Mastering Tech Growth

by Mike Sirius

Stop Wasting Time with Bad AI Outputs: Get Results That Move the Needle with Jonathan Mast

For today’s episode, Mike is joined by Jonathan Mast, the founder of White Beard Strategies. He is a leading voice in AI prompting mastery with over 400,000 followers. Jonathan has helped 1000s of business owners and entrepreneurs unlock AI's full potential using his structured four-step framework. Enabling some of them to experience a 5,000% uptick in their ROI. This episode is a must listen if you want to stop wasting time with bad AI outputs and start getting results that actually move the needle. KEY TAKEAWAYS Technology is there to be leveraged to make your life and that of others better. Adding value for your customer is where the growth is. Most people are using AI wrong and blaming the tool when they get poor results. AI can´t read your mind, you need to give it context and invite it to ask you for clarification. Give AI an avatar to write as e.g. You are an expert copywriter who specialises in …. One prompt is rarely enough, you need to provide a framework e.g. To write a book, you need to provide hundreds of prompts. It is still hard to get AI to only use the body of knowledge you give it to create content. Mike shares his method for doing this. AI works with a limited amount of memory, so if you give it too many instructions in one go, it soon loses the thread and goes off track. Johnathan shares several ways to get around usage caps and gain access to all of the AI models. Make using AI a win for your team. Learn how to leverage AI. Doing so turns you into a sought-after employee. Do something new each day with AI. To overcome the hallucinations issue. Trust, but verify. When brainstorming with AI, use your voice. Weirdly, you get much better results. It is also good at transcribing. AI does a great job of organizing and contextualizing what is sometimes a very random stream of thought. The fastest way to learn AI is to use it consistently. BEST MOMENTS 00:55 "It´s not AI that´s broken, it´s your prompts." 7:12 "Give the AI permission to ask you clarifying questions.." 21.15 “If we give it too many things to do, it's simply not going to follow through on that… it works best in a prompt if we give it 1, 2 maybe 3 things.” 38.59 ”When you're rolling it out at first, make it a win for your team, not just a win for the company.” 44.29 “Trust but verify.” 46.03 “By giving it (AI) permission to ask you questions, it'll avoid most of those hallucinations.” 51.18 “Have a conversation with AI. Don't expect to give it one prompt and get perfection.” 53.17 “We make too many assumptions that AI will figure it out. In other words, we don't give it enough context.” 57.53 “We are not at a point, nor do I see us ever getting to a point, where AI is that proverbial money tree in the backyard.” ABOUT THE GUEST Personal Website: https://jonathanmast.com White Beard Strategies: https://whitebeardstrategies.com AI Prompting Mastery: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aipromptsforentrepreneurs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathanjmast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanjmast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@jonathanmast_withai Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathanmast Threads: https://threads.net/@jonathanmast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathanmast/ 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.

E59

Mar 26, 2025

1:03:14

Revolutionise your SEO to acquire traffic that converts into actual sales with Aditya Jain

Mike speaks to Aditya Jain, the co-founder of Passion Fruit and a leading SEO growth strategist who has helped companies move beyond vanity metrics and generate income from their SEO efforts. They discuss why most businesses get SEO wrong and spend too long chasing rankings instead of revenue. Many are targeting high volume low intent keywords. Aditya Jain is going to change the way you think about and use SEO. He provides truly practical advice that works in the modern marketplace. Including how to use AI to improve targeting and speed up content creation and data analysis. KEY TAKEAWAYS Companies waste months chasing rankings instead of revenue by optimizing for high volume, low intent keywords that never lead to sales. Position yourself to solve your customer’s pain point and target those in your SEO. Regularly review this, Aditya shares some of the tools and framework he uses. Ask your customers what their problems are. Use Aditya´s method to ensure you get honest answers and insights. When it comes to building your website, your North Star is matching user intent Your pages also need to be search engine and AI LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT and Perplexity) friendly. If they are not, your content will not be found online. Write with the intent of answering your customer´s questions, especially when using AI. If you don´t, you will get a high bounce rate, and your traffic will crash. Measure how each page is performing, including the sales generated. Use SEMrush, it is a cheap and quick way to get started. AI enables you to dig deeper into your data and sometimes that of your competitors. Don´t just follow trends, you need to focus on what you really do and want to do. BEST MOMENTS 0:18 "High traffic doesn't pay the bills, conversions do." 00:28 "Understand which keywords actually drive revenue and how to adjust SEO in real time to capture more business." 2:24 "What drives growth is your customer’s pain point, figure that out and position yourself to solve that problem." 7:40 "We actually have a living, breathing document of all the common questions and concerns etc that our customers have." 10:16 "90% of pages receive no organic traffic because they optimise for broad, low intent keywords." 13:28 "Your North Star is not just revenue, it’s actually – am I matching my user's intent and am I building topical authority?" 15:10 "The readability of your code base, etc., is increasingly important." 33.10 "Any marketing strategy that involves producing content or doing SEO just comes down to delivering on customer needs.” 50.17 “Reviewing the data actually just tells you what type of customers want you, and then you choose, is this a customer I actually want?” EPISODE RESOURCES https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditya-j-985a92108/ https://www.getpassionfruit.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.

E58

Mar 19, 2025

56:20

Master the Art of Effective LinkedIn Outreach To Generate Leads and Close Six-Figure Deals with Peter Kaliuzhny

Mike speaks to Peter Kaliuzhny, the founder of GetSales.io, who is an expert on B2B sales. He has closed numerous six figure deals with Fortune 100 companies. Peter leverages LinkedIn and can turn any profile into a lead generation machine, which is free to use. Peter explains how to optimise your LinkedIn profile, create break-through first connection messages and generate inbound profile links. He shares how to understand your customers and use that knowledge to generate massive leads and sales. KEY TAKEAWAYS Greatly boost your earning potential by creating LinkedIn content that showcases your expertise. LinkedIn is a powerful lead generation and sales tool, not just a place to find a job. Tech growth is about leveraging technology to get better results and generate sales. LinkedIn marketing is free. Optimise your LinkedIn profile to gain 30% more views and 3x more engagement. An effective profile reflects your values, your goals and outlines how you can help. LinkedIn marketing is not about spammy DMs that will get you blocked. Make true connections and turn those relationships into sales. Peter doesn’t use LinkedIn SEO – he explains why. Actively drive inbound links to your profile. Peter explains how. Consistently create high-quality content that solves your customer´s pain. Be careful when using automation with LinkedIn. Peter shares how to do it properly. Start slowly and use the same IP. You have seconds to make a positive first impression. Peter shares how to compose your first message. AI can be helpful when creating your initial messages. Humour triggers emotions which helps build a connection. Personalise your message and make it truly relevant to your prospect. Ask people you already know well who they think might be interested in your service. Regularly review and re-balance your network. BEST MOMENTS 1:00 "Master the art of safe and effective LinkedIn outreach." 8:50 "Test, see how the conversation goes…. Don't just pitch something right away, explore it instead." 14:37 "Really connect … if you want to sell, you never sell. You have to think about how you can help them resolve their problem." 15.05 “Optimise your profile, fine tune it so that it is aligned with your goals.” 27.02 “Post really good content, consistently. content that helps them to solve that pain.” 31.46 “You have to identify those leads and understand what you really want …once you do that, you can go for automation.” 48.01 “Never send a wall of text.” 59.29 “Don't ask for a call.” 1.11.03 “Create content related to your job, to your expertise, it is super cool.. you increase the value of yourself….” 1.11.18 “They will be paying you more later on, if you show your expertise.” ABOUT THE GUEST https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaliuzhnypeter 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.

E57

Mar 12, 2025

1:12:50

Turning Promising Ecom Brands into $10m/Yr+ Profitable Winners with Sabir Semerkant

Today, Mike is joined by Sabir Semerkant, a top E-commerce growth strategist, with 25+ years of experience. Over the years he has helped brands like Coca Cola, Canon and Tommy Hilfiger to achieve massive growth. Sabir has turned that expertise into his 8D Method - a step-by-step framework for unlocking scalable, profitable e-commerce growth. His rapid 2x program has helped brands grow by an average of 108% in just 21 days In this episode, Sabir breaks down pricing, marketing, product research and profitability strategies that will transform your online business. He also shares what not to do, his e-commerce sins. KEY TAKEAWAYS 90% of e-commerce startups fail within 120 days. Sabir knows why and how to stop that from happening to you. Be sceptical, there are a lot of scammers actively selling things that will kill your business e.g., toxic backlinks that will mean your business disappears from the search results. Sabir teaches his students to take care of all of the 8 dimensions an E-commerce business needs. Step 1 is optimising your site for customer attention. You have 1.7 seconds to stop the scroll. Landing page speed is critical. Optimise it for your market and the devices they use. Be laser focused and tackle one vital thing at a time. After addressing customer attention, your bestselling product landing pages are next. Master marketing across multiple platforms. Use your data to understand your customers and turn them into repeat buyers. You need to get people to buy from you at least once every 6 months. Your product pages need to be optimized structurally, for SEO and content. For e-commerce, SEO is vital. You have to put your face on your brand and tell your story. Couponing works, but constantly using promos will bankrupt you. Even small incremental improvements can have a massive cumulative impact, e.g. If you improve by 40% your sales actually increase 3x. BEST MOMENTS 00:39 "E-commerce in 2025 is a battlefield." 02.14 "Tech actually is the thing that helps you elevate and accelerate your growth profitably." 13:25 "As an entrepreneur, you need to have a healthy dose of scepticism.." 21:00 “Don't dwell in the past, … the realities of 2025, are very different from the realities of 2020, and 2022 ." 30.00 “What is the consumer attention span in 2025? - 1.7 seconds.” 41.03 “Most Shopify owners don't know the behaviour of their consumers.” 54.30 “If you're not correcting these problems, it's de-ranking you.” 1.01.36 “When you are doing couponing to that extent, you're robbing yourself of your future.” 1.20.23 “I'm Mr. Miyagi … I'm telling you how to wax on, wax off.” ABOUT THE GUEST https://growthbysabir.com/masteringtechgrowth Harvard Business School article - https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=62855 https://www.luckyorange.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.

E56

Mar 5, 2025

1:26:00

The Art of Recurring Revenue: Lessons From Scaling a 5,500+ Employee Business with Pranav Dalal

Mike speaks to Pranav Dalal founder and CEO of Office Beacon, a leader in remote staffing solutions that has grown the company from just five employees in 2001 to 5,500+, without any VC funding. He and Mike talk about how to identify your competitive advantage, leverage it, and how to automate successfully. They also discuss how to create an irresistible hook to break through the noise and get your conversion rate into double figures. Pranav also explains how you can try Office Beacon´s fully managed remote staffing free of charge for an entire month. KEY TAKEAWAYS Businesses that increase customer retention by 5% can boost profits by 25 to 95%. Service is just different levels of speed and price - you can get that anywhere. You've really got to think about those unique things that you can provide. That is your competitive advantage. Your hook has to be unique. If you use the same software as others, your email and LinkedIn titles will look the same as theirs and not get opened. When your hook is right your conversion rate will be in double figures instead of 1 or 2%. Businesses that automate at least 30% of their sales operations experience higher scalability and profitability. But automate gradually. Focus on building trust with your consumers. At Office Beacon, they only automate if they can get payback within a year or so. Work with customers as you make changes, test carefully and roll out gradually. To master tech growth, stay on top of trends and understand how the global climate could affect your business model. Pranav shares how he does this using his Horizon method. BEST MOMENTS 1:54 "Business leaders need to make sure that they stay aligned with their vision, along with industry and consumer trends." 5.45 "Businesses should be looking forward and asking how we gonna position ourselves within the market." 16.17 “It's just different levels of service, speed and price that you can get anywhere. You've really got to think about those unique things that you provide.” 31.49 “Make your initial messaging as short as possible.” 37.59 “Don't invest in automation or big technology until you're sure that that process is ready for it.” 45.14 “The biggest mistake I see is that business owners look at the sales funnel as just a transaction. What you're actually selling as a business is trust.” 1.08.48 “We are hiring top talent in these countries and our pricing is in the range of providing at least a 50% ROI to customers here in the US.” 1.09.19 “If they want to try out our service, we'll give them one month free to test it out (Office Beacon).” – how to sign up is explained ABOUT THE GUEST https://www.officebeacon.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/officebeacon/ https://www.facebook.com/officebeacon https://www.instagram.com/officebeacon/ Blue Ocean Strategy - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Expanded-Uncontested/dp/1625274491 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.

E55

Feb 26, 2025

1:10:31

How To Turn Your Expertise Into 7 Additional Income Streams with Katrena Friel

Mike is joined today by Katrena Friel to discuss how to turn your expertise into 7 new streams of income. Katrena is a business mentor, TEDx speaker and award-winning author who has spent 25 years helping professionals turn their skills into thriving businesses that give them real freedom. Katrena reveals how you can turn what you know into 7 new income streams and do so within the next 90 days. KEY TAKEAWAYS Personal growth is the powerhouse behind any business growth. Whether you are actively developing it or not, you have a personal brand. People already have an opinion about who you are. Your brand walks in the door before you. Having a strong personal brand does not require perfection. To achieve that you would need to constantly wear a mask. That is exhausting, so you need to be authentic. Before you can be yourself, you need to know who you are. When deciding what to change, focus on what is causing the most pain. Leverage one on one contact opportunities to make true connections that turn into investments and sales. Teach what you know through books, training, coaching, mentoring, facilitating and consulting. Ideally, you want to take people through each of those formats. Writing a book does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and it is not that difficult to write. Use your book to get on stage and connect with people who will buy your course and hire you as a coach, mentor or consultant. Offering a free discovery session is a highly effective way of attracting coaching and mentoring clients. Katrena explains the difference between being a trainer, coach, mentor, facilitator and consultant. Following Katrena´s approach you can publish your book and set yourself up as a public speaker, coach, mentor and more in just 90 days. BEST MOMENTS 2.18 "Personal development is just as important as professional development." 3.55 "Tech people are missing the people piece." 10.30 "Your brand is out there and it's there in their perception of you. That's happening regardless.” 13.55 "To hold that mask up of perfection is burnout waiting to happen." 15.21 "The more authentic you are, the more endearing you become." 34.48 “Speak to educate. Don't speak to sell or market yourself, be genuine, authentic, real, and your tribe will find you and connect.” 41.27 “The book still has gravitas, you're not the expert, until you've got a book.” 51.03 “Create a signature program for people, one that creates transformation. An end-to-end solution.” 55.30 “These online programs just aren't cutting it. People want personalised.” 1.04.38 “You need to mentor people, and other times you need to facilitate some sort of change.” 1.23.43 “I just teach you the bit that you need to know and when to do it.” ABOUT THE GUEST https://www.becomingtheexpert.com.au 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.

E54

Feb 19, 2025

1:29:04

Combining SEO and AI to Create Effective Content and Land More Customers with Jade Pruett

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 seas

E53

Feb 12, 2025

1:07:47

Using Predictive AI to Attract and Retain High Value Customers with Eran Friendinger

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.

E52

Feb 5, 2025

1:02:25

Developing the Right Founder's Mindset to Fuel Tech Growth with David Hirschfeld

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 understan

E51

Jan 29, 2025

1:24:53

Turning Frustration into Inspiration to Create Tech Success with Tanmai Gopal

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.

E50

Jan 22, 2025

1:18:12

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