Embedding AI - How to avoid failure in your upcoming SaaS project

[0:00] Hi, welcome to this webinar and I want to explain how AI changed my mind. I'm going to take you through my own personal journey with AI which you've probably been through your own personal journey with AI but I've come to some conclusions that a number of people I've spoken to have found really helpful. So hopefully by the end you'll have something that you can really take away from this. So let's get into it really quickly and talk about how my journey came to be and what was going on in my life, my journey. And AI was something that I encountered actually for the first time in the '9s. But then started seeing more and more of it in the early 2000s. And at that point I was very curious and I thought you know this has promise this could do something. I didn't think it was going to be super capable, but I did think it had promise. And I quickly transformed from an idea of curiosity to a perspective of hope, realizing that, you know, there's a lot that can be done here. I think AI could actually make the world a better place.

[1:13] And from there I went on to think ah this is a scam which was a sharp corner to turn I'll admit going from hope to scam but the problem was I was hearing so much about it people were hyping it up all over the place. It became ubiquitous both in the news and in SaaS products but also useless. You know Siri didn't and still doesn't do that much for me. Like there's a lot of AI out there and the early AI was just not very useful at all and kind of was a frustrating experience and so I thought well maybe just we can't do much with this and then I kind of went on another right turn to a feeling of helplessness because all of a sudden there were all of these new AI services all over the place and I couldn't keep up with it and they were getting more and more capable and everybody was saying how much they were using them and they were going to take our jobs and I thought you know what let's just bow down to our new overlords and get this over with and finally it that kind of transformed into a sense of utility and I started thinking oh I think I may be able to control this some of it not all of it but at least use it and have it work for me and if I can do that then I can make money from this and so that's where the thought of you know utility came in my mind. So why did I think it was a scam? Like what was in my head that was driving me to see this as a scam? And I would say like the shadiness of the goings on at OpenAI, you know, Sam Altman being fired, the fact that it went from a public good and a nonprofit to wanting to make profit and going back and forth again and the fact that the Open AI board was actually going to judge whether or not they had achieved AGI and that fact that AGI, if it was achieved, would have a huge, you know, benefit, financial benefit to whomever got there first. It just all seemed like really shady. All of my red flags from, you know, having experienced the early days of the internet started going up. I started seeing in every SaaS solution, but it was useless. And everybody was telling me the AI could code and that it was going to take developer jobs, but it just could not. And it's still not very good at it. If you're watching this, I'm recording in the summer of 2025 and honestly, by Christmas that may change, but it couldn't. It still is not great at coding. And it was hallucinating all over the place and people weren't really talking about the fact that it hallucinated. But all of a sudden, like you were seeing lawyers getting fined for using an LLM in the court and so forth because it just was not accurate. It was making up cases.

[4:14] And I even wrote an AI post where I said, "Yeah, this is like ridiculous." Like that the research is garbage. So that was really frustrating. And then I got into this idea of, you know, helplessness and, you know, why was I feeling helpless? And the reality was there was just a head spinning explosion of AI tools available out there. And everybody seemed to use it better than I did, or at least that's what, you know, Reddit and X was saying, and everybody was like super confident about it. But it was just evolving too quickly for me.

[4:49] And I thought there's no way I'm going to keep up on this. I didn't even know where to start. And so I really kind of felt helpless. But the real, you know, crux of my journey was that I went from helplessness to utility in a really short period of time. And part of this was from some projects that we had at Razoyo where clients were embedding AI and we were helping them do that. And initially they were I won't say failures but they had a lot of problems but over time we were able to refine it and make it really successful for our clients. So that was part of it. The other was I developed an LLM habit. Meaning that I stopped googling and I started asking either GPT or Grok which no I'm not going to hide that Grok is my favorite because it is especially in unhinged mode. If you haven't tried that, I highly recommend it. But I also did some research and I watched some YouTube videos by Andrej Karpathy.

[5:56] And if you don't know who he is, I talk about him quite a bit when I'm talking about AI. But Andrej Karpathy has a series of videos on YouTube about what LLMs are and how they work. And I started to understand better their limitations, their capabilities, and what was being done to overcome them. And then you know the pros and cons of those additional steps that are being taken to improve AI to improve the LLMs and that became you know a really kind of a guide stone for me to a certain extent so I recommend you look up Andrej Karpathy's videos we'll put a link below and then I broke my LLM habit now I was getting into a habit of using LLM and not thinking for myself and then getting really frustrated because the LLM wasn't, you know, doing what I wanted, etc. And so I broke my bad LLM habit of kind of going too quickly into LLM. And then I made it into a good LLM habit where I was using it to augment my mind and no longer take over my mind. So that was a really, you know, big change for me. And I think that the LLMs overall, I began to see them as useful, but I was kind of like this girl. I saw these LLMs and these and these AI tools out there as like these beautiful butterflies that could do all these wonderful things. I just wanted to catch them and have them for my own. And as I did you know they maintained their beauty and their wonder for me but they didn't retain their utility and something occurred to me in the course of all this and that is that automation is the magic that makes AI work for humans.

[7:54] Having all these, you know, AI capabilities on their own is not useful unless you can take the output of one and feed it into another and you can keep your hands off and really have the AI do something for you without a massive amount of cutting and pasting and personal intervention and going from one LLM to another. So, that was really kind of where I changed the corner. And the drivers of this epiphany for me were essentially the idea that that you know I needed to learn more about it. And a few weeks ago, actually I guess about a month or so ago, I was working with a group called SaaS Academy.

[8:40] And I wasn't working with them. They were training me. I paid for their training. If you're in the SaaS business, it's a great group to work with. And the one thing that was very clear is that those entrepreneurs who were taking the course with me, they were desperate for AI to work because they needed to be more efficient and they had to have something that worked. So they were at the cutting edge of figuring out how to benefit from AI. And I went from this book called buy back your time which tells you how to hire people to buy your time back instead of hiring for growth and it's great training for entrepreneurs. I recommend that book by Dan Martell. But also the teacher of the course you know whenever somebody had a question the answer was well ask GPT ask GPT and creating this habit of when I don't know something going to GPT instead of doing like a long research on the internet was a big habit changer for me and I could see that within this group of people AI and the use of AI was really helping them unleash their creativity they were reducing ing the amount of tedious tasks they had to do of lowv value tasks and they were increasing the amount of time that they were spending on innovation and creativity and you know using AIs for them was a way to really level the playing field. Then a couple weeks ago I attended SaaS talk and the folks that attend this conference were amazing and as you can imagine as a tech conference these folks were really on the cutting edge of software but everybody there was using AI plus automation. That's when the light bulb went off in my head because I was talking to makers and users, creators of companies, but also creators of AI, users of AI, and many people who had been through multi-million dollar exits from the companies that they founded, the tech companies, the SaaS companies that they founded, some of whom were not technical people at all.

[10:51] And what I realized was that none of them was really an expert. In fact, nobody's an expert on it, but I could still learn from them and I could still learn from AI and discover it for myself. And that's when I went from, you know, hope despite the disruption in my business and I replaced that fear with practicality. There were a few success stories that I think are of note and one is Chili Piper. So the the founder of Chili Piper, she and her husband founded this company and they were using AI everywhere to feed their automation. So the automation was not necessarily created by AI. They were using some tools to kind of tune it, but really they were using tools to look for signals in the marketplace, which could be anything from, you know, an individual contact or prospect who you had a birthday or got a new job or something like that, a company got funding.

[11:57] Even you know things coming out of their CRM system you know some when a a opportunity was lost and closed and they could summarize that with AI and feed that back in to triggers for automation and there were all kinds of you know competitive intelligence sources and market intelligence sources and just you know intentbased behavior that their prospect ects were engaging in that really helped them to do more and to create all these signals that were triggering automations the responses of which were curated by AI and creating new messages from AI and I thought that was just incredible and if you haven't had a chance to look them up look up Chili Piper because they're doing some amazing things. I also got to hear Oleg speak and it was hilarious and I loved it. I loved his point of view. He had this really rough Romanian accent when he was speaking on stage. He hates being on stage. He hates being in front of the camera. He's way too busy to produce content. But he was in a situation where in order to promote his company, he needed to produce two Tik Tok videos a day featuring him. This was the strategy that his team came up with.

[13:23] And so he built an AI stack and he hired a social media team to do it for him. And if you look at him and his videos on TikTok, and I would encourage you to do it's not him. 80% of those are AI avatars that are generated by HeyGen. You know, if the language is one he doesn't speak, ElevenLabs, is a tool that was using the audio. And what was amazing to me is even when he's speaking English in his videos, he still has them run it through ElevenLabs because ElevenLabs will pick up his halting, difficult Romanian accent and make him sound like the greatest smooth talker ever, but sound like him the same. And then he was using Submagic for editing and he created this new system called vidIQ for production and the production is really just kind of handling the whole thing from beginning to end. I started to also have my own small success stories. In fact, if you look at this video that appears on my LinkedIn feed on the left, this is not me. This video was recorded by me creating an 800 character script and feeding it into captions AI and using my AI avatar. And I started recording like what I was doing with AI each day.

[14:49] And I started discovering that, you know, I was doing more and some of the stuff was working and it was succeeding and I started to get more confident with AI. And I think that's one thing that a lot of people lack is just they don't feel confident. In fact, they feel very incompetent when it comes to working with AI. But you don't have to because again, nobody's an expert. And if a tool doesn't work for you can't understand it. It has 20 competitors. I guarantee you that. But I do think there are some tools out there that are potential game changers. Customers.ai. I actually met the founder of that, but I tried it out myself and it's very accurate tool for not seeing who is coming onto your website, identifying them, identifying behaviors, companies, far more accurate than other tools out there. And of course, it's using AI to do that. And then you have like gong which is you know for overseeing your whole inbound sales funnel and your sales force and just like tweaking things and instructions and you know parts of your workflow you know identifying coaching needs etc. Going through gong clay for animation and all of these others. I'm actually currently using Databutton to create some applications. See how it goes. Right now it's about as good as a junior developer but cheaper and a little bit more frustrating. So requires a fair amount of babysitting but I will tell you what Databutton is by far the best. And I've used Replit and I've used Lovable. I hated both those. I thought they were garbage. Databutton I really see promise in. And so hopefully you get a chance to try some of these on your own.

[16:44] So what are the next steps in my journey? Well, the next steps in my journey is I got to continue thinking AI first and strengthen that and I need to not rely as much on you know Google searches or you know the old tools but I need to think of the new tools first. I'm also need I also need to get better at automation and envisioning automation and tying AI systems together. I need to be able to put the tools in context and understand better, you know, what is used in what context and, you know, when this tool is effective and when it's not. There's also a fair amount of business intelligence that can be gleaned from AI. And so I'm working at getting better than that. But most of all, I have a team of 25 people and I need to be leading my team into thinking of AI despite the fact that they're all younger than I am. I have millennials, I have Gen Z's in there and you know they are not necessarily thinking of how to best use AI tools to be better at their jobs. And really it's a question of like thinking more about it.

[17:58] I've got some people that are just brilliant at it, but the majority of them, you know, need to need some coaching to get there, but we're going to have to get there because AI is going to be the future and we're going to have to master those AI tools. I have a few upcoming projects. I'm going to build a funnel of ICPs for Razoyo. And ICP is ideal customer profiles. And I'm going to be using AI to really refine that. I'm going to be working on customers.ai and putting that on our main website and permanently and working that into our sales pipeline. We're looking at creating a Tik Tok avatar specifically for SaaS startups and it's going to be me and it's gonna I'm going to have my own channel. But when you look at that, it's probably going to be all content that I supervised but did not shoot unlike this which I'm actually shooting live and I'm using OBS to do that. Finally, I'm doing some more evaluation of the development tools that are available. So, you know, where am I now?

[19:09] Actually, I think it's going to be really good. I'm kind of excited about it. Again for you know for the first time I don't want to say for the first time but you know once again I'm pretty excited about AI. I love to refer to this particular quote by Steve Jobs talking about how you know we have time to deal with AI like there is definitely you know time to absorb it time to get into it. Now, I would think if you're going to argue that it's coming at us faster than anything in the past has, totally agree with you there. But we also have more tools. We have the internet. We have training. We have we have all kinds of ways to deal with faster innovation than we had before. So, I would encourage you to kind of see it like Steve Jobs did. And you know, it takes time for this stuff to unfold, but you can get on top of it.

[20:18] You know, we've got this. And where do I think things are going to end up? Well, I can tell you where I hope things end up, and kind of the way I see things going is that we're going to get to do the fun stuff and we're going to use AI to do the tedium. You know whether we're going to do the things that require really connecting with another human being, which may not be so great for introverts. But even if you're an introvert, you're going to become a super introvert because you're going to have the tools below you to do way more work, way more interesting things than you were doing before. The AI, they're going to do the tedium. And you know they're going to drive our cars and you know do all that kind of stuff for us which you know yeah I love to drive a car and I will continue driving cars hopefully for a long time but we're going to be able to do more and we're going to be able to choose you what do we want the AIs to do what do we want to do as time goes on. So, I want to thank you for watching this video and I hope this has been useful for you and that you're going to be able to glean some things that you think that you can do from this. And if you have any questions or just want to talk about this a little bit more or have a software project you want to get some advice on, reach out to me on LinkedIn or hit us up at rzo.com.

[21:48] I would love to hear from you.