Forget About Blue Ocean Strategy

Forget About Blue Ocean Strategy

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a revenue acceleration series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who are actively trying to grow their businesses and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and It definitely shouldn't be guesswork. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Juan Betancourt, the CEO from Human Intelligence, the leading AI coach Ask Aura with me today. Juan, thanks for joining me, man.

Juan Betancourt
Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely. I am excited to dig into this with you today. You got a ton of things to talk about. Before we do that, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions. Are you ready jump in?

Juan Betancourt
Yep.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. So very quickly, what do you do? How long have you been doing it?

Juan Betancourt
We have an AI product. It's an agent, an AI coach called Ask Aura that uses psychometric information like picture personality test that can answer any question around teamwork, collaboration, leadership, motivation, engagement instantly. And it's actually within workflows of Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Slack, etc. So It's basically how all psychometrics will be consumed in the future. And we've been doing it for eight years, but we've pivoted. We've only had this product for six months. We've been around for eight years, though.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay. Awesome. I love it. What's the most important lesson you've learned in running the business for the last eight years?

Juan Betancourt
Investing in marketing should be research before you do it and not just do what seems logical and get advice from others who've tried before you.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That is one that nobody has ever said.

Juan Betancourt
I've wasted so much money. We're talking millions of dollars that could have been saved if I only had talked to people who had gone through the journey before me.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, why make the same mistakes? Learn from them. The thing that I see all the time-Or a coach. Yeah. Well, and the thing that I see all the with marketing is people tend to jump into the tactics and just start doing things without knowing why they're doing things and whether they should even be doing those things. Strategy is super important, and it needs to come first. So you mentioned you pivoted multiple times. We know that growing a business is hard. If it was easy, everybody do it. Do you have any mantra mantra or motivational saying you say to yourself or share with your team to push through those challenging times?

Juan Betancourt
Less of mantra. Just having the vibration as a leader that you really believe in where you're pivoting the company to. Usually, pivots are not something you strategically plan. It's out of a reaction to a bad situation, a market change, the product not selling. It's ugly and it's painful. You got to change your marketing message, your documents, your investor table, your investor pitch deck, marketing pitch deck, sales process, trial process, all the old clients, you now have to transition them and support them on a new product. I mean, it's a nightmare, right? And so a lot of employees might want to run because they think they're there. So if you don't believe where you're pivoting to, then just don't be stubborn and close the company. I think a lot of people pivot as the only other option. I think closing the company is also an option other than pivoting. We've pivoted four times. This current incarnation called Ask Aura, this AI platform, I've already let the team know that this is the last pivot. We make this one work or we don't. And if we don't, I'm closing shop and selling the technology to a larger player.

Pivoting Multiple Times in Business to Drive Growth

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, got it. So let's dig into that a little bit. So you pivoted four times. Looking back, what have been some of the key marketing or sales strategies that helped you push through those transitions to drive growth?

Juan Betancourt
Yeah, so the first major pivot, we had grown within three years from zero to three million in revenue. As a recruiting platform in HR technology. So picture using second metrics, the higher, better, reduce turnover by 30 %. Home run idea, nobody else could measure personality and work behaviors like us. So it was easy. Covid hits. Nobody's hiring, nobody's going to be paying us a monthly fee for software that they're not using. So we went from 3 million to 300,000, almost to zero, in six months. I had to fire 20 or 25 employees. The pivot there was, Well, first, I had to identify if there was a there, there. How can we use our psychometric instrument for existing employees that are at the companies? Who's the new buyer? Who's the new person we market to? What is that new message? We found that distributed working was a challenge, and we had a tool that could help. We built a product, redid our website, redid our marketing materials, and then found a new buyer who we believed was generally head of HR or head of change management. We even tried to sell to the CIO. And so we had to try out different buyers to get to one that then we would invest more money in. And the challenge there, though, was new space. Nobody ever had collaboration tools using psychometrics for better Zoom meetings. And so we tried SEO, SEM, but if nobody's looking for what you have, trying to trick them and find something like engagement only confused them because we could then get people who are more highly predictive to buy engagement tools. But when they heard engagement, they were looking for a survey, not for our tool. Even though our tool had more impact on engagement, they would have none of it. They'd come on these demos and say, Oh, great tool. Love it. It's amazing. But we were We were tasked by our company to go find an engagement survey. Using SEO, SEM for a new product might not be the smartest use of money. Also, we had to move away from conferences because up until 2020, conferences was how you got buyers and got interest as a startup. There's no conferences for three years. So there was a lot of pivoting, not just in our product, but in the go-to-market strategy, the buyer, how we messaged, etc.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, God. One, as you're talking about this new product, a lot of people have heard of the book, I can't remember what it's called, but about the Blue Ocean, right? For most people, the Blue Ocean is not where you want to go. Creating a new market, it is very challenging.

Juan Betancourt
It's so funny you say that. That first pivot, we went from a market that everyone was already in, right? Application tracking systems, recruiting software. There was video hiring. There was lots of different products. We were me too, but we were just better at it and better price. It was feature function, better, reduce more benefit. It just worked. We were now entering a territory, which I didn't know that transition was happening. I'm just like, Oh, let's go where there are no competitors in a new product where nobody is looking for it. We'll just define it. The amount of money to educate a market by a guy named Juan and a company named Human Intelligence that nobody's ever heard of either of us. I didn't realize that you could have the cure for cancer, but if you're in Tennessee in a garage and don't know anybody at NIH or a big pharma company, that cure to cancer will die with that researcher. Those next two years, I learned that painful lesson.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Most of us are far better off going into an existing market and finding a way to differentiate within that market. Blue Ocean is very, very difficult, as you found out. And then you decided to pivot again.

Juan Betancourt
Yes, because remote and distributed workers, as they made your problem, We knew that there was a chance that that would not be the top of conversation for the rest of the universe forever. But that was the product we sold. So the messaging within two years of, how can your remote and distributed workers work better together and collaborate better, that message The message started to fall on deaf ears. So then we moved to AI. So we're really early adopters in AI in the next pivot. So focusing just on collaborating based on people's behaviors and motivators. So rewriting emails through Outlook in virtual meetings. Problem there is what we learned was there's no chief collaboration officer. So there wasn't a true buyer, no matter how slick our product was. There's no budget if there's not a buyer. And those buyers aren't users because HR doesn't care about collaborating. People need them. And usually that people need us. They're not going to adapt their emails in their meetings. And then trialing it was AI was just coming out, so you needed security review for six months. So all these things that have nothing with marketing. But if you look at marketing as, well, you got to trial the product and get security review that's six more months in the sales cycle. Then once they do get it in to 10,000 people at a company, and we were focused on enterprise deals, which is a whole other can of worms, then you have to train people on where the button is. I mean, for all those reasons, that pivot didn't work. Even the marketing just fell in deaf ears because we were really shooting blanks, trying to figure out who this buyer is. No matter how much money we put in or what the message was, it all came to this strategic mistake that why are we trying to sell a collaboration tool? Even though companies talk about it, nobody has been tasked and mandated to be head of collaboration. So you might as well not try to solve that problem, which led us to the current AI product, which solves all the problems of selling in the past, and also much more focused buyer, focused message, and more clear marketing tactics to get there.

Tim Fitzpatrick
There's a lot to unpack there. I want to try to do that a bit because I think there's a lot of learning lessons here because it sounds like you-Have failed for eight years?

Juan Betancourt
Yeah. But We're succeeding now. It's led to an amazing product, an amazing message, and a great sales and marketing strategy, which we weren't anywhere near this eight years ago.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I mean, that first pivot was market-based, right? Correct. You were successful with that first product, but then the market shifted, and it's like, Oh, my God, we have to change what we're doing, how we're doing it. And then within those shifts, then it was-

Juan Betancourt
It was a technology change. AI came out. I wouldn't say it's market. That's just a new technology change that you either go AI or you're invisible. Nobody's meeting with software vendors that don't have AI, right?

Tim Fitzpatrick
But the shift in the... Well, and I should say the shift, it's not necessarily the shift in the market. The shift was COVID, which changed how we did business, and they didn't need that service anymore. And so you had the change. And then you came up with It was a product that was cool, but people weren't looking to buy it.

Juan Betancourt
A vitamin, not a painkiller.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And so now you've got with Ask Aura, You've got a product that is solving a very specific... Solving a problem, but it's also a problem that people want to solve.

Juan Betancourt
Yes, and that they've already been spending 3 billion a year for the last 60 years on psychometric tools that never get used or see the day of light, light of day. We're just doing something better. I call it, we're the Uber to what taxi cabs have been doing, but for psychometric instruments.

Tim Fitzpatrick
You're creating... You now have a product that is in a market that it's proven. You're differentiating in an existing market.

Juan Betancourt
Yes. We're back to, Hey, we do what you already spend money on, but there's a much bigger ROI. Your investment gets used once a year, ours gets used 240 times a year, and we're a fraction of the cost.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, and if you think about it, it's not just for you, it's not just a better way to do psychometrics. It is a new way of doing psychometrics because-

Juan Betancourt
It's a new way of consuming them.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Correct. And because they're consuming it differently, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're leveraging those tools in a much better, more effective way. Because with your tools, they're using it all the time. It's not just, Hey, we were interviewing somebody, and we want to better understand them, or, Hey, we have this employee, and we want to read this report. Your tools are telling them, You have these five people in this meeting. Here's how to interact with all of these people.

Juan Betancourt
Correct. And before, these tools were only for... When it was used for talent development, only the top 5% of execs. Now, all employees were democratizing these tools for everyone.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So it's a new way to leverage the tools.

Juan Betancourt
Yes. It's like what Grammarly did to the Dictionary thesaurus after 500 years that nobody used those things, we, in workflow, seamlessly also are doing that to psychometric data, which an insight that just sat on the sideline.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, this is awesome. I hope people that are watching, listening, see how how what you're doing now is different and why it's working much more effectively than somebody.

Juan Betancourt
You're getting a really good point, Tim. Marketing isn't just getting the message out. Marketing is strategically saying, What's the product market fit we're going after? Most people don't realize that marketing starts in, what is it we're going to make and sell?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Correct. Yeah, you have to have product market fit. If you don't have product market fit, none of the other stuff matters. And you're seeing the benefits of that now. And I appreciate you sharing all this because, man, you've learned a lot in this journey. And many of us have been through similar things, but a lot of people don't talk about it because it's hard. It's frustrating. You've got all these things. You want to grow this business. And it's like, I'm going here. No, that's not working. I got to shift again.

Don't Hire Ahead of Growth

Tim Fitzpatrick

If you could go back to when you first launched human intelligence, what would you do differently from a marketing or growth perspective, knowing what you know now?

Juan Betancourt
I wouldn't hire ahead of the growth. I'd wait for the team to be bursting at the scene. So it's like a human capital thing. I hired thinking and assuming we continue growing, which burned us when COVID hit. And so probably would resist hiring above the growth just to be more conservative there. Second, in marketing, I just tried all the things that had worked over the last seven years. But with technology really being the driver of what marketing is and technology changes so fast, I made the mistake to assume that given that I knew what marketing had been in the world of SaaS offer the last seven years, I'll just do that playbook. Huge mistake. That playbook isn't relevant for the next three years. The playbook changes every couple of years. I was doing things like I was spending way too much money on conferences. I was doing SEO and SEM the wrong way. I wasn't leveraging some true and tried things that I thought was an old model that, oh, we don't need that, which was things like customer case studies and getting panels where I bring a customer, raving fan, all those true and tried things I actually thought because they weren't tech oriented. I didn't do them when actually those things really work. And so it's a mix of what has shown the test of time marketing-wise around customers and case studies and quotes from customers and use cases versus understanding that marketing now is getting a marketing executive who knows how to build a tech stack and integrate it all together. That didn't exist when I was a marketing pro at Procter & Gamble 25, 30 years ago. So I just made a lot of assumptions in marketing, and I should have asked for advice either from a consulting firm and maybe outsource some of it at the beginning, or or just other founders who are probably at the 2 or 3 million revenue level. The way you market at zero to get to a million is different. Now you market from one to five and different from five to 10. And how much money you have in the powder and the in the keg to do that. And again, every entrepreneur is going to go through lots of lessons and learnings. It's impossible to see around corners and know all these things. And the context of what's happened the last four years is very different than in the next four years. But maybe I was too much under my own rock. I think entrepreneurs get caught up just working so hard and not getting out there and asking and talking. It's probably a big common problem.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. It's... You pointed out a couple of things there. One, it's so easy for people to just skip the fundamentals of marketing, the pride and true tactics within marketing that just don't change all that much. Like, case studies is super low-hanging fruit. Most clients that we start working with do not have case studies. And so that's always a quick win that we focus on is putting those case studies together because that stuff works. It helps. You can use it not only in your marketing, but in your sales process. People want to know-

Juan Betancourt
And it's the most credible thing that a customer will evaluate, no matter what your demo is, your product, your marketing campaigns. They want to know, what are people like me in my position at companies like mine buying and why?

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that you mentioned that I think is really important, too, is these frameworks that people put out there that, oh, all you need to do is just follow this framework and you'll grow your business. You can take elements of those things, but every business is different, and you're serving different markets. It's a different product or service. And all of those things create nuances and differences. So you can't take exactly what's that's worked for another business like yours and expect that it's going to work the exact same. It doesn't work that way. It'd be great if it did, but it doesn't work that way. And so we can take that information, but then we need to adapt it and test it for our own businesses. And most people don't... Well, that's why they buy a lot of this stuff, right? It's like, Oh, go to whatever it is, the SaaS blueprint or So the MSP blueprint, whatever it is, that shit doesn't work.

Juan Betancourt
One area, though, that was a huge discovery for me, which I'll use the rest of my life no matter what business I do, there are so many great tools for LinkedIn that will just go out, scrape, reach. You just put, I want to reach this title or people from alumni from Harvard who are in this title or in this region or these companies. And You set these six messages and you set the timing for them. You don't do anything. You put your calendar in there, your link for scheduling, you put a great message, and it follows up on its own. And literally, it could be targeting 20,000 people over the next six months all in the background. I don't have to look at it. I don't have to think about it. And all of a sudden, I'm getting five to seven meetings on my calendar, and it's 200 bucks a month. Given what I've been spending on other things to get very low response some of these LinkedIn tools are a miracle and extremely effective and cost-effective.

Tim Fitzpatrick
My guess is, because a lot of what you're focusing on with that now is around Ask Aura and AI.

Juan Betancourt
Yes, you're right. You have a great point. It's a new AI amazing product that somebody can read about and be like, Wow, that sounds good. Let me learn. Where if it's a me and try it, if it's like, Oh, I have another applicant tracking system you want to meet, I bet you that wouldn't work. I think for a new eye-popping type product, that would work. You're right. An existing industry product probably would have less traction.

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's a perfect example, though, of how something can work for one person and not as well as another. I think right now what you're capitalizing on is there's so much... AI is so top of mind. There's a ton of FOMO. People don't want to miss out. They feel like they're behind, and you're capitalizing on that, which you should, and it's great. I'm glad that that's working for you. And you found an approach that's getting meetings and is working.

The Biggest Growth Opportunities for Human Intelligence

Tim Fitzpatrick

So let's talk about growth a little bit. Where do you see the biggest growth opportunities for human intelligence? Well, and ask, we're really moving forward. And what types of marketing or sales shifts do you think you're going to have to take advantage of?

Juan Betancourt
Yes, we're in that place and that actually strategic decision. There's the phase of... Even though we've been around eight years, this product is six months old. That's fully working in market. So I see it's like a startup again. We don't have the case studies yet because we're just starting to have usage in some of the initial buyers, and it's just small amounts of people. We don't have the case studies. We don't have the raving fans yet. We don't have the metrics. So one learning add is in this early phase, building a whole lead gen engine and repeatable success, it's too early. It's really founder-led sales. It's relationships. And the HR buyer to whom we sell, head of talent management, talent development, L&D, chief learning officers, they're prickly. Venture Capital says that is the hardest function to sell into, much harder than CIOs, much harder than much harder than supply chain. These are people that are not typically technology savvy. They're used to just protecting a company from getting sued. You're dealing with labor relations. Usually, the head of HR is not a name that anybody in the company knows. They're usually hiding. Selling them a product that puts them as a bullseye for the whole company. It's a hard sell. We're only finding traction right now in introductions. So either someone I've met or known in my past who somebody at their company, in HR, that's most of my campaigns out there in LinkedIn and just to my network, or people like board members or friends who have people at companies. For five months, that's how we're getting our first client. Now that we're getting those clients on board in a couple of big ones like Accenture, Coca-Cola, Honeywell, Chick-fil A, those will become our case studies that we will then use for thought leadership in our mass market lead gen HubSpot, CRM, where we have SDRs, higher sales account execs, and build a whole engine for repeatable. But we're not at the repeatable yet. In the past, I would have jumped right to that repeatable lead gen funnel and spending a lot of money. I'm realizing, no, I got to be a little patient and get these key wins and some trials and case studies before I move to that next step.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Well, and you're not only... You're trying to reach that head of HR, but your ideal clients are like Fortune 500, right?

Juan Betancourt
Yeah, we're tackling 10,000 and greater clients. Now, one thing, because in these six months, we've had a meeting once a month with these companies, and often they're like, Okay, we'll talk again in five months. We're realizing we're going to starve if we don't get some smaller ones. We are now targeting 1,000 to 5,000 employees because we know that the sales cycle will be 3-4 months versus 5-9 months.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Right now, are you guys operating on a minimum viable product and just continuing to iterate and improve it? Is that where you are with Ask Aura at this point, would you say?

Juan Betancourt
We started developing it in February of 2024. So when ChatGPT went from zero billion people, that was like, holy crap. If we can create that interface for our content, where it's just a question-answer, that's the model. Oh, my, of course. One of those Uber moment on your first Uber ride. Of course, it's the way Uber taxis will It took to get a first viable product till September. So seven months in September, we launched something that could show. October, we let people start trialing it. So it's been trialed and Probably 80% there. Every two weeks, we have an agile methodology. Every two weeks, there's little cool features in doing demos, and the few people trialing it now are giving us great ideas. We keep incorporating changes, but I think the core 80% of how it looks, what the interface is, how it's integrated to teams, Outlook and Zoom, that's all there. The structure, it's like, imagine a house. Will the roof and some of the window panes change in cutting the grass? Yeah, but what a house looks like, and you know that that's a house, we're now there. Clients, they know what they're getting, and no matter what changes we make, it won't be too much different.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, very cool. This has been an awesome one. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your journey. One last question before we wrap things up. Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would do differently?

Juan Betancourt
God, the list is like 100 things. I don't know how to prioritize.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's a loaded question.

Juan Betancourt
What I know today, I could have gotten to the same place in half the time. Look, I've been successful. I went to Harvard, I went to Wharton, I worked at Procter & Gamble, I I worked at Reebok, I worked at all these great companies. I was always top performer. Always 9-10 projects, I crushed it. There's always the battle you lose, but usually my wars in career, I always won. I cannot believe that at the age of 55, my last eight years have been 90% failure when before the age of 47, when I started this company, 90 % of my time, I had been successful. So you're looking at a guy who took all of his learnings in life, super successful in so many things, definitely had a great idea with great product differentiation, failed for so long. It's amazing with all the wisdom I had, how hard it's been. It has been the most difficult, most failure-based thing, which has led me to a great place. Now we're really doing well in this product is a potential unicorn. I never thought we ever had a unicorn. Never thought we were a billion-dollar company. Now we are, but I only got there through the portal of failure. Interestingly, to put a positive spin on this, I have never been more fulfilled career-wise than in the last eight years of failure. They always say that challenge is the portal to fulfillment, not ease and routine. And things always came easy to me. I was successful, I made money, but I was never really fulfilled. I was happy, but that doesn't mean you're fulfilled. There are weeks I'm happy, there are weeks I'm not happy doing human intelligence in the startup. But the one consistent vibration that makes me think I would do it all over again is this vibration of fulfillment, which almost feels as great as gratitude.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Fantastic, man. People want to connect, how can they do it?

Juan Betancourt
On the bottom of your screen there, askaura.ai is our website, and my LinkedIn is there as well. My email, if somebody wants it, would be juan@humanintelligence.com, and happy to open up and chat with anybody who's interested.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. We will make sure that that stuff gets in the show notes as well. Juan, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate you. Those of you that are watching, listening, appreciate you as well. If you want to connect with us, you can do that over at rialtomarketing.com, rialtomarketing.com. The other tool we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. When we help clients build their marketing engine, we focus on nine key areas. If you want to know which of the nine are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. Take advantage of it, and till next time. Take care.