The Future of Content Creation: Automating the Workflow

In today's digital landscape, creating high-quality content is crucial for businesses to establish their brand presence and engage with their audience. However, content creation can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, especially when it comes to video production. This is where technology comes in – automating the workflow of content creation can save businesses a significant amount of time and resources.

The Importance of Automation

As Sebastian mentioned, there are still many individuals who prefer to be hands-on with their content creation, whereas others may not have the skills or expertise to create high-quality content. This is where automation comes in – by leveraging AI-powered tools, businesses can automate the entire process of content creation, from scriptwriting to video production.

One potential solution is to hire an agency or company to handle content creation on behalf of the business. However, this approach can be time-consuming and costly. Sebastian mentioned that he would love it if someone gave him a perfect script every single time, all he has to do is hit record and be done with it. This highlights the importance of automation in streamlining the content creation process.

TikTok's Teleprompter Feature

Sebastian also mentioned TikTok's teleprompter feature, where users can create their script and have it displayed on their phone as they record. He saw this feature as something that could be easily incorporated into a content management tool. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the way businesses approach content creation.

Scaling Up Lead Capture

Another aspect of the future of content creation is scaling up lead capture. Businesses need to find ways to handle incoming calls, emails, and other inquiries in an efficient manner. Sebastian mentioned that he wants people to focus on their craft, whether it's music, electrician work, or running a startup, without having to worry about handling content creation.

Building a Partner Network

To achieve this goal, businesses can build partnerships with companies that specialize in AI-powered tools and content management. These partners can help businesses automate the workflow of content creation, from scriptwriting to video production, while also providing lead capture and analytics services.

The Grand Vision

Sebastian's company is working on developing a product that will revolutionize the way businesses approach content creation. The product aims to automate the entire funnel, from acquisition to conversion, making it easier for businesses to focus on their core activities.

A Hands-Off Approach

One of the key features of this product is its ability to provide a hands-off approach to content creation. Businesses can set up their script and let the AI-powered tool handle everything else, including video production and lead capture. This means that business owners can wake up every morning with a report of how their content is performing, without having to lift a finger.

A Seamless User Experience

The ultimate goal is to create a seamless user experience for businesses, where they can easily access the tools and features they need to succeed in their industry. Sebastian wants users to be able to focus on their craft, without having to worry about handling content creation.

Partnerships with Other Tools

To achieve this goal, businesses can partner with other companies that specialize in AI-powered tools and content management. These partners can help businesses automate the workflow of content creation, from scriptwriting to video production, while also providing lead capture and analytics services.

A Focus on Customer Experience

Ultimately, the focus should be on delivering an exceptional customer experience. By automating the workflow of content creation, businesses can provide their audience with high-quality content that resonates with them, while also making it easy for them to engage with the brand.

The Future of Content Creation is Here

As Sebastian's company continues to work on developing its product, we can expect to see a significant shift in the way businesses approach content creation. With automation and AI-powered tools taking center stage, businesses will be able to focus on their core activities, while also delivering exceptional customer experiences.

By partnering with other companies that specialize in AI-powered tools and content management, businesses can tap into the latest technology and revolutionize the way they create and distribute their content. The future of content creation is here, and it's time for businesses to take advantage of it.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to another AI Minds podcast this is a podcast where we explore the companies of Tomorrow built AI first I am your host Dimitri o and this episode like every other episode is brought to you by Deep grham the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the internet today trusted by the world top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like Spotify twio NASA and City bank today we are joined by none other than the CEO and co-founder of Alana Sebastian how you doing man I'm doing great always good to catch up with you appreciate being on here talking about how you are in Miami you're preparing for a potential storm uh so it's good you're inside today and taking the time to chat with me I know that you have a bit of a history of being an entrepreneur and I want to get into what Alana is in just a minute but let's start with where you were working at a record label and then deciding to go all in on starting your own thing and what was that move like oh wow yeah that's a great question you know um it's never easy to make a transition that way right um you know I worked at a large record label Universal Music Group big company and obviously it's cool and it's awesome because you're you're working with artists and talent I mean a lot of concerts a lot of events and and it's music which is has been a passion of mine for such a long time but in the end you're you're at a big company you've got a fixed salary you've got your you know your plans your health insurance you have all of these different elements and so um to make that plunge of like well let's let go of you know that security that you have and go dive into something that um is really the unknown right that's never an easy decision um but you know my wife always tells me I'm crazy because that's who I am I could drop in a dime and and and and go do it even if it's risky because you you dive into it but you know it's still in the back of the mind it's kind of like hey you know if you're making that transition from leaving a gig to going into it you want to make sure that you're you're going to give it your all and um you know I've always had side businesses and so we we've kind of figured out ways to always make money and and revenue on the side and so you know when we saw that it was just we can't do this on the side you've got to like take a Plunge in that's where like making that decision of like look I love what I do here love the team and everything like that and but it is that time um and you know this wasn't the first time I was I was going to try to leave but they you know there's always to stay right um but you know that last time was like all right this is like the moment let's do it let's go all in we started picking up even more on business and I know if you can allocate all your time to something obviously you can put your your all in it doesn't mean it's going to be completely stable but you could really push through which which is what happened and so ended up going all in into the company um you know my co-founder so had a co-founder and she's also my wife we we've been married for almost 20 years now and she actually quit her job 6 months before me and so I held on to this one to keep going while she was there and we ended up um diving into it but you know the week after we literally had meetings with universal and obviously they become our customers so we turned it into a customer afterwards for some other work that we were doing and and so many people were very supportive of it I mean we started meeting with other labels there was artists that were like wow I can't believe you left we'd love to be able to work with you now and and see what you can help us do um and some Brands like you know we worked with like Corona and Dunkin Donuts and and these different elements so it was cool to be able to um have that experience to jump into what was the agency doing yeah so the the agency it was called Raz interactive it was a digital agency um very focused on um Building Product uh web development app development um and building a lot of like uh marketing experiences so you know at that time there was a lot of like digital uh physical activations like they would turn an entire you know Courtyard into like a huge experience for like Brands and stuff like that right or events we would do very we would do digital versions of these activations to be able to bring people and activate for like a Corona or Dunkin' donuts and so some of the a lot of things we did was in the gamification side too like we would incentivize people to do things play games earn points and and get like beer um um you know collect beer bottles as an example um and so we did a lot of those types of experiences that help from a brand level um but I mean anything from like web development to web apps other startups or companies that were trying to build stuff we've done too um but yeah think software product ux design um and web development was kind of our bread and butter yeah it feels like you've got to have a ton of creativity to be able to a understand the client what they're looking for and then translate what they're looking for into something tangible and also in a way that it is going to attract people and not just be a dud yeah absolutely it and you know we were we were very much on the B2B Toc side right so obviously a lot of our customers were um business customers right in the B2B side but all the experiences that we were building and creating waiting were for the their end customer which were consumers out in the market you see what I'm saying oh yeah awesome all right so I resonate a ton with the idea of jumping almost like into entrepreneurial land and kind of not having that safety net going from having healthc care to now you're paying for your own Healthcare I imagine and the expenses start racking up and you're like all right I got to start invoicing folks it seems like you were able to quickly assemble the plane as you were jumping off of the cliff and I love hearing about that I know you grew the company and then in ended up selling it right can you tell us about the story of selling the agency yeah and actually like right in between that so throughout those years while we had the agency we we had built two SAS products and launched them as individual Ventures so one was called Zeki and the other was called Ezio and um one was a gamification platform that we then leveraged to be able to power um National campaigns for like Sprint before they got acquired by T-Mobile so for example we did the first ever Rewards program for Pokemon go and and Sprint so that activated over 65 Million Pokemon go players leveraging a platform like that one um and so it allowed anybody to spin up like a loyalty and Rewards program for just a small subscription versus you know you know back then it was so expensive to get something like that off the ground right and um and the other one was a uh a a real estate marketing platform but for a multif family real estate I I would say very Niche and it's because there at the agency we started you know more than half our business at one point be started becoming multif family real estate and these property management companies because they loved what we were doing with the artist and the brands and these things and like wow like you know we're we're trying to sell a you know a apartment or or something like that or rent you know rent an apartment and um there was nothing really Innovative in that industry and so like can you make this cool yeah like can you make this cool and and that's what we did I mean our designers kind of approached it like all imagine you were um don't think you're you're designing for an apartment building for second right imagine you were doing a campaign for a global artist like one project we had was with Jay Balvin and he was really taken off miente went Global and like we would think of it in that way of like wow like what type of experience would you create and what for people um but of course towards the multif family industry because in the end you got to convert whatever it is that we were doing and that was like the approach that our team really took with projects that were outside of like the core as an example and once it surpassed half like we just saw a huge problem and and so then I literally separated out of team and we built out a um marketing platform CMS website builder like the entire thing to be for that market wow and um we we went out to we were like you know what for this in individually like we need to go fundraising for it and we did we almost closed around but we ended up getting acquired instead no way um not a bad outcome yeah not bad and you know it was but overall it was a little bit different than what you imagin and it was like you know first it started like partnership talks right and you're like entertaining this thing you're like wow I'm about to close this round we can kind of go big but um when we started looking at the deal and we also met with the PE firm like and talking through this whole thing um they wanted to combine the companies and and because you know together we can actually go out and um be able to take over a bigger portion of the market they had a gap with the products that they were selling because they didn't have a marketing platform so they were losing contracts and obviously we didn't have like the accounting and the property management software so we just had the marketing aspect of it which again individually could still do well um and when we they saw that we had an agency and we had this gamification platform they're like actually we want to buy all three because we can actually tailor the whole thing for the property management sector so we were like wait a second so we're we're we're now in talks of like wow we've you know we've been working for 10 years building and we have our clientele and all this stuff and we're like so now it was like okay this is actually a just the entire thing so you know me and my co-founders we had to make a lot of decisions and figuring out like weigh all the options and figure out what was the best move um and not only just for us but also for the team you know because even though you're running a company and we had all these great customers and clients it's still you're building a business and you're we there's always you know you have your ups and downs uh clients take time to pay like these the bigger the the client the longer they take the play the pay it's it's it's ludicrous right so you know you you kind of see all of these things and um so we the acquisition for us was really important that like we could take care of the entire team nobody gets cut not only that but we we were looking to grow we weren't looking to scale down and and anything like that right and so we even tied in like we literally probably within the first year almost tripled the size of our team to handle what we were working on right well right so they were what was great about was they were really willing to invest a ton to scale this out because they had uh number one they're much larger than us so they had way more customers um that they wanted to roll out what we already built to them right and so when you go through the acquisition process you know some Founders think like oh wow they're going to buy a product and it's going to be easy and I'm going to have my team but no the team gets slashed budgets get cut they don't invest more on it they pick apart what you need and all of those elements so when you're considering an acquisition and that's the things we consider was like we're not going to let this kind of die right we want this to be Everlasting and to be able to build up and everyone's taken care of and um we could actually continue to innovate on what we were trying to do to begin with because if not then it's like going back to corporate only and um you're just working for somebody and not really enjoying what you're doing does that make sense yeah so the thing that interests me the most probably out of this are what are some of the hard or the challenging decisions that you had to make when you were thinking about selling and then how did you go about making those decisions I think the challenge so aside from the challenges of just making sure they're going to invest in scale because that that obviously was a one thing we really had to think through but the other part you kind of think through and um you know it's it's in my nature it's like we have an amazing team we have a product that's been taking off right and we built it all bootstrapped and for the 10 years we bootstrapped the companies right between us and the co-founders like that's what we did it's like well we're about to raise around and you know for a couple million dollars it's like we could take that and go just go big and scale right um and it's like so that that was a critical decision because it's like well you know if we go the VC path and start raising after all this work like we could be end up at a much larger outcome and work and do all these things but the other side of it and this is debate that we had between us as gofounders is like well you know even though we we just finished this new Venture and we scaled that we already had clients and revenue was amazing in total us as a group we were we were already 10 years years into overall even though this one was a little bit newer but it's been 10 years so it's like we did all this work and it's like you know is it going the Venture route we would have been signing up for another 10 years for that specific product and Industry and so it it's it's really hard because there's exciting pieces to both you know right um and so those are things that come into like that was very challenging we had to weigh and the the outcomes and it's like if you think about well if I we have to raise three or four rounds of funding what our dilution would be it was four co-founders right so we would already been diluted to a certain extent and then you know great we do sell for a great outcome for what the company would have been but then when you look at the what we had from the exit side and the package and it was guarantees there was no money that was like oh you won't get this if you don't hit a certain Benchmark right um from from the deal deal so we were like all right are we satisfied what the deal is but not only that we were rolling into the company with equity for the larger stake and what helped with that was that the PE company had about 18 months to sell that company because they had to put a return for their fund so they were already at that time period where everything needed what we had so that we can combine forces to go for another exit in 18 to 24 months that was a risky part too that we had to consider because that was not a guarantee you see so we kind of had to look at all the decisions like are we happy with what we've got now and would this work out um but I also knew that running for another exit still kept the entrepreneurial side in me my co-founder because we knew that there there was even though there was risk it would have still been fun to figure out like are we going to be able to pull off another exit in 18 24 months cuz that was like the window that was talked about so I think we looked at it internally as like this would be great this would be a challenge we got to take care of the team everybody had jobs we scaled up added more resources like all these things so um you know you have to weigh both sides and kind of see like what works for for you and you know we had a I have a daughter she's 3 years old we were living in an apartment it was even though we were entrepreneurs we were paycheck to paycheck because we always kept putting back into the company we were always growing and it's like it'd be great to have a Cush and take some time and then we could always do this again right like I had aund other ideas that we just never got to because we were we were really focused on what we were doing which I want to talk about uh with Alana but a few tactical items on the deal and how you sold it cuz this fascinates me a ton did you hire someone like an intermediary and did so I'm going to kind of Rapid Fire you just take whichever questions you want to answer and in whatever order you want did you hire someone were you happy with how the deal eventually turned out or do you think you could have potentially got more uh and then did you sell everything or were you still did you sell a percentage and then later in that 18 months later you sold break that whole thing down for me like a little bit more color around the deal itself yeah a lot of the deal is still confidential so I'll try to explain as best as I can without um divulging getting into trouble yeah but but even if you know again I want to help others if others are contemplating like getting investment or an acquisition or no matter where they are in their career we didn't have an intermediary but we obviously we have we had our attorney um who was a good friend of my co-founders that's how I met him and we become friends and he's like awesome he he handled a lot of big big real-time Acquisitions so you know he was in our court which was awesome um but I ran with most of the conversations and my co-founder like we'd have but a lot of that directly in in like the final negotiations when we had to get through it with the guidance of like what my co-founders and my attorney and like we would talk about like well this is what we should shoot for this is what it is um and what was good is like even our attorney felt like this was actually a pretty good deal like so when you look at the numbers like you want to get gut checks and get talks and talk to people and just make sure like okay is this good or is it unfair and it's like well when you look at the whole picture it was like so far it was a pretty fair deal now again could you shoot for the moon and go even higher possible again but risk is the deal at hand a a good deal and so um you know a lot of times I think it's it's I'm not going to say a lot of times because this was the this was our acquisition that we we did and I haven't experienced a different side but you know I liked it better when I was able to have the conversations and there wasn't someone talking on my behalf but but for me it's because I love I'm I'm very big on negotiating on doing deals sales on that part of it I love the technical aspect of things but I also enjoy that part um so but for someone who probably has never had experience in negotiating or talking or or doing sales you want to have somebody who really understands to help um like again you still want to be at the Forefront if you're the CEO that's super important because those negotiations are and those talks are also them doing more diligence on you at that point right because in the end they could not sign the the like you could they could let go of the entire deal right if if if you're not doing it right so yeah I think um with it it was a total sale we we sold um the entire company um 100% And but obviously we negotiated Equity stake into the larger company because of the way we were it's just the way the transaction had to be handled that's it um so you know some Deals they do instead of equity they'll just do earn outs based on performance only right that's and um we were able to negotiate a good plan but on Equity so we were really vested in like the overall company versus just like a fixed sum that could come out and um we even contemplated what that would look like if we were to do a fixed sum and to be completely honest I I I love spreadsheet so I put everything in a spreadsheet and I'm like all right what would be our our you know worst case scenario our base case and what would be our best case scenario you know and we had to be comfortable with all three scenarios right because this is what it is and in in in terms of how it was and when we finally got through the acquisition I I went back to the spreadsheet and it was our best case scenario which was amazing the the company kept their word the CEO kept their word on everything that they would do everything was outlined the way it was it took 18 months and we sold in 2021 right before the crash yeah so it I don't know if it's luck I mean obviously a lot of hard work we're blessed but it all worked out really well um it but just super important for other Founders it doesn't always work out that and especially now the environment is so different um but it all worked out really well and so all the that we did over the last 10 years really paid off for us um as a team it gave us what we need to be able to take some time you know um for what we need to do and you know which you know I took too much time now I now I'm back into doing it all over again to go through the pain so you went right back into it what was the reason that you wanted to attack the specific problem that you're attacking now with Alana yeah that's a great question um when we owned our our past companies we turned away a lot of customers which even today like you in any company you're starting you're going to turn away a lot of people that's not in your right fit but we we met with a lot of um okay businesses uh Founders a lot of artists that were upand cominging that were trying to get their music out figure out this whole content strategy so they can get plays on Spotify or anything anything like that it was it was a good range of people who who we we we met with and that we couldn't take them on because our you know our hourly rates were like almost 200 an hour at the time today might have been even higher um stuff that people couldn't afford but it's what we needed because we didn't our entire team was in house in Miami right and at the time so this was like for us we saw like the problems that they were having and it and it came down to it's like well I need to get more business for my company I need to get more leads I try to make more money like where to to be able to grow they know that they got to do stuff on social media but it just feel like they don't know what to do right they don't know how many times to post they don't know what type of content to post they don't know what people are going to want and and then to make it worse is that there's like all these different social platforms do I do Instagram do I do Tik Tok do I do YouTube what you know what it is that I do and so we saw that problem it was just so overwhelming for them right even for ourselves like as an agency it's like it's so hard sometimes to practice what you preach because you're so vested in doing the work for your customers right and so when we thought about um content and we and we looked at video I mean billions of hours are being streamed on YouTube all the different platforms more people are spending more time on watching video it's it's insane like think about it um even apps have to control and give you notifications when you're spending too much time on on video it's just significantly increasing so you if if you're a startup or a business or a founder and you're not leveraging video to help in growing your company you're going to get left behind right and so for us that's why we really focused on like art we we want to build a platform to make it super easy for others to be able to turn any video audio or an idea into over 30 or 50 pieces is a content and ultimately what our vision is the entire process is autonomous you enter what your goals are exactly what it is that you're trying to achieve like hey I'm trying to you know uh bring in another 100 Grand this year what do I need to do and it outlines an entire strategy and automatically starts deploying it on your behalf right and so that that's our ultimate vision and in its current state it actually takes one video or audio and it'll turn it into 50 pieces of content and we make it super flexible for you to be able to leverage that until we can get to what our ultimate goal is wow okay I see that vision and I love it because if I can get that knoow from you and almost a tailored experience or a customer experience that isn't you actually having to give me this custom write up or marketing plan or strategy document and you're leveraging what is out there with AI but it has your knowhow on top of it that's very cool absolutely I think it's got to be in your voice and your brand as it's represented and again you don't know you might be really good at what you do I mean I'll just even go to like let's say an electrician they know what how to you know install Outlets lights or whatever it is they know how to you know revamp your entire system and and your and and the box outside or if you need to set up a charging uh station for your Tesla and they come in and actually do the installation and the wiring and I mean it goes very in depth and and they know how to do all that but they don't know what to post like they're not going to you know the electrician is not in the business of teaching other people um to uh like go very Advan and like rewiring a whole house that requires an electrician like permit but they could they do have a lot of knowledge of like like here's some tips on how to avoid tripping your breaker just buy a um a search protector and make sure your devices are connected to it and that avoids an electrician like me from coming to your house and paying me hourly rate to fix it and so they can do a lot of this type of content that makes them feel like wow they're just helping and enabling me to do a lot of the stuff that I can do myself to avoid needing an electrician and guess what when they actually really need an electrician and something breaks they're going to call a guy who gave them all that amazing advice on on um let's say Instagram or whatever it is and in order to come in and that's just one example right there's so much types of content but the electricians just at one point don't even know what content to even create or post and nevertheless to put the time to do it because the time that they're doing content they're not out actually handling jobs as an example right I go so far down the rabbit hole on that kind of stuff on Tik Tok I love those kind of videos that and so I'm 100% with you on that right just the random things that I don't get to do with the the piping or how's this made or what kind of tips and tricks can I have in my house to not mess up my house basically and so the uh the thing that I was wondering is though are you basically if I'm an electrician let's go down how would that look for me using Alana are you asking the electrician questions where you just saying hey here's some prompts maybe you want to talk about this kind of stuff and record yourself doing it yeah that's a great question uh sometimes I mix up a lot of kind of vision versus what we've got in our current state and so I'm going to switch to just making sure I focus on what we've got right now that might be really helpful um because the way that we built a product today we wanted to get our product out we didn't want to go another six months building and not have anything out in the market right and so you know we made that decision decision and launched it officially in July what it's helped the most with others are people who are already recording video but they don't have the time to uh repurpose it and put it out on other networks so they might already be recording a 60-second video for Instagram or maybe they shot a 10-minute video and they put it on YouTube or maybe they did a podcast and now what we'll do is we'll take that and we'll automatically repurpose it for everything you need for Instagram for Tik Tok or to post on LinkedIn on x and all these things so we have a AI card system we call it AI cards and they're like these little cards on a page it's almost like a drag and drop website builder you can add as many cards on the page and as you add them it starts generating that content and those AI cards are things like Instagram Clips um uh a viral X thread a blog post a newsletter so if you think about a video like you can turn that into a newsletter you could turn it into a blog post you can turn it into a thread for x or for the stagram threads app and all this different content it'll handle all of your titles your descriptions your show notes like all the details and it's all written in the form to help that content be discovered and also to go viral especially obviously if your content is good right and and that's the way it's written so you know you're not going to just post a really large block of text on LinkedIn like you want to break it up it's got a certain style like if you see things on LinkedIn go viral you'll see how it's written those are the types of things that we we do but each person can do their own workflow right so like you're doing this podcast and let's say you or or your team has a very specific workflow this is the type of content I like to do based on my brand this is how I like it written in every single format you do that once and then you can save that as an AI template so that now for the next 100 videos that you upload it automatically replicates that process for you that makes 100% yeah and I appreciate you saying hey here's what we got but here's where we're going and so the the understanding that I have is you're really trying to cater to the folks that are almost like too busy doing the work of their job to think about this sea of social media and how to do the marketing because they know they should as you mentioned before everyone knows if you have a company no matter what the company is you got to be doing stuff to promote it online and so yes you're saying hey we're going to help folks that are almost it like a in a disposition because they're doing so well doing their actual job and then they're thinking about all this other stuff and they're like ah how do I even what do I do I'm I'm not good on camera I don't know uh or they have one thing that they're doing but then you get to Fan it out into many things exactly so if so when I look at like what we're really doing I learn about your business what you do and we have best practices already baked in we know what your goals are whether it's a revenue Target a views Target or whatever it is we you know we can even go even more Niche and like what's some of the expertise that you have what are you really good at in this sector versus what are you not good at you know and you you start to learn a little bit more about the person and from that information we then are able to be able to build out what an entire content strategy would be for you based on the platforms that would work best on your behalf right and so it let's just start with like say something like um let's let's just say t uh Instagram for a second and it's like all right 30 days of content well you know if if you're willing to be able to record video then we can actually put together the entire content plan here are the titles for those videos here's the viral hook that you need to say for each individual video that already works and is tailored for that platform and proven to get content to go viral in your industry and then here's what the framework of the body of the content and the call to action you're going to put at the end and have that all ready so that all they got to do is go in and hit record so that they can put that video so now we've taken away the um I don't know piece but on the flip side if you don't want to go on camera then we'll create the entire video for you and deploy it on your behalf and so I think the the the piece of this is for them to be able to have the ability to be able to either be them they themselves to become the in the Creator the person who can talk about this content but there's still a lot of people who are just they're just not going to record video right and so what do you do in that case you sometimes hire another agency you hire another company you hire an AI uh you hire a content creator to do it on your behalf and let them record the videos but on behalf of the company and so you know for us is to be able to automate the entire process so that you're completely hands off but we do we're always going to have individuals who want to be Hands-On so we can automate the entire workflow of the parts that you're again you may not be good at you might be fine at talking on screen you know I would love it if somebody gave me the perfect script every single time all I do is hit record and I'm done because I I'm I'm fine with being on camera you see what I mean yep yep yeah I've seen one just as a bit of a tangent I saw one feature that I think Tik Tok has where you can create your script and then it's like a teleprompter that's coming up on your phone as you're talking to to your phone so it's like you're looking at your phone you're reading the script and it's there for you feels like that's something easy to include in that what you're what you're trying to do too and the other piece that I was thinking about is undoubtedly from your days in the agency you saw that it's not just the social media part and so I can imagine that you're you're already thinking about okay well this is one part of the funnel or that acquisition channel right how can you go and then scale that out this is just the wedge to get you in but then somebody's got to have a place where they can capture leads so what are you going to be doing there somebody's got to have uh somebody that picks up the phone and answers it when someone calls or that replies to emails etc etc and I can imagine the Grand Vision as you mentioned before is really trying to help those folks and going into to end on it yeah it's funny and not um I really get asked going that far from from people and so that's a a great question because we don't talk about that because it is very forward looking um but in the end I need to be able to solve the problem where you you you absolutely have nothing you need to do when it comes to being able to handle the content the conversions and growing that part of the business I want you to f focus on your craft whether that's you know performing music whether you're the electrician that's going out and doing the jobs or running the team or if you're a you know SAS startup founder who is more Technical and you're you're you're trying to focus on that part of the business versus um content and um what your marketing strategy is and so yeah I as we think about the future and expansion who knows where it goes um but there's a lot of room to be able to expand into areas to automate the entire funnel right because I think for us that's super important we we we built a lot of funnels in our past companies we built these campaigns we saw the conversions in the analytics and but what we avoided in the company was content Creation in our past companies and we really focused on the other side of things and we had a partner who worked on content creation video and we would um leverage them like introductions type of thing but I I think seeing that shift there's so much more opportunity to be able to handle this piece of it and then be able to handle that entire process and how that looks like whether it's within our product or we're leveraging Partnerships with other tools to just automate the process the point is is that it shouldn't be a u a difficult tool for you to use it should be more like hey I've got my AI content manager or your you know content Studio that kind of handles everything for you and you wake up every morning with your report of either how many leads you got how many views you got what the measurements were and because of you know how everything's performed here's some new content I created and I'm going to put this out tomorrow for you like you should just wake up with that drink your cup of coffee and move on that's incredible well I love the vision Sebastian thanks for coming on here man no appreciate it thank you man always good catching up with you guys I love the gram you guys really helped us out uh when we made the switch so uh anything we can we can do to continue partnering togetherwelcome back to another AI Minds podcast this is a podcast where we explore the companies of Tomorrow built AI first I am your host Dimitri o and this episode like every other episode is brought to you by Deep grham the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the internet today trusted by the world top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like Spotify twio NASA and City bank today we are joined by none other than the CEO and co-founder of Alana Sebastian how you doing man I'm doing great always good to catch up with you appreciate being on here talking about how you are in Miami you're preparing for a potential storm uh so it's good you're inside today and taking the time to chat with me I know that you have a bit of a history of being an entrepreneur and I want to get into what Alana is in just a minute but let's start with where you were working at a record label and then deciding to go all in on starting your own thing and what was that move like oh wow yeah that's a great question you know um it's never easy to make a transition that way right um you know I worked at a large record label Universal Music Group big company and obviously it's cool and it's awesome because you're you're working with artists and talent I mean a lot of concerts a lot of events and and it's music which is has been a passion of mine for such a long time but in the end you're you're at a big company you've got a fixed salary you've got your you know your plans your health insurance you have all of these different elements and so um to make that plunge of like well let's let go of you know that security that you have and go dive into something that um is really the unknown right that's never an easy decision um but you know my wife always tells me I'm crazy because that's who I am I could drop in a dime and and and and go do it even if it's risky because you you dive into it but you know it's still in the back of the mind it's kind of like hey you know if you're making that transition from leaving a gig to going into it you want to make sure that you're you're going to give it your all and um you know I've always had side businesses and so we we've kind of figured out ways to always make money and and revenue on the side and so you know when we saw that it was just we can't do this on the side you've got to like take a Plunge in that's where like making that decision of like look I love what I do here love the team and everything like that and but it is that time um and you know this wasn't the first time I was I was going to try to leave but they you know there's always to stay right um but you know that last time was like all right this is like the moment let's do it let's go all in we started picking up even more on business and I know if you can allocate all your time to something obviously you can put your your all in it doesn't mean it's going to be completely stable but you could really push through which which is what happened and so ended up going all in into the company um you know my co-founder so had a co-founder and she's also my wife we we've been married for almost 20 years now and she actually quit her job 6 months before me and so I held on to this one to keep going while she was there and we ended up um diving into it but you know the week after we literally had meetings with universal and obviously they become our customers so we turned it into a customer afterwards for some other work that we were doing and and so many people were very supportive of it I mean we started meeting with other labels there was artists that were like wow I can't believe you left we'd love to be able to work with you now and and see what you can help us do um and some Brands like you know we worked with like Corona and Dunkin Donuts and and these different elements so it was cool to be able to um have that experience to jump into what was the agency doing yeah so the the agency it was called Raz interactive it was a digital agency um very focused on um Building Product uh web development app development um and building a lot of like uh marketing experiences so you know at that time there was a lot of like digital uh physical activations like they would turn an entire you know Courtyard into like a huge experience for like Brands and stuff like that right or events we would do very we would do digital versions of these activations to be able to bring people and activate for like a Corona or Dunkin' donuts and so some of the a lot of things we did was in the gamification side too like we would incentivize people to do things play games earn points and and get like beer um um you know collect beer bottles as an example um and so we did a lot of those types of experiences that help from a brand level um but I mean anything from like web development to web apps other startups or companies that were trying to build stuff we've done too um but yeah think software product ux design um and web development was kind of our bread and butter yeah it feels like you've got to have a ton of creativity to be able to a understand the client what they're looking for and then translate what they're looking for into something tangible and also in a way that it is going to attract people and not just be a dud yeah absolutely it and you know we were we were very much on the B2B Toc side right so obviously a lot of our customers were um business customers right in the B2B side but all the experiences that we were building and creating waiting were for the their end customer which were consumers out in the market you see what I'm saying oh yeah awesome all right so I resonate a ton with the idea of jumping almost like into entrepreneurial land and kind of not having that safety net going from having healthc care to now you're paying for your own Healthcare I imagine and the expenses start racking up and you're like all right I got to start invoicing folks it seems like you were able to quickly assemble the plane as you were jumping off of the cliff and I love hearing about that I know you grew the company and then in ended up selling it right can you tell us about the story of selling the agency yeah and actually like right in between that so throughout those years while we had the agency we we had built two SAS products and launched them as individual Ventures so one was called Zeki and the other was called Ezio and um one was a gamification platform that we then leveraged to be able to power um National campaigns for like Sprint before they got acquired by T-Mobile so for example we did the first ever Rewards program for Pokemon go and and Sprint so that activated over 65 Million Pokemon go players leveraging a platform like that one um and so it allowed anybody to spin up like a loyalty and Rewards program for just a small subscription versus you know you know back then it was so expensive to get something like that off the ground right and um and the other one was a uh a a real estate marketing platform but for a multif family real estate I I would say very Niche and it's because there at the agency we started you know more than half our business at one point be started becoming multif family real estate and these property management companies because they loved what we were doing with the artist and the brands and these things and like wow like you know we're we're trying to sell a you know a apartment or or something like that or rent you know rent an apartment and um there was nothing really Innovative in that industry and so like can you make this cool yeah like can you make this cool and and that's what we did I mean our designers kind of approached it like all imagine you were um don't think you're you're designing for an apartment building for second right imagine you were doing a campaign for a global artist like one project we had was with Jay Balvin and he was really taken off miente went Global and like we would think of it in that way of like wow like what type of experience would you create and what for people um but of course towards the multif family industry because in the end you got to convert whatever it is that we were doing and that was like the approach that our team really took with projects that were outside of like the core as an example and once it surpassed half like we just saw a huge problem and and so then I literally separated out of team and we built out a um marketing platform CMS website builder like the entire thing to be for that market wow and um we we went out to we were like you know what for this in individually like we need to go fundraising for it and we did we almost closed around but we ended up getting acquired instead no way um not a bad outcome yeah not bad and you know it was but overall it was a little bit different than what you imagin and it was like you know first it started like partnership talks right and you're like entertaining this thing you're like wow I'm about to close this round we can kind of go big but um when we started looking at the deal and we also met with the PE firm like and talking through this whole thing um they wanted to combine the companies and and because you know together we can actually go out and um be able to take over a bigger portion of the market they had a gap with the products that they were selling because they didn't have a marketing platform so they were losing contracts and obviously we didn't have like the accounting and the property management software so we just had the marketing aspect of it which again individually could still do well um and when we they saw that we had an agency and we had this gamification platform they're like actually we want to buy all three because we can actually tailor the whole thing for the property management sector so we were like wait a second so we're we're we're now in talks of like wow we've you know we've been working for 10 years building and we have our clientele and all this stuff and we're like so now it was like okay this is actually a just the entire thing so you know me and my co-founders we had to make a lot of decisions and figuring out like weigh all the options and figure out what was the best move um and not only just for us but also for the team you know because even though you're running a company and we had all these great customers and clients it's still you're building a business and you're we there's always you know you have your ups and downs uh clients take time to pay like these the bigger the the client the longer they take the play the pay it's it's it's ludicrous right so you know you you kind of see all of these things and um so we the acquisition for us was really important that like we could take care of the entire team nobody gets cut not only that but we we were looking to grow we weren't looking to scale down and and anything like that right and so we even tied in like we literally probably within the first year almost tripled the size of our team to handle what we were working on right well right so they were what was great about was they were really willing to invest a ton to scale this out because they had uh number one they're much larger than us so they had way more customers um that they wanted to roll out what we already built to them right and so when you go through the acquisition process you know some Founders think like oh wow they're going to buy a product and it's going to be easy and I'm going to have my team but no the team gets slashed budgets get cut they don't invest more on it they pick apart what you need and all of those elements so when you're considering an acquisition and that's the things we consider was like we're not going to let this kind of die right we want this to be Everlasting and to be able to build up and everyone's taken care of and um we could actually continue to innovate on what we were trying to do to begin with because if not then it's like going back to corporate only and um you're just working for somebody and not really enjoying what you're doing does that make sense yeah so the thing that interests me the most probably out of this are what are some of the hard or the challenging decisions that you had to make when you were thinking about selling and then how did you go about making those decisions I think the challenge so aside from the challenges of just making sure they're going to invest in scale because that that obviously was a one thing we really had to think through but the other part you kind of think through and um you know it's it's in my nature it's like we have an amazing team we have a product that's been taking off right and we built it all bootstrapped and for the 10 years we bootstrapped the companies right between us and the co-founders like that's what we did it's like well we're about to raise around and you know for a couple million dollars it's like we could take that and go just go big and scale right um and it's like so that that was a critical decision because it's like well you know if we go the VC path and start raising after all this work like we could be end up at a much larger outcome and work and do all these things but the other side of it and this is debate that we had between us as gofounders is like well you know even though we we just finished this new Venture and we scaled that we already had clients and revenue was amazing in total us as a group we were we were already 10 years years into overall even though this one was a little bit newer but it's been 10 years so it's like we did all this work and it's like you know is it going the Venture route we would have been signing up for another 10 years for that specific product and Industry and so it it's it's really hard because there's exciting pieces to both you know right um and so those are things that come into like that was very challenging we had to weigh and the the outcomes and it's like if you think about well if I we have to raise three or four rounds of funding what our dilution would be it was four co-founders right so we would already been diluted to a certain extent and then you know great we do sell for a great outcome for what the company would have been but then when you look at the what we had from the exit side and the package and it was guarantees there was no money that was like oh you won't get this if you don't hit a certain Benchmark right um from from the deal deal so we were like all right are we satisfied what the deal is but not only that we were rolling into the company with equity for the larger stake and what helped with that was that the PE company had about 18 months to sell that company because they had to put a return for their fund so they were already at that time period where everything needed what we had so that we can combine forces to go for another exit in 18 to 24 months that was a risky part too that we had to consider because that was not a guarantee you see so we kind of had to look at all the decisions like are we happy with what we've got now and would this work out um but I also knew that running for another exit still kept the entrepreneurial side in me my co-founder because we knew that there there was even though there was risk it would have still been fun to figure out like are we going to be able to pull off another exit in 18 24 months cuz that was like the window that was talked about so I think we looked at it internally as like this would be great this would be a challenge we got to take care of the team everybody had jobs we scaled up added more resources like all these things so um you know you have to weigh both sides and kind of see like what works for for you and you know we had a I have a daughter she's 3 years old we were living in an apartment it was even though we were entrepreneurs we were paycheck to paycheck because we always kept putting back into the company we were always growing and it's like it'd be great to have a Cush and take some time and then we could always do this again right like I had aund other ideas that we just never got to because we were we were really focused on what we were doing which I want to talk about uh with Alana but a few tactical items on the deal and how you sold it cuz this fascinates me a ton did you hire someone like an intermediary and did so I'm going to kind of Rapid Fire you just take whichever questions you want to answer and in whatever order you want did you hire someone were you happy with how the deal eventually turned out or do you think you could have potentially got more uh and then did you sell everything or were you still did you sell a percentage and then later in that 18 months later you sold break that whole thing down for me like a little bit more color around the deal itself yeah a lot of the deal is still confidential so I'll try to explain as best as I can without um divulging getting into trouble yeah but but even if you know again I want to help others if others are contemplating like getting investment or an acquisition or no matter where they are in their career we didn't have an intermediary but we obviously we have we had our attorney um who was a good friend of my co-founders that's how I met him and we become friends and he's like awesome he he handled a lot of big big real-time Acquisitions so you know he was in our court which was awesome um but I ran with most of the conversations and my co-founder like we'd have but a lot of that directly in in like the final negotiations when we had to get through it with the guidance of like what my co-founders and my attorney and like we would talk about like well this is what we should shoot for this is what it is um and what was good is like even our attorney felt like this was actually a pretty good deal like so when you look at the numbers like you want to get gut checks and get talks and talk to people and just make sure like okay is this good or is it unfair and it's like well when you look at the whole picture it was like so far it was a pretty fair deal now again could you shoot for the moon and go even higher possible again but risk is the deal at hand a a good deal and so um you know a lot of times I think it's it's I'm not going to say a lot of times because this was the this was our acquisition that we we did and I haven't experienced a different side but you know I liked it better when I was able to have the conversations and there wasn't someone talking on my behalf but but for me it's because I love I'm I'm very big on negotiating on doing deals sales on that part of it I love the technical aspect of things but I also enjoy that part um so but for someone who probably has never had experience in negotiating or talking or or doing sales you want to have somebody who really understands to help um like again you still want to be at the Forefront if you're the CEO that's super important because those negotiations are and those talks are also them doing more diligence on you at that point right because in the end they could not sign the the like you could they could let go of the entire deal right if if if you're not doing it right so yeah I think um with it it was a total sale we we sold um the entire company um 100% And but obviously we negotiated Equity stake into the larger company because of the way we were it's just the way the transaction had to be handled that's it um so you know some Deals they do instead of equity they'll just do earn outs based on performance only right that's and um we were able to negotiate a good plan but on Equity so we were really vested in like the overall company versus just like a fixed sum that could come out and um we even contemplated what that would look like if we were to do a fixed sum and to be completely honest I I I love spreadsheet so I put everything in a spreadsheet and I'm like all right what would be our our you know worst case scenario our base case and what would be our best case scenario you know and we had to be comfortable with all three scenarios right because this is what it is and in in in terms of how it was and when we finally got through the acquisition I I went back to the spreadsheet and it was our best case scenario which was amazing the the company kept their word the CEO kept their word on everything that they would do everything was outlined the way it was it took 18 months and we sold in 2021 right before the crash yeah so it I don't know if it's luck I mean obviously a lot of hard work we're blessed but it all worked out really well um it but just super important for other Founders it doesn't always work out that and especially now the environment is so different um but it all worked out really well and so all the that we did over the last 10 years really paid off for us um as a team it gave us what we need to be able to take some time you know um for what we need to do and you know which you know I took too much time now I now I'm back into doing it all over again to go through the pain so you went right back into it what was the reason that you wanted to attack the specific problem that you're attacking now with Alana yeah that's a great question um when we owned our our past companies we turned away a lot of customers which even today like you in any company you're starting you're going to turn away a lot of people that's not in your right fit but we we met with a lot of um okay businesses uh Founders a lot of artists that were upand cominging that were trying to get their music out figure out this whole content strategy so they can get plays on Spotify or anything anything like that it was it was a good range of people who who we we we met with and that we couldn't take them on because our you know our hourly rates were like almost 200 an hour at the time today might have been even higher um stuff that people couldn't afford but it's what we needed because we didn't our entire team was in house in Miami right and at the time so this was like for us we saw like the problems that they were having and it and it came down to it's like well I need to get more business for my company I need to get more leads I try to make more money like where to to be able to grow they know that they got to do stuff on social media but it just feel like they don't know what to do right they don't know how many times to post they don't know what type of content to post they don't know what people are going to want and and then to make it worse is that there's like all these different social platforms do I do Instagram do I do Tik Tok do I do YouTube what you know what it is that I do and so we saw that problem it was just so overwhelming for them right even for ourselves like as an agency it's like it's so hard sometimes to practice what you preach because you're so vested in doing the work for your customers right and so when we thought about um content and we and we looked at video I mean billions of hours are being streamed on YouTube all the different platforms more people are spending more time on watching video it's it's insane like think about it um even apps have to control and give you notifications when you're spending too much time on on video it's just significantly increasing so you if if you're a startup or a business or a founder and you're not leveraging video to help in growing your company you're going to get left behind right and so for us that's why we really focused on like art we we want to build a platform to make it super easy for others to be able to turn any video audio or an idea into over 30 or 50 pieces is a content and ultimately what our vision is the entire process is autonomous you enter what your goals are exactly what it is that you're trying to achieve like hey I'm trying to you know uh bring in another 100 Grand this year what do I need to do and it outlines an entire strategy and automatically starts deploying it on your behalf right and so that that's our ultimate vision and in its current state it actually takes one video or audio and it'll turn it into 50 pieces of content and we make it super flexible for you to be able to leverage that until we can get to what our ultimate goal is wow okay I see that vision and I love it because if I can get that knoow from you and almost a tailored experience or a customer experience that isn't you actually having to give me this custom write up or marketing plan or strategy document and you're leveraging what is out there with AI but it has your knowhow on top of it that's very cool absolutely I think it's got to be in your voice and your brand as it's represented and again you don't know you might be really good at what you do I mean I'll just even go to like let's say an electrician they know what how to you know install Outlets lights or whatever it is they know how to you know revamp your entire system and and your and and the box outside or if you need to set up a charging uh station for your Tesla and they come in and actually do the installation and the wiring and I mean it goes very in depth and and they know how to do all that but they don't know what to post like they're not going to you know the electrician is not in the business of teaching other people um to uh like go very Advan and like rewiring a whole house that requires an electrician like permit but they could they do have a lot of knowledge of like like here's some tips on how to avoid tripping your breaker just buy a um a search protector and make sure your devices are connected to it and that avoids an electrician like me from coming to your house and paying me hourly rate to fix it and so they can do a lot of this type of content that makes them feel like wow they're just helping and enabling me to do a lot of the stuff that I can do myself to avoid needing an electrician and guess what when they actually really need an electrician and something breaks they're going to call a guy who gave them all that amazing advice on on um let's say Instagram or whatever it is and in order to come in and that's just one example right there's so much types of content but the electricians just at one point don't even know what content to even create or post and nevertheless to put the time to do it because the time that they're doing content they're not out actually handling jobs as an example right I go so far down the rabbit hole on that kind of stuff on Tik Tok I love those kind of videos that and so I'm 100% with you on that right just the random things that I don't get to do with the the piping or how's this made or what kind of tips and tricks can I have in my house to not mess up my house basically and so the uh the thing that I was wondering is though are you basically if I'm an electrician let's go down how would that look for me using Alana are you asking the electrician questions where you just saying hey here's some prompts maybe you want to talk about this kind of stuff and record yourself doing it yeah that's a great question uh sometimes I mix up a lot of kind of vision versus what we've got in our current state and so I'm going to switch to just making sure I focus on what we've got right now that might be really helpful um because the way that we built a product today we wanted to get our product out we didn't want to go another six months building and not have anything out in the market right and so you know we made that decision decision and launched it officially in July what it's helped the most with others are people who are already recording video but they don't have the time to uh repurpose it and put it out on other networks so they might already be recording a 60-second video for Instagram or maybe they shot a 10-minute video and they put it on YouTube or maybe they did a podcast and now what we'll do is we'll take that and we'll automatically repurpose it for everything you need for Instagram for Tik Tok or to post on LinkedIn on x and all these things so we have a AI card system we call it AI cards and they're like these little cards on a page it's almost like a drag and drop website builder you can add as many cards on the page and as you add them it starts generating that content and those AI cards are things like Instagram Clips um uh a viral X thread a blog post a newsletter so if you think about a video like you can turn that into a newsletter you could turn it into a blog post you can turn it into a thread for x or for the stagram threads app and all this different content it'll handle all of your titles your descriptions your show notes like all the details and it's all written in the form to help that content be discovered and also to go viral especially obviously if your content is good right and and that's the way it's written so you know you're not going to just post a really large block of text on LinkedIn like you want to break it up it's got a certain style like if you see things on LinkedIn go viral you'll see how it's written those are the types of things that we we do but each person can do their own workflow right so like you're doing this podcast and let's say you or or your team has a very specific workflow this is the type of content I like to do based on my brand this is how I like it written in every single format you do that once and then you can save that as an AI template so that now for the next 100 videos that you upload it automatically replicates that process for you that makes 100% yeah and I appreciate you saying hey here's what we got but here's where we're going and so the the understanding that I have is you're really trying to cater to the folks that are almost like too busy doing the work of their job to think about this sea of social media and how to do the marketing because they know they should as you mentioned before everyone knows if you have a company no matter what the company is you got to be doing stuff to promote it online and so yes you're saying hey we're going to help folks that are almost it like a in a disposition because they're doing so well doing their actual job and then they're thinking about all this other stuff and they're like ah how do I even what do I do I'm I'm not good on camera I don't know uh or they have one thing that they're doing but then you get to Fan it out into many things exactly so if so when I look at like what we're really doing I learn about your business what you do and we have best practices already baked in we know what your goals are whether it's a revenue Target a views Target or whatever it is we you know we can even go even more Niche and like what's some of the expertise that you have what are you really good at in this sector versus what are you not good at you know and you you start to learn a little bit more about the person and from that information we then are able to be able to build out what an entire content strategy would be for you based on the platforms that would work best on your behalf right and so it let's just start with like say something like um let's let's just say t uh Instagram for a second and it's like all right 30 days of content well you know if if you're willing to be able to record video then we can actually put together the entire content plan here are the titles for those videos here's the viral hook that you need to say for each individual video that already works and is tailored for that platform and proven to get content to go viral in your industry and then here's what the framework of the body of the content and the call to action you're going to put at the end and have that all ready so that all they got to do is go in and hit record so that they can put that video so now we've taken away the um I don't know piece but on the flip side if you don't want to go on camera then we'll create the entire video for you and deploy it on your behalf and so I think the the the piece of this is for them to be able to have the ability to be able to either be them they themselves to become the in the Creator the person who can talk about this content but there's still a lot of people who are just they're just not going to record video right and so what do you do in that case you sometimes hire another agency you hire another company you hire an AI uh you hire a content creator to do it on your behalf and let them record the videos but on behalf of the company and so you know for us is to be able to automate the entire process so that you're completely hands off but we do we're always going to have individuals who want to be Hands-On so we can automate the entire workflow of the parts that you're again you may not be good at you might be fine at talking on screen you know I would love it if somebody gave me the perfect script every single time all I do is hit record and I'm done because I I'm I'm fine with being on camera you see what I mean yep yep yeah I've seen one just as a bit of a tangent I saw one feature that I think Tik Tok has where you can create your script and then it's like a teleprompter that's coming up on your phone as you're talking to to your phone so it's like you're looking at your phone you're reading the script and it's there for you feels like that's something easy to include in that what you're what you're trying to do too and the other piece that I was thinking about is undoubtedly from your days in the agency you saw that it's not just the social media part and so I can imagine that you're you're already thinking about okay well this is one part of the funnel or that acquisition channel right how can you go and then scale that out this is just the wedge to get you in but then somebody's got to have a place where they can capture leads so what are you going to be doing there somebody's got to have uh somebody that picks up the phone and answers it when someone calls or that replies to emails etc etc and I can imagine the Grand Vision as you mentioned before is really trying to help those folks and going into to end on it yeah it's funny and not um I really get asked going that far from from people and so that's a a great question because we don't talk about that because it is very forward looking um but in the end I need to be able to solve the problem where you you you absolutely have nothing you need to do when it comes to being able to handle the content the conversions and growing that part of the business I want you to f focus on your craft whether that's you know performing music whether you're the electrician that's going out and doing the jobs or running the team or if you're a you know SAS startup founder who is more Technical and you're you're you're trying to focus on that part of the business versus um content and um what your marketing strategy is and so yeah I as we think about the future and expansion who knows where it goes um but there's a lot of room to be able to expand into areas to automate the entire funnel right because I think for us that's super important we we we built a lot of funnels in our past companies we built these campaigns we saw the conversions in the analytics and but what we avoided in the company was content Creation in our past companies and we really focused on the other side of things and we had a partner who worked on content creation video and we would um leverage them like introductions type of thing but I I think seeing that shift there's so much more opportunity to be able to handle this piece of it and then be able to handle that entire process and how that looks like whether it's within our product or we're leveraging Partnerships with other tools to just automate the process the point is is that it shouldn't be a u a difficult tool for you to use it should be more like hey I've got my AI content manager or your you know content Studio that kind of handles everything for you and you wake up every morning with your report of either how many leads you got how many views you got what the measurements were and because of you know how everything's performed here's some new content I created and I'm going to put this out tomorrow for you like you should just wake up with that drink your cup of coffee and move on that's incredible well I love the vision Sebastian thanks for coming on here man no appreciate it thank you man always good catching up with you guys I love the gram you guys really helped us out uh when we made the switch so uh anything we can we can do to continue partnering togetherwelcome back to another AI Minds podcast this is a podcast where we explore the companies of Tomorrow built AI first I am your host Dimitri o and this episode like every other episode is brought to you by Deep grham the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the internet today trusted by the world top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like Spotify twio NASA and City bank today we are joined by none other than the CEO and co-founder of Alana Sebastian how you doing man I'm doing great always good to catch up with you appreciate being on here talking about how you are in Miami you're preparing for a potential storm uh so it's good you're inside today and taking the time to chat with me I know that you have a bit of a history of being an entrepreneur and I want to get into what Alana is in just a minute but let's start with where you were working at a record label and then deciding to go all in on starting your own thing and what was that move like oh wow yeah that's a great question you know um it's never easy to make a transition that way right um you know I worked at a large record label Universal Music Group big company and obviously it's cool and it's awesome because you're you're working with artists and talent I mean a lot of concerts a lot of events and and it's music which is has been a passion of mine for such a long time but in the end you're you're at a big company you've got a fixed salary you've got your you know your plans your health insurance you have all of these different elements and so um to make that plunge of like well let's let go of you know that security that you have and go dive into something that um is really the unknown right that's never an easy decision um but you know my wife always tells me I'm crazy because that's who I am I could drop in a dime and and and and go do it even if it's risky because you you dive into it but you know it's still in the back of the mind it's kind of like hey you know if you're making that transition from leaving a gig to going into it you want to make sure that you're you're going to give it your all and um you know I've always had side businesses and so we we've kind of figured out ways to always make money and and revenue on the side and so you know when we saw that it was just we can't do this on the side you've got to like take a Plunge in that's where like making that decision of like look I love what I do here love the team and everything like that and but it is that time um and you know this wasn't the first time I was I was going to try to leave but they you know there's always to stay right um but you know that last time was like all right this is like the moment let's do it let's go all in we started picking up even more on business and I know if you can allocate all your time to something obviously you can put your your all in it doesn't mean it's going to be completely stable but you could really push through which which is what happened and so ended up going all in into the company um you know my co-founder so had a co-founder and she's also my wife we we've been married for almost 20 years now and she actually quit her job 6 months before me and so I held on to this one to keep going while she was there and we ended up um diving into it but you know the week after we literally had meetings with universal and obviously they become our customers so we turned it into a customer afterwards for some other work that we were doing and and so many people were very supportive of it I mean we started meeting with other labels there was artists that were like wow I can't believe you left we'd love to be able to work with you now and and see what you can help us do um and some Brands like you know we worked with like Corona and Dunkin Donuts and and these different elements so it was cool to be able to um have that experience to jump into what was the agency doing yeah so the the agency it was called Raz interactive it was a digital agency um very focused on um Building Product uh web development app development um and building a lot of like uh marketing experiences so you know at that time there was a lot of like digital uh physical activations like they would turn an entire you know Courtyard into like a huge experience for like Brands and stuff like that right or events we would do very we would do digital versions of these activations to be able to bring people and activate for like a Corona or Dunkin' donuts and so some of the a lot of things we did was in the gamification side too like we would incentivize people to do things play games earn points and and get like beer um um you know collect beer bottles as an example um and so we did a lot of those types of experiences that help from a brand level um but I mean anything from like web development to web apps other startups or companies that were trying to build stuff we've done too um but yeah think software product ux design um and web development was kind of our bread and butter yeah it feels like you've got to have a ton of creativity to be able to a understand the client what they're looking for and then translate what they're looking for into something tangible and also in a way that it is going to attract people and not just be a dud yeah absolutely it and you know we were we were very much on the B2B Toc side right so obviously a lot of our customers were um business customers right in the B2B side but all the experiences that we were building and creating waiting were for the their end customer which were consumers out in the market you see what I'm saying oh yeah awesome all right so I resonate a ton with the idea of jumping almost like into entrepreneurial land and kind of not having that safety net going from having healthc care to now you're paying for your own Healthcare I imagine and the expenses start racking up and you're like all right I got to start invoicing folks it seems like you were able to quickly assemble the plane as you were jumping off of the cliff and I love hearing about that I know you grew the company and then in ended up selling it right can you tell us about the story of selling the agency yeah and actually like right in between that so throughout those years while we had the agency we we had built two SAS products and launched them as individual Ventures so one was called Zeki and the other was called Ezio and um one was a gamification platform that we then leveraged to be able to power um National campaigns for like Sprint before they got acquired by T-Mobile so for example we did the first ever Rewards program for Pokemon go and and Sprint so that activated over 65 Million Pokemon go players leveraging a platform like that one um and so it allowed anybody to spin up like a loyalty and Rewards program for just a small subscription versus you know you know back then it was so expensive to get something like that off the ground right and um and the other one was a uh a a real estate marketing platform but for a multif family real estate I I would say very Niche and it's because there at the agency we started you know more than half our business at one point be started becoming multif family real estate and these property management companies because they loved what we were doing with the artist and the brands and these things and like wow like you know we're we're trying to sell a you know a apartment or or something like that or rent you know rent an apartment and um there was nothing really Innovative in that industry and so like can you make this cool yeah like can you make this cool and and that's what we did I mean our designers kind of approached it like all imagine you were um don't think you're you're designing for an apartment building for second right imagine you were doing a campaign for a global artist like one project we had was with Jay Balvin and he was really taken off miente went Global and like we would think of it in that way of like wow like what type of experience would you create and what for people um but of course towards the multif family industry because in the end you got to convert whatever it is that we were doing and that was like the approach that our team really took with projects that were outside of like the core as an example and once it surpassed half like we just saw a huge problem and and so then I literally separated out of team and we built out a um marketing platform CMS website builder like the entire thing to be for that market wow and um we we went out to we were like you know what for this in individually like we need to go fundraising for it and we did we almost closed around but we ended up getting acquired instead no way um not a bad outcome yeah not bad and you know it was but overall it was a little bit different than what you imagin and it was like you know first it started like partnership talks right and you're like entertaining this thing you're like wow I'm about to close this round we can kind of go big but um when we started looking at the deal and we also met with the PE firm like and talking through this whole thing um they wanted to combine the companies and and because you know together we can actually go out and um be able to take over a bigger portion of the market they had a gap with the products that they were selling because they didn't have a marketing platform so they were losing contracts and obviously we didn't have like the accounting and the property management software so we just had the marketing aspect of it which again individually could still do well um and when we they saw that we had an agency and we had this gamification platform they're like actually we want to buy all three because we can actually tailor the whole thing for the property management sector so we were like wait a second so we're we're we're now in talks of like wow we've you know we've been working for 10 years building and we have our clientele and all this stuff and we're like so now it was like okay this is actually a just the entire thing so you know me and my co-founders we had to make a lot of decisions and figuring out like weigh all the options and figure out what was the best move um and not only just for us but also for the team you know because even though you're running a company and we had all these great customers and clients it's still you're building a business and you're we there's always you know you have your ups and downs uh clients take time to pay like these the bigger the the client the longer they take the play the pay it's it's it's ludicrous right so you know you you kind of see all of these things and um so we the acquisition for us was really important that like we could take care of the entire team nobody gets cut not only that but we we were looking to grow we weren't looking to scale down and and anything like that right and so we even tied in like we literally probably within the first year almost tripled the size of our team to handle what we were working on right well right so they were what was great about was they were really willing to invest a ton to scale this out because they had uh number one they're much larger than us so they had way more customers um that they wanted to roll out what we already built to them right and so when you go through the acquisition process you know some Founders think like oh wow they're going to buy a product and it's going to be easy and I'm going to have my team but no the team gets slashed budgets get cut they don't invest more on it they pick apart what you need and all of those elements so when you're considering an acquisition and that's the things we consider was like we're not going to let this kind of die right we want this to be Everlasting and to be able to build up and everyone's taken care of and um we could actually continue to innovate on what we were trying to do to begin with because if not then it's like going back to corporate only and um you're just working for somebody and not really enjoying what you're doing does that make sense yeah so the thing that interests me the most probably out of this are what are some of the hard or the challenging decisions that you had to make when you were thinking about selling and then how did you go about making those decisions I think the challenge so aside from the challenges of just making sure they're going to invest in scale because that that obviously was a one thing we really had to think through but the other part you kind of think through and um you know it's it's in my nature it's like we have an amazing team we have a product that's been taking off right and we built it all bootstrapped and for the 10 years we bootstrapped the companies right between us and the co-founders like that's what we did it's like well we're about to raise around and you know for a couple million dollars it's like we could take that and go just go big and scale right um and it's like so that that was a critical decision because it's like well you know if we go the VC path and start raising after all this work like we could be end up at a much larger outcome and work and do all these things but the other side of it and this is debate that we had between us as gofounders is like well you know even though we we just finished this new Venture and we scaled that we already had clients and revenue was amazing in total us as a group we were we were already 10 years years into overall even though this one was a little bit newer but it's been 10 years so it's like we did all this work and it's like you know is it going the Venture route we would have been signing up for another 10 years for that specific product and Industry and so it it's it's really hard because there's exciting pieces to both you know right um and so those are things that come into like that was very challenging we had to weigh and the the outcomes and it's like if you think about well if I we have to raise three or four rounds of funding what our dilution would be it was four co-founders right so we would already been diluted to a certain extent and then you know great we do sell for a great outcome for what the company would have been but then when you look at the what we had from the exit side and the package and it was guarantees there was no money that was like oh you won't get this if you don't hit a certain Benchmark right um from from the deal deal so we were like all right are we satisfied what the deal is but not only that we were rolling into the company with equity for the larger stake and what helped with that was that the PE company had about 18 months to sell that company because they had to put a return for their fund so they were already at that time period where everything needed what we had so that we can combine forces to go for another exit in 18 to 24 months that was a risky part too that we had to consider because that was not a guarantee you see so we kind of had to look at all the decisions like are we happy with what we've got now and would this work out um but I also knew that running for another exit still kept the entrepreneurial side in me my co-founder because we knew that there there was even though there was risk it would have still been fun to figure out like are we going to be able to pull off another exit in 18 24 months cuz that was like the window that was talked about so I think we looked at it internally as like this would be great this would be a challenge we got to take care of the team everybody had jobs we scaled up added more resources like all these things so um you know you have to weigh both sides and kind of see like what works for for you and you know we had a I have a daughter she's 3 years old we were living in an apartment it was even though we were entrepreneurs we were paycheck to paycheck because we always kept putting back into the company we were always growing and it's like it'd be great to have a Cush and take some time and then we could always do this again right like I had aund other ideas that we just never got to because we were we were really focused on what we were doing which I want to talk about uh with Alana but a few tactical items on the deal and how you sold it cuz this fascinates me a ton did you hire someone like an intermediary and did so I'm going to kind of Rapid Fire you just take whichever questions you want to answer and in whatever order you want did you hire someone were you happy with how the deal eventually turned out or do you think you could have potentially got more uh and then did you sell everything or were you still did you sell a percentage and then later in that 18 months later you sold break that whole thing down for me like a little bit more color around the deal itself yeah a lot of the deal is still confidential so I'll try to explain as best as I can without um divulging getting into trouble yeah but but even if you know again I want to help others if others are contemplating like getting investment or an acquisition or no matter where they are in their career we didn't have an intermediary but we obviously we have we had our attorney um who was a good friend of my co-founders that's how I met him and we become friends and he's like awesome he he handled a lot of big big real-time Acquisitions so you know he was in our court which was awesome um but I ran with most of the conversations and my co-founder like we'd have but a lot of that directly in in like the final negotiations when we had to get through it with the guidance of like what my co-founders and my attorney and like we would talk about like well this is what we should shoot for this is what it is um and what was good is like even our attorney felt like this was actually a pretty good deal like so when you look at the numbers like you want to get gut checks and get talks and talk to people and just make sure like okay is this good or is it unfair and it's like well when you look at the whole picture it was like so far it was a pretty fair deal now again could you shoot for the moon and go even higher possible again but risk is the deal at hand a a good deal and so um you know a lot of times I think it's it's I'm not going to say a lot of times because this was the this was our acquisition that we we did and I haven't experienced a different side but you know I liked it better when I was able to have the conversations and there wasn't someone talking on my behalf but but for me it's because I love I'm I'm very big on negotiating on doing deals sales on that part of it I love the technical aspect of things but I also enjoy that part um so but for someone who probably has never had experience in negotiating or talking or or doing sales you want to have somebody who really understands to help um like again you still want to be at the Forefront if you're the CEO that's super important because those negotiations are and those talks are also them doing more diligence on you at that point right because in the end they could not sign the the like you could they could let go of the entire deal right if if if you're not doing it right so yeah I think um with it it was a total sale we we sold um the entire company um 100% And but obviously we negotiated Equity stake into the larger company because of the way we were it's just the way the transaction had to be handled that's it um so you know some Deals they do instead of equity they'll just do earn outs based on performance only right that's and um we were able to negotiate a good plan but on Equity so we were really vested in like the overall company versus just like a fixed sum that could come out and um we even contemplated what that would look like if we were to do a fixed sum and to be completely honest I I I love spreadsheet so I put everything in a spreadsheet and I'm like all right what would be our our you know worst case scenario our base case and what would be our best case scenario you know and we had to be comfortable with all three scenarios right because this is what it is and in in in terms of how it was and when we finally got through the acquisition I I went back to the spreadsheet and it was our best case scenario which was amazing the the company kept their word the CEO kept their word on everything that they would do everything was outlined the way it was it took 18 months and we sold in 2021 right before the crash yeah so it I don't know if it's luck I mean obviously a lot of hard work we're blessed but it all worked out really well um it but just super important for other Founders it doesn't always work out that and especially now the environment is so different um but it all worked out really well and so all the that we did over the last 10 years really paid off for us um as a team it gave us what we need to be able to take some time you know um for what we need to do and you know which you know I took too much time now I now I'm back into doing it all over again to go through the pain so you went right back into it what was the reason that you wanted to attack the specific problem that you're attacking now with Alana yeah that's a great question um when we owned our our past companies we turned away a lot of customers which even today like you in any company you're starting you're going to turn away a lot of people that's not in your right fit but we we met with a lot of um okay businesses uh Founders a lot of artists that were upand cominging that were trying to get their music out figure out this whole content strategy so they can get plays on Spotify or anything anything like that it was it was a good range of people who who we we we met with and that we couldn't take them on because our you know our hourly rates were like almost 200 an hour at the time today might have been even higher um stuff that people couldn't afford but it's what we needed because we didn't our entire team was in house in Miami right and at the time so this was like for us we saw like the problems that they were having and it and it came down to it's like well I need to get more business for my company I need to get more leads I try to make more money like where to to be able to grow they know that they got to do stuff on social media but it just feel like they don't know what to do right they don't know how many times to post they don't know what type of content to post they don't know what people are going to want and and then to make it worse is that there's like all these different social platforms do I do Instagram do I do Tik Tok do I do YouTube what you know what it is that I do and so we saw that problem it was just so overwhelming for them right even for ourselves like as an agency it's like it's so hard sometimes to practice what you preach because you're so vested in doing the work for your customers right and so when we thought about um content and we and we looked at video I mean billions of hours are being streamed on YouTube all the different platforms more people are spending more time on watching video it's it's insane like think about it um even apps have to control and give you notifications when you're spending too much time on on video it's just significantly increasing so you if if you're a startup or a business or a founder and you're not leveraging video to help in growing your company you're going to get left behind right and so for us that's why we really focused on like art we we want to build a platform to make it super easy for others to be able to turn any video audio or an idea into over 30 or 50 pieces is a content and ultimately what our vision is the entire process is autonomous you enter what your goals are exactly what it is that you're trying to achieve like hey I'm trying to you know uh bring in another 100 Grand this year what do I need to do and it outlines an entire strategy and automatically starts deploying it on your behalf right and so that that's our ultimate vision and in its current state it actually takes one video or audio and it'll turn it into 50 pieces of content and we make it super flexible for you to be able to leverage that until we can get to what our ultimate goal is wow okay I see that vision and I love it because if I can get that knoow from you and almost a tailored experience or a customer experience that isn't you actually having to give me this custom write up or marketing plan or strategy document and you're leveraging what is out there with AI but it has your knowhow on top of it that's very cool absolutely I think it's got to be in your voice and your brand as it's represented and again you don't know you might be really good at what you do I mean I'll just even go to like let's say an electrician they know what how to you know install Outlets lights or whatever it is they know how to you know revamp your entire system and and your and and the box outside or if you need to set up a charging uh station for your Tesla and they come in and actually do the installation and the wiring and I mean it goes very in depth and and they know how to do all that but they don't know what to post like they're not going to you know the electrician is not in the business of teaching other people um to uh like go very Advan and like rewiring a whole house that requires an electrician like permit but they could they do have a lot of knowledge of like like here's some tips on how to avoid tripping your breaker just buy a um a search protector and make sure your devices are connected to it and that avoids an electrician like me from coming to your house and paying me hourly rate to fix it and so they can do a lot of this type of content that makes them feel like wow they're just helping and enabling me to do a lot of the stuff that I can do myself to avoid needing an electrician and guess what when they actually really need an electrician and something breaks they're going to call a guy who gave them all that amazing advice on on um let's say Instagram or whatever it is and in order to come in and that's just one example right there's so much types of content but the electricians just at one point don't even know what content to even create or post and nevertheless to put the time to do it because the time that they're doing content they're not out actually handling jobs as an example right I go so far down the rabbit hole on that kind of stuff on Tik Tok I love those kind of videos that and so I'm 100% with you on that right just the random things that I don't get to do with the the piping or how's this made or what kind of tips and tricks can I have in my house to not mess up my house basically and so the uh the thing that I was wondering is though are you basically if I'm an electrician let's go down how would that look for me using Alana are you asking the electrician questions where you just saying hey here's some prompts maybe you want to talk about this kind of stuff and record yourself doing it yeah that's a great question uh sometimes I mix up a lot of kind of vision versus what we've got in our current state and so I'm going to switch to just making sure I focus on what we've got right now that might be really helpful um because the way that we built a product today we wanted to get our product out we didn't want to go another six months building and not have anything out in the market right and so you know we made that decision decision and launched it officially in July what it's helped the most with others are people who are already recording video but they don't have the time to uh repurpose it and put it out on other networks so they might already be recording a 60-second video for Instagram or maybe they shot a 10-minute video and they put it on YouTube or maybe they did a podcast and now what we'll do is we'll take that and we'll automatically repurpose it for everything you need for Instagram for Tik Tok or to post on LinkedIn on x and all these things so we have a AI card system we call it AI cards and they're like these little cards on a page it's almost like a drag and drop website builder you can add as many cards on the page and as you add them it starts generating that content and those AI cards are things like Instagram Clips um uh a viral X thread a blog post a newsletter so if you think about a video like you can turn that into a newsletter you could turn it into a blog post you can turn it into a thread for x or for the stagram threads app and all this different content it'll handle all of your titles your descriptions your show notes like all the details and it's all written in the form to help that content be discovered and also to go viral especially obviously if your content is good right and and that's the way it's written so you know you're not going to just post a really large block of text on LinkedIn like you want to break it up it's got a certain style like if you see things on LinkedIn go viral you'll see how it's written those are the types of things that we we do but each person can do their own workflow right so like you're doing this podcast and let's say you or or your team has a very specific workflow this is the type of content I like to do based on my brand this is how I like it written in every single format you do that once and then you can save that as an AI template so that now for the next 100 videos that you upload it automatically replicates that process for you that makes 100% yeah and I appreciate you saying hey here's what we got but here's where we're going and so the the understanding that I have is you're really trying to cater to the folks that are almost like too busy doing the work of their job to think about this sea of social media and how to do the marketing because they know they should as you mentioned before everyone knows if you have a company no matter what the company is you got to be doing stuff to promote it online and so yes you're saying hey we're going to help folks that are almost it like a in a disposition because they're doing so well doing their actual job and then they're thinking about all this other stuff and they're like ah how do I even what do I do I'm I'm not good on camera I don't know uh or they have one thing that they're doing but then you get to Fan it out into many things exactly so if so when I look at like what we're really doing I learn about your business what you do and we have best practices already baked in we know what your goals are whether it's a revenue Target a views Target or whatever it is we you know we can even go even more Niche and like what's some of the expertise that you have what are you really good at in this sector versus what are you not good at you know and you you start to learn a little bit more about the person and from that information we then are able to be able to build out what an entire content strategy would be for you based on the platforms that would work best on your behalf right and so it let's just start with like say something like um let's let's just say t uh Instagram for a second and it's like all right 30 days of content well you know if if you're willing to be able to record video then we can actually put together the entire content plan here are the titles for those videos here's the viral hook that you need to say for each individual video that already works and is tailored for that platform and proven to get content to go viral in your industry and then here's what the framework of the body of the content and the call to action you're going to put at the end and have that all ready so that all they got to do is go in and hit record so that they can put that video so now we've taken away the um I don't know piece but on the flip side if you don't want to go on camera then we'll create the entire video for you and deploy it on your behalf and so I think the the the piece of this is for them to be able to have the ability to be able to either be them they themselves to become the in the Creator the person who can talk about this content but there's still a lot of people who are just they're just not going to record video right and so what do you do in that case you sometimes hire another agency you hire another company you hire an AI uh you hire a content creator to do it on your behalf and let them record the videos but on behalf of the company and so you know for us is to be able to automate the entire process so that you're completely hands off but we do we're always going to have individuals who want to be Hands-On so we can automate the entire workflow of the parts that you're again you may not be good at you might be fine at talking on screen you know I would love it if somebody gave me the perfect script every single time all I do is hit record and I'm done because I I'm I'm fine with being on camera you see what I mean yep yep yeah I've seen one just as a bit of a tangent I saw one feature that I think Tik Tok has where you can create your script and then it's like a teleprompter that's coming up on your phone as you're talking to to your phone so it's like you're looking at your phone you're reading the script and it's there for you feels like that's something easy to include in that what you're what you're trying to do too and the other piece that I was thinking about is undoubtedly from your days in the agency you saw that it's not just the social media part and so I can imagine that you're you're already thinking about okay well this is one part of the funnel or that acquisition channel right how can you go and then scale that out this is just the wedge to get you in but then somebody's got to have a place where they can capture leads so what are you going to be doing there somebody's got to have uh somebody that picks up the phone and answers it when someone calls or that replies to emails etc etc and I can imagine the Grand Vision as you mentioned before is really trying to help those folks and going into to end on it yeah it's funny and not um I really get asked going that far from from people and so that's a a great question because we don't talk about that because it is very forward looking um but in the end I need to be able to solve the problem where you you you absolutely have nothing you need to do when it comes to being able to handle the content the conversions and growing that part of the business I want you to f focus on your craft whether that's you know performing music whether you're the electrician that's going out and doing the jobs or running the team or if you're a you know SAS startup founder who is more Technical and you're you're you're trying to focus on that part of the business versus um content and um what your marketing strategy is and so yeah I as we think about the future and expansion who knows where it goes um but there's a lot of room to be able to expand into areas to automate the entire funnel right because I think for us that's super important we we we built a lot of funnels in our past companies we built these campaigns we saw the conversions in the analytics and but what we avoided in the company was content Creation in our past companies and we really focused on the other side of things and we had a partner who worked on content creation video and we would um leverage them like introductions type of thing but I I think seeing that shift there's so much more opportunity to be able to handle this piece of it and then be able to handle that entire process and how that looks like whether it's within our product or we're leveraging Partnerships with other tools to just automate the process the point is is that it shouldn't be a u a difficult tool for you to use it should be more like hey I've got my AI content manager or your you know content Studio that kind of handles everything for you and you wake up every morning with your report of either how many leads you got how many views you got what the measurements were and because of you know how everything's performed here's some new content I created and I'm going to put this out tomorrow for you like you should just wake up with that drink your cup of coffee and move on that's incredible well I love the vision Sebastian thanks for coming on here man no appreciate it thank you man always good catching up with you guys I love the gram you guys really helped us out uh when we made the switch so uh anything we can we can do to continue partnering together\n"