Mastering Tech Growth

For this episode, Mike sits down with Jade Pruett, an award-winning SEO specialist and founder of HelloSEO, with an impressive client list that includes CNN and Business Insider. She uses AI to create authentic and effective content. Doing so in a fast and effective way that was just not possible pre-AI. She shares several in-depth techniques that you can start using immediately.

Learn how to turn AI from a shortcut into a secret weapon for building trust and winning customers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Truly understanding your customer´s pain points is key to mastering tech growth. 
• SEO is still essential for reaching customers online.
• AI is making it far easier to write content that appeals to the right type of potential customers, while also pleasing the ranking algorithms.
• Google and other algorithms prioritise content created by Experts that have Authority and are Trusted (EAT). Jade explains how to leverage this.
• When you give AI an exclusive body of research to work from, it produces unique and more accurate content.
• Re-hashing what the AI finds online isn´t enough.
• Jade shares a keyword research technique she uses to better understand the users pain points and the questions they need answered.
• You always have to edit what AI produces.
• If you publish AI content you will break trust with the reader and Google.
• Learn how to use canonical links.
• SEO has a better ROI than most lead generation.
• You have to constantly produce new content.
• Authentic backlinks and digital PR will boost your ranking.
• Use your network to create guest post backlinks.
• Podcast backlinks are powerful.
• Track and understand your metrics on all platforms.
• AI will potentially replace traditional search engines. You need to evolve.

BEST MOMENTS

00:35 "Using AI the wrong way can hurt your credibility and waste your time… but when used right, AI generated content can become your secret weapon." 

1:58 "Really understand your users, what their pain points are… interview your users." 

8:32 "EAT… Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, that's what Google is looking for." 

10:01 "We increased her traffic by 400%, in a month." 

19:34 "There's no one prompt you can put in and get something great … it is time consuming." 

22.08 “You want to be pulling from your own information, otherwise, you're just getting information that already exists online.”

25.52 “Breaking trust with your users .. is going to hurt you in the rankings.”

40.56 “You never want to stop maintaining your SEO processes …it´s like watering a plant.”

43.41 “There´s no quick fix to backlinks.”

50.22 “Google Analytics is going to give you more than you need, and it's free.”

55.53 “By the time it's gone through human hands, you can't tell that that AI had a part in it.”

ABOUT THE GUEST

SEO is Jade's superpower. A skilled SEO Specialist, she has empowered hundreds of brands and businesses to gain visibility in Google and connect with their ideal clients. As the Founder of HelloSEO, Jade works 1:1 with small businesses to develop SEO strategies and achieve killer ROIs. Her client partnerships are customer-driven, insight-led, and fully transparent. Empowering businesses to grow and flourish never gets old. With Jade, you don’t just get an SEO specialist. You get a long-term brand advocate and support system. 

https://helloseo.com/seo-report-card-tool

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

Mike speaks to Eran Friendinger the cofounder and CTO of Voyantis, a company that helps businesses grow using AI. Including big brands like Lennar, Miro, and Figma that have used his strategies to get 20 to 50% better results from running their ads. 

Scaling in 2025 isn't about doing more. It's about working smarter with AI. If you're not using AI to help you, you're wasting time and money while your competitors are speeding ahead - The right AI deployed in the right way helps you to make you better decisions and predict what your customers want. Freeing up your time to focus on what really matters.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Companies that foster data driven culture are 3x times more likely to outperform competitors. 
• Understanding the right KPI to measure an outcome is essential. If you are not measuring the right thing the insights will be worthless.
• Budget for experimenting with AI.
• Set your company culture up to accept and work with AI and to be data driven.
• AI can be used as a natural extension to your gut feeling, your intuition. You can´t effectively crunch the data to confirm that gut feeling, AI does it in seconds.
• Predictive analytics works for every industry.
• You have to spend money on working out how to use AI in your company.
• At some stage the data pipeline will break, and the AI will fail. You have to monitor output, spot issues, have contingencies and fix things fast.
• You can tell AI to write 100 SQL queries, show you the results and highlight which ones are most interesting.
• Automating business processes can reduce operational costs by 30%.
• AI is good at running marketing campaigns, but it needs some human input.
• Providing Google and Meta with as much consolidation information as possible will improve your campaigns.
• AI is great for customer support, but make sure it knows when to send the person to a human.

BEST MOMENTS

00:40 "If you're not using AI to help, you're wasting time and money while your competitors are speeding ahead.."

5:57 "We were in the dark and we had a flashlight, and we were looking for those interesting nuggets of data points or KPIs, and then AI just turned on the light." 

6.58  "AI could be the missing link to scaling smarter, not harder."

15:12 "Choose what's important to your business." 

22.25  "The data will break. Don't expect that it is going to continue performing… Do some risk management." 

 32.17 “You can create automations by sending the right feedback to the AI." 

42.22  "Automation can handle repetitive tasks, but businesses still need to maintain that human touch." 

53.08  "Look far enough into the future .. there´s nothing to stop AI from mimicking all human behaviour ." 

GUEST RESOURCES

https://www.voyantis.ai

https://www.youtube.com/@Voyantis-ai

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eran-friendinger-5b38506

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

Today, Mike speaks to David Hirschfeld, a seasoned entrepreneur who has worked on 30+ tech and software startups to discuss why developing a founder mindset is critical. David explains why founders need to switch from a creative to a managerial mindset.

He shares why taking a clinician's approach, testing and measuring results, embracing failures as learning experiences, and being open to pivoting are all so essential. David also explains how you can use AI to automate and improve workflows while generating revenue early and keeping the cost of customer acquisition below one third of their lifetime value.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• An evidence-based approach is essential.
• Generate revenue from your customers early. It makes you less reliant on investors and you quickly learn what your customers want.
• If you are not out there in front of your potential customers from the start, that is a sign that you do not have the right founder´s mindset. David explains why and how to address this issue.
• You need to generate revenue from your customers early on. It makes you less reliant on investors, as well as more attractive to them.
• Look for a way to quickly produce something simple and get it in front of potential customers.
• At the founder stage, you need to switch from a visionary mindset to a managerial one.
• Value stream mapping will help you identify bottlenecks.
• As soon as you have a workflow that is generating decent results, create a playbook for it.

BEST MOMENTS

2.52 "Clinicians don't believe in anything. They just test and measure, then make a plan based on the results of those tests."

7:58 "Founders often exhibit an obsessive leadership style and autocratic decision making, which can lead to poor decision making and strain team dynamics." 

13.08 “ Founders shouldn't love their product. They should love their customers' and be committed to mitigating their customers problems." 

30.37  “I looked to see where my business flow was kinked ... and focused my energy on (removing) that restriction." 

34.41 “It starts to become very obvious where to focus your effort based on your cashflow.”

45.39 “When you're ready to bring someone in … give them the playbook.

55.03 “Predictability means if I spend more money in that area, I should see an equivalent return, in terms of what we're producing.”

1.03.17 “Make sure that they follow the playbook.”

1.04.49 “Founders that are really successful don't think of them as failures. They think of them as tests.”

1.07.14 “They (highly successful CEOs) are brilliant contingency planners.”

1.21.17 “If you want to accelerate through investment, having a conversation with an investor is a completely different discussion, because you've got a growing customer base.”

EPISODE RESOURCES

https://tekyz.com

https://tekyz.podbean.com/ - Scaling Smarter Episodes.

www.scalingsmarter.net - Schedule an interview

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/ https://x.com/tekyzinc 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/ 

https://www.facebook.com/dmhirschfeld 

David Hirschfeld is a 35-year software development veteran with a unique perspective on startups, technological innovation and business growth. A former physics student from UCLA, David's career spans leadership roles at tech giants like Computer Associates, Texas Instruments, Intel, and Motorola, before launching his first startup—which grew to 800 customers across 22 countries and was successfully sold in 2000. 

Since founding Tekyz Inc. in 2007, David has emerged as a strategic advisor specialising in AI-driven workflow transformation for scaleups and in the design & development of startups. David's expertise bridges cutting-edge AI technologies, workflow optimization,  and startup ecosystem dynamics. 

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

This episode is all about finding opportunity in frustration and turning it into a platform trusted by 1 million+ users including tech giants like Airbus and Wal Mart. Mike speaks to Tanmai Gopal the CEO and co-founder of Hasura that enables users to easily build, run, govern and evolve high-quality APIs for all types of data. Reliably providing them with accurate real time data that can then be used in numerous ways to serve customers effectively and drive growth.

Tanmai shares the story of Hasura’s development, how to scale effectively and how to use PromptQL to turn AI from a flaky assistant that regularly lets you down into a tool you can rely on.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

●      Getting the timing right is crucial. Understand your market and product to work out what to focus on when and launch when the right tech and demand is there.

●      The Hasura team started out by offering consultancy services and made good money, but they stopped doing this to focus on product development. You can´t spread yourself too thin.

●      Identify the problem that is at the front of your customers minds, solve that and you will attract the product champions you need to gain momentum.

●      Be cautious about how you use AI. Even with access to live data it still hallucinates. Prompt QL is making AI far more reliable.

●      Letting the AI figure out how to achieve your objective and build its own program to achieve it is a far more effective way of using AI.

●      If you are tempted to build your own product, just do it. You will soon know whether entrepreneurship is for you.

●      Failing fast is still the most effective way to create a product that solves people's problems

BEST MOMENTS

2:39 "This episode is about finding opportunity in frustration and turning it into a platform trusted by tech giants."

25:20 "To have the experience of the best kind of products and have access to high quality, instant, secure data is essential."

32:34 "What´s really important is to be aligned to how people think about a particular problem – What is hot for them?"

48.17 “For AI to become a part of our day-to-day lives, it needs to become a part of our processes and our workflows.”

52.03 and 54.08  “We actually tell the AI to first plan what it wants to do with the data, then write a program to extract the right data, aggregate it and present it.”

56.23 “The business logic was the actual automation flow.”

1.13.28 “To be aware that there is a right time where things happen is very important.”

1.16.40 “You create the perfect timing by doing proper market research and just understanding the biggest problem spaces. You create a product when people are ready for that product, so the adoption is just simply there.”

ABOUT THE GUESTS

https://hasura.io

https://promptql.hasura.io

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.

If you are juggling too many ideas and do not know which one to focus on or are stuck because you are overthinking everything, this episode of the Managing Tech Growth podcast is for you. To discuss how to navigate your way out of that situation and avoid it in the future, Mike is joined by David Boice. 

David is a serial entrepreneur who, at just 22, founded his first business. Today, it is worth hundreds of millions. His current companies employ 500+ associates who are mainly engaged in developing and providing technology for several transport industries.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Achieving growth takes time, but once you have it, maintaining momentum for a few years is relatively easy.

• Once you demonstrate growth, attracting capital becomes much easier.

• Focus on solving a problem that exists. If you solve a problem only you and a few others believe is an issue, you will go nowhere.

• Constantly striving to improve your understanding of your customers and their problems is a growth essential.

• Set up a customer advisory board of 12 to 15 engaged clients, a mix of big and small. 

• Identifying your exit strategy before establishing your business is counterproductive.

• Be careful with automation. Often, to ensure that the customer gets the best service possible, you will need to insert humans into your systems 

• Be positive publicly. Regularly congratulate people for their achievements. Discuss problems, but primarily in the context of solving them.

• You will meet resistance to change regardless of whether it is good or bad.

•  Put in place systems that enable you to step back. If you don´t you will burn out.

• Not every founder should automatically become the CEO.

BEST MOMENTS

5.46 “There's a whole category of private equity firms called growth investors.”

8.36 “Just make sure you're solving a problem before you start looking at anything else.”

22.18 “We kept thinking, and kept staying curious about, what could we do next? What do our clients need? What problems are we solving?”

25.08 “We weren't as prepared for how profitability was really going to drive the ultimate value of the company.”

26.59 “I am very much against pre-planned exit strategies.”

36.19 “The customer advisory board is a great way to have a constant focus on where you want to go.”

44.36 “Because clients don't always know what's possible… our job is to come up with the really big, visionary ideas.”

47.51 “Bring in people that have the skill sets that you don't have.”

1.00.36 “If you manage your downside, the only outcome that is left is positive.”

1.14.22 “Change, whether good or bad, is going to be resisted with equal intensity.”

1.22.49 “You can be aligned at the head, and you can be aligned at the heart, but the best alignment is at the wallet.”

EPISODE RESOURCES

https://teamvelocitymarketing.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

Today, Mike is joined by Ivan Gekht a Siberian Aerospace Engineer and CEO of Gehtsoft, a custom software development powerhouse. For the past 20 years, he has delivered complex solutions for numerous industries. Ivan has led transformative projects at both startups and billion-dollar enterprises. He explains why, regardless of the industry you are in, developing and delivering products at speed is essential.

Ivan explains how the need to move at speed impacts the way you structure your business, go through development, deploy it, market it and more. Ivan covers using Agile, value stream mapping, decision making, creating a robust and sustainable team and much more.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Prioritize speed and the ability to solve problems quickly. If you can´t move fast, you will fail.

• If it takes just a few days to create the product, then it takes 6 months to bring it to market, you lose. 

• Not using Agile well will slow you down. Using examples, Ivan explains how to fix that issue.

• Use value stream mapping.

• Take a holistic, value stream-based approach to identify and address bottlenecks. This approach improves efficiency by 30%.

• Don´t end up with just a few go to people. If they leave, the project can fail.

• Empower cross-functional teams and the product owner to make decisions.

• You can´t 100% solve every problem, you just need to solve it enough to get to the next level and bring your product to market.

• Be truly customer-centric

• Often, asking 8 potential customers the question is enough to validate an idea.

• Achieve sustainable performance by providing a safe, learning-oriented environment.

• You need to learn to fail and do it safely.

BEST MOMENTS

00:38 "Slow teams don't just lose, they get wiped out." 

10:17 "If you know exactly what needs to be done and the outcomes are predictable, you don't need Agile." 

17:52 "The majority of the time is wasted not on doing the work the wrong way, but rather on doing the wrong work." 

21:35 “They (the product owner) should be trusted … to make these decisions." 

31:20 “Harvard Business Review reports that organizations using value stream mapping can identify bottlenecks that lead to 30% improvements in operational efficiency." 

51:04 “It's not about perfection… it´s about making it good enough to hit the market … that's where you get the speed." 

57.12 “For the user stories … your personal opinion doesn't matter. It's not about you, it's about the end user.”

1.05.30 “That emergent knowledge and emergent decisions come up through the teamwork process to be able to deal with the complexity.”

1.27.24 “Make sure that everything you work on brings value to the people who are paying for it and make sure to shorten time to market.”

ABOUT THE GUEST

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-gekht

https://www.gehtsoftusa.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

Today, Mike is joined by Ian Myers, founder and CEO of Oceans. He is an expert in building high-growth companies by hiring the right global talent, delegating effectively and creating a company culture which enables everyone, including remote workers, to thrive.

Ian and Mike discuss the best way to source talent from across the globe while avoiding common issues. Including, fraud, inadvertently breaking labour laws, and people working full-time for multiple companies and not delivering. They also discuss how to improve communication and inspire people to successfully work proactively.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• When you hire the right person, you will see an uptick in growth.

• Hire talent from sources that are usually overlooked by your peers.

• Look for people with overlapping skill sets. Soft skills matter.

• If you realise after week 3 you´ve hired the wrong person, go back to the drawing board.

• High-growth companies need thinkers who can pivot.

• Global teams are the future. They are productive, resilient and work 24/7. Forbes reports that those hiring global talent grow fastest.

• Employing globally keeps costs low, which is especially important for startups.

• Using an agency that specialises in providing companies in your country with global workers helps you avoid many of the most common pitfalls. How is explained in the podcast.

• Successful companies deliver the culture the people they hire are attracted to.

• Hire using referrals from your employees.

• Being good at delegating is a superpower; you are 33% more effective.

• Tell your people they are expected to be proactive. Make it a foundation of your culture.

• Pick someone people trust and respect and get them to introduce and lead changes.

• You have to manage remote workers differently e.g. your communication has to be more precise.

BEST MOMENTS

1:03 "If you still think productivity can only happen in an office; you're clinging to an outdated model." 

25.24  "Make good on the promises of the culture you're promoting." 

34.39 "Referrals, when hiring, are overlooked by many firms." 

37.49  "Innate intelligence, adaptability and understanding of how to pick up new things… that's what's going to matter the most." 

48.32 "We give our people permission to be proactive by telling them they need to be. ." 

59.20 "You no longer need to hire all-arounders … AI can handle most all-around tasks." 

1.06.28 “Using channels to communicate instead of DMS is a huge unlock for visibility alignment across remote teams.”

THE GUEST

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-myers-oceans

https://www.oceanstalent.com

HBS delegation - https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/how-to-delegate-effectively

AI global economy - https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/artificial-intelligence/publications/artificial-intelligence-study.html

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

Today, Mike speaks to Michael Nicastro who is the VP group, director of technology and head of accessibility at Digitas. They discuss a very overlooked aspect of scaling tech ventures - digital accessibility which is not just a compliance checkbox. It is actually a growth strategy that unlocks new markets, drives revenue and helps your product reach its full potential. 

Michael is passionate about ensuring that digital products are accessible to everyone and uses quality assurance and automation to drive growth without sacrificing inclusivity.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• 1.3 billion people worldwide face barriers when using digital products. Some have permanent disabilities, and others have temporary disabilities.

• Companies that are ignoring accessibility are losing out on an estimated $1.2 trillion annually.

• Lawyers are literally hunting for companies that are not complying with accessibility laws. The fines are high.

• In 2025, the EU is introducing new accessibility legislation.

• All areas of the business are involved in delivering true digital accessibility.

• There are 40 to 50 keystrokes that a page reader may use to read a URL. Each page needs to be tested to ensure each keystroke works, which is time-consuming.

• Outsourcing checking accessibility is far more cost-effective than doing it yourself. AI may change that.

• If your cart process is not fully accessible you lose sales.

• DAIs force you to focus on the experience you offer for all customers.

• Standardisation and automation are essential.

BEST MOMENTS

00.32 "If your company isn't making accessibility a priority, you missing out on revenue and losing customers.”

12:12 “Screen reading one URL can take up to eight hours. You have to do it for desktop, PC and Mac, Android and IOS." 

20.03 “If there's an image there needs to be an alt text behind it that tells you what the image is.”

30.46 “When you fix issues for those who have a disability, you're fixing issues for all.”

38.11 “There are trillions of dollars in the hands of those with disability and their families across the planet.”

42.24 “Passion is vital for mastering tech growth.”

57.40 “Ask - How can I build automation one time?”

ABOUT THE GUEST

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-nicastro-2862061

EPISODE RESOURCES 

WCAG Guidelines - https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/#guidelines

European Accessibility Act 2025 - https://www.deque.com/blog/european-accessibility-act-eaa-intro

Tools

• Screen readers

• Mobile (Native)

• IOS Voiceover

• Android Talkback

• Desktop

• JAWS https://support.freedomscientific.com/Downloads/JAWS

• NVDA https://www.nvaccess.org/download

• Colour Contrast Analyzer https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker

• Digital Accessibility checker https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/axe-devtools-web-accessib/lhdoppojpmngadmnindnejefpokejbdd?pli=1

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

In this episode, Mike speaks to Jason Barnard, CEO of Kalicube. Using cutting-edge Brand SEO, he shapes brands on Google to reflect a growth-driven vision. Jason unpacks strategies for controlling your brand story in Google and all of the AI engines so you can take full control of your online reputation, be easily found by potential customers and convert them into clients.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• When it comes to tech growth your brand is the most influential factor. 

• Your personal brand is just as important as your business brand.

• The way both Google and AI platforms represent you is critical.

• Your content needs to be packaged in a way that the machines can understand, so they can find you and showcase what you offer.

• Your website is the touchpoint AI and Google trusts and uses to verify who you are and what you offer. In their eyes, that website is the foundation stone.

• What you publish on 3rd party websites and how you reference and connect that content on your personal website makes a huge difference in getting found in the SERPS and AI searches.

• If you do not take control of your brand, it will be incredibly easy for a malicious actor to take control.

• How you structure your About page and align 3rd party sources with it is important.

• Focus on the sites and URLs the machines think are important. The Knowledge Graph will help you to do that.

• How you manage any career pivots matters.

• Publish in the places your potential customers are looking.

• Being found online is just the first step. People will research you, so everything said about you or by you, matters.

• Reputation issues can be fixed, but it takes time.

• Track what is said about your brand online and quickly deal with problems, including errors in video transcripts.

• Focus on your website. Get the structure right so the bots can understand it.

BEST MOMENTS

2.07 "The brand is going to drive your business growth."

12.32 “The secret to (brand) control is making sure that you have one source of truth about you that you control.”

22.56 “Take control today, by cleaning up and optimising your digital footprint.”

33.01 “Our data from the Kalicube Pro database with 2 billion data points tells you the walk that you need to walk to be the most effective representative within your industry.”

43.48 “Be visible across the entire research environment for the topics we specialize in.”

48.42 “Anybody and any company can and should have a knowledge panel.”

50.31 “Generative AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Bing and Copilot have created new demand.”

1.00.59 “If the algorithm decides that something is true, it will be true, and if it decides that it's true, you have to figure out why it thinks that's true and correct the source of information.”

1.08.26 “Video is increasingly important.”

GUEST RESOURCES

https://kalicube.com/solutions/free-downloadable-guides

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals. 

Mike speaks to Alex Levin co-founder and CEO of regal.io a leader in customer journey optimization through understanding customer intent, Alex has guided companies to go beyond reactive strategies and meet customers exactly when they are ready to engage. He shares how anticipating and responding to customer intent can unlock untapped growth. 

They cover capturing and analysing customer data, including doing it in real time and incorporating contact centre interactions. As well as the current role AI agents are playing and how they are likely to develop.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The rate at which one customer turns into more customers or $1 can turn into more $s is the factor that leads growth.

• Your customer needs and motivators change. You have to constantly analyse and update the way you approach them.

• Obtaining customer data is vital. Without it, you can´t keep your understanding of them up to date.

• Go beyond gathering customer data online. What they click on only tells you so much.

• Contact centre interactions are where you find the gold nuggets of customer understanding.

• Brands that invest in contact centres and reach out to customers at the right times with suggestions or help in a similar way they do with sales and marketing are seeing huge ROIs.

• Customers like you getting to know them and the fact you offer them truly personalised sales and support.

• Certain data patterns are strong indicators of intent. Figure out what they are for your business.

• Customers want contact, but only if it is relevant to them. Tailor your emails, calls etc.

• Analysing customer data is initially costly, so wait until your turnover is big enough or the spend per customer is high enough.

• Invest in building a real-time data pipeline to gain fresh insights fast.

• Now is the time to shift to using AI agents in your contact centres. They can absorb a lot more information than a human and hone in better on what the customer needs.

BEST MOMENTS

04:31 "Whatever works today is probably not going to work tomorrow, so constant reinvention is necessary." 

09:35 "That old low-touch model in customer service does not work." 

16:04 "I'm not in favour of buying customer data .. but there are cases where there are reasons to do it." 

21:35 "As a business understand what behaviour patterns you consider high intent with your customers."

35:10 "No matter who you are, we can ingest the data." 

42:41 "The big thing now is, the shift to AI agents in the contact centre." 

46:38 "Soon they're going to say, I'm so pissed off that x airline sent me to a human instead of an AI agent, because the agent would have gotten to my issue faster. It's gonna flip." 

ABOUT THE GUEST

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexlevin1

https://www.regal.ai

Email: [email protected]

EPISODE RESOURCES

https://www.snowflake.com

https://www.usehatchapp.com

ABOUT THE HOST

Meet Mike, a seasoned tech entrepreneur and visionary with over two and a half decades of invaluable experience in founding and scaling successful tech start-ups. Mike brings a wealth of firsthand knowledge, and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and tech professionals.

As a host, Mike is dedicated to sharing actionable insights, strategies, and stories gathered from conversations with industry leaders, innovators, and experts. With a remarkable ability to distil practical wisdom from guests, Mike curates engaging discussions that resonate with both aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned professionals.