How to leverage NLP for Better Customer Feedback - Ryan Millner: CEO of Unwrap AI

Jake Aaron Villarreal: My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal born and raised in Silicon Valley and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they solve, and the products they build in an effort to transform industries. I'm excited to have with us today Ryan Millner, co-founder and CEO of Unwrap AI. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Millner: Thanks for having me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So a little bit more about Unwrap. Unwrap is a company that uses AI to find patterns in customer feedback. Before starting Unwrap, Ryan led one of the product teams at Amazon Alexa, trying to make Alexa smarter by answering more of your questions. Um we're excited to talk a little bit about your company, but before we do that, Ryan, where, where you calling in from today?

Ryan Millner: We are based in Santa Barbara, California.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that town. God, what a great place to be. We're down in Southern California, not too far away, but as we speak I've got great memories of that place and I always love getting back there. Are you originally from there?

Ryan Millner: Originally from St. Louis, Missouri. So grew up in the Midwest, went to school on the East Coast, and then found my way to Santa Barbara about 11 years ago and have not left. It's a hard place to, to get away from.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I could imagine. Well, that's great. Well, welcome to the West Coast. In terms of you, we're going to talk about your company, we'll dive into the problems you solve and really what it's about. But before we do that, give us a little background of yourself, your origin story. Kind of where did, where did you start out and how did you become an entrepreneur? Were you the person that ran the lemonade stand, you know, sold newspapers? Like give us, give us your, your background here.

Ryan Millner: So like I said, grew up in the Midwest. Was always interested in technology and engineering and it just seemed very obvious to me from a young age that I wanted to start a company. I remember pretty vividly when I realized that not everyone wanted to start a company. When that was surprising to me, I was like "You know, what else would you want to do?" It seems like the only thing that seemed like worth doing uh when I was younger, and so from an early age it was something that I knew I wanted to do and it was always just a matter of finding the right balance between my experience and ability to succeed in a company, save enough money to do so, and really feeling like I had the right problem to tackle. So I sort of, from a young age, was sort of looking for the right opportunity to, to do that and that all sort of culminated when I started Unwrap. Before that, I, I always did enjoy sort of building things from scratch and I had built a number of different odd, you know, side projects and tools. Some worked well, some less so. But uh learned a lot through that and then again was sort of biding my time until I felt like I had all the right ingredients to, to really succeed at a larger venture.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, it's interesting you say as a young kid you always wanted to start a business. Some people have different reasons for wanting to start and run a company. Not everyone can do it, there's a lot you add: the stomach and the ups and the downs and raising capital and are you going to make it, are you not? Like there's a psychological process to running a company too. For you, what's, what's inside of you that really feels like you feel like you need to have your own company, have to be the leader of your own story?

Ryan Millner: I think a couple of things. I think first off there is nothing more exciting to me than going from zero to one. So I, I get really energized and excited by taking you know an idea and actually building it, whether it's a software product, a physical product, a team, a culture, anything like that. And to me the ultimate manifestation of that is a company. And so you know, if I'm going to dedicate a lot of years and hours to my you know, professional career I I want to focus that on what I think is the most exciting and to me that's the ultimate zero-to-one, which is starting a company. So it's, it's more about that as opposed to like needing to be the leader or anything like that. I think I'm I'm really excited to be a co-founder. The CEO piece you know isn't something that I I need to do. I I love working with smart people and being there from the beginning. That's what's, what's most important to me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, when you think about opportunities, you don't always know what you want to build but I think you have to start with what the problem is you can help solve. So talk to us a little bit about Unwrap and what problem do you, did you identify that you felt there, you could build a business around this?

Ryan Millner: Yeah. So as I mentioned, there was... I sort of always knew I wanted to start a business, it was looking for the right ingredients. And there was two pieces that were, that were really important to me. One was having a problem I had personally faced. So some other entrepreneurs are really good at identifying a problem that they have no familiarity with and going into a new market and solving it. I think I'm, I'm less good at that. For me I, I'm energized and excited by problems that I have personally faced. And so that was one thing. Second thing was I had to really love the technology that we were using to solve the problem. I you know, I'm a tech guy, I love researching and learning about tech. And so I needed to have a problem that I had experienced solved with what I thought was really interesting tech. The reason I, I wanted to have both of those is this is a long, long journey as you know. And so to be able to stay motivated for you know, 5, 10, 20 years I wanted to be able to make sure I had those two things in place: both the technology piece and the problem piece.

I realized at Amazon, and that's, you know, after I left Amazon that's why I decided to start Unwrap. The technology piece was the natural language processing. So this is a form of AI that understands and produces language and we learned a lot about that at Alexa and I was really passionate about this technology and still am today. The problem piece was around identifying patterns and customer feedback. So as a product leader one of your most important jobs is to create the roadmap for, for any given product in software, in hardware, etc. And that process requires listening to your customers and at a product of scale like Amazon Alexa, um it's actually really difficult to listen to all your customers. And so when it came time to set the roadmap it was just very anecdotal. We would look at a Reddit post or a tweet or a support ticket and, and really use that along with other signals to help influence the roadmap. My insight was, can we actually use this technology to holistically look at all this customer feedback? So all the support tickets, all the social media posts, all the phone calls. And build a basically a dashboard of the top trends from customers. And if you could do that you would build a, a product that customers loved more, they would use it more often, stay more engaged. Uh and so that was the initial problem that we were, we were hoping to solve.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Why is that space important to you?

Ryan Millner: So I love like I mentioned, building products. And I felt like the connection between the builder and the user is not as tight as it could be often. And so the idea to me of helping all builders connect more with their users is super motivating because we're you know, we use products all the time and to be able to get in touch with someone building the product, let them know my experience, and have them move it in a direction that makes it better for me... that to me is a really exciting challenge that is very widespread. I mean this applies to a ton of different tools and products that you use. And tightening that relationship to me is, is really exciting and that's what we're trying to do at Unwrap.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, so many times you have a problem with a product, whether it's a technology product or something else and you might not call into support to get it fixed, but you might post about what frustrates you about that product. And as the owner of that product, you don't always hear it. You don't always hear what the customers are saying, but if there is a way to capture that and to streamline it, optimize it and give you a report on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, whatever it is that helps really what your product designers and developers are trying to do already, which is to survey your customer base, understand what you're doing, what you could do better. If that saves them time, targets exactly what a customer needs, and improves your product, that to me sounds like a great solution. What's the, what's the competition in the market space look like for you before you started this, with this idea which I think is great? Are there other things out there that companies or product people typically use or is it really just more surveys and manual process?

Ryan Millner: Yeah. I think when you're starting a business, competition is, is an important factor of that. I think my experience is sort of a sweet spot in what you look for if you're going to start something. If there's no competition at all, to me that's honestly a bit of a red flag. It's like "why has no one else tried this, why has no one else thought of this?" And so that's a signal that it might not be a big enough or valuable enough problem. So that's something that you know, I think to look out for. And then if on the flip side if there is so much competition where you have you know hundreds of entrants and it's hard to distinguish between them... also harder to break in, harder to differentiate yourself. And so this was one thing that we looked at obviously when starting Unwrap and I think there is a a healthy level of competition and it's been growing since this technology around NLP and ChatGPT has been growing. But I wouldn't say that there's a, a clear winner in this space and I think it's, it's ripe you know to have, have someone emerge here as the winner. There are in my opinion two categories of competitors in this space. You have the legacy companies that have been doing sort of feedback collection, management for a while like the Qualtrics and Medallia. Then you have sort of this newer wave of, of folks like Unwrap who are smaller, scrappier, and using different technology typically. So a couple categories, but again I don't think there's a clear winner yet in this space.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, when you started building this it was really before ChatGPT came mainstream and everyone knew that hey there is an opportunity to use technology that can disrupt a lot of industries. You're really building before that came to, came to the, to, to the world. What, what's changed now since that's come into play from how you're building your product and how you're maybe looking at the roadmap going forward?

Ryan Millner: Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, so one of the reasons that I was fascinated with the technology to begin with was it was clear to me that there was going to be some major breakthroughs here. So at Alexa, uh we worked on this technology a lot and it was just very clear how quickly it was getting better and I wanted to be a part of that. So that was one of the reasons we focused on a problem using this technology. It was not, I mean couldn't have predicted ChatGPT and, and what that's done to, to this space and how widely it's been adopted. But for us it's been, it's been great. The main reason it's been great is because it has made our product more accurate and cheaper. And so the technology that powers ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, we've been able to adopt into our product. There are more solutions every you know, few months in this space and so prices typically go down, quality goes up. And so for us to be flexible enough to identify and adopt these technologies into our platform, it has made our offering much better for our customers and more affordable. So it's been a really important part of our growth.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Makes total sense. I think you're in a great space and a great time to be building this. When you look at your customer base and you look at your go-to-market strategy, oftentimes it's getting the product in front of the right people that want to buy it, use it and see the benefit. Who are you selling to when you talk to anybody within a company, who's your target?

Ryan Millner: Yeah. I think one of the the blessings and the curse of, of this company is that it's a really wide market that could use this product. So if you think of companies that get customer feedback you have B2B businesses, B2C businesses, you have hardware companies, software companies. So there's a lot of different profiles that we could go after. I think that's great because the you know Total Addressable Market is very large. It's harder though to focus at times. And so what we've really focused on is two roles at a given set of companies. So the two roles are product leaders, so Product Managers, CPOs, VP Product, and support leaders. So Head of Support, customer experience leads, things like that. We found that those two roles are closest to customer feedback. And then we focused on companies that get lots of feedback, and so that's typically consumer businesses. And then we also within that we like software businesses because those companies typically move faster, their product evolves quicker and so their need to stay on top of trends is more important than a slower evolving product. So typically yeah, product, support leaders in a consumer-facing technology business.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Alright. Imagine I'm a product support leader in a company and I want to understand the product itself. Visually paint the picture for the listeners, what's, what, what, what am I looking at on the screen, what's it going to show me and kind of navigate us through when you log in what the app looks like.

Ryan Millner: Yeah. So the first thing that customers tend to experience is our, our dashboard. And so let's say, let, let's just make a tangible example here. Let's say that you are a um product support lead at Spotify. Spotify gets lots of customer feedback from app reviews and support tickets. Uh, and so you are typically like overwhelmed with all this, right? You have hundreds of thousands of text feedback and you're trying to figure out what, what's happening. You log into our dashboard, you have a page where you can search across all that feedback. So if you want to say, "show me negative feedback about our pricing over the last 30 days" you can do that. We organize that feedback for you and so you get a list of all the examples. You can then click into an issue, for example, let's say pricing, and see has that issue been getting better or worse? What types of customers are complaining about this more, whether they're on a certain tier, certain location, etc. And then we also link to like a Jira or an Asana where you actually execute sprints. And so if you made a change to pricing three months ago you can click in and you can see how did that impact uh this group. Did it go down, did it go up? And so that's an important part of the process as well. That's all in this dashboard.

The, the other piece is that we actually push insights to you. So you get an email uh once a week where we summarize all the key findings. So let's say for example that the shuffle button stopped working on iPhones. Instead of you having to come across that from a support ticket or find that yourself, we're going to send you an email identifying that, showing you when it started, how many users it's affecting, etc. So there's the proactive piece as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, I love those proactive emails that you get, and might be a problem for you but something you could fix and you're at least aware of it. So I think that's, that's really, that's really great. And is AI the foundation behind bringing, pulling this all together?

Ryan Millner: Yeah, there's to do like the, the tagging of feedback and the delivery of insights there's a lot of different decisions that our system has to make. You just talked about like, "is this an actionable uh insight, right? Like can I actually take action on it?" We have our own classifier that, that just focuses on actionability. We do the same thing for sentiment and clustering and a lot of other decisions our system makes. And we use AI throughout that. We use a different, specific AI solution potentially for different decisions that our system makes, but at a high level, yeah, it's a very AI-forward product.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know as you're building your company, you've raised some funds, you have you know employees on payroll, you're growing. What's the biggest challenge you're facing right now as a company?

Ryan Millner: Good question. I think one thing that's fun and exciting is that it, that the answer to that question changes every few months. You know one quarter it may be fundraising, another quarter it may be uh customer support. Today I think the big one for us is recruiting. Because a couple reasons. One, at we, at our stage every employee is a, is a larger percentage of the overall company right, because we're small and they have a really big impact on the culture. And so getting your early hires right I think is just really important. I think it's crucial to hire well at, at any stage obviously, but at our stage we hope these employees you know stick with us for the next 5 or 10 years and they really help us shape the culture. And so finding someone who fits as far as culture fit, skills, attitude, all that stuff is really important. And so it's hard to get that right. And the other thing is that you know we've been growing fairly quickly here and it takes a lot of time to recruit and find great people. And so I think we've gotten into trouble in the past where we don't prioritize it as, as important as it should. And you know getting great people in is, is one of the most important things you can do as a leader and so it's become more of a focus for us, but that's something that we're spending a lot of time on right now.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. You know, you join the hundreds of other AI startups that are launching every month, you know, trying to build their foundation teams and making sure that the right fit and the right people that can do the job. You talked a few different times, you mentioned culture, so it seems to be very important to you. What is the culture that you're building in your company today?

Ryan Millner: Good question. And we get asked this a lot. You know basically any, any candidate we interview asks that question. It's a really good question and it's always... you can describe culture in different ways. Uh how I think about it is what if, you know, if you worked for a week at our company what would you notice, what would stand out? Uh a few things I think.

One, uh we all work really hard. So I think with any startup the, the odds are always sort of stacked against you and we know that it's going to take a lot of hard work to, to win in this space. And so we work hard, we value people that work hard. I tell people like if you're looking for a 9-to-5, you know this is probably not, not the right opportunity for you. But for us again it doesn't feel like work, it, there's just a lot to do and we know it's important, we think it's important work to do, but that's one.

The other thing is that the team is really close. So this reminds me more of like a sports team than maybe a traditional job. And the reason is because we all, we all are owners in the company, we all celebrate each other's wins. So at a larger company, if someone else you know does something great, you're, you're excited for them, but I think there's a bit more focus on yourself. Like my promotion timeline, my role change, etc. because the company is so large you just feel like you have less impact. Here, you know, engineering is really celebrating sales wins, sales is really celebrating engineering wins. And so it feels like a much more collaborative team effort, which I really like. That's one of the benefits of all startups, I think we really try to embody that as well. I think those are two of the main things.

The last thing I would say is I you know I try to make work as fun as possible. Like I said, we, we work hard but another one of the benefits of startups I think is that you have more freedom to, to do things that uh the team wants to do. And so whether that's uh team-wide offsites you know in a different country or happy hours or barbecues. I think that's a really important part of a close team and, and part of our culture.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love the metaphor of talking about your company as a team because we do the same when we look at companies and you know we're in the business of helping them build their teams. But, you know, if you think about it, any good team that's out there usually has a good strategy. They also have a good leader that could be a coach, could be a guide, trainer, whatever you want to call it. A lot of times they have also a playbook that they use that helps them execute their business or executes them hiring the right people. And it's about putting the right people in the right places on your team to win. I think if you do that right, you the business, how you build it can be very culture driven and, and exactly the way you want it. Which I think is, is probably the most important aspect of getting it right when you're building a company.

Because if you look at uh the company itself, the lifecycle usually starts as a baby when you're in year one and grows to a teenager in year five and you know middle age where you're maybe 100 million or more. And then eventually you start going the other way. But the same as a person in their career, they start off as you know working entry level, get more mature, they might you know be married with kids. That might be a perfect time for them to join a startup depending on their mindset. It might not be depending on their mindset. But if you define your culture and you know what it takes to build and you're in that zero to one or you know one to two, whatever it is. You know it takes the right fit from the person's ability in their life to do the work and also align with your culture at the time you're you know in, in your build mode. So I think those are great things to, to keep in mind and look at as you're doing it and as you're building.

But you know what you're going through is what a lot of other founders are going through. And what we found is it's a lot of times the company with the best story and the best culture and the best, best way to execute that in the market are the ones that attract and get the right people. That's what we've seen.

Ryan Millner: So yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And one thing that we've done recently that has helped in that same vein is we are mainly in person, so we have an office and we want people to be in person. And so we started bringing candidates to the office, flying them out if they're in the kind of far-around stages, to meet us and to spend time with the team, get lunch with us, see the office. And that's been a big help because that's an important part of our culture. I think joining any company, especially a startup, is a big leap. And so feeling comfortable with the team, getting to know them and spend a day with them, I think is uh an important part. It's not you know, the most economical, but it's, it's really worth it, I think.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. You know, we're talking about bringing people on board to a company and a startup. What, what advice do you have for say the younger generation that's a recent graduate coming into the workforce?

Ryan Millner: Yeah. I would say that I, so I got this advice when I was graduating. I think it was, it was really useful. So in general, people can afford to take less risk as they get older. Whether you have a partner, you start to have kids, a mortgage, etc., your ability to take risk in life I think goes down over time. And if you agree with that, I think there are certain opportunities that you would look for right out of school that maybe you wouldn't look for later in life, and it makes sense to do that. One of those examples, I think, is working at a startup. So startups are a bit riskier, they're typically lower pay, higher upside potentially, but require more work. And all of those things lend themselves to me to, to taking a job at a startup right out of school. And so if you have the option of let's say a larger company, a smaller company, I encourage recent grads to always look at the smaller company. The main reason is that I think your feeling and your ability to grow at that small company is higher. Your, if you're going to put in a lot of work and really stand out, you will move up faster in a smaller company than a larger company. A larger company typically has more process in place, they like to move people up kind of in the same progression. And so if you're ambitious and you're looking to really make an impact, I would encourage you to go work at a smaller company and be able to take on projects that you would never get to take on at a larger company just because you know there's no one else to do it at a smaller company. So that's I think one general piece of advice.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. So for, for all the UC Santa Barbara students out there that are graduating or recent grads...

Ryan Millner: Exactly.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know where to go. Go to Ryan's company and you know, you never know where it ends up taking you. But that's great. I think, I think it's uh wise advice. I agree with that as well, where you know, as you get older you're going to take less risk because if it fails you're in a bad position. Whereas that first three to four companies really in your career you can swing the bat and you just might knock one out of the park.

Talk about the company itself. You started three years ago roughly. You've gone through... oftentimes you have a North Star you shoot for. You got to make some changes. Talk to us if you've had any major you know, shifts or pivots that really changed the breakthroughs and sort of progress of your company, if any.

Ryan Millner: Yeah. I think there's sort of two that come to mind. One is like, do you focus on smaller companies, have more of like a product-led growth motion where you know people can come sign up for free, get access, and pay you $10 a month? Or do you go for the enterprise approach where you're selling six, seven-figure deals and you know longer processes, but you make you know more money per deal. That was a big uh decision for us. We I sort of imagined a self-service tour. You come in, you sign up, you get access for maybe just yourself and your company. You start looking at feedback. You know, growth is really important at our stage and we found that it was much easier to grow revenue going after these, these larger deals that we knew companies were bought into. We knew that we'd adopt you know, the whole team to use the product as opposed to one or two individuals. And so we have really now shifted towards more of an enterprise focus. That was one change that I think we made in the last probably 12 months, which has been really, really beneficial for us.

The other thing is a realization that we've had, seems obvious now, but I think there's a differentiator of our product as well. When you think of like an analytics dashboard, there's different versions of that. And one version of that is a platform where you have all the bells and whistles, you can make any change you want, any chart you want, any filters you want, and get the insight that you care about. The other side of the uh equation is where you just have an insight delivered to you. You don't have to do any work, uh you have to just you know monitor your inbox, you get an insight delivered to you. Some people like the former, they want complete control. Some people don't. And we've sort of made the, the effort to focus on the latter. So we've realized that people want insights delivered to them. They don't want to have to work for it and find it themselves. And we've spent a lot more time focused on the proactive delivery of our insight piece as opposed to adding more functionality to the dashboard. You obviously can still do a lot with that, but we realize that people love spoon-fed uh insights and so we're spending more time on that side of the business.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. As a leader, you've been leading the company here for some time. What's been the biggest breakthrough for you personally as a leader?

Ryan Millner: Really good question. I think the big thing is, is around just delegating and trusting. So when it's, you know, it's me and my co-founder, we're, we're doing everything, we're involved in every decision. Nothing happens in the company you know without, without me being aware of it. But obviously that doesn't scale. And so to now have customers that sign without me being involved at all at first, that was harder, to just let, let, let them go and let the sales team just do everything. But that's great and obviously that's how you scale. And so hiring great people that you can trust and just letting them run processes how they want to do it in their own way is I think is important for a friendly leader. And I think as you, as you grow the business, you know, you're sort of relinquishing control step by step. But I think that's a good thing.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Really true and really important to be able to mature to that point where you can do it. And takes a little bit of stress off you too in certain areas where you don't have to worry about every detail. What's on the roadmap as you look forward coming into 20, 2025, not too far away?

Ryan Millner: Yeah. So a few things, a few themes using that Spotify example I talked about earlier and then what I just talked about spoon feeding insights. So being able to deliver really actionable insights on a person-by-person basis. So instead of, for example, that weekly email by company or by team, can we get to the ability to know "this person cares about this feature, we're going to give them a great recap of their week feedback-wise every single week"? So more customization, that's a big theme. The other theme is just more scale. So being able to support customers that get 10 million or 100 million pieces of feedback in a year. And so scaling up our systems to make the platform more enterprise-ready, really scalable and fast for, for any amount of feedback. I think that's another theme. And then the third piece is around tying these insights to the business much closer. So understanding for a given trend, what's the impact on your NPS score, or what's the impact on your revenue if this issue was resolved. And so tying those insights and linking closer with our customers to tie those to business metrics.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well, I'm excited to see where things go for you and Unwrap. I know you are in a really great spot to be building specifically around AI and bringing that into a product that I think could make a lot of company products better. So really cool to, to see where you go. Um, if anybody wants to find Unwrap AI, where do they go?

Ryan Millner: Yeah. So first off, you can check us out on our website unwrap.ai. And then you can follow us on Twitter or X, as well as LinkedIn. That is where we're most active.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. And if anyone wants to find a job and apply, can they go to a career page? Do you have something listed there for them to see your priorities, what you're looking for?

Ryan Millner: Definitely. Um on our website Unwrap we have a link to our careers page and we always have our, our open roles there. And so check us out on the website, click on careers, and there you go.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. All right. Well Ryan, I want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, and for the listeners for listening on this Friday. Means a lot to us. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal. I'm the host of the show. And signing off for now, I can't wait to catch up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.  

Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible, and for all the listeners for listening. It means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.  

This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.  

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