How AI is Reshaping Marketing Campaigns and Website Optimization

Greetings, everyone. I'm excited to welcome AJ Goiall, CEO and founder at cyber AI. AJ, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks, Ben, for having me here. Yeah, no, great to have you here looking for the conversation. First, first question, always tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah. So I've been now 14 years since my graduation. I did engineering from there. I moved into CPG world, starting with Nestle, then world with a very early stage startup that opened the world for me. The founder was from Wharton. He with his blessing and his guidance, I got into Stanford. So I did my MBA there and then started my own company in women's health, which was my first venture, which I exited. And after a year of golden handcuffed, started my second one, which is fiber AI. And the learning was all from the first venture where I've been a marketer and I realized, hey, this is a gap and with AI and with my understanding, we can solve it. So yeah, so that's the journey have been founded throughout operating initially, but like founder have been founded from the last eight years now. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, love that. So you said, so engineer out of school and then tell us. So and then stand or MBA is to, MBA Stanford. Yeah, Stanford. So tell us of curious, like I got my MBA and of course, found it useful, valuable, but tell me like real quick, yeah, engineer, but then wanting to get that MBA training. So what was your thinking? Okay, why go to grad school? Why just not just, hey, let me go start a company. Yeah, I think as I said, like after, after my engineering, I moved, I worked with Nestle, which is like your corporate structure. I think it was a great gig because I got to learn a lot. It's like a brand new real venture, but I don't like to call that because like when you are working with like large jobs, you have so much money, but your disposal that you can do stuff. But I think a lot changed for me with my first startup career with a very small company, beverage company called paper boat and that founder actually opened up MBA for that. I was very against the idea of MBA. I was like, okay, this is my learning phase of startup and I'm going to start up. And then he's, you are like a horse, you just look in one direction. You need to be an eagle. You need to have a bird's eye view. And for that, you need an MBA and I'm like, okay, I'm going to give it a shot. And that's how Stanford happens. There's not a plan. It just happened. Okay. Great. I think it just helps other engineers or maybe it may be non business backgrounds. Then, hey, should I go to that? So a lot of debate about that. So perfect. Let's talk about fiber AI. So tell us what products and our services does it offer? Yeah. Ben at fiber AI, we're solving a very old problem statement, but the problem statement that has become a lot more relevant in this new era. Right. So if you think about websites, a website have been existing for almost a decade more. And the whole reason website started were because people wanted to showcase information. Right. And then they got connected to the marketing will like your algorithmator and like all those folks creating campaigns and then making sure each touch point has the same campaign look and feel. And that was also possible 10 years back because you will run two campaigns in a year. But then came Facebook and Google and this whole ad ecosystem and this whole communication and reaching out to people just exploded. Right. So you have hundreds of ads running now. You have thousands of email campaigns running now for the same website. And website is still a static brochure page and we realize, Hey, if you're doing hundreds of a thousand campaigns and messaging is so different targeting is so different, why don't you optimize websites for that? And that's where we started at fiber AI. What we say is that we are an agentic experience layer for your web. So basically we sit on top of your web, connect your marketing ecosystem with it and make sure the messaging that you're doing, the story that the customer has seen is the story that they land on when they reach your website. It's not starting from zero. It's not something new. It's not they going and searching what's happening. Right. Like a classic example. I'll give you say, for example, you want to get a credit card and you start your journey where you see a credit card, add showcasing you travel miles because you travel a lot. Right. Or say financial software credits or cash back on that, right? With your background, you click on that card. You landed on a page. Most likely you'll land on a page where you will have to figure out where that particular information is messaged because the page will be like, it is the best credit card or twice the bank credit card or stuff like that. What we do it, we take that information, make sure in that web page, we take that core information, put it up there because band has consumed that information. That's big, his interest. So I want to make sure that's up and sent that at the website as well. So that's what we do right now. OK. And just to make sure I understand. So we're running paid ads. We're email campaigns and returning personas, right? The key to this is we have an ICP or multiple or different audiences. So if I'm trying to reach, let's just say, hey, I'm trying to reach Sassio Fos out there. And I have a Sassio Foe ad and then I send them to a landage page that says, hey, welcome marketers. Right. They'll probably just all right, done moving on. And so you're able to customize these pages. So they come and I'm so better conversion, better stickiness, all that stuff. Exactly. Yeah. So the idea is like, even like a very small, in your example, small things like we're doing a Sassio Foe, but Sassio Foe in a, in say, a frintech ecosystem versus like a marketing ecosystem, you do want to make sure you translate the pace to that. You have case studies more related to that profile. Those are the things that we we pitch in. So is it, so are you creating say these URLs or these pages are then autumn, like say if I'm running, I don't know, Facebook campaigns and I need all these different landing pages. So you're able to just create all these different pages tailored to each of the campaigns. Yep. Exactly. So that's how it works then. But the beauty of the solution is you don't change the code page. Okay. They come a free tag. So each campaign is like a gobble or a filter on top of the page with which you will see a different stuff, but the core or the base page always remains the same. And that's the reason it's scalable. It's high. Okay. So just to make it because it's interesting because if I, if the, you say that, all right, it's the same page, same URL. Yep. But knowing you know who's being directed and then you code basewired or in the code, it can then adjust the page. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, to be honest, this is not a new tech. Yeah. A tech which required a lot of human intervention. Yeah. Like the classic folks in this space is optimizely and a dobit target. They've been here almost more than 15 years now doing this. But those are softwares. They require a lot of people to run this money. Like what we were talking about, if you have, as you rightly said, if you have 50 campaigns, creating 50, 50 of these variations with the traditional tools will take you almost for a few months. With us, it's two days job. So that's what we saw as well. Okay. So let's talk about your ICP. I could see marketing agencies, internal marketing departments. So yeah, who you're going to have to as a customer. Funnily enough, this is my first B2B stand, right? So I didn't know a lot. And I somehow ended up with one of the largest bank in US. The mock tech guy, he loved me and he's, hey, this solution makes sense. We're going to introduce you to inside. And I thought, okay, this is the right ICP. I should go after not realizing it's an 18 month sales cycle. But because we got that one, we moved into more banking players. And eventually, after almost one and a half years, I think somehow we ended up in a very regulated industry, which is banking. And similarly, regulatory industry, which is healthcare. And so that has become a core ICP. I typically define, and this is like a traditional definition, but I typically define when I tell my sales guy, are ICPs anywhere where LTVs are high. If you're ICP LTVs high, like credit card, high LTV, loan, high LTV insurance, high LTV, that is the people we want to go after. That's a non-traditional definition of my ICP. Yeah. Okay, that's really interesting. So maybe just by chance, I went to regulated industries, which is an interview to another founder for this where they were, they helped regulated industries, make sure all their ad copy and brand, like it was all like compliant and not saying the wrong word and different things. Interesting. So is that where you're sticking right now is, yeah, say financial services and healthcare and explore that or you looking and I know you can do more than that, but are you trying to find other specific verticals? So we could be horizontal, but everything else beyond this is all inbound if we solve and that outbound strategies around financial services and healthcare right now. Okay. Okay. Yeah, we'll talk to Mark a little bit, but so let's, so what year did you found Fiber AI? So we started 23 and then it took like we, the first year was all like figuring ecosystems out. I was a CPG guy. So I started CPG and realized it's low AOV, maybe a high LTV, but not that high LTV product and might not be very interesting for us to solve. So I moved into this new ICB, but I think it took us first year to even just figure it out. Second year to figure out that AI can solve a lot of it and integrating that into the ecosystem because 2024 was the year of agents, year of actual AI and everything. So we, we, last year was the actual year when we started onboarding some. So we had a lot of customers getting POCs in place and getting a lot of traction that was required for us. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And let's talk fundraising. So it's out, so I'm curious. You're about three years in. Yeah. And did you see, so you've raised, it looks like a seed around of seven and a half million so far. Yeah. So it's like a combination of two rounds. So we did a very small one and a half million, early on, which gets us started. And then from there, we just raised 5.7, a 5.8 mil more. So that's seven and a half million total, which is last year when we figured out that this is what we are going to. after and we got some of the large logos to start by later to this. - Okay, so kind of a very pre-seed and then see it again. - And then the pre-seed was that right off the bat or did you try boots to also? - Yeah, it was right out the bat. - Yeah, I totally liked it. I had a year of Golden Handcuff when I sold my last company. And so at that time, when you're in that position, like a lot of folks reach out to you and say you have like your own pick, I think it was not very easy for us because Tony Tony, he was like a declining VC time it was tough, but we did, we were able to get some pull in because of a lot of angels who were backing me again from my previous startup. And then like Excel also came in last minute and then we were hoping to raise like a million but then Excel came in and then we did like a one and a half because they put in like another 450. And we didn't want to raise more because we didn't want to die at that time. But yeah, so it just happened. It was out of, it was on like a prototype, a DAC and a co-founder. That was that that is what we had at that time. - Okay, all right, prototype founder experience because you said you already, because in the past, you already had a startup. - Yeah, my co-founder also is a third-time founder so if you had two startups before, so yeah. - Okay, so that could agree helped. So I'm curious when I talked founders in raising some capital, whether it's that or equity, it's like how much? And say with that seed round, it was like more of kind of how much do we need to operate for a certain period of time and hit our targets or is it like what kind of valuation are you getting to give me and how much cap do I have to give away? And then that size is it? Do you remember those discussions? - Yeah, I think we were very clear. We needed a year of runway. That was a complete and the whole idea was that we wanted to quickly iterate and test and figure out if this is going to work or not. And that was the reason. And we knew that hey, we don't go beyond 10 to 12, 2015% dilution at this stage when we're just hydrating. And so there was the whole discussion. We, I don't think like when we went out and it was weird, but we stick to it, we went out with a clear ask and a clear valuation. So there was a discussion on what valuation you will come in or what we'll negotiate. There was no negotiation. There's a valuation we need and this is what the, what is the amount of funds we are raising? And that's it. That's how we went out. - Okay, yeah, that's really helpful because I asked you, or what did you learn in this process? But it sounds like in probably previous experience and co-found, just a lot of experience there and you can go out and say, here's the clear ask. Here's what we're going to do. And do you think it's really important to line expectations around whatever if it was that seed with those investors of, all right, here is our plan that's with this capital and here are objectives in aligning that with the investors to make sure you're on the same page of what you want to try to achieve with that capital. - I think when you are at pre-seed, it's very important to align that expectation but a pre-seed to a seed, it's important you know when you are raising a seed. And it's internally also, it's, and then it's also useful for you as a founder to know what you're expecting out of this capital, right? A lot of founders raise the capital and have no clue where they want to go with it. Like they're like, okay, I'm going to hire a team, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. We were clear that we want to test these three ideas and we want to go deep into one of them, whichever. We saw that and it took us almost, we thought it happened within 12 months, it took us 18 months to get there, but we got there and then eventually we raised the seed round which we recently announced, but we are at 18 months, the six months of differential that we have with the investor because we said we'll get there in 12, once we get there in 18th, it was tough, but since they already knew that this is the path we are taking, it was not putting them off that much. They were, they knew that yes, they are in the right direction, it might take some more time. So I think having a clear showcase, showing very clearly what you're going to do helps a lot. - Yeah, okay, that's helpful because it does come up in conversations where maybe the founders, hey, I just want 10 happy design partners, but the investors, no, I want 100 customers by this stage, so I'll just make sure you're aligned there. Before we talk to a market, any because you've got a lot of experience so far and I'd say in a short period of time based on my age, but any other lessons that come to mind for founders kind of in the stage or where they're thinking they got the MVP product or idea and thinking about a pre-seater seed round. - Yeah, so Ben, again, this is purely my experience. One thing that I've realized is either raise before the product or raise after a customer, don't raise in between. So don't go in with the product without a customer, don't go in with some built up product. What I've realized is at some point in time, every investor, every angel becomes the persona that you're going to sell to. - Oh yeah, I'm a marketer. I'm gonna, I'm not going to buy this shit because this is too early. And then you're like, okay, but this people are okay with and I'm gonna sell it, but you haven't sold. So it's best you go on an idea and raise or it's best you have some design partners and then you raise, don't do it in between. That's a very tough place to have a raise convolution. - Oh, I love that because I think I've interviewed 250 founders so far. I think that's the first time that's come up. So just make sure I understand. Raise, either raise before you have the product where it's all about maybe the tam and your experience and what you're going after your vision. But don't raise where maybe you say, hey, we've got a product but no customers, no traction. Yeah, wait 'til you do have a little bit, some of those signals, those attractions, which always comes up in conversations with founders, why did you raise we had traction? - Yep, exactly. I've seen it, I had a beverage or women's health startup before this and the problem was I went in with, okay, this is what we are gonna give to women and then every investor's significant other wife, they haven't opened it on it. And then you're like, I don't know, you are not my target audience. I'm not going after you, but still it eventually gets to it boils down to that and they're like, oh, yeah, my wife didn't like it and, okay. So I always like, so I had a philosophy not to go out with either with customers or have big product. - Yeah, that's an interesting dynamic in that other scenario. - Appreciate that, that's great, it's, I love it. Let's talk, go to market. Because before we mentioned our bank, healthcare regulated, longers, very long sales cycles, it sounds like. So how, tell us a little bit about your sales motion right now. - Yeah, so we've been, we've been iterating a lot on the sales motion. I think one thing that's working for us for sure is events. The conferences get together. So that's one thing we've been able to crack well. I think the reason why this happens is as well is because you get a FaceTime with the customer. You can explain easily what you're trying to do. Like our product is slightly complex. Also, I call it an afterthought in marketing. Like we are not the core thought that they are, they're not doing advertisement and they're not even doing like the tension marketing. It's like in between, but it's important. And so that has become really good for us. Second channel for us is LinkedIn. Email and email has somehow not worked at all for us. Like it's something, we have tried a lot. My AEs have tried, it doesn't work at all for us. But LinkedIn and events is the way that we're going after. A new thing that I'm trying to set up is round table dinners with each city every two or three weeks. That's some that we are not started, but like that we are starting to do because we think a physical touch or being there in person will help a lot more. So that's been the GTM for us. It's not scalable. That like it looks not at all scalable, but because the contract size are larger, it makes sense for us. Yeah, that's perfect. So right, conferences linked to an outbound email, maybe not working and that's works for some things. Not for others. And then round table dinners, interesting, I've done some of those with Ray Reich and our target SaaS, CFOs and founders. So when you try to hold these dinners are in the future, what kind of persona are you going for there? Is it the marketing leader? Is it someone engineering and marketing? Who are you trying to get out those dinners? The forest, most large enterprise is a Mactech lead, like a VP of Mactech, or also like CMO or head of growth. Like these are the three core personas we want to go after. These are the people who understand what we are trying to do. And these are the people who care about it because it's all about like improving conversion. We haven't tried one thing, I keep debating with my team is like try CFOs because we do cut costs significantly, but like we haven't tested it yet. So I'm not sure. But like for now, marketing focused three personas. Yeah, okay, interesting. I hear sales and marketing are much more willing to go out to dinners than CFOs. Sometimes hard to get CFOs out of the Cuban office. So which I understand. Let's talk pricing. A lot of debate today around pricing and AI first and SaaS and subscription and usage. So where is your pricey model landing right now? Yeah, so to understand pricing, when just to give you like what we do, right? The traditional SaaS plus the most of our customers will have an agency and a team to run the entire product. We replace this entire stack to fall together. So our costing is not purely on volume of visitors that are landing on your website, which is traditional SaaS or the amount of work, amount of hours that an agency need to run an experience. We charge based on number of experiences that we create. So that's typically our pricing. It's like outcome, but because our outcome is not just experience is also conversion, it's very convoluted. So we typically when we go in, we tell them, hey, we have an hour run, thousands of experiences for you and we'll show you how much lift we get to you. But to do that, right now you might spend a million or two million on the people and like couple of $100,000 on the software, we're gonna replace it with say, whatever the price that we come in come out to be. Our model which we do is AI cost, which is on number of campaigns, they're running and our server cost, which is on the number of visitors that are visiting that page. So that's how we typically show basic to them. Typically, ACVs are somewhere north of 100K and could go as I as a half a million to a million. - Okay, yeah, make sense in that, those industries. - So it sounds, I find understand correctly, kind of rate times volume, a little bit of usage as they're running these campaigns, the number of experiences you're creating, visitors, and I assume they're running tons of campaigns. - So do you see a bit of volatility in the revenue by a customer, or is it pretty steady because they're always running something? - So the best part is pretty steady because they're always running something and they never kill their best campaign. So always that. - That's what you're, - Also, like one thing that we are realizing, most enterprises and the kind of, the kind we work with, they don't want to pay variable fee. So they always come in and say, okay, give me your best on the unlimited campaigns and unlimited visitors. That's how, like, and then you end up like coating them high and then they negotiated it down. But eventually we know like how much, we basically go through their analytics and we know in the last one year, you're not never plus 100,000 visitors. I don't know, you will ever process it, but okay, you need unlimited, don't let them give you a price on unlimited, right? So yeah, so that's how it had happened. So because this happens, the volatility goes away for us. - Okay, and I'm so glad you mentioned that because you hear a lot about AI pricing and subscriptionists are dead. But then I talked to a lot of AI founders who were like, hey, no, we're just starting simple. We're just starting with subscriptions. We're keeping it easy. But then you're working with very large companies in large industries. And that's what I'm kind of hearing too is that, especially if they're bringing that contract to the CFO, like I don't, I need to know, am I spending 500,000 this month, a hundred a million? And then it gets converted back to a traditional subscription. - Yep. - So it sounds like you're seeing that same experience where they're like, hey, I don't wanna worry about my cost. Just give me something that is fair to you and fair to me. - Yep. It's like, it's all about predictability for all of the cloud donations. They don't want any additional unpredictable expense that comes their way. And one thing that I think it's still being very traditional pricing because eventually what they say, hey, I'm gonna sign for three years. Why don't you give me the first year cheaper and then you increase the price in second three years, but give me a predictable number. And so it end up becoming almost like how SaaS has been running for years right now. - Yeah. - So I haven't seen at least in my experience and maybe because we don't sell into well-e company or like San Francisco companies right now, in my experience nobody has picked us as a variable pricing model. Like everybody's just buying as a subscription model with us. - Okay. Well, it's interesting. Yeah, subscription not dead yet. It's still live and well. So good to hear. Well, AJ, this day your business, about three years in, is there a favorite number metric, operational metric that you're using to guide the business? Or this just important to you or important to you to monitor? - Yeah. I think that I was thinking about this a couple of weeks back before my board presentation, like what's the number that's impacting us right now, the highest. I think it's like a weird number in our case. It's like for us the first contact to an account to the first meeting set for a discovery call is a three and a half months journey. And so it's such a high number that this has become like a core number that I have tracked because if we can reduce it to a month, our pipeline just shoots up three times, right? And so that is one number we have been, like I have very intentionally guiding and working with my A's to make sure that works because for us, like when you're working with enterprise, it's all about how many can you get started as soon as possible because this is like 14 months pipeline. So you want to fill the pipeline early on long enough so that you don't run out of it when you reach that 14th month or like the 12th month. And so that's what we are, that's the number I'm focusing on majorly. It's not like ARR, it's not ACV, it's not the number of accounts. I said, from the account first connect to the first call, can I reduce that cycle to less than three and a half months? - Okay, so tap the funnel, did I get you said first contact to the first meeting? - Yeah. - Yeah. - Basically like somebody or like I reached out through to them on an email and then they're like, oh yeah, we're excited. And then getting them on the first call just to understand the use case. - Okay. - That's for us is very long. It's like more than three months right now. - Okay, just trying to get that first call, discovery, introduction, all that stuff. Okay, so trying to shorten that to accelerate the pipeline. Yeah, that's interesting. That's a great metric. And then a few, eight few steps figures before we wrap up here today. So do you have a headquarters location? - We are in San Francisco, three month California link. - Okay. - Bay Area, yeah. - Bay Area, perfect. And then what's your current team size? - Aviel, total of 23 people right now. We have offices both in India and US. So US team sizes like Majorly Sales and Marketing and Founders and then India has like engineering right now. - Okay. - Okay, sounds good. And anything you want to share around revenue or air ranges that you're comfortable sharing? - We are still sub-million, but our revenue is like more like a step function. So every side one deal, it just bump, bump. - It's a great, yeah, big growth. - Yeah, so yeah. - Yeah, that's great. Yeah, we're working with those big companies. Yeah. So EJ, for a wrap up here today, we're, I don't know, we're almost done with first quarter 2026. So with the pace of technology change and AI change, what's top of mind for you? Is it internal focus? Is it watching what the market is doing? What's top of mind for you this year? - I think for us, it's still internal focus. I think we have proven a certain technology. We don't think it is horizontal enough for LLMs to solve it. I know there's a lot of fear around. God making a lot of companies go out of business. I don't think that the case in a, that's the case for us. So for us right now is can we use this technology and scale quickly with like large enterprises? Get to 10 best ones, get to three to five million revenue by end of the year and then be able to figure out what next. But we are not looking out at all. We just raise funds. We don't need funds. Don't ever talk to any VCs. That's great. And then I think any change in AI is conducive to our growth because nobody's building ours are use case, but we are using all the new AI that's coming into our solution. So far everything external is always helping us. Even if it's not a good market for raising doesn't matter to us right now at least. And so yeah, so end of focus is internal right now. - Oh, that's great. Had a down operation execution. So love that. - We appreciate your time sharing your journey so far and experience, a past experience. If listeners would like to learn more about fiber AI, where should we send them online? - Yeah, so we are at www.fiberai.ai, fiber.ai, great forward. And yeah, they can follow me on LinkedIn or follow fiberai on LinkedIn as well. - Okay, so go to fibr.ai to learn more. Perfect and we'll have them in the show notes. And then AJ, you appreciate you coming on the show. Really enjoyed it. - It's same year then. Thanks a lot for having me here. - Thanks. - You have a great day, bud.