Venture Everywhere Podcast: Andres Glusman with Jenny Fielding
Andres Glusman, co-founder and CEO of DoWhatWorks chats with Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 90: Do What Works Better.
In episode 90 of Venture Everywhere, host Jenny Fielding, co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, chats with Andres Glusman, co-founder and CEO of DoWhatWorks, a platform that learns from every major brand's experiments and uses AI to help growth and product teams move the needle. Drawing on 15 years scaling Meetup, Andres shares how his passion for experimentation led to founding DoWhatWorks, turning A/B testing into data-backed insights that reveal what drives growth. Andres also discusses the challenges of scaling a critical-mass business, balancing lean operations with enterprise demands, and shifting the industry’s focus from speed to meaningful outcomes.
In this episode, you will hear:
How DoWhatWorks uses every major brand’s experiments to enable their enterprise customers to get more impact from their UX
How speed is only half the battle. Launching fast isn’t enough
Turning testing patterns into actionable "BetScores" to know what to bet on before launching
What the industry gets wrong about experimentation
Industry-specific insights that distinguish what works in B2B vs. B2C
Lessons in building two businesses where getting to critical mass is essential for winning
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:34 Jenny: Welcome everyone. Super excited today to have Andres from a company called DoWhatWorks. We're going to get into Andres' background, a little bit about what he was doing right before that sparked the idea of DoWhatWorks, why he called it DoWhatWorks, and how the company is making a big impact. Welcome.
00:00:55 Andres: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here with you. I've been loving the stuff you've been putting up on LinkedIn, by the way, too. I'm happy to get to be a part of your socials and to be a part of your podcast.
00:01:03 Jenny: Amazing. Okay. We met through our mutual friend, Scott, the founder of Meetup, and you had spent more than a decade, 15 years?
00:01:14 Andres: 15 years, yep.
00:01:15 Jenny: Oh my goodness. 15 years building Meetup, everyone's favorite collaboration community, IRL. And I'd love to just hear a little bit about those early days there. What were some of your learnings about community in particular?
00:01:32 Andres: I had such a good time launching in the process. I made $14 of revenue. One of the claims to fame. In addition to being there for like a decade and a half running all kinds of teams like product and growth and community. So they showed me a lot of lessons. In the early, early days, I think one of the most interesting things that I experienced was the search for the revenue model or the business model. And the initial hypothesis around it was that we could get businesses, venues, bars, restaurants, cafes to pay us to send them people. That was the first thing I worked on, which is how I made our first $14 of revenue. So I just experimented my way on accident.
00:02:08 Jenny: Wait. Who paid you $14? I love that.
00:02:11 Andres: Oh, have you ever been to Ben's Chili Bowl in Washington, DC?
00:02:14 Jenny: I have not.
00:02:15 Andres: Well, it's forever seared in my brain because they were the very first people. In the early, early days of Meetup, there's a long story, but the humans didn't necessarily decide where the Meetup was going to be. A computer in New York city did using a random assortment of venues that were in a large venue database.
00:02:32 Andres: Anyhow, I got a call. Now got a list of the places where meetups were going to be. And I called the Ben's Chili Bowl and I said, "Hey, we're sending you 14 people next week. Do you want to keep getting more of them every week?" And they said, "Yeah, it sounds good." And they said, "How much?” And I said, "A dollar per person." They said, great. And they signed up on the spot.
00:02:47 Andres: I sent them an invoice. I'd never done any kind of cold calling or any kind of direct sales, but I was like, "My goodness, this is awesome." We're onto like a billion dollar opportunity here. So I called the next person on the list and they just as quickly told me no and go away. But before they hung up, I was like, "Well, did I tell you anything remotely interesting at all here?"
00:03:04 Andres: And they say, "Well, yeah, don't talk to me about sending me traffic on a Friday night. I got a line out the door, but if you can give me a group full of people on Tuesday afternoon, you're in." I basically kept doing that over and over and over again.
00:03:15 Andres: Just repeating with people before I said, look, I'm not going to sell you, but just tell me, is there anything I told you and all that was interesting to iterate across the 30 little pitches to like get to a spot where we had a pretty good formula and that was good enough to get going.
00:03:26 Andres: So that was pretty cool at the outset. So that was one of the big early day experiences for me. And then, man, the lessons learned in terms of trying to organize people and help them self-organize into community, I think it's the hardest challenge on the planet.
00:03:39 Andres: I don't think there's a harder social challenge than Meetup because you need to convene people, you need critical mass in a geography of people who have a common interest, who can meet on the same time in the same day, that are of the same skill level, interest level, all these other things. It's so freaking hard to get to critical mass.
00:03:59 Andres: And yet we did it in so many ways and it was really, really powerful. I feel like we really pulled off something really hard to do. I still think there's a huge opportunity out there for somebody to do it again and they do it better. Every great idea comes back every 10 years. I think we're due for that if somebody's out there looking to start it.
00:04:18 Andres: But the biggest lesson learned was this idea of critical mass and cell division, which is how do you get people who have a small enough shared interest so that they're really creating value for each other and break big groups into smaller groups continuously so that they can create community, which is the essence of what all communities are is really just a combination of small groups of people that are loosely affiliated into a larger, larger, larger organization. That's how most churches work, how most companies work, most armies work.
00:04:45 Jenny: What a legacy. I remember when Scott, the founder, introduced us, he was singing your praises and said, Meetup wouldn't have been where it was without you. You've made an impact on communities, on culture, so it's very exciting.
00:04:57 Jenny: When we met, you were kind of at the early days of formulating DoWhatWorks. Tell me what sparked the idea. Where did you see the pain points and how has it evolved?
00:05:07 Andres: I personally felt the pain that I'm solving for right now. When I led product and growth, we were early pioneers in lean startup movement. We started running experiments online prior to anybody. The more experiments we ran, the more hockey sticks, or a result point from like linear to like hockey sticking upwards. And it was so addictive and so fun. It's like a straight shot of dopamine into your system every time you win. What could be better?
00:05:27 Andres: But the reality is, I learned the hard way is that there's so many wrong ways of doing it. It's so hard to actually change people's behavior. And the reality is that 89% of experiments don't move the needle. What I experienced though, when I was at Meetup as a colonel of the idea was there was a group of friends that I had that were the product leaders and all the other great New York companies, Etsy and Shutterstock and various other companies.
00:05:49 Andres: And we'd all get together and we'd swap notes on what worked. Then we'd go back to our offices the next day, rejigger our backlogs and execute those things. And lo and behold, they worked and they would drive a lot of great results for us.
00:06:00 Andres: So literally the idea of just like, well, why are we all reinventing the wheel all the time? What if we could create a system that magically absorbed what was working for everybody and just collected it without having to convene people and get them to swap notes?
00:06:12 Andres: What if we could just extract from the internet the essence of understanding what everyone's experiments are and not just see the individual test. With time, you will see the patterns across thousands of tests. That was the big idea. We are finally there, which is so cool. It took a long time to build up the critical mass, but we are finally there.
00:06:30 Jenny: All right. Before we talk about that, a little diversion, cause you said something that was very exciting to me. And that is this idea of you finding the other folks in your peer group at other companies creating, I don't know, did you do an official meet up? And I think that's just something that's so important for founders.
00:06:49 Jenny: Oftentimes they come to me for answers that I have no idea. And I'm like, yeah, but there's so many other people out there that can be helpful. For the most part, people come to me for fundraising advice. I'm always happy to give it. But the best people to help you fundraise are your peers or people that are 12 months ahead of you.
00:07:06 Jenny: I love the fact that you spontaneously got this group of peer product leaders across New York who helped inform what you were trying at Meetup and I'm sure was a great support group and I just feel like we need a lot more of that.
00:07:19 Andres: For sure. And not just being pointed in the direction and learning what to do and how to do it better, but also just seeing that you're not alone, hearing other people's problems. Oh, that feels so good to know. Everyone thinks that the only person in the world is dealing with whatever they're dealing with.
00:07:33 Andres: No, you're not that special. We're all not that special. There's a lot of people who are feeling it. And so just to know and see it and to be able to even help somebody will pick up your mood in a heartbeat.
00:07:43 Jenny: I love that. No special snowflakes. Everyone is going through the same crap. So early days of DoWhatWorks. Tell us a little bit about the origin of the name, which describes the product a little bit, but it is a quirky name. So how did you get that one?
00:07:59 Andres: We invented the technology first, my co-founder and I, and we were looking for a name. And as it turns out, it is actually one of the daily mantras that I would write down in my journal every morning.
00:08:09 Andres: And so the idea or the name or the reason I've been doing that just came from working with my team in the past, which was like, “Hey, let's not reinvent the wheel. Can we find somebody who's done this before and learn from them and execute on that? And use it as a starting point.” So it really was my daily mantra and DoWhatWorks.io was available. We grabbed it and built it and moved on. You know, it's one of those names of convenience, but it's a fun name.
00:08:29 Jenny: It's a really fun name. And it always reminds me, although it has a slightly different meaning. Scott and I, when we were naming The Fund, one of the names that were down to like one or two was a 'Work in Progress.'
00:08:39 Andres: I love that.
00:08:39 Jenny: It's such a great name, but then we were just like, it's going to be weird if people just call it like the WIP Fund. We didn't like the acronym.
00:08:46 Andres: I got to go meet with my investors at WIP. Yeah. You got to think you desperately want that. I think Everywhere is a really smart name, especially for how you all have evolved as well. I love it.
00:08:55 Jenny: For sure. All right. So early days, it's you and your co-founder who is also at Meetup, correct?
00:09:02 Andres: Yeah, Will and I worked together for over a decade running these experiments and developed just this great bond. And he and I both took a year off after we were acquired and we're just playing with a whole bunch of different ideas.
00:09:13 Andres: And this is the first one that when we saw it, we just really quickly prototyped it and it got some traction pretty quickly from our friends that we had shown it to. Not only that, but they started paying for it right away. And so that gave us a pretty good feeling that we should double down on it, which we did.
00:09:27 Andres: So I've been working with Will now for a long time now for 15, 16 years. I am so grateful to have him as my partner.
00:09:33 Jenny: That's great. No co-founder risks there. You guys been through it all, I imagine. What was taking the leap, although you are obviously almost like a co-founder of Meetup, it's a little bit different when you're the CEO and you're kind of taking that leap. So what were some of the considerations you made?
00:09:51 Jenny: I'm sure lots of bigger companies would have scooped you up or friends at Etsy and all of those New York companies that you worked closely with, but what gave you the ability to just go out and take that risk?
00:10:04 Andres: I don't know if I ever told you the story, Jenny, but the short answer is $1,200, I think, which is at the time I gave myself a year and I joked that my wife was a board member. You want to start something then you got one year to get some traction. And if you don't get it within a year, you got to go get a real job, that’s what she said to me.
00:10:20 Andres: With that, we were playing with different ideas. But right around the time that Will and I were validating this idea and seeing the technology actually start to show that it could really track people's experiments and teach us something really interesting. Recruiters started calling me and I got the biggest job offer I've ever had. A humongous paycheck. I had to decide whether to move forward with it or not.
00:10:42 Andres: I had shown this to three friends. And they said, "Yeah, this is really interesting. If you build it, we'll use it." And I said, "Well, will you pay me upfront? Pay me right now.” So I sent them a link and they started paying me through Stripe basically.
00:10:53 Jenny: And you had nothing.
00:10:54 Andres: Oh, we had zero. We had no website. The only thing at DoWhatWorks.io was a Stripe form basically, where you could put in your credit card. One of them gave us about $300 subscription and the other one was like $400 and the other one was about $600. It's about $1,200. I'm doing the math right. With that, it's like, okay, well we have people paying us money to solve this problem. Let's double down and let's do it.
00:11:14 Andres: So we did. I turned down the check, I turned down the offer and we bootstrapped it ourselves for the first two years with no income. Like we did it entirely off of the funding we were making from our customers and just doing it in the most capital efficient way possible, leveraging our exit at Meetup beforehand to help pave the way.
00:11:32 Jenny: But my takeaway from all of this is everyone has a boss. So thank you to your wife.
00:11:39 Andres: She's awesome. She's a very cool board member. I've had lots of board members before too. I think you want her as a board member for sure.
00:11:45 Jenny: I love it. We're going to talk about all the good things about DoWhatWorks, but talk about some of the challenges. Clearly working with big companies has challenges. We were just chatting about the bigger the company, the more friction there is working with startups, obviously the macro with AIs. Talk about some of the things that you've had to think through over the last couple of years.
00:12:07 Andres: This is a brand new thing that no one's ever been able to do before. And so part of it is we're really radically changing how people think about optimizing their designs and their user experience. And whenever you have that, you have a lot of reeducation on what's possible and there's a build there. But the biggest challenge is that we're again in the critical mass business.
00:12:25 Andres: I keep finding myself in critical mass businesses, but we're in the critical mass business, which is in year one, it was so cool to be able to like pick any company and see their tests. And just to be able to look at Netflix and see like that they ran this test and actually see the test was like, wow, that's really neat.
00:12:38 Andres: And that certainly motivated a lot of the streaming companies that we now work with. We work with six of the top streaming brands to like use the service, but it became very clear that seeing an individual test isn't really where it's at or what's the coolest part.
00:12:49 Andres: The really interesting thing is, what happens when you can see the same thing being tested over and over and over again in slightly different ways and use that to truly know what moves the needle. And there's so many ways to like experiment with adding a video to your website. There's a video itself with like a standard YouTube thing that you can have auto play.
00:13:06 Andres: You could just have the little red circle. You have a little circle with a triangle inside. You can have a link to it. There's so many different ways of doing anything and execution matters. And so you can't just look at one test and say, this is a good idea or a bad idea. You need to be able to understand and look at an individual variable, see it tested in so many different ways to tease apart what was it that made it win or lose? And you need to know the context of the industry it's in. Because what works in B2B doesn't work in B2C. What works on a signup page doesn't work on a homepage, et cetera.
00:13:34 Andres: So for us, the biggest challenge has been figuring out not just how to like make it work and prove that we can track it effectively, but getting to the scale where we can now look at the patterns. Once you have that, it just makes everything possible that we're now doing.
00:13:46 Andres: But until you get to that point, you got to be really careful about how fast you grow, quickly you take on expenses. If you raise money and do a whole bunch of marketing too soon, you're basically just going to flame out.
00:13:57 Andres: So really balancing that trade off and getting to the point where stay as an entrepreneur in certain ways, you got to like make sure that you stay alive and that you're running the business in a way that sets the foundation to get where you want to go.
00:14:09 Andres: So we've had to make sure that we are very prudent and efficient and staying alive and getting to the spot. And now it feels like we're finally at that spot. So that has probably been the biggest challenge. That's a macro challenge for us related to how we think about raising capital and how aggressively we spend or don't spend and where.
00:14:26 Andres: That's been one of the most interesting challenges. You've been great, by the way, along the way, and whenever ask you for advice on those things. So thank you for that as well.
00:14:32 Andres: And then the other challenge you were alluding to is people are shocked. When they look at the logos that we have, we work with like three of the top 10 banks are using us. Six of the top streaming brands, major brands like Adobe and Intuit and Duolingo. They're all using our platform.
00:14:44 Andres: People are like, wow, it's incredible. How many hundreds of people do you have in the company? We're like, no, we actually were able to do this with about 20 or less and they're shocked at the size that we are.
00:14:54 Andres: Part of it means that we have to both be like nimble, but also when you're working with a bank, it could take four months just to get a simple proof of concept through procurement and you got to manage that. And when it comes through, then you got to be able to immediately staff that up.
00:15:08 Andres: There's so many challenges that are like very interesting. I'm grateful to get to work with the brands we work with. And it's a really cool new set of learning how to work with them. I didn't have a lot of experience doing that.
00:15:20 Andres: Growing Meetup to 40 million users. We didn't really work with a lot of enterprise customers. So that's a brand new experience, but those have been the biggest challenges and learning. But honestly, I think the hardest thing has been really around setting the right goals, which is probably the lesson that's probably most applicable to your audience too.
00:15:37 Andres: It's like, how do you set the right goals and how aggressive do you get on things like marketing, on things like engineering, on building up your team ahead of where you want to go especially if you haven't like before the technology is fully proven, which is sort of the journey where we were about two years ago, three years ago. And so how do you manage yourself towards that end goal?
00:15:58 Andres: I feel like we're actually at a point now where we are on the customer scaling. We just hired a CMO who's doing great and he's generating like millions. I don't know how this guy does it, but he's got millions of people on his LinkedIn, viewing his LinkedIn content every month. I'm lucky if I get a thousand or 3000 people or 4000, I think I celebrate when I get like 10,000.
00:16:14 Jenny: Go to LinkedIn, I tell you, we're all getting that muscle.
00:16:18 Andres: So, he has millions of people that get our content, which is cool. And so we're scaling that part up. We're managing, but we're still nimble. Do I wish I had twice as many engineers? Yes, for sure. Right. But they're not cheap.
00:16:30 Jenny: Let's turn a little bit to the customer. What makes a great customer for DoWhatWorks? What are they trying to achieve and maybe are lacking and how do you get them to go from a one-off using your product to really changing the culture and making it one of experimentation as opposed to like, oh, we just did this A-B test.
00:16:52 Andres: For us, the ideal customers have a lot in common right now and they will evolve over time as we evolve the technology too. But right now the ideal customers are marketing teams or product growth teams at large companies. They spend millions or billions of dollars getting people to the front door.
00:17:08 Andres: They have a limited number of shots to improve the experience. Even these big companies, these big streaming brands, for example, they have the ability to run about one experiment a month, for example, on some of these major pages, like their pricing page. And so they need those things to deliver.
00:17:23 Andres: They spend a lot of money. They have a high value per customer. They have limited ability to like execute on experiments. And if the biggest ones can't execute on experiments, smaller companies are going to take even longer for them to run tests too, or to get a single test done. They all have that in common.
00:17:38 Andres: They all want to drive more growth. The good news is that that actually describes almost every single company on the planet, except for the part where they're spending millions or billions of dollars for the large companies that describe most companies. Although I think some industries feel it a lot worse because banking has such limited traffic and such valuable customers and SaaS has such high value with customers.
00:17:58 Andres: Those are real sweet spots, but the streaming industry loves us and digital experiences, e-commerce, the digital healthcare, the ongoing direct consumer health is an interesting segment for us too, but they all are trying to do that.
00:18:11 Andres: And the biggest thing for them is really re-imagining their playbook or like understanding. And for us, it's our job to help integrate this into their workflow and to help change the workflows so that it starts with a point of view of saying, instead of starting with like, “Hey, let's generate ideas.” The workflow starts with, “Hey, let's generate ideas based on data.” Let's look at what everyone else's experiments are. Let's see what the patterns are for our experience versus every winning experiment.
00:18:36 Andres: And think of that as the starting point and then use that to hone in on what you're going to dig in on. It's been an educational process. It's a challenge less so for the companies that use us. Once they start using it, it gets so fun to see them doing it and evolving and it's spreading within the organization. The harder part is just literally explaining how this works to new people.
00:18:57 Jenny: For leaders who want to be more data informed, but they just feel overwhelmed with all the places that they can experiment or all the tools in front of them, what's one place that they should start or kind of one thing that they can do?
00:19:10 Andres: If they're overwhelmed, there's kind of two ways of being overwhelmed. You can be overwhelmed with having too much data or overwhelmed with having just the inability to get your hands on any data at all. Well, there are different kinds of problems, especially like with smaller organizations.
00:19:23 Andres: But I think in both cases, what you want to do is find signal fast that reduces the amount of things you're looking at to a small manageable set. There's so many ways of doing that. So obviously, DoWhatWorks is a great tool for that, but you can also convene your buddies over at the other product companies here in New York City and start to get some signal from them.
00:19:42 Andres: Talk to other people who are facing similar challenges. Your competitors probably won't tell you, but maybe if you're Calendly, you can go talk to the folks over at Airtable. You're not competing with them, but you both have pricing pages, right? So that would be the number one place to start.
00:19:56 Jenny: I like that. That's a good one. What's one idea that experts in your field or even the Twitterverse say that you disagree with? Seems like there's a lot of conflicting advice when it comes to some of the principles that DoWhatWorks helps unlock.
00:20:11 Andres: The thing we disagree with is fundamentally how you should run experiments. Nothing too major, just the biggest thing. You can understand where the playbook comes from, but it's a 30-year-old playbook that I think is completely leading people astray. And the history of the web and being able to generate things is, oh my god, you can generate things really fast.
00:20:30 Andres: The emphasis in the industry and for all people who create user experience has been like, how much velocity, how quickly can I launch something? How many tests can I run? And you'll see people get up on stage or conferences and they'll be like, I ran 200 experiments last year and everybody applauds.
00:20:45 Andres: But it's like, what if you ran 200 experiments and four of them won, is that really the thing to be celebrating? The thing that I think everyone's focusing on is velocity and speed and even with AI tools, it's easier than ever to launch stuff. But it's so hard to launch stuff that people will use.
00:21:03 Andres: And so really focusing on, “Let's truly understand and also let's use data. We don't have to imagine it." It's not because we're some like divine wizard that can understand what you should do or not do. Look at the data and understand what has been tested, what works or doesn't work.
00:21:18 Andres: Use that as the starting point to fundamentally like create better early iterations. I think you can do both. I'm not saying you shouldn't be fast. I'm not saying you shouldn't do high velocity, but the mantra of just velocity, velocity, velocity, all the time is wrong. And I think when combined with increasing the percentage of things you do that work, great. With you as a VC, you can increase the number of investments. You could 10X the number of investments. That's not necessarily going to help if they all fail, right?
00:21:45 Jenny: All right. So as you think about what's next for DoWhatWorks, can you give us a little peek into the future and where you guys are heading now?
00:21:55 Andres: There are so many dimensions out there we're so excited about. So we took all these experiments that we've aggregated that we've discovered and analyzed and each one of them took about a month to run. So it had to take about five years, six years to get this data.
00:22:05 Andres: But now we got the data. We're transforming the data into scores for every single variable on every kind of page. And those scores are everything from like the elements that are on there, the layout, the approach, the messaging, the tone of the messaging, everything that people have ever tested.
00:22:22 Andres: We're transforming those things into scores that are driven by all the experiments that had happened related to that specific thing being done. Let's just use layout or the number of plans showing whatever the case may be.
00:22:34 Andres: So now that we have all these scores and we call them bet scores, the super interesting thing is how do you help people get their hands on those things faster and use the scores to just know what to do. We sort of called it "Project Movie phone" originally. If you remember the Seinfeld, he's like, "Just tell me the name of the movie you want to see."
00:22:49 Andres: So that's always sort of been the mantra. People have been like, "Tell me the thing, synthesizer. Just tell me what to do, what has worked, what hasn't worked and help me then apply it to my work." We're now using those scores to do just ridiculously interesting things that will be rolling out in the near future to be able to ask questions of us.
00:23:05 Andres: Of the system and have it dynamically answer those questions, have it be able to interpret or have your current experience be diagnosed by the user experience, by these scores to know what is suboptimal, what's missing, what could change. And for that to be a living and breathing thing that keeps coming to you.
00:23:21 Andres: Imagine you get these alerts about these new phenomena that are coming up that there's suddenly this new opportunity you haven't taken advantage of that is coming to you. Maybe folks in your industry or competitors just ran these kinds of things and now they're scoring really well and you should be aware of it.
00:23:35 Andres: And then in an ideal world, the 12-star experience to borrow from Airbnb is then you just make it dead simple to execute. We don't necessarily need to be in the world. There's a lot of people, I think, who are going to do a great job of building things. And I think Figma and various other tools and experimentation platforms are going to do a great job of launching stuff.
00:23:50 Andres: We want to create the operating system around it that helps you know where to work on it, what to work on makes it easy to generate and easy to iterate. And it continuously like working as a team of folks on your behalf, just constantly making your site more effective and making your performance go up.
00:24:08 Jenny: When you started the company, did you really think it was a data company or did you see it as a marketing tech company or whatever you would have categorized it? I know that maybe in your mind you knew that after a couple of years you'd get the data that you needed, was that always the plan?
00:24:23 Andres: The plan certainly has evolved. Will and I are product people at heart. My co-founder, he's a CTO, but he's an amazing product person. Having come from Meetup, the idea was always around what can you do in a way that's super scalable and how do you do something at scale.
00:24:36 Andres: That's been one of the elements and I think we're more fascinated by the problem than anything else and so I think we were very problem oriented because we both felt this pain and where it could go and we were so excited to solve for that.
00:24:48 Andres: I think we always believed that with more data, as the data scale, that it would allow us to see the patterns. There was no clear indicator that it actually would. In order to validate that, we actually launched a whole services team and have been doing the work and analyzing stuff for customers with human beings proving out that it just generate multimillion dollar wins, which makes us feel really great about continuing to invest and scale it up more too.
00:25:13 Andres: So funny because from a DoWhatWorks point of view, I don't consider myself a data company CEO. I don't consider myself a MarTech company CEO. We're in the win business. We want to be in the business of helping people like get the ultimate goal of getting better results. And we need to keep doing that every single quarter. They need it every quarter and we need to keep helping them every quarter.
00:25:34 Jenny: The win category. So it's like the best in healthcare, fintech…
00:25:38 Andres: Exactly.
00:25:39 Jenny: I have a question because you mentioned, or we had spoken about just when you work with enterprise customers, the challenges, the sales cycles, the procurement, all of that. You probably saw that MIT study that came out a couple of weeks ago saying 95% of generative AI pilots have been a disappointment to the enterprise.
00:25:57 Jenny: I think we all know with new technologies, sometimes they get rolled out too fast or they're too janky. But I'm curious about your take on that stat and where we're going in the world of enterprise AI.
00:26:10 Andres: It's not entirely surprising. And it's so common with the cycles that you and I have both lived through over the course of being in the commercial internet since the dawn of the commercial internet and seeing that happen.
00:26:21 Andres: My co-founder who just has the best way of describing it, he calls AI in some regards, having a BS artist who's like really good at selling you something. AI can create a great demo and it can create the feeling the thing you're looking at is actually good. But the reality is, all of the training did and all the underpinnings.
00:26:39 Andres: People were so excited and rushed so fast to get the experience. They have this shell of an experience with a very high promise, but it's garbage in garbage out. A lot of them are experiencing that the cool promise of what they're trying to do was trained by really flawed data and therefore it's not delivering the results they want.
00:26:58 Andres: And we were joking and kidding with ourselves. We're like, “In the last couple of years, we should have put AI on our website more and made it be like more in our H1.” But we're like, no, we'd have to build it and prove it before the AI be the instrument that gets you there. Instead of garbage in, garbage out, it's like insights in, impact out.
00:27:13 Andres: If you don't start with the right internal building blocks to train the AI, it's just not going to do anything. It will look like it's doing stuff. You'll show a lot of motion. Your velocity will be high. Your impact will be very low. Your win rate will be very low, which I think is sort of unfortunately endemic to the entire industry and what we're seeing there.
00:27:31 Andres: I think it's awesome that companies were willing to invest so heavily in experimentation. Let me share a great thing with you about this one too. In the last year and a half, what our engine does is it can detect all the experiments that are being run. We then have metadata related to it.
00:27:46 Andres: One of the things that we tag is the use of the word AI in people's headlines. And of course it went from zero headlines in terms of the H1 on someone's website when you go to HubSpot. So of course it went from zero, very almost nothing to suddenly like hundreds of experiments where people are testing the AI platform for blank, the AI CRM for you.
00:28:07 Andres: And they were experimenting with that regularly versus other experiments. Like they're using that versus other headlines that didn't necessarily talk about the AI, but talked about the outcome or the benefit. Time after time after time after time, those experiments that did not emphasize AI in the headline, that instead emphasized the benefit or the value or the capability, those were the things that won.
00:28:29 Andres: And so I feel like there's a rush and a push in and among senior leadership, a lot of organizations to like mandate that you adopt these things, but it isn't necessarily tied to the underlying problems we're trying to solve, which is what we're so excited to be able to finally be able to use AI to do, but there you are. So I thought it was a really funny thing that we're seeing across the industry.
00:28:45 Jenny: That's so great. So everyone who's putting AI on every page of your investment pack, you also may want to look at that because I'm not sure that it's going to convert me as well as actually giving some insights that lead to impact. So I love that.
00:29:02 Jenny: All right. Well, this has been a delightful 30 minutes. Let's finish with a speed round so we can know a little more about you. What's a book you're reading, podcast or some media that you are enjoying now?
00:29:14 Andres: Book is Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. I just think it's a nice one to keep coming back to on an entrepreneurial journey and just reminds you to embrace the hard parts along the way. Use this as an opportunity to make whatever you're working on better, which is always really nice. So I appreciate that book and such a nerd on the podcast stuff. I love the Startups for the Rest of Us. It's a really relatable podcast too.
00:29:37 Jenny: If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?
00:29:40 Andres: Anywhere that I've been, it would be Costa Rica. We used to go there every year, seven years in a row, when my kids were younger and when they're in college, I will be spending my winters down there for sure.
00:29:49 Jenny: Oh, love it. Favorite productivity hack.
00:29:53 Andres: I love the little polish feature on Gmail. It is the most time-saving thing I've ever seen. I love that little thing.
00:30:00 Jenny: I know. Google's really stepping up with their products. I feel like they were just kind of lagging. I integrated Gemini into like all of my workspace, it's pretty great. Where can listeners find you?
00:30:11 Andres: So I don't spend any time. I think my last Tweet was like six years ago, maybe seven years ago. I'm on LinkedIn. Andres Glusman at LinkedIn, or they can email me andres@DoWhatWorks.io.
00:30:22 Jenny: Well, this was such a pleasure. Always fun catching up with you and can't wait to hear what's next for DoWhatWorks.
00:30:29 Andres: Thank you for being on this journey with us, Jenny. We appreciate it.
00:30:31 Jenny: Thanks, Andres.
00:30:33 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Andres Glusman in Founders Everywhere.