The Exchanges

Q what people are paying me for. There's gotta be a better way, a better model. And you created it. You called it pepper content. And it was a marketplace where you personally at first were matching customers with writers. The writers were in India. So the price was lower than it might be where you are today, which is San Francisco, right? That's the, that's the model that you had.

A Yeah. And you know, the model evolved quite heavily where we now have a global talent network. So we have about, uh, close to one, 50,000 freelancers who've applied to write for Pepper. And this is not just now writing as well. So, uh, just a minor correction, we also do design, video production, and so it's a multimodal in terms of what we do, and the talent pool is now global. So, 50% of our user base on the talent marketplace side sits out of the US. So, and we work only with the top three percent. So, our value proposition to an enterprise today is we have subject matter experts In retail, cybersecurity, crypto, uh, who are U.S. native experts. And we're also working with global organizations who need regional experts. So Pepper also produces content in 45 languages. So we right now are working on, uh, with customers where someone needs Arabic strategy for search, or someone needs a native Chinese Transcription. So we have that level of, you know, global imprint. So far from, you know, where we started on.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. And you know, the model evolved quite heavily”

Q I have no idea you're doing all that. Ok, images too. You and I were talking before we got started about Kling and other tools that you're using because it's not just for text, it's not just for video. What are you doing with images and what AI tools are enabling you to do that?

A Yes. So we use, uh, a bunch of AI tools, all the standard ones, including run, uh, you know, runway for video, mid journey for creative. Uh, what we're seeing very interestingly with this is we're doing a lot of always on creative content. So imagine you go on DoorDash and Instacart's app, you will see these banners floating around, which are offer banners or which are talking about deals and all of that. Yeah. Now imagine, and you'll be surprised, most large enterprises still do it humanly, in a manual manner, including the push notifications, including the creators and all of that. We've created these custom engines, which can produce banner images, add creatives, add skills like 30,000 creatives over the last six months. And we're eB testing this with data to see which creatives work. And then automatically that's queuing an engine to the LLM engine to refresh that creative, to see how we can write more CTRs up. Okay. And with scale at say Instacart or DoorDash level, you'd be surprised that this translates massively into revenue. So we're seeing CRM teams or customer lifecycle marketing teams and all these big consumer apps heavily iterating on, uh, AI usage. In, um, no push notifications, in anything customer comms, which could drive more revenue and acceleration on.

AI assessment note: “mid journey for creative... We've created these custom engines, which can produce banner images”

Q But if, if you were smaller and trying to create content using AI today, what would you do? What tools would you use? How would you think about it?

A Yeah. So, I would recommend that don't go in for the staple, put it on chat, get whatever it's throwing out, and put it out. You need to make content more intuitive. See, what's happening is with this onslaught of AI sloth being put out on the internet, uh, people need to be smarter about how they create content. Uh, they have to, and especially, it's becoming harder with Showing up on LMS as well. So you need to build an authority into whatever you're doing. So here's what I would do. I would actually go and create videos, and I'll start putting myself out on LinkedIn. I'll use those videos and repurpose those videos into content, and then create articles about me, and then start referencing that he, ah, say, Anirudh Singla spoke about this on ABC, and start building more trust signals around it. I would create a lot of content on LinkedIn Pulse. Just as an experiment, you'll see, LinkedIn gets cited almost on 12% of ChatGPT citations. So, if I start, I want to build out a personal brand as a founder, um, you know, to drive leads for my business and eventually grow, I start putting out a lot of content on LinkedIn Pulse, which starts to drive this narrative of a UGC growth lever, which an LLM would want to promote, and Embed my video at the top of the article and then have a summary of that down there. So you got to become intelligent about the way you put out there yourself. …

AI assessment note: “So here's what I would do. I would actually go and create videos”

Q how to use AI to write in a certain voice. Like, you can kind of write using my voice. There's enough content out there. What about video? Are you saying now that you can even have talking head or do you need to have images only? Can you do a talking head like me and move and gesture and everything? You can. What are you using for that? That works.

A Yes. So there are a lot of proprietary tools right now. So these are not like, you know, mass tools at this point. Uh, we're experimenting with a lot of them. Nothing where I've seen huge success where I can tell you that, you know, hey, this definitely works, but I can tell you this entire concept of Synthesia. I don't know if you've heard of them. They, they've now obviously expanded into a much larger company. Uh, I used to, uh, you know, I had a friend who used to run this company called rephrase.ai. Which used to do this, which was basically, um, uh, synthetic voice cloning, and, um, they got acquired by Adobe eventually, because Adobe wanted to introduce them in their Gen AI, uh, you know, platform features, but there's 100,000 of experiments being built and run on these things.

AI assessment note: “there are a lot of proprietary tools right now... concept of Synthesia... rephrase.ai”

Q And also far from just humans. AI is the next thing. How did, uh, how, how does AI and humans, how do AI and humans work together with you?

A Yes. So I'll give you a quick evolution of how Pepper also evolved. So we started off with this managed services marketplace for content production, where we were matching customers and these writers. And then, um, we tumbled upon this thing called Chad, called GPT. And this is two years before Chad GPT. This is 2019 we're talking about. And we were the first 50 users to get access to this. I had cold email Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. To get access. They were happy to give it to us. And, uh, we realized very soon that, you know, if you put content on a number line of one to 10, uh, there is probably, and you know, this is my prediction that time, and obviously the strength changed. One to four, which is high volume, low value content will get automated. And, uh, everything above that five to 10 will need experts enabled by AI. I can say safe to say that with AI now it's one to seven or one to eight, and we keep getting better and better. And that's when we realized that AI needs to be, uh, natively embedded in workflows, uh, to produce content at scale and do it effectively. So we built a lot of tools. We built this tool called PepperType.ai that was an AI writing tool that scaled from zero to half a million users while we were running the marketplace. And we realized that Hey, there, there needs to be this marriage, which embeds both. So we started building in this agentic t…

AI assessment note: “combines how AI can enhance humans to produce content at unparalleled scale”

Q And what did you write that got a response? Was it just, I want to use this software that I've heard about?

A No, I think, I think we, we kind of detailed out our use case in terms of what we could do and so on. And I think, uh, you know, the good thing is the use case sticks because we said, hey, we have this marketplace of 100,000 of writers, which can be AI turbocharged and aligned. And we want to build tools on these elements, which are more personalized and customized for different platforms. So I think that That was probably the most, you know, sensible use case that made sense. Um, and yeah, I think they, they gave us access. It took us 20 days to build out a platform called PepperType, which we launched on Product Hunt. We were number one product of the month, and we got to a million, got to a half a million users in one year just for that tool. Uh, but we did realize that just standalone tool won't help. You have to intricate this Deeply into the workflows. So like I've been giving examples this entire podcast about make it workflow oriented, which can give value to the customer so that it can compound growth. You don't solve for short term.

AI assessment note: “we said, hey, we have this marketplace of 100,000 of writers”

Q Ok, I'm with you now. I see this, and this is what you do at scale. How many articles would you say that Pepper, ah, is responsible for creating a day?

A So just for reference, we've done about seven, 50,000 articles, uh, till date. Uh, there have been months where we've done 30,000 articles a month. So we've seen scale of all kinds. Um, right now what we're focused more on is not just, you know, huge volume content production, but content which will actually drive meaningful outcomes. So Pepper has now evolved into a content-led growth engine. Where we're helping companies show up on AI search, uh, through our own platform, and the entrance, interesting, interesting part is we have workflows built in, uh, these are autonomous workflows which can accelerate content velocity, which can accelerate things like content refresh, which can give you a sense of what are low hanging suits that can help pick up traffic at scale. Because if you see, 80% of the websites in the world, traffic's been going down. People don't know how to respond. So we're working with CMOs. So we do a lot of these CMO dinners. So we've done, like, 40 CMO dinners over the last one year, and you'd be surprised. Everyone's still not able to get that, you know, it's not about SEO being dead. It's now SEO plus GEO. We call it GEO. Generative Engine Optimization, which is Uh, it's creating new real estate in the internet, and suddenly it's not just about optimizing your own website. You need to think about platforms like Reddit, Quora, uh, having a Wikipedia page. Y…

AI assessment note: “right now what we're focused more on is not just, you know, huge volume”

Q But the first layer is AI starts the work, creates the first draft always, then a human being takes over from there. Do you then take what you've learned from how the human being adjusted the AI content and feed it back in for now? You do. Talk to me about that.

A Yes. So we have, uh, what we call as a reinforcement loop where, um, and it's not just, uh, Andrew about AI generating the first draft and the human reviewing it later. We've, as part of the platform technology we've built called Nimbus, and we're publishing a lot of blogs on our website now, which talk about how Nimbus works. We are able to, uh, create unique insights and fetch data. From a lot of sources, and throw that into the LLM, and it's not like I'm going to charge GBD and putting in a topic saying, hey, help me create content on this, and it gives me something, and I use that. Uh, we chain multiple prompts, and these are very complex prompts that we write for enterprise customers, and we chain those responses, and each response's output goes as an input to the next response. So for example, I want to create an article on something. I'll pick up that topic. Uh, um, my platform technology called Nimbus, what it'll do is, uh, we create workflows where we'll put the topic on SERP. We will see the top 10 URLs that come in. Our platform will scrape all those top 10 URLs and see what, uh, what all have they covered? What are the H-ones, H-twos, all of those things. We combine all of that intelligence into one flow. And then identify what's the most optimized SEO focused article, uh, and obviously now it's GEO, so we are also inculcating workflows you need to optimize for AI s…

AI assessment note: “and it's not just, uh, Andrew about AI generating the first draft”