Modern Tech Stack | Ragnarokast #5

Intro

I’m Steven. And I’m Spencer. Welcome to Ragner Rock Cast, your podcast for all Things marketing And MarTech. Hello everyone. We’re the CEOs of Ragner Rock. 

Spencer

Hi everybody, I’m Spencer. Welcome to the Ragner Rock Cast 

Josh

And the One Signal podcast. I’m Josh, by the way, I appreciate joining you guys in this this forum. 

Steven

And I am lamo Steven, apparently just freshly back from paternity leave and ready to take my revenge on people who think I’m lame. So we’re gonna be doing something a little bit different this week. A I’m back. So yeah, we gotta do something a little bit more fun and we’re gonna be chatting with one of our awesome MarTech partners over at the Nuro Uno Signal. One Signal, and they also have a podcast of their own. So this is almost like a podcast Elaboration cast. Yeah, 

Spencer

It it is a podcast. A pod collab. A pod pod collaboration. I don’t know, we’ll work 

Spencer

On one A pod collaborate a a pod collaboration cast. 

Josh

That’s A word. Nice try man. Make sure 

He’s got terminology for that. 

Steven

I’m trying. Yeah, I mean it’s, it’s MarTech so you gotta throw some fancy word about it, you know, in there just to, if it, 

Spencer

It would be an acronym if we’re talking tech, you know. 

Steven

Oh, fair, yeah, De definitely acronym 

Spencer

Today. Since this is a joint collaboration, we are combining the efforts in more of a round table discussion about how the world of MarTech has grown exponentially over the years, especially with the tools available to us, how to navigate building tech stacks and why it’s important. Since this is a mixed audience, we need to give you all a little bit of background about ourselves. I’m Spencer, as you already know. 

I’m a co-founder along with Steven and we started Ragnarok in 2012. We’re actually an agency partner of One Signals, Steven, I dunno if you wanna add any color to that. 

Steven

Yeah, so we’ve been partnering with One Signal since I think about 2018 or so, and they’ve been around for quite a while and we’re, we’re a big US partner of theirs. And I’ll pass it over to Josh. 

Josh

Thank you Spencer. Thank you Steven. Yeah, one signals large, large usage in the mobile messaging space. We’re now in one in every five apps released in the iOS and Android app stores. Really focused on customer engagement and we’ve been working with, with you guys yeah, for several years now. 

I don’t like to limit it just to, to us I think we work with you a little bit more than, than that as well. But we are fairly well scaled across the globe. Only 31% of our, of our customers are here in the United States. So most, actually majority of our business is outside. So, and it’s a great topic. I mean, MarTech, we could spend hours riffing on ecosystem and the vendors and, and tools. So I’m excited to at least do it in a truncated format with you guys today. I guess first question I always, always wanted to know, because we’ve never talked about this in that first sit down, we had years ago in New York when we first met, how’d you guys get started in the MarTech space? 

Spencer

So I’m gonna take this one simply ’cause Steven’s gonna be way more eloquent talking about the, the, the technical questions that I’m sure are coming up at some point. All right. The year was 2012. Steven and I were roommates and we were, we’ve known each other since 1996 or something like that. It’s been a long time. We’re besties from, you know, brothers from other mothers, another mothers. I don’t how you say that in plural. Fast forward to 2012, we’re we’re, we’re roommates after college. We’re sitting sitting in a basement. The basement happens to be our apartment, the entire apartment actually there was no non basement part of this apartment. 

We had been, you know, working for a while and just, you know, decided that actually it was a little bit arrogant, but we were like, I, I think we can do this better than the people that we’re working for. 

And also both of us were like, do we really wanna work for other people at this point? So, you know, we started to, we knew that we weren’t gonna be able to go full-time right away. 

So we did have to, you know, grind for about four or five years. Moonlighting working full-time elsewhere. We started the company 2012, got build up our clients over the next four or five years. We did videos, dance studio, dance rehearsals. 

We, we made an app, we made construction companies sales materials. We did a little bit of everything, realized what we wanna do and what we don’t wanna do. You know, eventually 2017 we went full time, started hiring people and we started really getting a lot of interest in like, not just the content but the actual ongoing campaign work for email and marketing. I think what really helped take us to the next level was partnering with One Signal we’ve been working with for a few years now, but early on we had a few other companies and we’ve sort of been growing from there. And it’s actually partnerships is really what’s, what’s helped us grow to the size that we’re at now. 

And that’s kind of why we’ve gone in the MarTech direction rather than just being a bread and butter marketing agency like everybody else. Every other paid media agency out there. Not trying to throw shade or anything, but you know, there, there’s a bazillion of them and we’ve just seen that like there’s a need for this specialized niche that we’re in. And so we’ve just trained ourselves in that direction. Alright, quick history lesson here. How did we meet the One Signal team? Well, we were actually on a call with our good friends over at Mixpanel and they used to have a messaging tool of their own and they decided to sunset that a few years ago. 

But they said don’t fret. We wanna really be best in breed, we wanna focus purely on analytics, which we do really well and we have a, we have a partner that we’ve been working with that we would love for you guys to meet. And we’re introducing our clients to as well. They’re called One Signal. They have a much more, you know, robust messaging system than we ever had. And we want, as part of the best in breed ethos, like we want people to work on Mixpanel from an analytics standpoint and one signal from a messaging standpoint. I believe it was Yosha on, on the Mixpanel team and possibly Scott introduced us to the One Signal team. 

I think it was like two years ago actually. It was definitely two years ago. ’cause I was still living in New Jersey, I think. And I remember being in the car listening on the call, driving to, I think I was driving to the vet or something like that. Yeah. And we got introduced and it, it’s, it’s been a great partnership ever since. But thanks to the Mixpanel team, shout out there for starting off something beautiful. 

Josh

I get on a little bit of color here. It was, I think we met in person the first time in December of 2020 in some bar in York City. 

Steven

Yes. Yeah. And Nick, we 

Were like the only ones in there. 

Josh

Well it was, keep in mind it was sort of like this pandemic era. Yeah. It was actually our first business trip. It was my first business trip since the pandemic had hit. And I went, I think the following week I went to Europe for the APS conference. We spoke there and met all these people and it was kind of coming outta a cave, right? But you guys showed up and Spencer, you got this wonderful, beautiful beard you were talking about coming over from New Jersey, Steven’s there. And I’m like, what are these, what are the, what are these guys? Do you know who are these people? And we had, we had an awesome conversation. 

You talked about some of the work you’ve been doing with clients and how you approached it. And I immediately knew that we knew it was a gap for us personally. ’cause being a, a product like growth business, it’s easy for people to get set up. They can start using the product in 15, 30 minutes, but really getting value outta the product, you know, it really takes some thought and some effort and ideally, especially for legitimate companies that have resources that don’t have the time necessarily to focus on it. They need partnership with someone like you, like yourself. So I remember that that week because it was my first trip in seven, eight months. 

So I think we’ve been working together for three-ish years, something like that. I forget what year it’s exactly, I think 

Steven

I said 2018 earlier. So, you know, that’s where my memory’s at. 

Spencer

Yeah, yeah. Which Steven, each time he mentions a date, it gets further and further back in time. So 

Steven

That’s right. 

Josh

Well I joined the company five years ago, so I, and that’s 2018. So it was like, I, I knew it wasn’t 2018, 

Spencer

I was gonna quote David Bowie’s song five years, but I realized five years is about the end of the world, so I’m not gonna, I don’t wanna go there. 

Josh

So I, I think it’s, I mean obviously it’s been wonderful working with you guys and there’s a lot of players out there. What are the things that, that you do that think makes, makes the system work really is there are all these great tools, but getting them to work together and properly enabling companies to use them in a manner that’s gonna drive impact is a critical missing element from most of the SAS providers, right? We, we build this great software, we have all these amazing tools and functionality we riff on how successful a client can be, but if they don’t get set up properly, it never works. 

And I think that’s where you guys have really stepped in and how to a material impact. 

So appreciate that. 

Steven

Oh yeah. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s funny ’cause we were just on a, a call earlier today, Spencer and I, in sort of similar scenario where we’re trying to explain to a a, a sales team in front of our partners of like what it is we do, how do we distinguish ourselves? And what we keep kind of leaning in on is this message of you buy these platforms but you’re not necessarily generating the revenue that was promised when you bought them. So we focus a lot of our effort into making that, making that a reality. Whether that’s through kind of the hands-on keyboard implementation integration work or it’s the kind ongoing consultation about, well how do you take this really kind of powerful Ferrari that you have? 

Or how do you mix it into the rest of your system and and actually expand its footprint or do more with it, either from more of an automation standpoint, save staff time or from a capability standpoint like adding in personalization, making that a reality and, and seeing what that puts out from a incremental revenue perspective. 

Josh

Yeah, makes sense. I think you might just come up with a new tagline too. It’s like, I started write, write down, generate the ROA promise for your MarTech stack or something in, in that, in that. Yeah. Boom. 

Steven

That’s, well, you know, I, I I, I honestly I stole that. I’ll give credit where it’s due. So Scott Singerman, all a dear partner for all three of us over at Mixpanel, you know, constantly quotes that the, the promise of best in breed is hard to deliver on because it’s basically three or four different vendors for four different solutions. And you have to time all together, it’s very difficult to make that promise of realization. And I realized that we directly solve that problem with a lot of our clients, whether it’s through being the sort of visionary or the, or the connector that, that makes it all work. 

Or the enabler of moving them off of a legacy platform into something best in breed, then actually training their team on how to, how to use it so they’re not sort of trying to figure out how to translate, you know, years and years of legacy platform experience into something that can be done with, you know, three button clicks instead of, you know, seven, 7,000 lines of JavaScript or whatever how they had to write it before. Yeah, 

Josh

Exactly. I, it’s interesting quadrant, I think the overall gist of this is about what is the stack, what is should it be? And I don’t know if the question is, there’s, there’s obviously more tools today than there were 10, 15 years ago and the complexity’s increased, but a lot of it’s because we’re solving greater needs or innovation or, you know, evolution of the industry, so to speak. Whether it’s new channels or new ways to interact. But it, I I wonder from your vantage point, ’cause you see all these different vendors and you see all these different use cases and needs, is it, is it really the difficulty of stitching those tools together or is it the same quandary that we’ve always had for 15 or 20 years, which is actually getting them set up with the technology they have and properly implement it so they can actually use it. 

Does that make sense that the nuance there? 

Steven

Yes, it does. And I’ll take this one, Spencer, I’ll give you the next one there. So we’ll, we’ll, we’ll just ping pong back and forth here like paddle. Okay. Or you know what? Not even like ping ponging anymore. What’s that? What’s the new one? Pickleball. We’ll pickleball it. 

Josh

We’ll pickleball. Yeah, yeah. 

Steven

Hey man, I lead you up. This is all you. That’s right. So I think from my perspective, the, the, the challenge is the same. I think it’s, it’s, it’s easy to put yourself into a quagmire thinking that the tool is actually that different. It really isn’t that different that it was, you know, 15, 20 years ago. You look at a system like responses or any, these kind of really, really old legacy players out there. And the, the main challenge that people always have is, is in not being very definitive into what they want that tool to do. And then matching that with what can that tool actually do. 

And that’s really where the problem spirals out of whether that’s because of an insufficient data integration in insufficient schema for what that data should look like, misunderstanding of how the tool would actually calculate the data or leverage the data and then anything that’s around the application of that. So it doesn’t need to be in real time. Is it syncing in real time? So really it’s, it’s kind of a, a mismatch between what I wanted and, and what I’m getting. And I think a lot of that comes out of both a lack of good due diligence from buyers of software platforms, which has allowed some kind of bad players to get away with a lot of these sort of insufficiencies that they have in their tools. 

But it’s also been the reason that we see tools like One Signal kind of come into play, which are much more of that kind of new modern, much more focused on an API much more focused on a flexibility or, or be more of a flexible tool as opposed to a, you know, kind of a here’s a, here’s a a SQL table structure that you have to fit into and, and here’s that, here’s here’s like all the different points you connect into. I I think you’ve sort of streamlined that quite a bit by having a, a simplistic API around that. I think the other piece of that too, which as you mentioned is, you know, is it is a tool basically getting better and they are getting better for sure. 

They’re getting much more competent in terms of how to, how to integrate with them. They’re getting more competent in the sales cycle and helping to qualify buyers a lot better. And I think that, you know, that sort of shows in the evolution of the, the space and now you have like 20 or 30,000 or 50 or 80 or however many tens of thousands of providers that we have that sort of overlap with one another. There’s a lot more room to grow for sure. ’cause we still see it happening today. There’s a lot of opportunities still, which is what we’re excited about. And I think why we’ll continue to exist long to the future, 

Josh

What I think is compelling quite frankly, and what people wanna know is what directions not necessarily pick this solution or pick this, you know, partner, but it’s more about like what are the essential tools, why it’s important I think to think about, you know, your, your use case and quite frankly selecting a really good product product and demystifying out there. I think you still have legacy vendors, it’s called the Legacy Marketing Clouds, where they’re like, oh, just buy me and buy everything and you’ll be fine. And I think everyone on this call knows that, let’s just call it Salesforce for what it’s like all their bot, you know, attached products or garbage, they don’t even work together. 

They’ve not done the effort technically to integrate them. And it just doesn’t make, that’s why companies like Beres and to a large, to a lesser extent, folks like us are having success because no one can properly implement the marketing cloud stuff to actually send competent messages to users even with email, which is what they bought these platforms for, let alone modern stuff like SMS or, or push and then analytics, right? Like that’s not very good within the legacy marketing platforms. And so anyhow, I’m riffing, but I’d be curious to get your guys’ take on that. ’cause you, you’re dealing with it every day and you’re seeing all these vendors and you’re, you’re working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you’re working with, you know, probably Oracle Solutions and Adobe and we work with them as well. 

So I think they’ve got some great products, but they’ve also got some products that are more difficult. And so I think people are getting stuck, particularly outside North America by the way. We see this a lot where they just buy the big vendor and then they never really get implemented and they never achieve what they’re trying to achieve. And then we kind of get bolted on and it’s, it’s always a, a delicate integration if you will. Literally and figuratively, 

Spencer

Steven, I’m gonna make this more complicated for you, but I think it, I think it will make the, the answer even more interesting, which is, so there’s what what is the stack that you need? But also, ’cause this comes up a lot too in our, our scoping processes. What’s the order that you should implement? Like what tool types of tools should you have in place first? Yeah. And should you do them at the same time, one after the other? Like if you have like a recommended sort of order of implementation as well. 

Steven

Yeah, so Josh, I’ll I’ll riff off of you and then, and then answer Spencer’s question. Spencer’s question, which is to sort of say how does, how does, how does Salesforce start to fulfill on that promise? And then where does it fall apart? And then how do you then adapt that type of problem that you run into, into then redoing the stack? Like how does a legacy event occur more or less? Essentially you start with Salesforce or anything like that because you need a way to sort of organize or your, your, your contacts or your leads if you’re a B2B or if you’re just a B2C vendor, you needed some way to sort of store users and to have information about them and to enrich them. 

And then once you had all of that, you were like, okay, well well now that I know who they are and I could do some very basic analytics on them and I can understand what the revenue I’m generating off them, well, well, well how can I get more money out of them? So can I email them? Can I use a marketing cloud to do that? Can I do, do any number of sort of marketing activities? Can I sort of enhance that with maybe running a, an e-commerce website that I send them to off of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, any number of other tools that they have? And, and all of a sudden you’re kind of like, well if I just keep belting on the next thing, I’ll just keep getting the incremental revenue. 

And then to your point, at some point it falls apart and that incremental revenue promise doesn’t become a reality because you’re spending significant cost and just actually trying to get the thing to work, whether it’s in consultation or it’s in the actual labor of your, of your team. So then you kind of come into this, this, this point of like, okay, well I need to now rebuild my stack because I’m not doing it correctly. I mean, rarely ever is a, is a new company starting and they have to go through a complicated like stack sort of buying exercise because the, the problems are not all the same at the same time, right? 

As I’m a new company, what I really need to do is communicate with my customers and then I need to know who they are and store them, right? So that’s a fairly simple problem. But if you’re more kind of legacy provider, you know how to kind of break out all those different use cases and requirements to different tools. So generally, sort of the first place that one would start is in the actual storage and and maintenance of their users. And that might not be a change, right? In a lot of cases, a lot of our customers continue to use the salesforce.com flagship product because it is good at storing users. It’s, it’s that’s what they built that that’s kind of their, their mainstay. 

We typically see a lot of folks kind of migrating into a snowflake or some other type of environment that they’re potentially doing some identity resolution on or some type of other enriched activity. That’s usually a good starting point because without having good clean data, the promise of integrating into another system is just, it’s, it’s a fallacy. You’ll never get there, right? You’ll just be uploading CSV list or trying to maintain some legacy architecture that you put in place until you can build the real thing and then you’re not really getting any value out of it. So ideally you have some type of data pipeline or, or, or source system that you can set up a pipeline off of. 

And then from there we’re typically seeing some type of ETL or a or, or, or a CDP type product that’s in there that’s actually doing the piping and the plumbing some more or less. You kinda start with building the foundation, then you put some plumbing in, you know, we’re, we’re halfway up to a house at this point. And then from there it’s about getting and unlocking the revenue capabilities. ’cause even if you have a great user data warehouse, and even if you have great piping, if you’re not doing anything with those users, you’re not really making any money off of them, right? So that’s where the, you know, the one signal really comes into play there. 

Whether that’s from a sort of running the entire app marketing piece from in-app and push notifications on top of email and then having some of the journey orchestration capabilities that you have and setting up that automation. That’s where you’re gonna quickly realize the incremental revenue from all that foundational work that you put down. And then from there, typically we see that sort of analytics, personalization tools, MMPs, these types of things that are kind of get added on afterwards because they’re just realizing more incremental revenue and then powering more of what you would do with that tool that you already had. 

So again, that example of a, you know, bring it back to, to Mixpanel, like Mixpanel and One Signal, like work really well together, you create cohorts and Mixpanel, you sync them directly into one signal and then you have a, a more robust way of creating audiences. You don’t necessarily have to generate the same cohort definitions with inside One Signal. You can just create it mix pal and sync it through. So I think that’s like kind of how that incremental revenue then gets realized is you have another tool you can plug in, plus you get all the additional capabilities and analytical function that Mixpanel has to offer on top of what you would do through one Signal. 

So there’s this almost like kind of compounding revenue realization that happens when you have more of these tools, kind of that a talk to each other and then B, also integrate well with each other. And then the sort of kind of final point of how you would progress and sort of round out that tech stack is then to sort of understand like what other use cases can I not solve for today that I need to solve for with people or sort of homegrown systems. And then this is sort of ultimately where that build versus buy discussion ends and you’re doing more of the build. And that would be probably more feature-based things that would be your own data science models that you’re using to power things that are unique to your business. 

Or could be some type of like billing or, or or margin optimization components that you might have that maybe is a little bit separate from like the actual couponing or any other type of functionality that you would have. 

Josh

I have a quick question to follow up on that. Steven, do you see a shift happening from the legacy world of CRM where everyone, I have to have a CRM that’s sort of the, the foundational component. You talked about the plumbing, if you’ll to a, I think CDP was sort of this migration for B2C companies, wagman store all my customer data. Yeah. To actually that happening now more in the customer engagement side and people are not making the C RM investment because CRMs are really built more B2B. Yeah. Like if you go out there a the relationship of of account, you know, parent child, they’re not meant for this real time speed and take more action, but I’m not gonna go super deep, right? 

I’m not gonna have Steven as one user of, you know, sweet green customer profile, right? And I’m not gonna have all these phone numbers against you and all of these contracts because it’s not B2B relationship, right? It’s a B2C relationship. So are you seeing a shift of if I’m a B2C business, does this still make sense for me to do a legacy CR CMM from my users or am I actually, I know some of the companies in the one signal broader competitive space are very much pitching, don’t get a CM, just use us. Yeah, we’re your CRM for B2C and we’re seeing that with more of our customers, with our user model where people are just like, I’m just all the data here and I’ll information into Snowflake. 

I’m curious, you guys see a wide variance here. Is that a trend that’s consistent or is that something I’m just like, I’m just seeing it here there, it’s not as consistent a 

Steven

It, it, it definitely is a trend, right? And it has been fairly consistent and I think a lot of that is from, you know, the segments and particles of the world kind of being early on in that space and sort of pushing their, or having an identity resolution product, which is kind of the main value that A CRM adds more or less, at least on the B2C side. So I, I think that’s been happening for a while and I think, you know, some of your, your kind of all in one marketing automation plus CRM tools don’t really deliver on the promises much there that they, that they’re seeking because of the, the format that the data has to be in in order for it to work. 

And I think that like lack of flexibility makes it a little bit challenging in some cases. I mean, unless you’re like a, hey I’m an e-commerce shop, like my, my data’s pretty straightforward. Everything I do is digital. But as you start to kind of look into non-digital services or app specific businesses that maybe are, the identification is not the primary concern, right? Like, like I want people to be able to like go through my app and use it and I don’t necessarily need them to like give me their email address or their phone number or any of these other number of things. Like I wanna get outta the way of them making a purchase. 

So I think the, like having a concept of like device idea, somebody’s primary identifiers is, is not very easy to do in a marketing automation system, right? 

And, and so I think that’s where the CDP really adds a lot of value. I have actually seen even more historically talking about CRMs for B2C, I’ve seen people use things like Zendesk to be that type of function and to use their like, like customer care tool to sort of serve that kind of broader thing where you, you’re still logging all of the activity on that user if you would in sort of like a Salesforce kinda structure, but again, specifically on like known customers. But it doesn’t quite work for that sort of anonymous like non-information user. So I’d say it’s definitely a trend. I think it’s the impetus there is more on the, we’ll call it like the enrichment capability that they’re getting out of the CRM quote unquote CRM that they’re now moving into. 

So being able to do things like sort of calculate LTV to looking at frequency or category viability or anything that that’s a little bit more useful from a marketing standpoint, I think is more the impetus. But just being able to like raw store users, like eh, I mean you could just use a, any type of data warehouse to do that. I think the, the, the CRM just really needs to add value somewhere, otherwise it’s just not going to or CRM function, if you will, needs to add value somewhere. Otherwise it’s not going to, it’s, it’s just not, again, it’s gonna not fulfill the promise that it should be doing. Makes 

Josh

Sense. 

Spencer

You know, where do you see MarTech going over the next five years? I’m gonna ask that with a little bit of a loaded question. Obviously there’s a lot of, or a, a loaded prompt in that there’s a lot of stuff going on with ai. I’d be interested to know how you see that, you know, kind of panning out or not. Is it a craze or is there like a real use case there and beyond ai, like just where do you see things going? 

Josh

I can start on the AI stuff. I, I think we spent a lot of time with it. I personally been using it from the day got released, the, the Chachi BT got released and I’ve been early on the beta and bared stuff and we’ve been using some tools around here. 

I, I’m a big, big, big, big believer. I don’t think it replaces humans, but it accentuates and kind of up levels what we’re able to do. One single specifically, we’re taking a much longer term view that the important things that actually move the needle are predictive around behaviors, categorization, things of nature that are gonna add value more broadly speaking. And we’re not rushing to throw in like, oh, you know, iteration on headline or iteration on content. Because what we find is that most people we talk to, they’re, you know, especially larger companies, they already have relationships with a Jasper or writer.ai or Grammarly and they’re already doing this stuff on the fly. 

So adding it to our product, it yeah, saves maybe two seconds or three seconds, but it’s not really something that people are clamoring for. So I think that’s incredibly important and I do think it’s gonna have fundamental change in the marketing areas and particularly as you get into more content image generation, you know, that kind of stuff is, is a little bit more, takes more time and effort. I mean, I can now create images for decks or presentations in 20, 30 seconds that are fantastic that before I’d have to go get in a queue with our design team, it would take me a week and take them a few hours. So I think for things like that, it’s been, it’s been found really, really fantastic. 

Steven

I think it would be, it’s not quite, I’m not sure if it’s five years out, but potentially it is or within five years. But I think would be really interesting to see is for AI to actually build a lot of the kind of labor that goes into putting a journey together. So essentially I can kind of put in the, the recipe of what I’m looking to do. Like not just from a templating stand, say, you know, I, I want to target as an example, you know, I wanna target everybody who browses my app within the last 24 hours and I wanna set up an automation that based on the number of activities that they did within the app, if they did, you know, more than 30 or less than 20 or whatever you think is the most optimized AI tool, I want you to build a a journey around that and, and a set of messages on what we would send to get them to come back. 

And I think that could be interesting to sort of, right now we, we, we do that, but we do that through humans essentially kind of analyzing the data, going and recreating all the content. Even if we can shortcut some of that content, we still have to go and create it. We still have to implement it and activate it for an AI tool to be able to kind of work out the pattern of what that is. And then for me as the human sort of a a q see it, but then also to sort of validate, can I beat the AI in this case? Like is it, is it worth my effort to continue focusing on this specific problem or do I have the AI run infinite number of variations and continue to kind of optimize against its own sort of foundation. 

So I’m sort of moving myself out of being the maybe the day-to-day operator of the tool and using AI more as the, as the operator. Whereas I’m more the strategic brain that’s telling, kind of dictating where it should spend its time. I think that would be interesting. I think we’re a little bit further off from that just ’cause there’s just a lot more sort of under understanding that the a AI has to do and the types of things that we’re doing are not necessarily readily available on Google search. You know, there is a lot of kind of human input. So there’s a lot of training of the AI that would need to happen before it can be able to interpret it. 

The, the the sophisticated level that we’re trying to get it to be at and to really think through of like, well it’s, if it’s doing, if you’re doing like these seven behaviors in the app, then you should probably get this message because that’s gonna be the most enticing thing that’s gonna get you to come back after you abandon. So I, I, I do think there’s a, a strong possibility there for sure. 

Spencer

This podcast was completely generated by AI all of a sudden, I’m gonna start, have you seen the one thing where they just start like, there’s like too many fingers? 

Yeah. Okay guys. I I, I did it again. I kind of, I I gotta admit that I spaced out for the last 30 seconds and I went into Dali. Oh no. Which is like the other open AI thing. Oh no. Basically, I, I typed in a hippo with the one signal logo on its forehead who is the host of a podcast. 

Gotta about halfway there. 

But it became a little bit Nightmare Fuel. And I’m gonna show this on my screen real quick. For those of you who are just listening and not watching, I’ll do my best to just describe it. I’ll show you two different ones here. There we go. Ah, so I just want to, it says hips up, hi Histo, which I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean. I don’t see the One Signal logo or anything that even says One Signal anywhere on here. So that was a veil. Also, just look at the, look at the eyes on this hippo. I don’t know what’s going on there. And then here’s the other one also not one signal. Hipo piot gu nepotis. Like, what is that again? 

Something’s wrong. Like really, really wrong, wrong with the eyes. So I tried, you know, maybe I gotta say like, we have two of our creative team on this call. You’re, you’re sa you’re safe. 

Speaker 1

We definitely have some time for sure before it gets there. Yeah. 

Spencer

To bring it back home. Five years from now probably we’ll have a lot more accuracy here. It’s exciting. But as of today, you get hips up, histo and ipo, tis test poop, whatever, however you say, I can’t even pronounce it literally starts going into a weird characters. So we got, we got some time to work that one out. Closing remarks, Steven and Josh, you wanna give us like 10, ten second blurbs, 15 second blurbs to, to leave us off with here? 

Josh

Yeah, I, we, we didn’t get into a lot of detail around some of this stuff. I, I would encourage people, one, if you don’t have the wherewithal, like find a good partner who can guide you in this process. Like a Ragner rock as an example. I also would encourage people to try, I think all modern software should have easy kind of POC trials to really get a feel for does it work, does it not work? You know, get inside there. Like it should be simplistic and straightforward and solve the basic things you need to get solved for. I think too often people get caught up in the, the whiz of a demo and just kind of make long-term decisions without actually really knowing what they’re, it’s gonna work for them. So, 

Steven

Yeah, and to add to that, I think it’s really important that you are very prescriptive about what you are trying to do with each tool. And that you have defined the, what you would consider not what the, not what the salesperson, not what your CSM tells you is, is success, but what you consider success of that tool and being very clear in communicating that with your provider so that way everybody can mutually work towards making sure that that outcome is successful. 

Spencer

Alright, well that’s all we have for today and because we’re over time, but it’s okay. So call to action. Thank each other. Okay. Thanks Josh. Thanks 

Steven

Spencer. 

Spencer

Thank you. Sounds like a cheer to everybody, like gets up and Oh yeah, it’s nice to, nice to see you and yeah, pat on the back. Okay, next in the bullet point list, subscribe to podcast slash follow us on social, do both of those things please. And by us, I mean both One Signal and Ragnarok. Yeah. And finally, bullet point number three. Don’t forget to check out One Signals podcast on your preferred platform where we talked about XI don’t know what X is, but I think it’s cross. Maybe I assume it’s everything we talked about here. 

Josh

I hope we read, I hope we mark this episode as comedy 

because, and we went, we, there’s some dark, there’s some dark comedy there at one point. This is like a, you know, there’s some drama. 

Spencer

Well, Welcome to the Ragnarok cast. Yeah, 

Josh

Steven Spencer, I really appreciate being, being on here and appreciate you joining our podcast as well as, as was mentioned, this will be a, a collab, which will be shared on, on both book channels. And yeah, you should definitely follow the podcast. Listen to ’em. You’re gonna get a lot more comedy from this one than any other I’ve ever done, but I realized that I need to infuse a little bit more humor and laughter to make it worthwhile. So on that note, thank you both, I appreciate it. 

Steven

Thank you, Josh. Thanks Josh. All right. Bye 

Bye. Bye.