Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm 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 face, and the AI products they build that are transforming industries. I'm excited to have with us today Chris, who is Chris Sell, who is not just the co-founder, but also the co-CEO of GrowthLoop. He started his career at Google working on, you know, the Google ads and the Chrome teams creating customer journeys. And he's here to talk about his journey here with us today. Chris, welcome to the show.
Chris Sell: Thanks so much for having me, Jake. It's great to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Chris, where are you, uh, where are you joining us from today?
Chris Sell: I am in beautiful Chicago, Illinois. Finest city in the country.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: There you go. Other than Silicon Valley, of course, Jake. [laughter] I like it. Very cool. Well, uh excited to talk about GrowthLoop and your company and we'll dive into what you're...
[Chris's Origin Story: From Pizza Delivery to Google]
...building and the problem it solves. Uh, but before we do that, give us a little background of um, of you, your kind of, your origin story. How did you go from school to technology to becoming a founder?
Chris Sell: Yeah, absolutely. Mine was a, a little bit of a windy road. I actually grew up here in Chicago, uh, in the suburbs of Chicago, and uh, I like to say it's where the strip malls meet the corn fields, so about an hour and a half outside. Uh, so really had nothing to do with technology almost all the way through high school. And I got this chance, there was a, a lawyer, uh, in the area that basically put up a summer internship to write a business plan. At the time, his wife owned a greenhouse and he was trying to see, could they deliver groceries from the greenhouse online. This was like 2005.
And so I spent the summer, I got the internship and I spent the summer with a good friend of mine trying to create that business plan. Uh, we ended up literally giving him the business plan and then saying instead he should launch an app that does pizza delivery because we thought that was a better idea for some crazy reason. And uh, we decided to try to start a pizza delivery business online, uh, back in 2006 and started running around at different college campuses. So that was kind of like this spark that led to this uh continuity where I was always trying something.
But that happened through college. I went to Northwestern here in Chicago. Uh, I got the job out at, at Google, which I, I decided what's a better place in the world to network and learn how to do this where you're not just launching random pizza apps but you actually know what you're doing. Uh, so I decided to try to go get my education there in entrepreneurship and Google was a great place to do that. And that's actually where I met my co-founder David and where we started, I would say the early stages of, um, understanding the needs that eventually led to GrowthLoop.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, prior to starting GrowthLoop, you had some experience as well. Um, you know, we talked to a lot of founders and it's not always their first company that kind of hits it out of the park, you know, in, in inning number one. It's, you go through a few iterations and eventually you learn and then you say, "Let me try and start this." You mentioned the pizza, pizza company. What other, um, companies if any...
[The Reality of the Entrepreneurial Path]
...did you try and start and, and kind of what did you take away before you launched GrowthLoop from that?
Chris Sell: Yeah, I think the, I think the biggest misconception is that entrepreneurship is a straight path of some sort, which anybody that's done it a couple times knows it is not. Is anything but a straight path. And that's exactly what I experienced. I, you know, kind of, you know, when I was younger trying to launch different applications, when I was actually going to Google, I had an application. It was a social media application I was building on the side that was, and I would pitch it to people at Google and it was essentially a way to brag about deals you were getting online, right? A total consumer application. I then pivoted after Google and I started a small business, uh, startup and application company to help them do advertising because I saw the struggles they were having at Google.
So I would say GrowthLoop is probably my fifth or sixth, uh, all in all. And the learning is like, I think the, the key thing of being an entrepreneur is you have to put yourself out there. You have to try and take as many learnings as you possibly can into the next one. And that's what I did with GrowthLoop. The one, the company I started right prior to GrowthLoop, we were able to get to, was another B2B company in the data space. We were able to get it to profitability. We were able to bootstrap it. And that was the first one where I started to say, "Hey, we can do this on a larger scale." And that's when David and I got together, took those lessons and started GrowthLoop. But it was definitely a, it seems like you get there quickly and it was a straight path, but if you had watched the full movie, you would have been like, "Hey, Chris, that took you a little while."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. You know, it's funny. Today, the market's a little bit different. Investors invest in ideas and the founders. They're looking for the trajectory that they believe they're going to take that company to another level. But it's now a little bit different. It's about path to profitability and how do I get to revenue faster than just this big idea that's going to go for growth and get the customer base and then figure out how to monetize GrowthLoop. Uh, we're going to dive into the problem you solve, but talk to me just a little bit about when you started and then getting...
[Bootstrapping to Profitability in the First 3 Months]
...to profitability with the company, because I think it's a little bit different in today's world and maybe even in the last five years it's been a little bit different.
Chris Sell: Yeah, I think this is something that Dave and I talked about this very early on in starting the company. You know, what type of company is this? Is this the shoot the moon and if you miss, there's no landing pad. There's no backup plan, which I think is a lot of the way startups, um, is the well-worn path that we all know, right? You see it all the time in the news. So and so raised $100 million at $75 billion valuation, yada yada. We kind of approached it differently. We said, "Look, can you build a technology business brick by brick and actually try to get to profitability as soon as possible?" So we actually, within the, the first three months of launching GrowthLoop, were profitable and we maintained profitability over the past six years.
And so the, the nice thing and the, the, the really beneficial part of staying profitable is it allows you to maintain focus. And that, you can only do so much. And so as you build that, it's this natural limiter on maintaining focus and building brick by brick as you go, which has been very helpful to us, is you focus on the customer because the customer is the one that's paying you and allowing you to keep going.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: God, it's so important, the focus. It's hard to keep the focus when you got 10,000 things you try and get done and just ultimately you're not going to get there. So, it makes it probably easier when you know that the cash flow is there and you can just focus on making a better experience for the customers that are paying you for what you're building. So, really cool to hear that.
Chris Sell: I think that's right. And also, you think about it too is, who is your source to keep running? Is it your customers? Is it your investors? And which one's more? A lot of startups start where the investors are 90% and the customers are 10%. And so where the money comes from to allow you to keep innovating matters to where you spend your time. So a lot of startups spend 90% of their time on investors, 10% on customers, and that splits your focus. Whereas if you're really trying to lean towards profitability and that's what's sustaining the business, it allows you to focus on them and keep driving features and value for them in the platform.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, you know, business is about looking at a problem and trying to solve it and having enough value that someone's going to pay you for it, whether it's technology or a service. Talk to us about the problem you're solving at GrowthLoop.
Chris Sell: Yeah, absolutely. So, the, the key thing we saw, I'll, I'll go back a little bit...
[The Core Problem Growthloop Solves]
...to where we first discovered the problem. So, actually when David and I, we were working in marketing at, at Google and as you can imagine, Google has a really good data infrastructure internally. It was the precursors to, you know, BigQuery, Data Bricks, Snowflake, all of the databases that have launched since then. This was probably circa 2011. And, and so you have, what they were doing is they were starting to aggregate data about customers. And they were starting to run predictions on that data to say, hey, who's going to churn off of this, this application or service? Who's actually ready for this type of upsell onto a new type of service? And so we started to notice all of this very rich data about the customers was entering into this database, but it was just being used for visualization. And we've all seen like PowerBI dashboards, Tableau, etc., where you can visualize that stuff.
Well, that gives you some insights into what's going on in the business. But the next question was, in marketing we were like, "Well, how do we actually use that to drive action and actually drive the cross-sells, try to keep customers from churning, try to create a new customer experience through email, push notification, and our website to be able to influence what happens next?" Uh, and the answer was that was extremely difficult, because as marketers we were completely locked out of the data. We would have to learn SQL. We would have to contact our data analyst friends and ask them for favors to just get us a list to run a single email campaign.
So kind of the aha moment was, well, if the data keeps increasing in value that you have about customers and the insights you're getting, marketers and business people want to be able to use that and take action in all the software tools to create a customer journey and experience to actually influence those outcomes. And so we were like, "We need to bridge that gap." So we, we were, literally just started it very simply. I remember the first use case was there was a churn prediction score, uh, at one of our early customers, and they were saying, "Hey, we have a churn issue. We're losing a lot of customers. We have a data science team actually predicting that. So we know who's likely to churn, but marketing is not using it. So we can't actually try to stop those people from churning."
So literally all we did was gave them a really easy to use UI where they could target all the top people, the top 10,000 people likely to churn, and we put it in Facebook ads, Google ads, and their email platform. So they started running ads to those people and they started sending them emails and churn started reducing. And they were like, "My gosh, we went from prediction to action." And that was like, "Okay, let's start building on that, that nugget and keep blowing it out." And that's what became GrowthLoop.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. God, it's, it's such a, you, you look at it, you think that would be something that someone else had already might have already created, but you were there sounds like maybe first to market on that. Um, what's the competition look like now once you've launched and where you're at today?
Chris Sell: Yeah, so the, the traditional way of doing this, they, they were traditionally called customer data platforms. So CDPs and you know, think of Adobe, Adobe CDP...
[Composable CDPs vs Traditional Customer Data Platforms]
...or Salesforce CDP. There's several out there. Um, a lot of them, the way they work is they're basically silos. So you have to send all your customer data from your database into their systems in order for them to work. And what started to happen was everybody's like, "Well, wait, I'm using Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery. My data is already there. Why can't I get CDP-like capabilities but directly there so I can launch instead of it taking me 12 months in a project to set it up, can I get started within minutes?"
And so that's really what we brought to market and was the disruption. We said there's this new model, we call it composable CDP, where we just connect directly to your database and literally the next day your marketers are able to start activating these segments to each marketing channel. And so kind of the disruption there was we benefited from the rise of the data cloud and then just building our system right on top, and that allowed us time to value to, to really compete with the incumbents.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Have you chosen, or who's the data cloud you decided to work with or collaborate? Is it Databricks or...
Chris Sell: We do, we actually work across all of them. So kind of the idea is, I don't, we were agnostic to the data cloud that you use. So if you have it in Databricks, Snowflake, or BigQuery, just tell us where it's at and all of a sudden you'll, you'll get this functionality and the interface for marketers. So that's kind of the power of it is we don't make you move it. But we have a very strong partnership with Google on the BigQuery side. We do a lot of work with them. We, we just were at Google Next, uh, doing a launch around Gemini in our product.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh wow.
Chris Sell: And then Snowflake as well, uh, is another very strong partners of, partner of ours.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. You got the big, big dogs in there you're working with. I like it. Uh, when you look at the customer itself and you're talking about enterprise companies, I'm assuming you're going after those are the ones with the big data, lots of customers that are churning potentially. Who are you selling to? How are you getting in front of the buyer in those big enterprise companies?
Chris Sell: Yeah, I, I'd say there's, there's two ways because you look at it. So, some of the examples of folks we work with, we work with folks like NASCAR, uh, on the sports side, PGA Tour, Indeed on the technology side, we work with several large banks. And if you look at all of them, essentially they're, what they're trying to do is they've built up these...
[Enterprise Use Cases and B2B Sales Strategy]
...these data assets around their customers and they're trying to say, "How do I actually get folks through the onboarding flow faster?" So take finance for example. You want to get somebody into a checking account. From there, I want to cross-sell you on a savings. Then I want to get you to a CD. Then I want to upsell you to a mortgage. Then if you're going to churn, I want to win you back. And so that flow of those cross-sells and upsells through email and push notification that they're sending, a lot of the predictions of what you're ready for is already happening in the data cloud. We're just activating it and make it easier for them to do.
So when we're selling in, usually we'll try to get in, we call them, uh, usually there's an innovative data owner internally. They've built up this data cloud and they're like, "Look, I have all this goodness sitting here ready to use for my business teams. Let's unlock that together." And then on the other side, you have marketers that are starved for data, just like David and I were when we were back at Google, saying, "Look, I have no access to it today to be able to make use of it." The magic is getting in through both of them. And then we bridge the gap. And they're like, "Okay, this is going to allow us to create that bridge so now marketing can use all of the data that the innovative data owners bringing to bear in the data cloud."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Gotcha. Well, you've listed some really prominent companies. Also the Boston Red Sox, Mercari, some real big organizations. What's the typical aha moment for companies, like when they're considering working with a GrowthLoop?
Chris Sell: Yeah, the first one happens really early on. It's almost like, I compare the data, like all this customer data, you know, you have, you're predicting each offer that the user is going to get. Are you ready for a checking account next? That's sitting in the data cloud, but the marketers have no access...
[The Aha Moment That Proves Product Value]
...to that. I always compare it to it's like oil sitting under the ground before you tap it. And there's this aha moment as soon as we hook up the interface to the data cloud and we show the business team. It's like they're seeing all of that oil or all of the data for the first time and they're like, "Whoa, now I can start... You mean I can do this? You mean I can start segmenting these users and then start running Facebook ads to them like right now?"
And so there's this moment of, it's like a paradigm shift from they're used to literally contacting a database owner and asking them to write a SQL query and not even knowing what they're asking for, to it's all presented to them. They get to do it and then all of the sudden in the next hour they're actually running their campaign. And so that's kind of like, when you get folks' eyes to light up like that, you're kind of going from the old world to the new. Uh, which is pretty exciting.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, especially when it turns into revenue where you're helping reduce churn and you can talk to your, not just your current team, but also it rolls up to the, the CFO and the founder of the company you're working for, so just using a tool...
Chris Sell: Really good point, is that's the second, I would say that's the second aha. You get that first aha where they're like, "Whoa, I can do this in the next hour." They then launch that Facebook campaign or email campaign and they come back to the app and since we're creating the audience, they can actually see the revenue uplift basically versus a treatment or a control group. And that's when they take that graph to their boss. That's kind of the second moment where they're like, "Not only can I take action faster, I can show my boss what happened to that audience once I targeted it." And that's when you kind of get that full circle, uh, effect.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, sounds amazing. Um, I know there's a lot of technology out there, but ones that actually show a quick return are the ones typically that you want to continue to work with and hopefully they continue to grow and add more functionality to their own application. You know, AI has been such uh, a, a big topic across really all industries and the impact of it. How are you seeing AI specifically for your company and, and, and helping and, and potentially what's on the roadmap for integration with, with AI and functionality for your platform?
Chris Sell: Yeah, I'd say it's, it's extremely important for us. And, um, actually initially I was a bit of a skeptic of how it would influence our software space. Um, and I've come around, around to be a very strong proponent. The reason, if you really look at our, our position in the ecosystem, you have the data side which is they can provide insights. Then you have the marketing side which wants to use that data and take action. The faster we go from insight to action, the more value we drive an organization. And...
[The Impact of Generative AI on Marketing]
...that's why we call it the, the company GrowthLoop, was we drive insight to action. So, how can AI help us do that faster? Uh, and actually one of the, our, our head of partnerships and chief data science officer, Anthony Rodeo, he actually did a presentation at Snowflake about this where he was like, "Version one was the bridge between insight and action was SQL. The second phase was a user interface, which is what GrowthLoop is, a very easy user, user interface. Version three is Gen AI."
But what does that look like? It actually means that why does the marketer even need to click around on a screen? Why aren't they just using natural language to describe what are they trying to do? "Well, I'm trying to reduce churn in this product category." "Okay, great. Here's the segments. We've already written the SQL for you. You should be targeting those in Facebook." "Perfect. I'm going to export that." So, the interface is changing literally now from this. We went from SQL to UI over the last three years. Now we're going UI to Gen AI, which allows it to make it even easier for marketers to take those insights and go to actions. That's where we've been focused is we launched a, a tool called Marv and it's our audience studio where marketers can actually do just that. They use natural language to describe their goal and we'll actually create the SQL and underlying audiences and just present them back and say, "Is this who you're looking for?" and allow them to activate it out.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that sounds powerful. God, you guys are on to something here. Really cool. I know you haven't went out and raised capital. I think you said you had a, maybe a partner, but I guess as you look at AI and you continue to build, does that as a company make you have to transition in terms of your team, like do you need to go out and add an AI team, AI engineers? Like what's it do for the current team on the engineering side to build this up?
Chris Sell: Yeah, I've, I've found the folks that can adapt quickest to it is the folks on our platform engineering team that were already deep in our uh core services. Um, the most important things for us is we haven't had to go hire a new team to do this. Uh, the most important thing was getting that platform team to understand the ins and outs of what's possible with AI, because they need a mental model to understand like, everybody just right now thinks it's a genie. You'll just throw anything at it and it can predict the world's problems. And that's not true, right? In actuality, like, uh, our team likes to say you don't have an AI strategy if you don't have a data...
[Adapting the Engineering Team to the AI Era]
...strategy. So unless you're feeding the AI, like for example a churn prediction or a cross-sell prediction for checking or savings accounts, it's not going to all of a sudden create that model and predict it for you. But if I tell it, "Hey, I have this goal of reducing churn in this area," it's going to create an audience for me based on the underlying data as long as the predictions are there. So establishing that base understanding has been crucial in the team.
What's also helped us is we have, we work closely with the product teams over at Snowflake and the Cortex AI team as well as the uh Google Gemini team. And so we're having regular, you know, I, I call it bi-weekly meetings with their product teams to understand we're trying to push the limits of what these LLMs can do together. Um, and so we've had our teams actually just interacting directly with them as they try to, for example, building audiences was not something LLMs know how to do out of the box and all the SQL behind it. We had to do a lot of experimentation to get there. So having that relationship helped us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. What's the biggest challenge right now for the company?
Chris Sell: Yeah, I would say overall right now the largest challenge is essentially trying to take advantage of the momentum the data clouds have provided. You know, we're a small company. We built it brick by brick. And so, you know, as we've gotten more tailwinds through uh partnerships with folks like Google as well as Snowflake, um, we've actually gotten the opportunity... Hey, how's it going? Got a little... It's because I'm talking about AI.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. We have to edit this out. [laughter]
Chris Sell: Hey, on a podcast right now. You're in the podcast, too, now. Yeah. You want to be in a podcast? You're in a podcast.
[The Biggest Strategic Challenges for the Company Today]
Yeah. Yeah. There's my little boy, Noah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Noah, it's good to meet you, Noah. I'm Chris...
Chris Sell: Say hi, Chris.
Noah: Hi, Chris.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Hey.
Chris Sell: What do you need? Do you need something? He just... Okay, let me get this real quick. One second here. He needs a little more time on his iPad as uh, I'm doing kind of double duty here with uh, we just got back from New York and I'm uh working with uh... his mommy's at work and I got to do waiting for grandma to get here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Makes, makes total sense. I feel like every other call we have uh currently there's, we've had a lot of cameos.
Chris Sell: Yeah. Let me just... Okay, we'll edit that out. But that was really funny.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. So, just going back to the... What was the biggest challenge?
Chris Sell: Yeah, I think the, the biggest challenge for us is um, placing our bets. Because if you think about our bets in terms of the go to market side, essentially we have limited resources. And I think this is a problem for every startup, but especially if you're trying to move towards profitability, is you got to be very strategic about where you place those. So when I look at this um, this space, you have huge momentum in terms of the data clouds all supporting this ecosystem and we need to place our bets on which ones we focus on the most. Right? So I mentioned we have a great partnership with Google BigQuery as well as Snowflake, but we need to invest marketing resources around that, partnership resources, as well as sales to really breathe life into it. And the question is which ones do you do and when is crucial. So that's a big piece I'm focused on right now. And I think it's one of those undersold things for startups. If you don't place those bets right, then you don't grow and take advantage of the opportunity and you miss the wave.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes sense. Challenges are part of every company and there's shifts and pivots. What's a shift that you've gone through that's really changed your company or maybe had a big breakthrough because of it?
Chris Sell: Yeah, I think the, the biggest change we went through was early on we used to actually just think about syncing data, literally copying data. So when we initially tried to solve this problem, we were like, "Well, what if you just copied the data from the database into Marketo? Like just copy it over." And what happened was we were working with a large customer and we started copying, like think about it, it's like 10 million users and you have a hundred different attributes about them. And we're syncing it over to the system to say, "Now you can send emails based on this data." That was basically the, the pitch, and the end platform started to fall over when they were trying to do their segmentation in the tool. It would take like an hour to run the query because the marketing platforms aren't set up to hold that. And then the other issue was their bill started to go up. And we were like, "My goodness, I don't know if this direct, you know, now they call this reverse ETL, but direct copying of data from a database to marketing tools probably isn't the...
[The Breakthrough Pivot to Zero-Copy Architecture]
...long-term solve here for our customers." And so we were like, "Okay, what if we didn't copy the data? What would you do?" And that's when we went to this zero copy, build the audience and the journeys directly on the data cloud, on Snowflake, and only route the data that's absolutely necessary for Marketo or Facebook to run the campaign so that they don't have to have direct copies. And so that, that aha, or actually I wouldn't even say it was an aha. This was like hitting a wall and we're like, "This isn't going to be how you do this in enterprise. You cannot copy all this data out." Uh, really helped us pivot back to zero copy and building audiences directly on the, the data cloud.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, great [clears throat] learning. Wow, that's a, that's a good one. I, I, you know, it's, we, we talk to so many companies and we get you know, you don't really know sometimes how to get around a problem until you're faced with it and you got to get resourceful and figure it out, or maybe you go out of business. But sounds like, sounds like you guys figured it out, which is great.
Chris Sell: Yeah, it, it was one of those moments where we're like, "We better figure something out because this isn't gonna work."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, when you start a company and you're five, six years down the road, sometimes it would be nice if someone would have told you, "Hey, you want to watch out for these things" or "Let me tell you something that you, you want to know about before you get there." What's one thing that you look back and wish someone would have told you about before you started GrowthLoop?
Chris Sell: I wish somebody would have told me that there is no destination. That actually the only thing you can hope for is that you're solving... my, my CTO always tells me this, is the best we can hope for is solving new problems every single day. And that's why you're doing what you're doing. If you're doing it for a destination or an outcome six years in, five years in, whatever it is, couple years in, it's very difficult to understand why you're doing it anymore. And so I, I had that reframe I'd say a couple years into this. I was like, actually this is just a journey. And the, the key thing is that you love the actual process of solving new problems and getting to the next one, not achieving an outcome destination.
If you go into it with that, I think the biggest problem entrepreneurs have is they give up too early because they expect an outcome and destination sooner than it actually is possible in the world and then they end up, either they run out of funding or they lose their passion and then they switch. Really the only things that stop you is do you have the money to do it? Can you sustain that? And can you maintain your perseverance of problem...
[Crucial Advice for Founders: Focus on Problem Solving, Not the Destination]
...solving long enough to believe something and actually make it real in the world. So, I wish somebody had sat me down and level set with me uh up front.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this. We, we've worked with so many companies and the three things you talked about was exactly what they go through. They get, they get low on funds. They start to lose the passion. They start thinking about like, "Hey, I think I need to make a change here" or make a pivot and it's, then it's too late and they go out of business or they just give up. As soon as you mentally give up, it's over. So I think that, I think that's spot on.
Chris Sell: And I think you need to just do it as a 1% a day and actually enjoy that. Like if you look at, and I think that's difficult because you look at some of the entrepreneurs that everybody hears about that's the wild success that's already happened and it looks like a zero to one, like it happened quickly. And actually no, they just stuck with it long enough and are zero to one-ers and they're passionate about that and eventually that outcome became true on something that they're working on. So, you know, I, I wish somebody would have told me that. And I also um, I'd say, you know, I don't know. I would have probably been more aggressive at the start of the company if somebody had told me about the data cloud becoming as big of a deal as it is and AI coming online. Early on in the company, we were uh more conservative. We would work with our, our customers and we were growing brick by brick. I would have forward invested harder into this space um because it's becoming larger than I actually thought it would be. Uh, if I knew those things were to be true. You know, the best you can do is you start to realize the data cloud's a multi-billion dollar industry and they're supporting you. That's a good thing. But I wish I would have known sooner so we would have invested even harder sooner.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. 2020. Looking back always, [laughter] what's the world going to thank you for, Chris, as you continue to build out your platform and your company and looking back?
Chris Sell: Yeah. Um, you know, that would be nice if somebody, you know, I don't think anybody will, you know, we're in B2B SaaS, but suspending disbelief on being in B2B SaaS. Um, I would say, you know, I was a marketer. So like why did, why did I leave marketing? And if I look at it on its surface, it was look, I, I wasn't able to uh try out all of the ideas that I had. Why was I not able to try out everything I wanted to and manifest what I wanted in the world? Well, large part of it was I had a hundred ideas, but the technology made it so I could only run one. I could only get the data from an analyst to run one email campaign, which meant my job wasn't very satisfactory.
And so when I think about it, I think about all the business users in these companies. I think the, the key thing they get is job satisfaction of being able to actually manifest and try all hundred ideas because the technology layer enables them to. So if GrowthLoop actually achieves its vision, marketers and business people are actually going to be able to say, "Look, here's the 50 ideas about how I want to change the customer experience to hit my goals and actually do it much faster," which means you actually have more fulfillment in the job and I might be a marketer still if that were the case.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. Well, fascinating story. Sounds like a lot of upside coming with AI and you're positioned perfectly to build out what you're creating. So excited to kind of see what happens over the next six, 12, 18 months. Uh, I also want to thank you, Chris, for coming on and sharing your story and having the courage to present. You've probably done this a number of times, but you did a great job. And I also want to thank the audience for listening. It means a lot to us that you spent your time with us today. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, signing off for now. We can't wait to catch up with you all in the next episode. Until then, Chris, everyone else, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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