897: Supercharging Marketing with AI - with Max Raphel, Investor & Co-Founder, TrendSights.ai

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back everybody. It's your time to add up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio back with you on another episode of this podcast as we fast approach 900 episodes. Who would have ever thought we would do 900 episodes? Certainly not me. Elvin Freitas probably thought we'd do 900 this entire time as I stand here every single day at 12 central time podcasting.

I guess there aren't that many days that have to go by for you to hit 900 just a couple of years. And we've been doing this for four years. Of course, if you've been listening, you know, we've been able to chronicle what happened during COVID. We've talked about now what's been happening with the FAFSA. We've, if for anybody that doesn't know, I interviewed ChatGPT, which was interesting, probably a year back. And I had ChatGPT on and she, I guess, told me all about artificial intelligence and the rise of AI and how it can help us in our performance for colleges, for universities, for how we conduct our businesses.

And really excited today to bring a new guest co-host. I always love a new guest co-host because it's a 50-50, whether they're going to totally screw it up or just knock it out of the park. No pressure though, no pressure at all. That wasn't a pressure statement. That was just, you know, a statement to our guest co-host today. And one of my favorite people, ladies and gentlemen, Cheryl Boeckman, she is the Senior Vice President for Education at LEED Squared. Cheryl, what's going on?

Cheryl Boeckman: Good afternoon, Joe. I'm just having an on top of the world day. And so hopefully I don't screw it up too bad. I'll do my best.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You're already knocking it out of the park. Look at that. She's already batting a thousand. Cheryl, you know what? LEED Squared, just to talk about it real quickly. You know, for anybody that's out there that hasn't heard of Lead Squared or would like to learn more about it, can you just give us an idea of what you do at Lead Squared and how you do it?

Cheryl Boeckman: Well, what we do is we help colleges and universities recruit the best and the brightest. And we do it with technology that is not a heavy load on the university or the college from a standpoint of it is completely configurable to the way that you run your institution versus having to make it fit to a software platform. And we help them recruit more students. We help them provide a better overall student experience for the entire student journey through our technology.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, and that's just not that's not just a spiel. I will tell you that at my university I brought in Lead Squared and it has helped increase it, particularly our online student base, by nearly 20% with the use of the technology and being able to see the business better. So thanks Cheryl for partnering with me to get my enrollment up. I appreciate it.

Cheryl Boeckman: Yeah, no problem. We, it's our pleasure.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, and I know I'm not easy to work with but you know, we'll talk about that another day. Let's get our guest in right now. He's gonna tell us what's happening in the world of marketing insights trends. You'll get it when when I say who he is. Ladies and gentlemen, he is Max Raphel. He is investor and co-founder at Trendsites.ai. Max, welcome to EdUp.

Max Raphel: Thanks for the invite, Joe. Really appreciate it. What can I tell you? Trendsites is a project that we started nearly four years ago. I've been a big believer in AI for quite some time. And we got out a little bit ahead of the curve. I'll tell you a little bit more about the product and the vision that we have for the product. But we've been in market for a couple of years, actually going to the US, launching in the US next month.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Really?

Max Raphel: Super, super excited about that. We started off as a Spanish first product. We perfected that. And now that we've got a good customer base, we're moving into the US.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Where are you located, Max? Where are you right now?

Max Raphel: Fortunately, I live in a great little community in Guanajuato, Mexico. It's the state of Guanajuato in San Miguel de Allende. It's a nice little expat community, about 200,000 people and about 20,000 expats that live here from all over the world. And I'm fortunate enough to live here. And I've been in Mexico for, geez, about 16 years.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Wow. I was going to say just by the decor and stuff, I said, you got to be someplace really cool because it looks very nice. You know, Trendsites.ai, you said you got out a little bit in front of the curve. Tell me as a founder, investor, what drove you to start this business and how would our audience best understand what it is that you do?

Max Raphel: Yeah. So I think the basis that we found that the company is an AI first product, right? So four years ago, a lot of things have happened in the past four years, but let's just say it was AI first. And since I have a really strong background in sales and marketing, we said, how can we give marketers superpowers, right? Great powers that allow them to make really fast decisions, use AI as the backbone and support them all the way through.

So what we did is actually we didn't go to market right off the bat. We had a couple of beta customers as we built out the product that took about 18 months. And what we did is we thought about this in thinking of it as like the marketing cycle, right? First things first, you have to know what's going on in media, right? So what are people saying about your brand? Is your communication effective? You know, who's it reaching, how much reach so on and so forth. And what's the sentiment behind all of that?

So we created a, let's call it a marketing and content intelligence platform with one module being focused and centered on listening, right? Now that's digitally, you know, on the digital landscape, there's lots of companies that do social media listening, but we took it a step further. We also incorporated traditional media. So what's happening on TV, what's happened in radio, any type of like written publication where we can have a, you can get an API into a subscription. We pull that information in, transcribe it, sentiment, reach, and it's all put up on the platform practically in real time. So if something happened on TV, say 60 seconds ago, it'd be back up on the platform already, right? So the video would be there transcribed, the reach and the sentiment, right?

We train these first in Spanish. That was quite a challenge because as you can imagine, what people say or the way people say things in Spain can be very different to how they say them in Mexico, Chile, so on and so forth. So we did that training. We took that time to train the algorithms on that.

So that first module, we said, OK, so we want to be able to track anything that's being said in any media, right? Then we said, we also, you know, there's, you know, you have competitors and you also want to know what's going on with the competition. You can layer that in and then, you know, what's happening if you're a company that's interested in pricing, you know, pricing product reviews, there's lots of product reviews out there. So we track product reviews in a module. And then if there's anything that's changed on your competitors websites, we track that as well. And if there's somebody that's maybe a detractor or even a promoter for your brand, you can put those up in the platform. Have all that information all in one place. A sentiment analysis is done, the reach of your media plan, we track that.

And then we said, but how can we make things easier? Because there could be a thousand posts in a day, you could have a brand crisis, right? Yikes! You know, thousand, two thousand, three thousand posts. And so if you can just press a button and you can get a, you know, we can cluster all the information and give that to you. It'll help you quickly analyze and detect what it is that you have to respond to. Sometimes you don't even have to respond. Sometimes just, you know, it's a false positive or a negative out there.

Amazing. So we did that and, you know, prior to ChatGPT, we were working with open source LLMs to create a content module. So you can just imagine, you know, you've got marketing teams that, you know, sometimes they outsource things, sometimes they insource things. There's lots of choices that you have to make. But we thought we should have a content module. So if what happened 75 seconds ago was relevant or what happened two hours ago was relevant, and you want to create more content around that, whether it's your own initiative or maybe you see that an influencer is getting a lot of traction on a certain topic and you want to kind of piggyback on that. We created a content module that today is the backbone is GPT, right? But in the past that wasn't the case.

And so inside the same platform, you can pull information in, you can type in a prompt, use the content that's already out there and then quickly create a blog article, you know, a Facebook post, a Twitter, an X post, anything that you'd like. And you can also, you know, you can actually put the tone that you want, so on and so forth, and then publish it, you know, straight from the same platform, you can push that over into what it's actually a white label product by Metricool. So if people aren't familiar with Metricool, it's very much like a Hootsuite. It's a publishing platform. But we wanted to incorporate all those things so you don't have to be going from one place to the other and add some value in that matter.

And then by design, what we thought there was is that if we can consolidate all this information, we know how marketers have their information in so many different places, we can consolidate that information and then create the reports for you. Also using AI, you know, you can have your sentiment analysis, your trend analysis, all done with AI. And then if you have more information that you want to incorporate, we built in a Looker studio and then you can basically have, you know, your operational dashboards, your strategic dashboards, all in one place.

And then to kind of like close the loop, everybody's super interested in influencers and everybody, you know, everybody is doing it, but not everybody knows they're doing it right. So we don't work with lists. We decided to create an algorithm using prompts. So if you have a description of an audience that you want to go after, you write up a prompt and then the algorithm goes out and looks for micro and nano influencers, geolocalized so that you can actually reach that audience in a more efficient manner. We provide an activity graph, a narrative, all that fun stuff, as well as interest of that audience. So if there's brands that over-index or if there are specific entertainment things that over-index, you can also layer that onto maybe a traditional media plan or a digital media plan.

We created this, it's a, I wouldn't say it's an all in one platform, but what I like to think back to my days when I was working in universities is that we want to give you additional resources, right? So, a lot of times you don't have a data analyst. So what if we have that data analyst built in inside of our platform? And so that's where our product is going actually. You know, we have automated reports where you, you know, what the AI will interpret, but now we're working on an agent. So we know there's a ton of information that we can compile for you. And so inside the same platform, you can actually start to ask the questions. I think that that upgrade in the product will probably come in July of this year. So that's Trendsites in a nutshell.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Cheryl, what do you want to know about Trendsites?

Cheryl Boeckman: There's a ton of things I want to know, but I've been feverishly writing notes here. So when you think about AI so far, and I'm saying so far because AI is constantly changing, where do you feel like the best applications of AI are for an institution? And I'm going to sort of back up on that question. When you think about the marketing resources and the brand of an institution, right? So many universities, they want to make sure that their brand is communicated well. They want to make sure that there's positive impact on the brand and not negative impact on the brand. One of the things that you said is that your product helps to gauge the level of impact of whatever's out there being said.

I mean, we all know about all the things that have been happening on campuses over the last three, four weeks, right? And so this is a perfect example. It really is. And so I would be interested to see what your thoughts are around that and then how marketing departments that are responsible not only for the brand of the institution, but they're also responsible for putting out information that attracts students to that institution. So I'd be curious to ask what you think so far the best application of AI is and then how that, how we could use a recent example like the campus protests to talk a little bit about that.

Max Raphel: Artificial intelligence. So let me think through this. Okay, first don't chase shiny objects. Okay, I mean like really attack the problem, right? So, if I was on a university campus in the US, you know that with what was happening maybe six weeks ago, you have to get out ahead of the curve, right? Because you're talking about reputation of your own brand. So the first thing I would have used AI to do would have been to often see what's happening at these other schools. What's the conversation look like? What's that dialogue look like? So I can get out ahead of the curve, right? Or what's the response look like, right? What's the response look like when it's negative? What are the topics that are driving that when it's - I don't think there's been very much positive. But let's just say that if there's something positive, how can you use that?

Who's driving that conversation, right? To understand because sometimes it's sometimes it's a bot and we're just chasing our tail. So really understand that situation and then use the AI to facilitate the work that you know the jobs to be done, whichever those jobs are right? Because it probably have an institutional response, but you also have a brand response that you also have a response to students that are on both sides of the line, right? There's some that are leaning to the left, some that are leaning to the right, and you want to try to find some common ground, get some insight, create content, and dialogue around the things that can be productive, right? So that's in the current situation.

I think on the other side of the equation is a lot of people - I said, don't chase shiny objects. I mean, I think you have to be in AI, say, jeez, you should probably be using it, right? And trying to understand the applications. It's an arms race today, right? But it's all going to be centered on data anyway. So if I take a step back and think about digital transformation, right? That is still going on. Right. And it's still going to, it's going to continue and that's going to be the same thing with AI. So really I take a step back and say, what are my major challenges today? Where am I in my digital transformation? Because, you know, digital transformation is really, really hard work. Right. I mean, I think I'm sure Cheryl, you know, with just what Lead Squared, I mean, just getting product adoption, right. Getting the data models in place.

If you don't have good data, it's going to be difficult to make decisions and even take advantage of some of the use cases for AI. On our side, we've used LLMs to create a product application layer on top of these things. Obviously, there are other things that you can use AI for. Probably the number one that everyone's looking at is productivity, right? And so, you know, I would say what do you want to be great at, right? Or extraordinary at, and then what's just a point of parity, you know, maybe I can outsource, maybe I'll just outsource that and I'll leave that to the agency. So what's the strategic work? And I think that the strategic work is on the AI front because, you know, as marketers, probably AI is going to impact marketing more than other functions, you know, in this first, let's call it the first phase of AI, right?

So find those problems that, you know, you're looking to address and then take that step back and say, what are the applications that, you know, I would first understand. I'm sure everybody has purchased some sort of, you know, application that sits on top of the CRM or adjacent to the CRM that helps marketing. And so try to understand what's that product roadmap look like from that particular supplier, right? And see if there's any application. And then if not, obviously the amount of VC investment that's gone into new AI companies in the past year and a half is something similar to what happened in the 1999, 2000 dot-com bubble, right? And so, and a lot of those companies, didn't make it. Did you see that? I don't understand. But anyways, a lot of those companies didn't make it, right? So you have to see which ones you have to look at address each one of these and again go after it with your use case and the viability of the product, right?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: For anybody that doesn't know because we're on video when we record these, Max did quotes with his fingers and balloons went everywhere. And I'm wondering, how do I get this AI technology that I can't get? It doesn't work for me, Max. It just doesn't work. You know, you've done, you started in Mexico, founded in Mexico, been selling in Mexico and you say you're going to go to the US now to the US market. Is it something like this where you all get in a room? It's like Order 66. That's like the US order. Why is now a good time for you to break into the US market?

Max Raphel: Because we're getting really good customer traction. And so we've modified our software package. You can buy parts of the software. We've got some really good feedback from educational institutions in Latam. So we just think that we're ready to, let's just call it ride the wave because you have to take advantage of those opportunities when you have momentum, gain more momentum.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: For sure. You know, one of the things I'll tell you and then I'll pass it back to you, Cheryl. As somebody who oversees marketing in my institution, it is an ever-evolving industry, right? I mean, it always has been and always will be and AI like you talked about was the newest largest probably most prominent disruptor to marketing in God knows how long. Can it replace jobs? Is it enhancing jobs? I need so much data now. There's so many ways that AI is creating more work for me as a marketer. It's cutting my data in ways that I didn't even think about cutting it. And I can prompt it through an LLM now. I can input my own data and have an AI look at it in a way that unless you have a statistical analyst that's going to sit there for a week, it's going to cut that data up for me and give me insights. I'm gonna go, wow, now I have to take action. Now I have to do something that I wasn't prepared to do yet. And I better do it sooner than later or else I'm not going to get these students or do what is, is it intimidating? Is this an intimidating technology for marketers? I don't know. I don't mean just Trendsites. I mean, just AI marketing. Or are we ready for it as marketers? Are we dying for this? What are you seeing out there in the marketplace? And how does Trendsites solve that jobs to be done problem for me?

Max Raphel: Yeah. I think people are super busy in the day to day, right? And so it's really hard to take time out of your day to day to learn, you know, what these possible applications are. A lot of people will not take that time. I think that there will probably be somewhere between a five and 10% of marketers that will actually dig deep into this new age, right? Just like it happened with digital marketing, lots of people just stayed on the sidelines and continued with the traditional approach. And some people got ahead of the curve. So I think that in today's world, there's probably that 5% to 10% really, really top people, more visionary, that are looking to evolve and even maybe change their position in the market because AI is, I would consider it as like a great way to, you know, let's call it, accelerate your marketing.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: 100%. We agree. Cheryl.

Cheryl Boeckman: You had said something earlier, Max, that said, what your product can do is track anything that is being said in any media. And so obviously that can be a positive thing or that could be a negative thing. And in my mind, as I think about it, how much time does it take humans to do that? And can they even do that from a standpoint of pick up all the different things that are happening in a set amount of time and be able to get through all that and divide it into this is positive, this is negative, and then obviously you want to focus on the positive things so that you can market your university or your institution further by something that someone is out there saying that is a positive thing. So when you think about how many people does it take to do that, and back to Joe's question is that obviously it's intimidating or can be intimidating.

But if you think about the amount of staff and the people and the time that you need to do those same things. I always say technology is great, but not for technology's sake. You want to make sure that it's doing something that's very hard for humans to do, and you want humans to focus on what they are, what you hired them for. So if the system can do it. So tell you know if you can talk a little bit about how much data it's going through. And because I don't want to filter through all that stuff, I know that. I don't think most marketers want to. And Joe, you're probably better to answer that question than I.

Max Raphel: I think there's a lot of, I mean, the whole idea is to simplify your day to day, right? That would be number one. And there are a lot of mundane activities in that value chain that don't add value, right? Literally, I say, you know, the people have to sit down and crank out a report, but they have to pull information from, you know, a number of sources. And then people don't even read that information. Right. So, you know, we get used to doing things in a certain way. And so now these, you know, these new solutions, you know, should look to simplify your day to day. Right. And then you can focus on making, you know, let's call it focusing on the strategic part of the equation. Right. Most of us are in the, you know, just working on Friday's payroll, just trying to get through, just trying to get through the week.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Tell them like it is.

Max Raphel: And, and then in the case of, you know, a solution like Trendsites, it's just about giving you that added layer of value so that you can focus on actual value-added activity. Right.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: The added layer of value so you can focus on value-added activity. I like that a lot, right? Cause that's what it's all about. How do I up my game? And you know, we like to kind of end our episodes with the same kind of couple of questions, but I want to get it back to you, Cheryl and see, is there anything else that you want to ask Max before we let him finish up here?

Cheryl Boeckman: So obviously Max, you talk to a lot of institutions and you have in your career. So what brought you to this point from a standpoint of what did you see over and over again that you just said this has to be solved or this is why I'm going out to do this?

Max Raphel: Yeah, I think I think the big thing is outsourcing marketing, right? I think that that's the that that could be the worst thing you could possibly do is to delegate, you know, an asset right at an activity that's so important, right? So that to me is a huge issue independent of whether it's education or other brands is that as marketers, we put so many things on third party resources and just trust that they do it and that they're doing it well. And so with tools like the one that we've developed, it adds that added level of scrutiny, right? Because all too often we just trust. You know, we trust the third parties to do the job. But I think that, you know, in today's world, we just have an ability to now act in more real time, you know, I don't think we'll ever get to real time, but we'll be able to get, you know, we're much, much closer to being, you know, at that moment, right? At that very moment when somebody's making a decision, when somebody's browsing, and to take advantage of market opportunities. I think the brands that will win are the ones that are most in touch with the moment.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You make a good point because marketing does get outsourced a lot really across industries. And I don't know if it's a cost-cutting measure or if institutions think they just can't handle it, don't want to handle it. You know that they don't have that there isn't people out there that have the skill level to handle it. But then you do put your brand you put your identity in the hands of another party and I've done both of outsourced and brought it in and there's just never the same amount of care on your brand. And is this the type of technology, Max, where you go, you know what if you've thought about outsourcing don't look at something like Trendsites. It's gonna... You don't need to go hire 10 people. You need to bring in technology now. And you need to have a few really, really good people that own your brand and track it.

Max Raphel: Yeah, I think if you could bring in... It's like this concept of a 10x engineer. So what about a 5x marketer? Somebody that's in tune with the customer right now, but also thinking about the customer and the prospect down the road and getting out ahead of the curve. I think that the best marketers are the ones that are getting out ahead of the curve, anticipating a customer need or a customer problem. So I think that's the key.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What else do you want to say about the same two questions we ask of every guest? What else do you want to say about Trendsites AI that we have not talked about? Anything coming up? Anything you want the audience to know? Open mic for you, Max.

Max Raphel: Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things it's an advantage in that we didn't, you know, have to go to market and immediately start to generate revenue was that we got a really crazy pricing model. We said we're going to make this as flexible as possible. And then obviously, we made some mistakes along the way, we didn't, you know, we didn't make the product modular at first. So we had to, you know, work that out on the back end. But we wanted to put more control back into the marketer's hands. Number one, there's always a consideration around licenses and usage. We buy software and then nobody actually uses it. There are software companies that track the usage of software. Then they go to the CFO and that's their customers, CIO, CFO and say, hey, you need to cut back on this. It's fuzzy man.

We decided to make it so that you have more control and it's all based on data usage. So you can have as many users as you want and you control the amount of data intake. And the way we do that is through a free trial. So we know more or less how much data you're going to use over the course of a month. And then we can tailor make that proposition to the customer. So it's not just for large scale enterprise. Although we do have large scale enterprise customers already, but mid-scale enterprises can also use it. They're not to worry about, do I need to buy 10 licenses? It's just one license and then everybody else can, and then you just control the data usage. I think that's a big thing. And I think it'll be a trend going forward as well.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Max, final question. Cheryl really wanted me to ask you this one. What do you see for the future of higher education?

Max Raphel: Wow. That's a great question. I think a big thing in higher ed is reskilling. OK, so as a university, I might think about how do I build that into my value proposition, right? Because there's a lot of startups out there I've invested in some that are looking to kind of disrupt that, right? And say, you know, certifications are more important than the four-year degree. I think universities play such a pivotal role in society that they're not going to, you know, universities are not going to go away, but definitely the full value proposition needs to be thought out again. And maybe, you know, maybe some folks aren't going to go, you know, full four years and maybe they just need, you know, a stack of something to learn and then apply it and then come back because knowledge work is going to accelerate. We don't know what the jobs are going to be here in five years, no, or 10 years, and just how much, what role AI will play. And then that leads me to the other thing, which is, you know, what's the role of AI and then what's the role, what's that human role? Because we, we, I mean, we need to touch, feel things. We need to be connected to people. And so, you know, when I was seeing those, you know, the open AI demos last week, and it's just kind of... It kind of runs some, you know, it's uncomfortable because you say, geez, I hope, I hope we don't become, you know, like that, right? That we're just talking to a computer.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: We just, you know, education needs to be personal. Cheryl, what'd you think of this conversation?

Cheryl Boeckman: I think it's incredible to think that people are starting to think about putting AI type training and degrees when, you know, three, four years ago, nobody was even talking about it. Right. And so how quickly technology is going to change our future and the fact that institutions, companies, it doesn't matter, all need to be able to pivot and fairly quickly in order to leverage what's coming down the path.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. It's crazy how fast things have moved, right? It wasn't what, two years ago in December when the whole ChatGPT craze came on. It has not been very long. We all talk about it like we're AI vets. And there are very, very few people in the world that are AI veterans. The rest of us are users, just like anybody else. When Facebook came on or Instagram, we went on and we said, look at this. So it's got user adoption has been incredible. Max, we wish you a great, how do we get in touch with you? If we're in the US right now, we're thinking, man, this Trendsites thing sounds pretty cool. Where do we go? How do we find out? What do we do?

Max Raphel: You can visit Trendsites.ai. That would be... I used to be on Twitter. This audience is probably a LinkedIn audience mostly, so we'll leave it there.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You can't even say X in a sentence and have it really make sense, right? It's really hard. Ladies and gentlemen, my guest co-host, it's her first time guest co-hosting. I gotta say... It was a 50-50 chance whether she'd steamroll and mess it up or if she would kill it and she absolutely killed it. Ladies and gentlemen, she's Cheryl Boeckman. She is the Senior Vice President for Education at Lead Squared. Cheryl, it's always a pleasure to see you and I'm so glad to have you here on the podcast and I hope you come back and do it with me again.

Cheryl Boeckman: Sounds like a plan. We can do that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Max, thanks so much. And here he is. He is Max Raphel. He is an investor and co-founder at Trendsites.ai. Max, it's been a pleasure having you here. We hope you had a little bit of fun along the way too. There you have it everybody. You've just EdUp'd.