog post and we're covering
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things from the slack APP ecosystem.
We're talking about messaging platforms, we talked
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about startups. We are a text
ours company and we're covering our journey through
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text ours and we are about two
thirds of the way done on that.
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We will be showcasing our product at
text stars Atlanta Demo Day on October thirteen
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and if anybody again is in Atlanta
and wants to know more about the text
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stars program you can reach out to
me. You can find me on twitter.
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My handle is M Sing Bush one
at twitter, and also you can
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follow us at Llo typecom or la
type on pleare you cover it at all?
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I didn't even get to ask you
how to how to connect, because
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you are already on top of it. Man. I really appreciate, like
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I said, you coming on here
and talking about this for our listeners,
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because it's not something that I've gotten
to put in front of them before.
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I'm excited for where this whole thing
is going and I like your answer to
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the you know, where are you
learning from question, because essentially you're talking
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about learning from the community and not
and not in like an insular kind of
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way, not just from folks at
Your Organization, but folks in the industry
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overall who are trying to do something
big and have a larger conversation. That's
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something that I, and certainly the
folks here at sweeps media, one hundred
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percent get behind. So, Kuldils, you for that. A million other
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questions I could ask you about this
subject that you just kind of introduced to
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me today. So it sounds like
we'll have to have you on again sometime,
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Michael, but the first for now. Thank you so much for being
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on the show man. You have
a good one. Thanks. Hey,
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we totally get it. We publish
a ton of content on this podcast and
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00:15:15.000 --> 00:15:18.200
it can be a lot to keep
up with. That's why we've started the
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00:15:18.320 --> 00:15:22.309
BETB growth big three, a no
fluff email that boils down our three biggest
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00:15:22.350 --> 00:15:28.710
takeaways from an entire week of episodes. Sign up today at Sweet Phish mediacom
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big three, that sweet fish Mediacom
Big Three