Matt is the Co-Founder of Omneky. His company raised $11m and presented at Techcrunch Disrupt in 2022 (before the generative AI wave!)
In August 2021, Matt joined Omneky as a Chief Business Officer.
The first month went well. Working side by side with the founder Hikari they hit record numbers.
The second month he took full responsibility. And sales crashed…
The calendar was nearly empty, leads weren’t inquiring and he started to worry.
But he quickly fell back on his years of experience at AT&T and worked hard to uncover the reasons for this.
Matt and I discuss short-term fluctuations in lead enquiries, and what the best strategies are to make sure you are networking properly and building trust with your contacts.
He soon understood that short sprints of pressure can stimulate innovative thinking, but it is crucial to allow for periods of rest to prevent burnout.
In today’s episode, we also talk about:
Tune in and listen to Matt’s journey, a lesson about the unpredictability of market fluctuations and the importance of testing different messaging strategies consistently.
This discussion is a humane, insightful, and personal exploration of the world of startups, sales, networking, and AI technology.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
Matt is the Co-Founder of Omneky. His company raised $11m and presented at Techcrunch Disrupt in 2022 (before the generative AI wave!)
In August 2021, Matt joined Omneky as a Chief Business Officer.
The first month went well. Working side by side with the founder Hikari they hit record numbers.
The second month he took full responsibility. And sales crashed…
The calendar was nearly empty, leads weren’t inquiring and he started to worry.
But he quickly fell back on his years of experience at AT&T and worked hard to uncover the reasons for this.
Matt and I discuss short-term fluctuations in lead enquiries, and what the best strategies are to make sure you are networking properly and building trust with your contacts.
He soon understood that short sprints of pressure can stimulate innovative thinking, but it is crucial to allow for periods of rest to prevent burnout.
In today’s episode, we also talk about:
Tune in and listen to Matt’s journey, a lesson about the unpredictability of market fluctuations and the importance of testing different messaging strategies consistently.
This discussion is a humane, insightful, and personal exploration of the world of startups, sales, networking, and AI technology.
More from James:
Connect with James on LinkedIn or at peer-effect.com
People and startups. They want to help you. So, like when you reconnect with people, you never know where that could go. It could go to you know a new sale, but that's not even like your. That's not the agenda. You're trying to help people, but it could lead to like some huge business opportunity of reconnecting with old people. I follow through about 99% of the time. When I say I'm gonna do something, I do it, and if I don't, I'd let someone know the reasons why I'm not gonna do it. And then the last thing is follow up. So, like in sales, everything it's all about follow up. I think the biggest thing I've seen at startups is that a lot of your organic interactions can open the door for a lot more introductions and stuff to people you never thought you could have met.
Speaker 2:So I'm delighted to welcome to the show today Matt. He's the co-founder of Omnikey. They've not only raised 11 million US, but they've also were talking about generative AI tech crunch disrupt in 2022 before the whole thing kicked off, so welcome.
Speaker 1:Matt, Thank you so much for having me. James Really excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Oh, my pleasure and think things are going really well today, but on the show we go back to moment when they weren't. When are we going back to?
Speaker 1:All right. So, yeah, when we think about a story of challenging times, there's lots of ups and downs throughout everyone's careers. One of the challenging parts was so I'd spent 13 years at AT&T before joining Omnikey. Omnikey is a generative AI advertising platform, and it was founded by a person named Hikari Senju, an amazing, visionary leader. New generative AI was gonna get good enough at a point to start changing the content landscape, and that's where we're at today, and so I joined Omnikey back in August of 2021.
Speaker 1:So a little over two, almost two and a half years ago and one of the challenging times was during month two. So my background when I joined I'm chief business officer, so I took over everything sales and revenue related and I've done a lot of sales in the past, met with thousands and thousands of customers. So in the early days that first month I joined Hikari on the team and Hikari runs back to back calls the entire day, talking to sales calls, investors it's like 10 calls in a day. So I joined. We took all the calls jointly that first month. We have the best sales numbers in the history of Omnikey. During that first month, because both our skills work so well together, I implemented some of the stuff I knew from sales in the past did a lot of the complimentary things that people can do on joint sales calls, with the excitement of a founder that he's the founder and CEO of these calls. And then month two, I'm like all right, I'm ready, let's just take all these calls on our own and we run digital marketing to bring in leads, and so I am extremely well versed in digital advertising and marketing now.
Speaker 1:But those early days I was unaware of the market fluctuations of advertising. So, like you can feel it in real time if you're using advertising, leads can go up and down on a monthly or weekly basis, just based on what's going on in the economy, what's going on in the news, things like that. And month two, on the job, I went through this period of time where all of a sudden, we went from having like six to eight meetings a day to having like like one or two a week in a couple of weeks. And I'm like what I was like what is going on right now, like going from you know that large company finishing up in corporate strategy, joining and going through this period of time where we went through this great growth month to when I take over and feeling responsible for, like this drop in lead generation from inbound leads coming from like digital advertising. And then it was a challenging moment.
Speaker 2:So just to recap, basically, you join, you take you've been 30 years in your role before. This is something that you know. You come in month one, you're dual running, things are great like record month. Month two you take over solely and it's just ghost time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what happens was is so we use our own product. Digital advertising we'll talk about probably later is our base to bringing in leads, besides referrals and partnerships and a whole other. But so what happened was people will automatically go to your website from an ad in the book of meeting A lot's where a lot of them come from. We have some outbound motion too. Well, month two, all of a sudden, just the leads slowed down and all of a sudden, like, the calendar was like somewhat empty and we went from having all these meetings and closing. If you close meeting with 50 customers in a month and closing 20% of those, you got 10 sales in a month in those early days and then all of a sudden, it slows down on month two and you're like is it me? Is it something that happened here? What's going on? I just took over. We have to.
Speaker 1:In the startup, the growth goals are three times year over year many times so you have to keep that constant trajectory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a tough moment and it was what I learned through two and a half years of this, though. Now is you go through a lot of different periods of time where, if advertising is one of your bases to growing your business. There can be short term fluctuations and you have to learn to adapt to. You know, one of the things we do is multivariate and creative, test different messaging and the algorithms of these platforms change, but you have to stay number one consistent in advertising through those challenges. And then two, test different things as you're going through those challenges that will, you know, bring back leads in full force. So, but then the following month, believe it or not, all of a sudden, like there's like a light flitch, a light flick and it we were on fire again. So everything like returned back. But I went through a period of about 30 days that I was, like you know, questioning a lot of things about how am I going to succeed?
Speaker 2:Because there must have been a lot going on there. So, like 13 years in one place in a big corporate joining a small startup, it's month two. You've got a visionary founder. What is going on going on in your mind?
Speaker 1:You know, I always like, had entrepreneurship in my heart and I really did things differently at AT&T and I hadn't been sell, direct selling, or I've been leading teams actually and doing corporate strategy for my last two years. So I gained a bunch of skills that help with sales but, like I hadn't been doing it like in startups a lot of times, you could be doing a lot of things you did earlier in your career. At certain points You're going to be selling all the time. In larger companies you can move away from sales into more like structured roles, but at startups you're doing things. You're doing strategy. I'm doing aspects of corporate strategy, but you're also doing like sales on a lot of the early stuff that you were doing, because you have to wear a lot of hats to figure out how to succeed.
Speaker 1:And it was a period of you know, questioning like what can I continue to do to make you know turn this around as quickly as possible and succeeded this? And you know, one thing I always do is I try to keep an even keel and not get too high or too low. It's a hard, hard thing to do when you go through those challenging times, but I'll always try to try new things and constantly be, you know, testing new things throughout these whole processes. And then what you realize if you keep up that constant drive in activity whatever the activity is in sales, meeting with customers, reaching out to certain customers I actually made a strategic networking list. You know, like before I started I went through all my contacts and had this whole process in play with my 90 day plan of how we're going to, you know, start to grow the business from where I can bring value, and I actually executed it, like 90% of that list. Looking back, and there were those challenging times but I actually followed that plan and a lot of those strategic contacts.
Speaker 1:Like during those weeks when I had less to do, I was reconnecting with a bunch of people I hadn't connected with in years, and that's the other beautiful thing about startups is all your relationships where you've helped, like I want to help anyone, I can, anyone out there. If we've connected on something people in startups they want to help you. So, like when you reconnect with people, you never know where that could go. It could go to, you know, a new sale, but that's not even like your. That's not the agenda. You're trying to help people but it could lead to like some huge business opportunity of reconnecting with old people.
Speaker 1:So during those tough times I went back to the basics and was like spending a lot of time on that during that month when it was slower, and then all of a sudden things get on fire and you've implemented all these new processes and we've we've adapted and evolved as the, as the company's matured and the products matured. Our strategy has really evolved from those early days as well, on on improving efficiencies. To dry it like close sales faster and bring in better leads. So those early days too, like when you you start to realize who your ideal customer profile is. It takes a lot of repetition listening to customers, meeting with a lot of customers you potentially can't sell to. In the early days you start to refine that process and and make sure all your time spent on the most valuable activities and customers where you can help bring the most value.
Speaker 2:So, in retrospect, having that plan sort of kept you sane during those periods, was there ever? Was there ever a sense of, oh, have I it's start up for me, have I been corporate for too long? Or a sense of what's the founder thinking?
Speaker 1:Well, he's extremely loyal, and so am I. So that's the thing. But the early days when you take on something new, there's a lot of you don't know right, and I believe that. But when you start not succeeding at something like I'm hard on myself sometimes, I'm like the hardest critic. I start questioning a lot of things, and so that was a challenging time. But I had a lot of these periods in my 13 years at AT&T that were really challenging, like some of the most stressful times.
Speaker 1:I had jobs I took on, where one point I took on this leadership role where I was managing a team in the mid-market space, and it was one of the most challenging segments of that job. You get promoted into that role because you do a good job. They're like you're gonna take over this role over here because you're doing such a good job in this acquisition role, and now you're managing a book of customers that had been customers for a long time. There were a lot of challenging issues and you had a team that was half there Like 50% of the people you're trying to hire these roles for and so, like you've got this huge book of customers without enough resources, with a huge commitment goals, and I went through some like times where I was like reading leadership. I was reading all these books on leadership and what can you do to like get on the yellow bus, you know, get on the bus with the team, get everyone rowing in the positive thinking and stuff, and a lot of those hardest times where I was like almost impossible. Times like really help you like not give up and just keep chipping away. Like my constant learning up through all of it is like keep chipping away at it, building skills that will bring you know future success. Like build them in your daily routine every day like new knowledge learning.
Speaker 1:For me it's a number. It's like three different things that I really worked on in the past. One was has to like stay active and exercise because it helps your mental capacity and stress, so like I have to go there in the morning, early in the morning. The second is like working on continued skills like public speaking or financial acumen or learning AI, things like that. Build them in your daily routine.
Speaker 1:And then my last one is I follow through, and follow up is like my base to success, like the base that I do so like I follow through about 99% of the time when I say I'm gonna do something, I do it, and if I don't, I'd let someone know the reasons why I'm not gonna do it. And then the last thing is follow up. So, like in sales, everything it's all about follow up. Like every single communication I have with any internal or external person I'm working with, there is a follow up of exactly what we spoke about. It goes in my notes or my CRM for customers and through years of those relationships as they progress, you can talk about the exact things that you uncovered in the last time, keep digging deeper and then eventually they lead to sales. You could sell I mean you could sell it to any customer over a period of two to two years or five years, with the right follow up and reaching the right people.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting because it feels like there's a sort of one of the constant in the podcast is that it's not a one to two year game, it's a five to 10 year game and it feels like this sales strategy very much ties into that. Like is track, follow up and if you're methodical you will be successful with these customers. But what's the next thing?
Speaker 1:is. Is it going? Oh, I was going to say when you look at like a period of 100 customers that are in your group, I used to say five of those are ready to buy from you. Today, 70 of those could buy from you within 12 months and the remaining 25, or whatever, would buy from you within two years. It's the right connection.
Speaker 2:Hmm something like that, I guess, a really nice way of looking at it. I suppose a lot of people stop at the 5%.
Speaker 1:That's right. Well, you have to find the 5% out of the 100 first, and then that's one of the challenges as well.
Speaker 2:But it's quite interesting if you've got like a long term sales strategy, it might also, in those moments when it's kind of like you're new in the role, the leads aren't there. It's kind of like I know I'll be successful over a two year period but it's just staying strong in the first six months.
Speaker 1:Maybe If you're thinking that those 70% is not going to come good in the first year, yeah, yeah, it's a continued follow up and now it takes it like back then it was calling and emailing people. Now there's a lot of other digital touch points you can have. There's these communities that you can be involved in. There's communities all over the place in different interest groups. There's LinkedIn. I know you're active on LinkedIn, I'm active on LinkedIn. You get podcasts and different things as you connect with people. That is shared and you get to see other people's work they're doing out there. So it really takes like a lot. And then from a brand perspective, like from Omnike, it's a constant brand building digital ads, a lot of different channels of follow up, email campaigns, advertising, organic news, pr. These all complement each other through the progression of your brand and it could take some time to land certain large enterprise customers. It's going to take a lot of touch points.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean a lot of people say that for startups, stay away from enterprise Just can't take too long. Yeah, what I was going to ask is there's a sense of you said startup people are willing to help. That's quite interesting because in a recent podcast the theme was like don't expect your friends to help. Do you think that there is in the startup ecosystem? Then found like actually more to get support from people almost you don't know within the startup ecosystem than people that you might know outside of work.
Speaker 1:I think the biggest thing I've seen at startups is that a lot of your organic interactions can open the door for a lot more introductions and stuff to people you never thought you could have met.
Speaker 1:And I'm looking at this from coming from one of the largest companies for many years in the world, like top 10 amount of people in the world, like AT&T was, and a lot of times you're networking only internally through a lot of the years.
Speaker 1:I mean you're meeting with a lot of customers in those sales roles, but then you go to these type of roles and everything. A majority of your time is spent meeting with different stakeholders investors, customers, your employees recruiting but you go to a lot of these events and stuff and people are just so willing if you know your solution complements something they do to open that door for other people or investors. You know, like one of our amazing investors and advisors, he's been so amazing at opening the door for all these different, all these different people and companies that you know are in his, his, his Rolodex, and I just have been amazed by that and it's something that I really always want to try to give back to people as well. Anyway, I really want to be the you know the giving personality where I want to help others and then it will naturally, you know, hopefully come back to you, but if I can help others, that that is a good place to be.
Speaker 2:Oh, I think, I think, yeah, as soon as we focus on value creation rather than value taking, I really think good things happen. As soon as you start shifting into how do I capture as much value as possible that I think we can run aground.
Speaker 1:I agree, james, I know. And the other thing is just trying to really be present. You know, in a lot of the situations today is like when you're at events or these other things, like really just clear your try to clear your schedule when you're in, when you're somewhere, and really connect with the people there.
Speaker 1:Not be on your phone checking on like 10 what's happening, kind of yeah, because a lot of those like organic interactions are, you know, can you never know where they can go and if you have have to jump into, like calls during the middle of an event you're at or something like back to back, you never can just have that organic you know natural conversation that you never know what happened if you're not present.
Speaker 2:So how many, how many events do you try and go to them? We?
Speaker 1:a couple of year. Right now we don't do as many. As our our company grows, we'll do more and more because it can be really expensive to travel a lot of these and we're like an early stage startup and then the value creation from these events is I mean, you can get a booth or you like the best case scenario, you get to speak at them. So I've been fortunate enough to get to speak it a couple of them over the past two and a half years. Those are great because you get to go. You get to go and you have like a direct roll at them. And then boosts are great too. But then that cost can get pretty expensive for an early stage startup and you don't know the return on it. So we go to a couple a year whenever we're especially like the CEO goes to a lot of them because he's invited to speak on a lot of stuff as well.
Speaker 2:And, as you said at the top of the show, like including tech crunch disrupt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he was the top. Yeah, he got this present generative AI in 2022 before the big wave in 2023.
Speaker 2:I think this idea of real world connections and people, willingness to help. It's quite a nice one like, and it feels like we've become so focused on, like, building connections online through LinkedIn, but I still I really think that this kind of real world, the real world connection, still has more power. What do you?
Speaker 1:think. I think it's a combination of both. I think it's a combination of both now today, but I do believe completely the real world and our interactions are key. And then everyone you connect with it's important to also connect with them virtually, because then you can see everything they're doing.
Speaker 1:In the periods of time that are between and actually virtual is part of the reason I've been able to reconnect with some, you know, old colleagues. Like it was amazing. So one of the events I attended last year I got to reconnect with one of my high school friends I played football with, who's also a founder. He's a founder of a technology startup and a marketing advertising startup and I got to and I got to reconnect with him for a week and you know our relationship has strengthened a lot through that and there's a lot of ways we could potentially work together in the future with different opportunities with my company, omniki, and his company. So you never know, and like that virtual connection, letting people know you were going to an event that you're going to and then reconnecting reconnecting that way, saying hey, I'll be, there really helped.
Speaker 2:I mean, given that you guys are in this genitive AI space and there is a sort of virtual connections, how do you think genitive AI can help with?
Speaker 1:connections. So the amazing parts about generative AI is is it allows you to get to scale many areas of content generation that used to would have taken days, months to generate. Now you can, with the right workflow, you can empower different areas of content generation from I like I like to say this 1080 10 rule. So human input 10%, the initial 10%, what you want to accomplish, some background, ai learns from that. Whatever your input is, then AI can do about 80% of the work and then the last 10% again takes human input because it's gonna there's all there's needs to be human feedback at the very end, again to review things, make sure you know, reword or redo certain parts of it, because AI can't do that part, but it's, it's streamlining about 80% of that middle area and where we really see and what we, where we're going with it is per greater personalization. So when you're you're dealing with and personalization isn't to one, to one, yet you hear that buzzword all the time. I'm not going to say like every James, like not everything's gonna be exactly personalized for you today it's, but you can reach much more smaller pockets of people with like four different major criteria kind of we look at. One is audience. And when I say audience, it could be different verticals for a saw like a SaaS company, like entertainment, retail or consumer product goods or something it could be.
Speaker 1:The second one is geographies. So you could be in all these different cities. You could be in UK, you could be in France, you could be in Japan. Now AI will allow you to generate content in all these different languages, with localization and input the city that you're close to and who you need to speak to in that area.
Speaker 1:The third one is products and services. So a lot of companies were, or even you could, talk about content in general. They would focus on like one or two major ideas or products. Now you could scale that across hundreds of products because General AI can help create images and do different elements of it or videos. And then, finally, the fourth is the platforms and dimensions. So, like James, when you do your podcast, you release it to 10 different places. Well, in advertising and content, like other types of content, you might have to follow your customers to Meta, google, tiktok websites, mobile apps, like all these different things you have. Ai can help format all that different content to go to market faster without like having a human have to resize 100 different things, reformat it and things like that.
Speaker 2:Does that lead to better communication or more noise? If everyone starts using General AI, I start creating lots more content more easily.
Speaker 1:I think, well, we're in paid advertising again. So, like we focus on ads that you'll see on websites and social media and TV, and I don't think it's more noise, because the thing that's changing with these algorithms today is they don't want to release personal information. You have GDPR and Europe. You have California Data Protection Act like they protect data so much. Now these platforms like Meta, google, all these they have such really smart algorithms where it recognizes what's in an ad, the copy, the image, all this stuff is detected, just like kind of how Omniki does with computer vision, and then it distributes it based on who they believe it's a good fit for.
Speaker 1:So you do need a lot of content, because if you're trying to reach certain people that are potentially buyers, you have to have content that resonates with them, otherwise the platforms will not distribute it. It's kind of like this reverse method is targeting becomes like more and more restricted with personal information. All the platforms say you need more content to distribute more effectively. And what do you want in that content? You want content that resonates with your customers and you need more of it now.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting. Could you guys have foreseen how much the market has shifted in your favor then? Because it feels like all these trends. Is that what led to Omniki? Yeah, so how all these trends we're going to converge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Hikari, like I mentioned when I joined, I was really excited to meet him. He's a Harvard Computer Science grad. This is like his second startup or third somewhere in there, but he thought of it in 2018. So this is way early days and he knew AI was going to continue to get better and the input would be data and analytics. So one thing I didn't mention that much is Omniki looks at performance data across all those different ads that I mentioned earlier and we can help quantify the elements that are performing well and then we use those as an input to generating new content. But Hikari's the best visionist I've ever worked around, like his whole life. Mission is to make Omniki successful and for us all you know, the IPO in the next five years. But yeah, he saw this in 2020, he had GPT-1 and GPT-2 in this product.
Speaker 1:In 2021, when I joined, we had been using a lot of different GPT and different elements of and then building this platform that simplifies the whole workflow for customers.
Speaker 1:But he saw this way ahead of time before we saw this wave and when we talked about lead generation earlier, when we had that one tough month you know my second month on the job, but we went through a whole lot of periods of time with ups and downs on leads, but then when, when Dolly came out OpenAI's Dolly came out, that was the first one.
Speaker 1:Then chat GPT came out and that hit like the whole market knowledge of the C-suite and these tech forward looking technologists. All of a sudden they understood what AI did. It like was like a light switch for the people that weren't AI backgrounds. And then we had the crazy 500 leads a month, every single month, like 500 demos listening, you know, which was really great for Omniki because we have a small and mighty sales force but a couple. We get to like, listen to all this customer feedback like what are the challenge? What are the challenge? What are the business problems that you want to solve in advertising? How are you using AI today? And then take all that and then start to build all the challenges we hear into our next versions of the product.
Speaker 2:And also we're hearing, if you went from like 500 leads a month, surely that's all down to you, man. I mean first, like, if you're going to take the blame for that second month, surely you get the credit for the five months as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, the 500 was a. It was like back to back to. We had like four people on our team taking like back to back like seven or eight calls a day. It was like crazy for a while. And then we started. You know, like we mentioned too, you have to get, you start refining your process more about who you can have time to meet with, and we just got more and more granular on like the next couple steps of figuring out who's the right people to meet with and telling the others that we're not, you know will follow up in the future when we have the product that's a good fit.
Speaker 2:So if you were to look back and give yourself like one piece of advice in that second month, what would it be?
Speaker 1:Well, this is the challenging thing. So I look back at all the time and all these challenging times you learn so much. And so there's this hard pendulum. Almost that I think about a lot is I can have a little bit of anxiety right from things, like whenever there's pressure, I start to think too much, but it turns on drive. So, like you know, like when those things happen for me it's like this reaction work harder, figure out the way to do it, so like during those hard times it kicks you into another gear.
Speaker 1:You just can't have those periods for too long because it can turn into like really negative. And that's one thing I like to mention too is like pressure, a little bit of pressure, can be very positive. Undo pressure. That is where you change the whole way you act and treat people. I don't like that and I've done that before in the past and earlier in my life. But I would say keep that, even kill. It's going to be a roller coaster, so hold on, and you're going to go through a lot more of these periods over the next couple years. That's what I'd probably tell myself, just like get used to this feeling right now, because it's going to happen a couple times a year.
Speaker 2:I think what's really nice about that is saying, yes, it will happen. But if you find yourself in that zone for too long, the response needs to change, because you can't go harder, live on adrenaline for extended periods of time. There are serious consequences to doing that.
Speaker 1:Right, yes, completely. It cannot go on for that long of a time, but for short sprints it can improve your drive and then help you think of new ways of doing things.
Speaker 2:Well, that has been really, really useful. Thank you for sharing and good luck getting to 1,000 leads a week.
Speaker 1:I hope you're, we will get there quite a curve. Yeah, thank you so much, james.
Speaker 2:As you heard today, coaching opens up a whole range of insights and areas to explore. If you have a potential moment to revisit on the podcast or just want to learn more about coaching, just book in for a 30-minute chat with me at peer-effectscom.