Ep # 131: How AI Eliminated Our CFO Overnight ft. Yannick van der Vaart (CEO, Sheetgo)

Adil Saleh 0:02 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is hyper and good podcast. And you know, like I said, like, we have seen it all, ever since this AI evolution and automation that is growing at a really, really fast pace. And you know, especially in in retail, especially in B to B Tech, customer success, support sales, today, we got this opportunity to explore a little bit about like, how workflow automation works across these bigger workspace organizations such as Google and Microsoft, all of these. I know that there's a lot of internal tooling that they have built, like CO pilots with these AI evolution with, you know, a lot of internal apps that they have, but there's still huge gap that we want to explore with the CEO and founder of Adil Saleh 0:47 Sheetgo. Yannick, sure, I mispronounced your name. Let me go it one more time. Yannick. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you, yeah, thank you very much for inviting Adil Saleh 0:59 me. Okay, perfect. So I mean, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yannick 1:04 No, thank you for having having me. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. Okay, Adil Saleh 1:09 perfect. So just giving the audience a quick brief on what sheet go does. And you know, the biggest thing that I've seen, looking at doing some research and having some notes coming from my team is it basically enables you to build your own custom tooling within, like, integrating with with what Google workspace, and primarily Google workspace and also Microsoft. But the biggest problem that it solved is it basically saves hours of your time. Imagine you're a financial analyst, and you have, like, Google Sheets, you have, like, all the data, like, in different all sorts of different places, and you're juggling around different tools. And having someone, some platform like sheet go enables you to, you know, automate all of that workflow, get some visualization numbers, and save a ton, ton of your time. So today, like, I was looking at your also, background, unique, you know, I know it's quite relevant, and it's, you've been in the in the space long enough, about 10 years now. How did, did it all, you know, go in the inception, in the beginning. Like, what was your thought process building sheet go, and how big of from it was back then, and compared to, like, how people are building, tooling around these spaces like Google and Microsoft, you know, just touch a little bit on, on the market competition as well, and how you're trying to position sheet go. Sure, Yannick 2:32 the original Inception came from my previous business, which actually was not in software. I come from software originally, but I was doing kind of real business, as I try to, as I say, really building things. We're building homes for people in need. In Brazil, a few 1000 homes, and we were invested by private equity, and it became kind of our larger company. But back in when we had started the company in 22,008 or so, that previous company, Yannick 3:06 within a year, I realized that I wasn't able to get information from the construction side, from the sales team, and to have that to be kind of all together in one place with our budgets and our actuals, And it was very difficult to have someone with a form to do it like there wasn't software out there to do it. So I built what you would some would call a management system or an ERP, out of what was then very new Google products that just bought Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, not too long from that, from that time and build an ARP, but I built it without coding. I The only thing that really struck me was that the communication of information was difficult. But what was not difficult was that, hey, I could we could create a document, you could send out an email, automate the information flowing from one place to another, and that was super powerful to report, but that was a long time ago. That was in 2010 and I wasn't able to start sheetco as it is today, until 2016 and and you ask how things have changed, I'd say that our original vision, the original vision of this, is that you could automate the process without having to code, and that you could use tools that are used to every day. And I don't think that much has changed. Actually, the tool, the tooling that we base ourselves on, is Google Spreadsheets, which is still Google Spreadsheets, and people have are very used to that, and it's improved a lot. Excel spreadsheets people still has been improving, and they've been going more online they were more offline before. And Google Docs, which has continued to improve. And email, people still use email, and so. Now there's a newer reality in over the last few years, which is the need for integrating with other SaaS. And we've, we've gone into that, we have an open API, and now we're pulling, putting out a whole bunch of direct integrations to systems like the, you know, finance systems like the ones you mentioned, like QuickBooks or others. But we're seeing the need in in E commerce. We're seeing an HR project management, inventory supply chain. We see it everywhere. And now, of course, you know AI, which is yet another tool in the toolbox to have to integrate, Adil Saleh 5:35 very interesting like the the biggest impact that it can make is, is when living within people's work workflows. You know, you talk about Google, you know, even Google tools, they have, like, lot of competition. Like, notion has been a big player in the last, I would say, four or five years. You know, a lot of a lot of tech companies only talking about tech. They prefer notion. It's more collaborative. It's more, you know, async, it's it's more integratable with other look alike tech tools. So how do you see it like as as, as I would say, as something you know, you know, that motivates you to build something really good that integrates with other, and it's flexible enough when it comes to tooling and integration, and, of course, defining it in the API and making API flexible for such tools like notion and other Yannick 6:24 Yeah, I think those tools, notion table click up. There's a whole bunch of them that I think have done a great job at filling in some of the gaps that you do not you're not able to fill in with a spreadsheet and a document easily we, I mean, we're so used to using sheet go and integrating all of that that we base our the way that we work on a workflow or a process, right? So if it's a process of finance, we concern more about that process than necessarily the tooling that you need for that, because the process is already resolved by sheet go. So we think of of the everyday of a worker based on the process that they have to do. Sometimes they need to manage a project. They need to manage recruiting grades in schools, and we think about what do they need, and how can we leverage the tooling they use every day with what they need more, and leverage the tooling that usually they use Google. I think people that use notion and and airtable. And as such, I think are are trying to fill in a gap of tooling that there is within Google or Microsoft and and they use it in their everyday but at the end of the day, as much as I see a lot of folks and I I'm involved in a whole bunch of notion projects, and air tables with different companies that we work with. At the end, they end up also using Google Docs, so it ends up having information all over the place. And my biggest concern is always the one source of truth and being able to really have everything together. And we continue to focus on that idea, Adil Saleh 8:23 okay? And Blake, what's, I mean, I think it must, it must go with a lot of customer education as well. Like a lot of these customers that you're dealing with, they're like, like you mentioned, they have documentation across different places. Some of them are trying to, you know, keep up with these New Age technologies, or New Age companies that are more adopt to, you know, platforms like notion another, but they still have, like, partially, have their documentation on notion, sorry, on Google. So how do you like help them? How do you help them adapt to the platform and make sure that they are well on boarded with customer education, documentation? How's that journey starting up? Like, especially this is every other day, like, you look at the Y Combinator directory every other day, you know, you'll find a tool that is building documentation. You know, for Google Spaces and for Microsoft spaces, they're integrating with all of these. And, you know, there's so much of distraction, Yannick 9:20 yeah, so, yeah, there is a lot of distraction. And so when we started the company, some people were like, Why are you betting on spreadsheets? Spreadsheets is dying, you know, all these, and you would see all these pitch decks I would get from investors. I'd see sometimes from friends of mine that we're saying we are replacing your spreadsheet process, and we're like doing this size to replace the spreadsheet process. That's what notion talks about. Also that's what airtable Rose all these companies. But that just doesn't hold true. It's just yet another tool that you also have to deal with, because people still. Go back to this spreadsheet, still go back to the documents and still go back to Gmail. So I guess we, we focused very much on just the basics or the basis that everybody's going to be using. But the biggest question, and I actually recently started posting some things about this in LinkedIn. Is something you you ask, which is very true, which is, how do you onboard and, and, and we've seen that there's a challenge in two sides. One is when you're selling you, of course, need to get your ICP, or whomever it is that you think is the level that you need for them to understand and appreciate what you're going to give to them, and that you're going to solve a pain point for them, that they can solve with with your product. And we are now kind of going into, we're adopting, after some discussions, a process with Harvard of four levels, basically. And I won't go into too much detail on this, but I'm going to put some LinkedIn out there about this. But basically, if there's four levels of folks that are ready on the data spectrum of understanding how data works, the perfect level for us is level three, sometimes level two. But you'd be surprised we have customers that are level one. Let's say that have even a tough time with a spreadsheet. Even have time have a hard time with Google, meet or zoom. So an example is we had a airline company, none nothing else than an airline industry company. Last week and I posted this, we hit the picture of the person and the name of the company, of course. But this is we see this that's very prevalent everywhere they they couldn't share a screen because the settings of their Mac or whatever. So they they actually just talking to the sales team, ended up taking a mirror to show them the screen because they weren't able to share the screen. And we have customers like that. A lot of customers like that. What would call level one, or Harvard would call level one. And so we see that the second thing we see is that once you are implemented at a company, and we have many examples of this, their CEO, chiefs, officer, or whomever is spearheading automation at the organization, really wants to implement Sheetgo much more because they want folks to be much more productive. And we see it. They see it. We're super excited. They're excited, but after a year, they're just having a really tough time to implement it inside the organization, and that's because it's just tough people. I ran a poll in LinkedIn the other day. People just are reluctant to change. They don't want to change from the current tool set. They really just don't want to change. And then there's what I mentioned before, skill gap of of new technologies. Now, you know, we talk about a lot about AI now, but there's a huge skill gap as well. So those two things, even when you're implemented already and you really want to do it, you can bring in all the bells and whistles, the sheet goes, the notions, the air tables, the roads, the AIS, but those two things are still going to be there. So going, you know, back to your question, onboarding has become much more important for us, especially lately, we've realized just how much more care we have to take to that, and how difficult actually it is, because many times people just don't want to get on a call and just spend half an hour to teach them some tricks. So it is continues to be a challenge, and I hope to better Adil Saleh 14:04 It Amazing, amazing. So, I mean, I know that you already are aware of this challenge, of course, with some of the customers and some of the industries that are not so much tech enabled, they're still like using these tools, and they're not able to do the change management and all of this. So now thinking about customer education, like, how do you think? Like, customer education plays a part. I know the people that are, you know, not so willing to do the change management, and they're not so, you know, ready to, you know, use the New Age technologies. It's harder for you guys to, you know, educate them as well, like, get them, you know, some, maybe some webinars, some training, some some session, maybe some help, Doc. So how big of that challenge is? Because customer education can solve a lot of things, you know, when it comes to, you know, making them adopt to these, these integrations and these onboarding experiences and all that. You know, your goal as a product is. To make sure you deliver the value. The fastest, you know, the faster, the sooner, the better. So of course, for that, how do you, you know you guys are doing, like the customer education part, the training part, you know what? What kind of investments in, in the in the training and management you You're, you're putting, Yannick 15:20 yeah, I'd say we're not doing a great job at that, as I'd like. But of course, you know, we have an AI enabled agent that it's, it's our chat bot, and we daily improve it. So we really improve it daily, and it's become a great tool for folks to just click and go and ask any question. And we're really pushing that so that people that that are getting stuck can easily access that, easily ask a question. Even I use it, I sometimes don't know how to function something within our product. And I go and ask questions, and then it answers this pretty good. It's very good, actually. And like I said, I actually took over customer support myself in September of last year because I was seeing that there was a challenge on this, and based on that, responding a lot of to customers, we start really feeding a lot to that AI, and that's that's been helping a lot. You must Adil Saleh 16:21 have, like, given the knowledge base to the agent. And of course, he's analyzing all the knowledge base and help guides and some of the documents you have on the website, or maybe your support page. Yeah, we Yannick 16:34 feed it with exactly our Knowledge Center. And then, based on that, when we see that there's a gap, we add things to the Knowledge Center. When we see that it's acting in a way we don't like it, we change, let's call it the prompt, or the behavior of it. So that's helped a lot. The other thing that's helped a lot is we created something called sheet co customer intelligence, and I'm going to be posting this basically, we we see that we know we use we use into customer support. We use HubSpot for for sales. We use our own product for gathering other information. We have BigQuery from Google database, where it has all of the usage information of our product. We have an admin panel. We have all these places, and we were having a hard time to help customers understand what to do next, or an example what to do. And of course, we have use cases. You know, we have dozens, if not hundreds, of use cases, but you want it in the moment. And so we we built, with sheetco, an integration with all of these and in different layers to contextualize it to a place where all end up in a database, a customer database, in a spreadsheet. That's quite smart, and that then feeds the AI, and it's a it's an internal AI, and basically, let's say going back to that airline one, if I want to go talk to an airline prospect or a customer, I can go and and they, I don't know, they want to know about inventory management, and they have a certain use case. I'll just go to our, what we call sai Sheetgo customer intelligence, which is our AI, and ask it, hey, I'm about to talk to this person that has this role, and they're trying to manage inventory, and it's an airline. Can you give me some examples of customers, what we do, done that and man, that thing just is amazing. I can super powerful. I can build from that. Then I always ask my team build an article based on that, because you Adil Saleh 18:44 just created an article. Yeah, out of it, yeah, exactly. Yannick 18:47 So everything that we do now can be a use case study. So I go talk to this customer, and I know a lot more than I would ever know, even as CEO of what how we've helped customers like that. The one thing that I didn't put into that is that we also add our all of our transcripts with all of our customers on that as well. So the knowledge that we have on that is incredible. But that, of course, is it. The challenge for us is, how do we transfer that for the onboarding? How do we transfer to customer? Because it's easy, if I'm gonna articulate, Adil Saleh 19:20 yeah, how to articulate to the customer? To, you know, take the right actions during the onboarding. That's right, you mentioned Yannick 19:30 it. Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no. Well, I'm just saying we're enriching that moment right now. Adil Saleh 19:35 Yeah, so from for that, you mentioned that customer intelligence platform that you're building within to your training, you're trying to fine tune all of your AI for all the use cases that you've served in the past, all the, let's say, best practices, and all of this, so you can mitigate this problem that when it comes next, you already know your AI already knows this. Is that? Right? Yeah, I was listening to, I was listening to the CTO of upspar. You. I think, eight months back. And they also have this feature, you know, where you can talk to your CRM. You can curate different things within HubSpot, and you can have different, you know, different next spec sections, different triggers you can set up. They're also launching their own internal CSP, like customer success platform. I'm not sure where they are at. Just a few weeks ago, just heard from someone at HubSpot. They're actually doing doing in the beta. So that is, that is also like, if you can configure all of these triggers once you know where, once your customer intelligence platform knows and you build some success metrics or tags or any triggers, any kind of events that you can pull in for every customer using tools like Mixpanel for product analytics, if there are any directions or events related to interactions product usage and other events as well from like third party external events. So once you do all of that, let's say you take like one segment you have, like in one segment you have, let's say five or six or seven different categories. You divide them into categories, and then every category would have like, 10 or 15 different use cases, and you divide them across stages, let's say, starting from onboarding to then product adoption and activation, right then retention expansion, all of this. So I'm sorry, I've been, you know, we've been all of this, you know, for more than three years with more than 140 founders, all of this, and a lot has changed with the AI, like previously, I remember, like, three years back when I had this, like, people used to have playbooks on their paper, or maybe have some sketcher inside their tools, and now they're breaking their own playbooks. And they have, they already know their success metrics during onboarding and adoption, and you know, they already know when to expand. They already know who's who's who's leaving like, who's going to churn based on some signals they already preset, because they already know the experiences. And they have trained their AI or internal they've done all the machine learning and everything. So I'm not that technical, but this relates a lot to what you're trying to do with customer intelligence. We Yannick 22:00 are. I mean, some of the things you've said are things that, you know, we're still figuring out what to do with it, because, you know, we have the intelligence already that's we've said it, and we should go we were able to, you know, bring down the information and and coordinated and and have it contextualized and have it automatically update all the time, and that already within itself is not easy. I am going to put the playbook for that for folks to do and and I speak to larger companies, and they don't have this because you we have HubSpot too, and we have HubSpot AI stuff as well within HubSpot, but like, you don't get them that great information from from LinkedIn. I cannot put the intercom information between them. We have some things that work there, but it's not great. We cannot get usage information from the product. We cannot get the transcripts of all our calls. So, I mean, we had to go beyond even as a small organization. And when I show this tool, because I have it in my phone, to some large organizations, some clients, like, how do we do that? Like, how did you manage to do that? And it's magic. It's truly, truly is magic. So, so that's fine. We've covered that. Our biggest challenge now is all right, how do we present that and when to the customer. Because, yes, in theory, like you said, it's great to know at what point, but what point and how many journeys are you going to have, and how do you manage the journey of that level one or that level two or that level three? And then within that, they have different use cases, right? So in a level three that they're trying to manage inventory. I have like, dozens of customer stories of that, if it's level two, and their school, we have 238, schools, and all of their use cases based on usage. And I can guess a feed it to them. But you know, what do I determine that their school based.edu and then it's going to have its own journey, and then it becomes a, like, a hairy kind of thing is like, how do you manage all these journeys? Because now, I can, I can I have the knowledge, but how do I now, like, how do I organize all that? That's, that's our Adil Saleh 24:16 challenge, yeah. How do we do it at scale, you know, for a lot of customers, not just, you know, one customer that we have said it okay, that's, I mean, you're not capturing usage data. There's no way for you guys to capture the data Yannick 24:31 of usage. Of course, yeah, we have all the usage. Yeah, you Adil Saleh 24:36 do. So, I mean, if you have user data, if you have data from the meetings, like I'm talking about quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data is more of like your interactions, usage, you know, interaction with the platform at different levels and different customers, different use case, different industry, different products. And then quantitative data is more like meetings, transcripts, all of this. So if you're working on your customer intelligence, which is a. I'm quite amazed with, you know, the way you're making it smart and train and fine tune all of this. You can also give, give that, AI, qualitative data, like media transcripts, any tool that you're using, no, they're like a ton of free tools that that you can use. You know, we actually, Yannick 25:16 we use our own we actually run our own script for that, because, yeah, it we it goes from Google meet to docs, and then we run our own script that then also is able to make sure that we identify the ID of that transcript to the HubSpot, which is same one as intercom. So you have to make sure. Yeah, all those things, I see all these things in LinkedIn, of people being, you know, talking about these, but they're not that easy. I mean, you got to work it out. You Adil Saleh 25:50 know, I spoke to this guy, because we're also building, you know, our co pilot for CS, and of course, we are pretty much on the same side as you are at the with the customer intelligence that you're building for yourself. We are just training our co pilot. We not just doing AI for the sake of AI. We take these user interviews, working, working with some design partners, and we're really digging indeed, to solve the problem, which is basically, you know, understanding use cases, understanding your workflow, getting the AI, the rights, contextual information to be to do this matter, because CO pilots and this agentic workflows, they're so wide, you know, if you tell them the customer success, it's so wide, you need to make them specialized by training them. And somehow, this is something that you're trying to do as well to make them specialize. You know, to, you know, do have the contextual information for specific use cases, for specific customers at scale. So, and that is, that is hard, that takes a lot of engineering, fine tuning, lot of experimentation with AI, because AI is not that, that there is no one platform that does it efficiently. Yeah, you can do it for support. You're using intercom, fin is good. You know, they've been the market leaders. But support, tier one, tier two is good. But when it comes to technical support, when it comes to bug fixing bugs, AI is not at that level. So anyone building an agent workflow, they need to do a lot of engineering and experimentation and training, fine tuning backstage to do the right thing. Otherwise, it's just going to be irrelevant, inefficient, right data, and people will just say, hey, it's not working. So Yannick 27:20 yeah, I mean, for us to make it reliable, I mean, now it's very reliable. It's super it's amazing, but it's been six months. I mean, we're been training at it, working at it, and there's still some elements that we would love to improve. You know, for example, we're, we're using chat, GPT in the back background. We'd like to use Gemini, but it hasn't. We haven't been able to work it out yet, but even the prompt has become limited, right? We need to kind of break that thing apart. We need to kind of put we'd love to be able to layer in different prompts and different layers of, you know, AI agents, even within that, Adil Saleh 28:03 yeah, you need to compare some responses as well make sure it's right. You can also try Claude, that's better when it comes to reasoning, and that's slightly cheaper than than open AI if you want to do it at scale. And of course, you might have seen deep sea and some Chinese. But there's, of course, they are very, very cost effective, like 1/10 of the cost. But again, nobody has done it, the regulations and all of this here, especially in the US, even Europe, is, you know, big on regulations than North America. So that is the big challenge with Chinese llms And all of this. Yannick 28:41 And things are gonna move now with the geopolitical situation, this is all yesterday. I you know also post this yesterday. I was with with Canada, the Embassy of Canada. We invited a whole bunch of data data engineers, data analysts and data scientists from Canada and other countries, and even from the government here in Spain. And I hosted this with with the Canadian Embassy, just to have this discussion about these things, because it's it actually it's starting to hit home faster than than it used to. Like, these things are really a thing now, really, really fast. Yeah, really, really fast. Adil Saleh 29:25 You know, just imagine, like, even like, eight, nine months ago, things were a lot different. The capabilities are a lot different. Now you will see more agents like, it's. I was listening to this episode by Elias Torres. He's, he's an ex VP of Marketing HubSpot and ex drift, founder of drift. He exited drip. Now he's building a CS co pilot. And when I saw that podcast, it seems like he was just sitting next door listening to all that we are envisioning and all the hypothesis that we made, and we were doing that user interviews and everything. So he's doing the same thing he builds. He thinks that. It, you know, it's not too far that a billion dollar company be owned by an individual. Yannick 30:10 I wouldn't be surprised, as a company, as a company, we have actually reduced our headcount significantly over the last year, as we really got mature on AI. And I have to say, the biggest reason is probably me actually doing more like before I used to. I used to delegate things to mid management to do right, and then they would interpret it in their own way, and then they would do it. And then I had to coordinate it. Then we have to go and see if they were able to do it or not. And I started, start catching myself going to delegate something. And of course, you know, depends of kind of what managers you have. They can really make things happen or not right. But what I started to see is that, if it started, I started to question whether, if I provided, if I asked for something and waited for all that to happen and coordinated, and, you know, quality, checked it and followed up and all that, would it take me more time to do that? Or yes, okay, let me try to do it myself and and it's incredible, like I have empowered myself to work more. So I, you know, talk to my wife, and I said, Look, I think I'm going to be working more, but I'm really having fun. I'm actually doing things I hadn't done in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. For example, I build an app per week, one app that could be anything. Could be something for Sheetgo. Could be some of my kids. It could be something that I think about. And every week I build something, and it's incredibly empowering. Adil Saleh 31:53 What are you using? By the way, I was also thinking of I'm also known technical, not sure about your the technical background that you have, but I'm absolutely somebody that cannot code, not a single thing. And I know that this is about time for founders like us, you know, build as we're using cursor and some other technologies. My CTO, he referred me some some technology. So what platform are you using for to build these small apps? Yannick 32:16 Yeah, just to give you a bit of background, I am technical from a very like a background. And I obviously built the first sheet go application. So I am technical as a systems analyst back back in the day. So I have knowledge. And I have obviously a lot of knowledge around data and how data should work, which I think gives me a foundation to think about building something. And then I know a lot about, yeah, I know a lot about creating product, whether it's a house, it's a financial product, you know, I used to have a fund, or it's a consulting or it's a systematic product or a website. So I have notions of the work that it takes to do all those things. So all those notions help a lot to build something. So having said that, I love lovable, like the Swedish company. So I think I have two top five apps there, and two or three other top 20 apps from lovable. So I love lovable Lindy I've been working with the diplomatic circles on working Adil Saleh 33:25 with Lindy R riplet or something like that. Yannick 33:29 Yeah, yes, this, there's that one that I haven't tried, and I want to try cursor, of course, but that's more kind of in this technical side. I like those. But in conjunction, I end up using many times spreadsheets. So we are, you know, I, for example, I built this app to I really care for my health. And I'm getting older. I have five kids, so I really care for my health. And I started looking into, you know what, what, what is in a diet that is really health or not health? And one of them things is oil, right? And the healthiest oil you can have is olive oil. And I happen to live in Spain, olive oils very thing. But I started, I know a lot about this. I'm a geek about this. And I started really studying into it. And I realized that most olive oils that you buy in a supermarket or even when you served in a restaurant are actually not good. Even if they say extra virgin olive oil, they actually don't have polyphenols, which is really what your body needs Anyways, long story short, yeah, all the nutrients. So I was like, everybody now is asking me, because I seem to be knowledgeable on this, and people are asking me, how about this bottle on Reddit, for example, or other, like everybody was asking me. So I said, bucket. I'm going to build an app that you take a picture and it tells you if it's healthy olive oil or not, based on the labels and and I did that. I built a. Yeah, but I realized that I needed to use spreadsheets on the back, because I have many tables that feed that, and tables and aI don't work very well, so I had to have the tables, and I used street go and Apps Script to kind of work with, with with the with this production. So that was not published yet, but my plan is to publish that maybe in a couple weeks, and hopefully it'll be a top five also at at lovable again, so I can continue to have more credits. Yeah, absolutely. Adil Saleh 35:32 Please also share your link at lovable as well. Yeah, link to your profile so people can see all of those, those products, and of course, I personally can follow your journey as well. Now it's interesting. I'm going to have my first baby girl, like, we just got married a couple of years ago, and we planned that for the last two years now, first baby girl in three months. So I'm also learning, I'm 31 so I'm also learning, like, how to be a dad, and a lot of things that I don't have to do, Yannick 36:05 you'll think about these things I didn't think about health. For example, you know, I feed five children, and they what they get fed depends on me, right? Adil Saleh 36:15 And also, I don't want to get all I want to try to not get too old, you know, so quickly so I can continue to to enjoy and you, you'll see it's such a wonderful thing. I cannot imagine not being a father. Today is Father's Day, by the way, here in Spain. So I have my little gifts from happy father, my kids. You got some gifts? So, hi, I got a lot of little gifts, some paintings, some writing notes, cool, cool. So I love about this. This conversation is, is a lot of these founders, they come up and say, like, flashy things, and, hey, we're doing incredible this segment. We're killing it doing this. Ai a lot of this and, but you're more like, this is a challenge, and, you know, we're struggling with this. And I love this conversation because we're not a podcast that is, that is charging anything and there is any monetization onto it. So we want people to, you know, really come up with some, you know, struggling stories as well, you know, so people can learn. And, you know, a lot of this, a lot of things, like everyday life of a founder, we tend to discover a lot of things, and we tend to learn. We tend to struggle. And I think those stories should be, should be, should be on here as well. Like, like, like, like, they are today. So thank you very much for for that as well. Yannick 37:28 No worries. Yeah, I think that I have becoming more it's becoming more obvious to me that the more you are yourself at everything company home and you're the same person, just easier, because you don't have to sell something you're not so for example, I talk a lot about LinkedIn now, but it was a found a one of our board members and investors, great person I've known for long time, 20 years, more than 20 years now, he's the CEO of a publicly listed company now, and very big company. And you know he, he told me, why aren't you the face of Sheetgo? Why? Why aren't you online? Why don't you write more? And I told him, Look, I don't know what to say. I don't feel very comfortable with being one of those people that seem to know everything, because I know I'm not, and I don't feel comfortable with that. And he says, that's fine. Just be yourself, right? And find, find your voice, being yourself, but at the end of the day, just be yourself online. And I think people might start appreciating that, and they might learn from these stories, and you know what you're going through, yeah, and that that encouraged me a lot, and that was only two months ago, after eight years of having a yeah, you Adil Saleh 38:59 started writing content, and you started sharing posts on LinkedIn. I Yannick 39:03 started sharing and yeah, being, being myself. But what I was going to also mention is Yannick 39:14 it's going back to the journey thing that you were talking about. Yannick 39:21 We are also doing something which is and realizing this in those level one, two and three and four. I mentioned of Harvard, and I think it would be important to not miss this. You know you and I, and the people that you invite to this podcast, and the people probably in my community of LinkedIn, most of them are, I can see they're really plugged into AI, like, what's going on, what's an agent who's doing what? Like, they're really plugged but, you know, we are only a small portion of the knowledge workers out there. And I specifically say. Knowledge workers. So there's still a lot of knowledge workers out there that mean they're just like saying using AI potentially as a better Google search, right? Like they're not taking it to the next level. And if you go beyond knowledge workers, you go to factory workers, you go to some of our clients, teachers, doctors, you name it. And then even beyond that, if you go to, you know, you live in Pakistan. I have never been to Pakistan. I've been to India. I've spent a lot of time in Latin America, living there. There are people that don't have a digital footprint, right? Yeah, they don't have a digital footprint to begin with, yes. And so they're not represented in all this. Like, 90% Adil Saleh 40:49 you would say there's 90% of the industries are not tech enabled. Yannick 40:53 They're not tech enabled. So, like, what percentage do we really represent, right? And so one of the early on, over a year, about a year ago, we already put AI prompting into our product so people could type in and then we could help them find what they needed. Our success rate on that was terrible, terrible. People don't like to prompt, and people don't know how to prompt. So we are actually now going back to that, going back to your original question about, you know, onboarding. We're stepping back using the customer intelligence, a product we have, using all that to then start guessing for them, and then giving them the ability to to then make changes clicking or even typing. But I think that that's something to be concerned or not concerned, but thinking about like, Hey, we're not the usual, at least not our usual customer. So anyways, should start pointing that out? Yeah. Adil Saleh 42:00 Interesting. Interesting. The last thing I wanted to also discuss, like I know that there is so much of evolution when it comes to AI capabilities and all of this. And of course, I'm so glad that you're only laser focused on your industry and your customer and what you can do better for your customers, and you know how you can onboard them better, serve them better all of this. So are you also thinking of any adjacent industries to tap in? Of course, the competition will be slightly bigger, because for all the new New Age companies, there's like, lot more tools, you know, be like tech companies and mid size to, you know, I would say mid size to early enterprise companies that that are still using Google Sheets, you know, or this how you want to, you know, from from a go to market standpoint, how you want to penetrate further in the coming years. And is there anything that you want to build within this platform that makes you really excited? Do you know, have some, let's say, some sort of a 10x feature, or maybe something that you want to do and you're excited about to, you know, penetrate further, or you want to just make sure that, okay, these are, there's slight, you know, 30% of the in oil and gas, like, there's huge gap in the tech, they're still using all these, you know, tools, Google, spaces, sheets and all when it comes to accounting and finance, a lot real estate, again, same, same is the case. You know, if you just talk about lot of government and Institute health care, I'm not sure how the regulations will go, but health care is still again, old age. So how do you see it, as a chief executive officer thinking about the market in the coming years. Yannick 43:41 Yeah, I think, I think I I don't take the easy way. The easy way is some smarter founders than me would, would probably and have really focused on certain industries where easy way would be, like, Let's go gas, real estate, which I know quite well, manufacturing, government, stuffer, but any of those, and just raise a focus and give them, you know, specifically to need and very specific to their niche. We've taken the harder route, which is being horizontal across all industries and care more about kind of the common tooling that they all have, and being that kind of, I'm not sure the word is layer, so that they can really take advantage more of it, so they can automate more of what they do, so that they can really focus on the things that are more important to them. That's kind of, that's we continue to think that, and I'm still maybe blindly, maybe blindly dreaming that that's the that's the way to go, and I think the 10x for us is AI. And I don't mean it as in, it's magic. I mean it as. In AI is here. AI is going to 100x and I think, you know, we are very AI relevant, because without a proper workflow, without automation, you're going to end up with these AIs that you're going to have to copy paste from one place to another, and you're going to figure out where they are, where the data comes from, how contextualize you you have to do that. So I think our, our, our 10x lies in just leaning on AI. Actually, I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel there. I think you just need to ride that wave and realize that, hey, people that are using everyday tools, like spreadsheets, Docs, email, they're gonna use their AI is gonna be part of their everyday tool, directly or indirectly, and we need to lean on to that. So that's that's the bet. Maybe ignorantly or not, I don't know that we're taking Adil Saleh 46:01 interesting and of course, if we just talk about the direction that you're moving towards, that you know, the product and platform is more integrating AI into all of these new age, you know, integrating AI into your tool that enables to integrate with all of these New Age technologies as well. So you you're able to serve them better as well than just, you know, sitting in the Google Sheet and sitting in, you know, some platforms that are more like for other industries, that that are not so technical, or you want to just make one platform that is compatible to all of these and that has AI for all of the customers, whether they're like some financial analyst in a tech company, or, you know, as some CFO all the CFO in a construction company or manufacturing company. So there's what do you think like? How do you see it like, product wise. Yannick 46:57 Product wise. We see AI to help you through our journey. So AI will be an integral part of the journey, like I think I mentioned before, but so that it helps you better to hey, I want to automate a my crew that is needing to get out to the market to serve cleaning of a street, or of a maintenance of a street in Utah, like, that's literally an example of a customer we have that needed that a few weeks ago. And it's a company that's growing a lot small company, and they're like, what hell? How do we do this? And you know, they're just getting started with scanning, right? Like, QR scanning, like to scan the products that they will need to go and clean. Their crew will clean the street, right? They're only getting started with that, right? So, there's so many people, and they they don't. They're not level one. They can use spreadsheets barely, and Docs and email. I cannot think of them getting further. But that's not an exception. This is the norm of of of companies, right? So I think still that that level one to three out of four of these companies still required to use the tools they need every day. What we're going to add to that is that, hey, I need to automate this, and we're going to do that for them. Our product will do that for them using technology they are familiar with, thanks to AI. And on top of that, have AI as a processor within the workflow. So for example, we at my company have an alpha version of this, and basically all my reporting to my investors and internally is is done by an AI that is fed by the KPIs of my team and the monthly form that they need to fill out, which is automatically sent to them via sheet go. And then all that is fed into the AI, which creates intelligence for me and investors analyze. It answers exactly within context and provides a little report on like, just a text on a dashboard powered by sheet flow. So we have a dashboard that's powered by all the charts that you have in your different workflows, and it just pops it up in the dashboard, and the text comes from the AI, and that's live, and that's, I mean, that's leveraging AI, right? You don't know it, but all of a sudden, I don't do any reporting, right? Adil Saleh 49:44 Yeah, a lot of these tech companies, they use the same process, same workflow, like, you know, to report to their investors and, you know, go out and on the board meetings, quarterly board meetings, they have, like, financial reports of all their team also cost all the estimates and everything. And I. Uh, you know, what's the burn like, yearly meetings that they have, like, with the board of investors. So a lot of this is more resonance with the tech companies as well. You know, using AI simply, you know, using all of these tools and feed these this, this to AI to have a smarter version of, a summarized version, a 360 view of all those, all those numbers. So for investor, just in two minutes, less than two minutes, they can understand, understand, instead of, like, if 41 hour, two hours long meetings and presenting those decks and Yannick 50:35 right, you don't even, you don't have to do that. But if you think about the process of doing that, if you don't have a workflow that manages that process that you end up having to have a you don't notice it as a CEO, right? You have a finance person, a CFO, then they have someone that helps them, and they work with the accountant to do all this, and then they make sure that everybody's done the reports to do this. You don't realize the cost and the time Adil Saleh 50:59 to do that, yeah. So Yannick 51:03 at cheat code, we used to have a CFO. We all have a CFO. We used to have someone that helped the CFO. We don't have anyone that helps the CFO. That's it. We I got rid of that whole function because all this automated, right? So these little things make a big difference. Adil Saleh 51:22 Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I mean, it was like, I'm absolutely, I second the fact that you're thinking of, you know, leveraging AI for these capabilities, and, you know, sitting on top of that letter and making sure that you serve all of these industries, and you go horizontal, then, you know, a mainstream approach that, like most founders do in this industry. They just focus on these big, big logos and the manufacturing, oil and gas and, you know, airlines and all these and they're happy with it because the customer is paying good bucks and the lifetime value of the customer is really big. So they don't, they're only focusing on that, Yannick 51:59 right? And I think it could be smarter. Maybe you make us richer faster, but somehow this thing excites us more. Maybe Adil Saleh 52:08 it's all about the impact, like, how big of an impact you want to make, right? You know, at the end of the day, money comes as a byproduct. So unique. It was really, really nice, you know, talking to you and learning from you, from your industry. It was, you know, thanks for being so open and, of course, expressive. I love the energy that was pretty infectious. And, you know, I found you pretty curious about things. And, you know, of course, that's what I you know, this is one of the reasons I do these, these episodes, because I get to learn personally, a lot with from people, because a lot of my learnings, they are from the people, and there is no substitute to it. And I always believe that. And thank you very much for teaching me things then I didn't know about the industry. And, you know, getting to know all of us, even the listeners, to know more about sheet go, by the way, folks, this is a, this is an app that is that has close to 5 million downloads, and, you know, trusted by platforms like booking.com, Spotify, you know, Canva. We like Canva and their story lot these Australians. They're really good at design. So, you know, I found it really, really interesting the platform. Yannick 53:16 Thank you, ideal. Good questions too. Yeah, Adil Saleh 53:18 have a good rest of your day, brother, thank you. Good Karen, Happy Father's Day. Thanks. Appreciate it. Yannick 53:25 Will do cheers. Sure.