A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas.
If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI, the current zeitgeist, and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.
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Good morning. The U.S. job market is a mess right now. AI is undoubtedly shaking it up, but it’s also empowering job seekers. This week’s story is one such example.
I also love featuring success stories from ambitious female founders who don’t see their gender as a barrier to entry. Enjoy the read!
This week in AI:
OpenAI launches ChatGPT Checkout
ChatGPT users can now shop directly in the chatbot. It’s available for free and paid subscribers.
OpenAI also launches own version of app store
Apps like Spotify and Zillow will be available inside ChatGPT. Users can ask Spotify to create a playlist or Zillow to display properties.
AI-assisted shopping set to explode this holiday season
Adobe predicts a 520% year-on-year rise in AI-assisted online shopping, peaking in the 10 days leading up to Thanksgiving.
Company background: Metaintro
Founded: February 2022
Team size: 7
Funding to date: Close to $8 million. Backed by NEAR Blockchain, Aave, Druid Ventures, Untapped Ventures, Ziba Capital, and Legacy Research.
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She grew 2 million users across 120 countries in a year
Lacey Kaelani is a two-time start-up founder in the HR space. Her first company was a labor marketplace in the media and entertainment space. After a successful sale, she was deliberating what to do next.
At the time, crypto was booming and Kaelani was reflecting on the pain points relating to reference and resume checks. Her thesis was that if you could validate those credentials in a digital resume wallet and have employers access that, hiring would be faster.
The job market wasn’t quite ready for on-chain verification and credentialling, so she landed on an idea that would use data in a different way – creating a job search engine that runs on public data, matching job seekers with every job opportunity worldwide, in a seamless chat-based experience.
Every job that’s listed publicly, in one app. “If ChatGPT ran on open-source and fully focused on job listings,” Kaelani said.
Kaelani, who was building at the bleeding edge of tech and running in these circles, was privy to the AI conversation years before ChatGPT came out. She went all-in down the AI consumer product path.
Within a year, Metaintro had two million users in 120 countries… and this was before the AI wave.
The go-to-market & growth strategy
Kaelani and the team launched into the market with a mix of strategies. “We have a newsletter that goes out to half a million people, friends tell their friends about us, and we have a strong internal referral network,” she said.
“We had some publications write about us and got buzz when we raised money. We dabbled in YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. Our approach was to diversify all of our avenues and throw as much at the wall as we possibly could. Some posts went viral, which ended up driving a ton of traffic.”
Kaelani described her go-to-market plan as “guerilla marketing.” They also did a lot of IRL stuff including hosting 10 job fairs a year and being the official partner for conferences like ETHDenver, Miami NFT Week, and NFT NYC. They also did lectures and workshops at different colleges, posted memes on Instagram, and launched a podcast.
“We talked to as many people as possible – from being in the back of a taxicab talking to the driver about how they can land their next job through to doing 1,000+ person events,” she said.
While the job fairs didn’t necessarily scale, these were powerful events because she could build personal relationships. “All those people have my personal email,” Kaelani explained.
But to expand globally, 80% of the focus had to be online. Metaintro’s major markets are the US, UK, India, and Latin America. It’s most commonly used by professionals from post-college to early 40s, as well as people in the market searching for jobs.
Product-market-fit & differentiation
The AI job search landscape isn’t as competitive as you might think. “In order to run on public data, you need a very talented team, a ton of financial resources, and a lot of IoT. It’s an impressive operation to essentially download the internet, scrub and verify for jobs, and do that every 12 hours. Our product, because of the way we’ve built it, costs us less than $1,000 a month to be able to do that, which saves us in cloud costs maybe $50,000 - $60,000 a month,” Kaelani said.
In terms of the business model, Metaintro is free for everyday consumers. They can use the product and pull as many jobs as they want. Metaintro has an enterprise product that supports workforce development programs that are government backed, where government programs need to track a certain cohort of job seekers in order to track ROI on their programs. So there’s an enterprise version of the product that’s used by program managers, career centers and more, with job seekers that they track.
And they do all of this with a small but mighty team of seven. “It’s less and less impressive the more people you add to your team. I don’t see us ever being more than 15-20 people, because we have AI integrated into everything we do,” she stated.
“When we think about adding teammates, we ask ourselves if this is a technology issue or is this a critical thinking issue – where we need somebody to pilot it, be in charge of this branch, and use AI underneath it.”
Takeaways
Product should always be involved in marketing. Nothing should ever go to market without a human touch point. We’re far away from AI just completely running the business.
Being a female founder likely made the culture more empathetic, which is a good thing. Her gender never got in her way, both in raising or rolling out products. A good product is a good product.
If you’re considering raising VC money, first reflect on why. Venture changes the course of your company, how it runs, and who you report to. Ask yourself if it’s possible to build the product, be the sole owner, be cash flow positive, and even sell. Venture isn’t the only route anymore.
Define if you want to be a builder or wrapper. If you use something day in and day out, and the costs are rising with the product, it’s probably time to build. Think about time, not just finances. Time to market, time to iterate matter more.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Amanda
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