EP362: AI Makes Building Easy, Selling Is Still Hard

Neil Twa (00:01.372) So Vitaly, how you doing today, brother?

Vitalii Sydorenko (00:04.279) Hey Neil, yeah I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Excited.

Neil Twa (00:07.888) Yeah, it's good to have you here. Hopefully your day has gone well. It's kind of wrapping up your day over where you are at. Where are you at again? Sorry.

Vitalii Sydorenko (00:15.142) Yeah, I'm located in Lisbon. So yeah, basically it's the end of my day. It was packed with internal meetings, but I'm ready to drive. You know, have this... I mean, I'm trying to organize my schedule the way that I have all my internal meetings on Thursday and I don't have any internal meetings on other dates.

Neil Twa (00:18.032) Yeah. End of the day.

Neil Twa (00:26.738) Cool, and what kind of meetings were you dealing with today in your world?

Neil Twa (00:40.88) Mm-hmm.

Vitalii Sydorenko (00:44.398) It means like if I can include all my internal meetings in one day, it's like 20 % of my time. And for me, it's like indicator. If I need more, it seems like I do something wrong because I spend more than 20 % time for talking with my team and I shouldn't do that.

Neil Twa (01:06.535) yeah. So where have you learned that principle from? Just experience or a particular methodology or?

Vitalii Sydorenko (01:10.766) No, by the way, actually, I found out about it from the guy I adore. I don't know if you've heard about him. It's Matt Mokery. It's a coach in Silicon Valley. He's coaching this giant CEO. I didn't meet him in person, but I found one of his videos on YouTube and I started to dig deeper.

And I found his book and also I found his, he, I believe when he prepared to publish his book, he did like open, open access or Google doc. There's a lot of information. And I think that this Google doc is the best business literature I have ever read. And it's, it's, it's just back to this super like efficient.

Neil Twa (01:53.872) Okay.

Vitalii Sydorenko (02:09.934) advice and one of them was exactly like it. And I read this page and I like, hmm, that makes sense, let me try to do this.

Neil Twa (02:22.832) Yeah, and applied. And what areas of people who are listening kind of understand where you're coming from? What areas of focus are you in, Vitaly?

Vitalii Sydorenko (02:30.286) So in last 12 years, more than 12 years, I've been building B2B SaaS startups in different roles. So I built two startups as a founder. Between my startups, I also worked in venture capital and startup studio and launched products from the startup studio. And now I'm building product development studio called Gearheart.

Neil Twa (02:57.895) Hmm.

Vitalii Sydorenko (02:58.926) And also we have another brand beyond the wall. So we help other founders to validate ideas and build products and launch them as fast as possible.

Neil Twa (03:11.096) Interesting. So ideation through vibe coding through production kind of.

Vitalii Sydorenko (03:16.174) Now, yes. That's exactly why we launched another brand. We call it Beyond the WoW. Yeah, and it's like AI native studio, how we call it, because we use AI a lot to accelerate this validation and building like first version of products, like as much fast as possible. And this process changed dramatically when AI came up.

Neil Twa (03:43.57) Mmm.

Vitalii Sydorenko (03:45.014) So yes, that's what we do right now and focusing on right now.

Neil Twa (03:50.002) So we're on the innovator side really, and the ideation of moving products and stuff to market. And I was reading a thing earlier that, and I was talking to my daughter about this, cause she's a book writer, but one of the hardest thing for book writers to do is actually market their products. And they spend, I think, well, I think it's the same way with like SaaS developers and even the Vibe Coders today and stuff, have a great idea that can become, conceptualized extremely fast or can be developed very quickly into some kind of.

Vitalii Sydorenko (04:02.634) I can imagine.

Neil Twa (04:18.03) MVP that you could use and see and I saw a guy on X this morning that literally made a snowboarding game from the new GPT sole version that just came out and he made a, you know, a three modeling fully playable snowboarding downhill snowboarding game. And I'm like, wow. So the idea to creation is no longer the limitation. What is actually slowing these down? What are you seeing innovators struggling with as you work with them to get their idea to market?

Vitalii Sydorenko (04:27.65) Holy

Vitalii Sydorenko (04:46.892) Honestly, believe that development wasn't the biggest problem even before AI. I understand that it was super expensive and now it's less expensive to develop something much faster. Yeah, I was saying correct. But the main problem of, I believe, of failures, especially in early stages, is actually

validation and sales like sales pipeline. So me personally, I'm focusing on B2B products. So you just mentioned this app for snowboarding and it's like B2C obviously. And for this kind of products, it's also about sales, but it's more like marketing driven sales in B2B. It's more like sale driven, like person driven. So you just go...

Neil Twa (05:18.079) Mm. Mm-hmm.

Vitalii Sydorenko (05:44.681) and try to open those doors into the companies and try to sell. I think that people like founders who just start in their way, in all ways, they're trying to avoid this point to go to your potential customers and show them your idea or ask them something because it's more interesting and more exciting to build a product than to sell it, obviously.

Neil Twa (06:13.093) Yeah, in some ways that's true.

Vitalii Sydorenko (06:14.446) And yeah, yeah. And of course, I think that it was the biggest struggle and it still is. But with AI, you can do it faster. You can do it just faster. And what is the most exciting part, like when you do this validation, how it was before you just came to your customer development interview or your...

Neil Twa (06:24.283) Yeah.

Vitalii Sydorenko (06:42.018) a sales call and you're trying to show your first shitty version of the product and get the first feedback. You're getting this feedback and then you go do your homework, rebuilding it and go again. Now, it's so impressive that in some cases you can just change your prototype, what you are showing during the call. You're getting this feedback.

and you change it right away and you can ask, hey, did you mention something like this? And you can just do this iteration part much, much faster.

Neil Twa (07:20.785) Yeah, that's true. That's very true. You can create that unique customization that allows somebody specific use case to come to reality. And that's really cool because we've been doing that internally in Voltage with the systems we're using and Cayman AI is really the thing that has allowed us to pivot, turn, develop use case around initiatives that we couldn't have done before. And I was laughing earlier because we had a development team. Now we have a developer whose job is to integrate and keep up with the operations team who's now coding.

all of the different components that they want to put into it. And he's just helping us keep guardrails on while we're learning to create things. so now he has like four five people constantly upgrading, changing and doing things. And he's trying to keep up with us now. So we switched teams and everybody's like byte coding these apps and stuff into our system. It's becoming pretty amazing because it's allowed the flexibility and speed of delivery, the constant push for integrity and data and guardrails and loop engineering.

Vitalii Sydorenko (07:57.324) Nice, nice.

Neil Twa (08:19.345) has been a huge component that really...

Vitalii Sydorenko (08:19.682) Yeah, totally agree. Especially in small and medium businesses when you still don't care about some stuff that enterprise businesses care about. Yeah, of course.

Neil Twa (08:25.002) yeah, it's moot.

Neil Twa (08:32.672) Yeah, yeah. Well, no, and the agility by which we can move, right? And absolutely the flexibility and having 30 brands would normally mean that you would have 30 people running each brand, right? And that was one of the failure points. I think in a lot of systems and development code as well is how many engineers you needed to have for each section of the engineering in the same way we needed to have so many operators for each part of the business. And now we have three operators running 30 brands.

right, instead of 30 people, because you can, know, the speed by which we can change and iterate and develop and the ideation phase that becomes a reality and says, well, what if we could do this, let's go see if we can do it. And then it becomes some component of reality. you know, that is, that is where I think even out of the marketing, right.

Vitalii Sydorenko (09:01.934) Yeah, I don't know it's-

Vitalii Sydorenko (09:16.566) Absolutely.

Absolutely. yeah, idea generation, also like automation, all those processes. Yeah, I believe so. In our case, I can share that for example, like before that we built MVP in like two, three months. But again, like everyone has own imagination about what MVP is. When I say MVP, it's something that you can...

Neil Twa (09:47.888) Yeah.

Vitalii Sydorenko (09:50.529) actually sell to somebody and somebody can receive value of it. It's already stable. So before, yeah, we built it in two, three months, on average. Of course, different products are different. But now it's two weeks top. In many cases, it's even one week. And when I say one week, it's until the product that you can actually sell. So it's not...

Neil Twa (10:19.513) is pushed out. Yeah.

Vitalii Sydorenko (10:20.342) just a prototype to show it's something working, something stable. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Neil Twa (10:22.821) Yeah. You're out of MVP and deletion to beta, right? Yeah. Yeah, that is a, it's a fascinating turn. And I assume because of your experience currently, you had a background in development and you started that way. Were you a developer or? No. Okay.

Vitalii Sydorenko (10:36.814) No, not really. I mean, I studied software development at university, but I was never a software developer. Actually, my brother is and my brother now is my partner at the company. And yeah, and actually, because of him, I knew that I will never be a software developer because I saw how good he is at it. then like,

Neil Twa (10:52.215) that's awesome.

Neil Twa (11:00.369) Right? I don't want to do that. No, no, it's stay in your lane and know what you know, right? And do what you do good. And it's great that he could do that. So I assume he keeps some of that lifting. So where do you keep your primarily your duties in primary? Where are you out in the business then?

Vitalii Sydorenko (11:03.434) Okay, I will never be that good in development. Yeah, I don't want to do this. Let me focus on this.

Vitalii Sydorenko (11:17.698) So yeah, I'm on a business side, product side. I have, obviously now in terms of our business, like agency as a business, I am more on the like operations, sales, yeah, and development our business. Also, of course, with our customers, I bring my product expertise from my previous products. And it's easier for me to talk with...

founders because I know exactly what's the way they're going through and I can maybe help them to avoid mistakes I did previously.

Neil Twa (11:57.862) Yeah, that's good because there's a road to ho these days and there's so much changing and so many things that are adapting. It seems almost daily and sometimes it's hard to keep up with the new news, the new thing, the new change, the new whatever. One of the things we've been doing and really realizing in the last 18 months is we thought we were e-commerce companies that sold physical products and what we've come into a reality and a change and a shift in the way.

we run our businesses, the mantra behind it is we're actually a media company that happens to sell physical products. We've become a media company that sells products. And that's a very different realization and pivot in the last two years. I think for Econ people out there, and even in the software world, my question to you is going to be, do you think that that's a similar effect being had in your vertical as we're seeing in ours? You need to be a media company who sells software.

Vitalii Sydorenko (12:31.534) That's the end.

Neil Twa (12:50.169) as much as we need to be a product company who sells media that happens to sell a product.

Vitalii Sydorenko (12:50.496) Actually, that's.

Vitalii Sydorenko (12:55.982) That's an intriguing point and interesting observation because what you just said is the same we started from. When you say media company, it's because you have to put lots of efforts in marketing, burn awareness and so on. And that's exactly what...

Neil Twa (13:14.513) brand awareness. Yep. Yes.

Vitalii Sydorenko (13:21.518) you should do when you build a product right now, Because especially when we talk about B2C products, like apps or something, I think it's super similar to what you're doing in e-commerce because it's like the hardest part. How can you bring your app to somebody's phone? How can you do that? Even if your app is super incredible?

Neil Twa (13:24.56) Yeah.

Neil Twa (13:32.997) I think so.

Neil Twa (13:40.699) Hmm.

Vitalii Sydorenko (13:49.123) Yeah, so I remember one story. was a mentor of one of the startup schools and one of the guides, he was building a mobile app about meditations. And he was like, I want to create an app with AI guided meditation specifically for you. It's probably so cool. It's always so nice. And I'm like, yeah, it's great. But how will you compete? I mean, from marketing perspective with giant

giant app in this industry who have millions of dollars of budget every day, like on Facebook or Instagram or something. Because for your customer to understand that your app is better than someone else's app, they should somehow install it, right? They should somehow see it.

Neil Twa (14:25.051) Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (14:40.889) Yeah, but I would argue and push back here something that and I'll tweak your brain a little and see what you think. But VHS and beta, you're familiar with the two formats. We had the VHS videos back in the day. And then you remember, do you remember beta? The little. Yeah, they were the competitor to VHS. They were beta disks, so they were smaller and they actually could hold high definition videos on them. But they but the storage was not the same storage link or video link that a VHS at a lower quality.

Vitalii Sydorenko (14:52.738) Yeah, of course.

beta.

Neil Twa (15:11.259) could maintain, so VHS won the market because they could put longer videos, they could put a single video across the entire VHS and you got one video for VHS, but it was lower quality. The beta was the better technology. It was the better technology with higher definition, but they couldn't fit as much on it. So while it was better technology, the marketing of VHS won the day, right? It won the day and it went out. So.

Vitalii Sydorenko (15:20.962) Uh-huh.

I'm

Neil Twa (15:34.513) I would argue that it isn't just a bill technology and the idea that we need to create this perfect application. It is that sales fixes everything first. That you sell that product even if it's not necessarily better than the competitor. You outsell, outmaneuver and outbenefit drive until your product can reach some level of competition within the competitive space and you keep enhancing your product and innovating your product at that point.

Vitalii Sydorenko (15:42.99) That's it.

Vitalii Sydorenko (15:55.576) Let's.

That's exactly what I'm talking about because in the case of this founder, he maybe built a great technology, but how people know about it when you are competing with guys who have millions, maybe billions of marketing budgets. So that's the game. That's the game right now. And even, I mean, on...

Neil Twa (16:00.476) Perfect. That's what I thought. Yeah.

Neil Twa (16:16.547) Exactly. Got to get it in there and fight your way. Mm-hmm. It is.

Vitalii Sydorenko (16:26.05) on different scale, but even this B2B products when I'm working in. Of course, it's like in-person sales on the beginning. But again, it's all about sales. It's not about the product, it's about sales. So you have to build the product only when you... I love to say that you can have like two kind of weak...

points. It's your sales pipeline and product pipeline. you shouldn't go, you shouldn't even worry, you shouldn't even look into the side of your product pipeline if your sales pipeline is empty. Only if you have like, overcrowded sales pipeline and you have your bottleneck in product pipeline. Only at that point, you should worry about development.

Neil Twa (16:56.037) Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (17:06.501) Yeah, that's where you should be focusing.

Neil Twa (17:21.595) Fix the equation whenever you realize which part of the equation needs fixed. And we will usually, in our world, do a similar process of product ideation, development of the product to a certain point, and then test marketing the product to find out how well we can sell the product. And we're hoping that the product manufacturing and everything is up to the par we believe it is. The samples, et cetera, the output is where we expect it to be. And then sometimes you get on the market and you find out, well, that return rate was higher than we thought.

Vitalii Sydorenko (17:26.27) Yeah, yeah,

Neil Twa (17:47.538) Things go bad. The attrition rate on your development project is higher than you thought it should be within the first 30 to 90 days. like, okay, we got to fix the attrition. We have the same thing on the product side. Well, we got to fix the product. We sold the snot out of it, but we got too high of returns. So we need to identify all the things that we need to change in the product to address the issues of why people returned it and didn't like it or whatever, or why there was an attrition rate, or why did people not stay long enough, or why did they not upgrade to the next package or whatever during their time. And you fix those things.

Vitalii Sydorenko (18:14.242) Yeah. Yeah, correct.

Neil Twa (18:16.325) But you got to prove you can sell the dang thing first. I think a lot of founders get caught in the two and a lot of them don't realize that that's, we have a saying in the country, can't ride two horses with one ass. So it's really difficult. And as you said, you got to bring your brother and you kind of splitting, splitting those horses so you can each ride one. It's hard for founders to ride both. you know, where do you see yourself fitting into that gap? Which one are you feeling?

Vitalii Sydorenko (18:41.646) I mean, I understand that it's easier for me because I know for sure that I'm not a developer. So it's not like so many options left, right? So what I have to focus on, if you're talking about this product pipeline and sales pipeline, I have to focus my efforts on the sales pipeline. So in my previous startups, I always was like a CEO and I was driving sales and all this stuff.

partnered with a technical guy to build it.

Neil Twa (19:14.118) Yeah.

Neil Twa (19:17.421) Awesome. One of reasons why I wanted to talk to you here is because we have looked at developing mobile apps to complement our physical products by adding on recipe books and other aspects of mobile integration with apps that could be utilized against our product. They don't necessarily have the mobile app connected to your phone, connected to the product like some sort of Bluetooth in a technical way, but a use case, a value case of an application that can be used in coordination with the product.

It is something that we've been doing with a couple of our products and has been received very well. It lowers attrition. You can go to an app pretty darn fast on mobile today.

Vitalii Sydorenko (19:49.934) And next.

Vitalii Sydorenko (19:55.619) think it's an amazing idea for you because again, what we just talked about, you already mastered at some point your marketing side, like media presence. So if you have this, why not to try to build and sell applications?

as you do with products, but with applications is like the margin is higher and if you can promote it right it's yeah that's seems like a great next step.

Neil Twa (20:29.551) Yeah, it's a big... Well, and I would reverse that and say those who are developing software should consider the idea of adding on physical products. Why not? Because when you have a product base that reaches an audience, they're typically going to be a demographic of users. And guess what? If they consume your mobile app, what else are they consuming? Right?

Vitalii Sydorenko (20:51.266) That's a rectangle. I can say what my first... I'm a software guy. I I always build software products, not physical ones. And when I hear about physical products, it scares me because I start to...

Neil Twa (21:03.366) Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (21:12.177) It's a different... Totally get it.

Vitalii Sydorenko (21:14.798) I started to imagine all this delivery, all these work houses and all this stuff and I oh no, no, no, no, no.

Neil Twa (21:23.789) Well, in some of that you do need and some of it you don't need based with today's platforms. You don't have to have all that work. But you still have to develop the product and get it out there. But we've looked at a couple of different relationships in joint venture with mobile developers to say, well, if you need to monetize some component of your app, put ads in there. If it's girls, particularly 27 to 40 playing games on their phones or whatever, apps which show up and have products that the ladies are buying.

Vitalii Sydorenko (21:28.731) Yeah, I know some, but still.

Neil Twa (21:53.562) our opportunities to monetize your app by just clicking over through advertising. you know, I'm, you know, those are joint ventures I'm always looking to figure out because that's one way for us to promote our products and help them monetize their products through that kind of relationship. So different traffic angles and different demographic angles. We're even looking at it from certain marketing like Apple oven by running campaigns over there to, you know, attract that audience who's playing a lot of those games, who's our audience that buys physical products on.

Vitalii Sydorenko (21:56.429) Yeah, makes sense.

Neil Twa (22:22.053) TikTok and Amazon and Shopify and other places and Walmart or whatever,

Vitalii Sydorenko (22:23.052) Yeah, it's actually very similar to, you know, this influencers like YouTube bloggers or Instagram bloggers, they gain their audience and then based on that, they start to launch different brands, apps, like whatever it is, because they have audience, right? And it's easy.

Neil Twa (22:33.819) Mm-hmm. yeah.

Neil Twa (22:41.819) promote their products.

Neil Twa (22:47.983) Yeah, we had a machine, one of our machines in a home kitchen counter, kitchen category blew up sales a month and a half ago because a YouTuber with a large audience did a review of the product. And while he gave pros and cons, he wasn't all glorious, but he wasn't all negative. And in even one instance, he's like, well, I kind of made a mistake. And when I fixed it, this is how it worked a lot better. That really drove the traffic crazy through his YouTube following. And I'm like, well, I want to get like 10 more of those guys.

Vitalii Sydorenko (23:10.926) Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (23:13.937) Find them on their YouTube channels and promote our products because we love that we love that organic traffic I've watched the you know website traffic go up quite a bit because of that

Vitalii Sydorenko (23:21.45) Yeah, mean, that's one of the, I believe, main channels right now, influencers. what I mentioned, what I was... I mean, when influencers launch their own brands because they have... even... I have many stories when influencers launch not even online business, but some restaurants or something like that.

Neil Twa (23:27.277) It is.

Neil Twa (23:35.643) Correct. I, right, I heard you.

Neil Twa (23:43.344) I was being selfish. I wanted them to launch my products, not theirs. just... Don't mess with warehouses and all that stuff. We got it, right? We'll just help you monetize. You don't mess with it. We got it. Just come to us. We got the whole physical product thing. Yeah, it is a process. It takes a lot, but it is one of the things, most people don't realize how big that market is. It's somewhere between five to $7 trillion in the e-commerce world, which I guess e-commerce, all things online or digital services, products, physical or digital.

which is pretty large. think the physical component of that itself is just five to seven trillion. There's obviously a lot more than that in the world on the digital side of it. But how are you guys monetizing their apps? Is it really subscription based? And maybe what's the best ways they're seeing it work today?

Vitalii Sydorenko (24:26.804) In our case, it's usually subscription. Again, it's B2B apps, but it's subscription. So we have different packages usually based on some parameters which are important for different audiences. That's why it's us, right? So software is the service and usually it's subscription-based.

Neil Twa (24:29.041) description.

Neil Twa (24:33.595) Yeah.

Neil Twa (24:48.611) license per seat. Where do you see your biggest angle right now? What kind of companies in B2B world are you seeing an uptick in or optimistic for this year that are working well?

Vitalii Sydorenko (25:02.798) you know, it's hard to say like some industry or something like that. But what I see and what we work with usually and I love to work with is domain experts. So people who work in some industry for like 10 years know them like really, really well, know people in the industry and they like found some problem inside and they want to solve this problem.

Neil Twa (25:08.165) Mm-hmm.

Vitalii Sydorenko (25:32.011) It's like, think that these people right now have the biggest opportunities because you can't replace this expertise with AI. You can't replace this experience with AI. You can't replace this network with AI. But what you can replace is development. So for them, it's like ideal situation because they know exactly, they know people.

Neil Twa (25:51.066) Yeah.

Vitalii Sydorenko (26:01.774) who will buy their products because they are from the industry. They know them very well. They know the problem very well. So the only one thing left for them is how to build it. And now it's easy. So I believe that these guys, they are in a good place right now.

Neil Twa (26:16.475) Yeah.

Neil Twa (26:29.413) Good. Good. That's fantastic, Well, did I not ask any questions that you wanted to cover or anything we didn't talk about that maybe we didn't bring up during our chat?

Vitalii Sydorenko (26:39.918) I don't know man, I think we discussed lots of them.

Neil Twa (26:46.851) Yeah, okay. Well, leave us with one bit of wisdom that you have. Either something you can quote or maybe a joke you know that leaves us with some... put you on the spot.

Vitalii Sydorenko (26:56.192) Okay. Yeah, okay. So I'm just, I'm thinking about what to choose. But let me say like this. So, okay, let me, so what I just tried to say with my story was that like niche expertise, it's not about knowledge, it's about network.

Neil Twa (27:06.566) Mm-hmm.

Vitalii Sydorenko (27:25.838) I was paid this. I don't know how relatable it will be, but it was one of my biggest insights after my previous startup story and actually failure. By the way, it was in e-commerce space and I didn't have expertise in e-commerce space. And I built a startup there and it was so hard for me to get to the right people because I didn't know them very well.

Neil Twa (27:28.593) Okay.

Neil Twa (27:41.104) Mmm.

Neil Twa (27:52.753) Yeah, yeah. Well said. Network is net worth, right?

Vitalii Sydorenko (27:58.804) Yeah. And another, it's more like general one, it's in business, nobody knows how it is right. Like nobody. I think that it is something I missed when I was starting my businesses because you're always like seeking of this advice, but in business, there is no right or wrong. And you just have to take actions.

Neil Twa (28:07.857) Mm. Mm-hmm.

Neil Twa (28:22.725) Right.

Neil Twa (28:26.737) Yeah, I often acknowledge getting started in business is kind of like getting married and everybody gives you all their, their, you know, wisdom and expertise for marriage. Uh, and the same way they give them all their wisdom and expertise and the wives tales for starting up a company. And many of the times you're like, well, that doesn't make sense for me or that didn't work or like, that's not how it should be. And you kind of find your way through that on your own until you kind of figure it out in the first year or two. Um, yeah, good stuff, my friend. Well, thank you for coming and sharing a good word. I appreciate you.

Vitalii Sydorenko (28:35.79) I'm gonna...

Vitalii Sydorenko (28:46.861) Absolutely.

Vitalii Sydorenko (28:51.788) Absolutely. So that's all I did.

Vitalii Sydorenko (28:56.942) First, thank you for having me.

Neil Twa (28:58.361) Yeah, my pleasure. Well, guys, like, comment, share and engage. Help us beat Big Tech at the end. Anybody who needs help with B2B software ideation through development, you definitely want to check out what's going on with Tali. We'll put everything below in the show notes, et cetera. Check it out online. Give us some love and comments wherever you feel most engaged. Give us a subscribe if you want to hear more great podcasts. And as always, as we end our podcast, remember to do something imperfectly and something perfect will happen along the way. I'll get you guys on the next episode.

Vitalii Sydorenko (29:27.279) Thanks, my man.