Developing the Future of Work with Tianna Linton

it on the head. I use So many different apps from i'm not actually named them But I use two different project managing apps and I kid you not Here is my to do list for today a piece of paper with a lot of boxes and drawings on An art pad because this makes my conversations in terms of how my brain works for tasks You Flow very easily and here you are trying to solve that big problem, but for our listeners out there Can you tell us you know who you are your background and what you're working on?

And I came up with this idea because I'm probably like the biggest pain in the butt when it comes to using the tools that like my team and I say we're going to use because I also am team pad of paper. Like the tools that we have tend to almost limit my productivity instead of increase it. So because that's counterintuitive to what I'm trying to do, I just won't use them. My team uses all of our softwares and tools and I just don't.

I will hand my pad of paper over to my assistant and be like, Will you put those notes in? But, I think as I was building out what I wanted for our team I realized that it didn't exist yet.

So I needed to go and actually build something custom. And then after talking to all of my clients about the tools that they use and what I'm trying to create for us and because they're going to be switching over and things like that. They said that they also needed something like that. So it gave me a framework for how it could be used. any industry, any level of profession big teams, small teams, individuals, it would work for anybody.

The basis of it is that with AI, we can have tools that not only learn how we work, but they can actually take tasks off of our plate. So instead of building out a software where it's just to remind you to do tasks, they It's going to actually do the tasks that are like the mundane time sucks that we all

hate. And I think that the whole meaning behind it is there's almost been like this shift where people really, hate work and they hate the stress of it and they feel like they can never get everything done that they need to in a day. And. I think that work for humanity is extremely meaningful when done correctly. I think that as people like we need work and a sense of accomplishment and I think what's happened isn't that people don't want to work.

It's that they don't want to work the way that we've been working. Building out this tool, I have a vision where it's going to feel like an assistant, like a real life in person assistant. And you can talk to it. It's going to be voice prompts, text prompts, things like that, so that you can ask it to do things that you need. Hey, put this in my calendar. Hey, can you pull up that call that I had the other day with so and can you make sure that this person's coming to the meeting?

There's so many different things that are super small that have to get done, but they take up minutes here and minutes there. There and it adds up to feeling like we really didn't accomplish anything in the day. So the solution is really just, it's an AI based tool, but imagine if you took like chat, GBT.

Salesforce HubSpot, ClickUp Slack, all of those things, but then add like a video component how you can send video messages to people on your phone or you can screen record and things like that for internal communications and all of those things had a baby and it's built on top of AI.

But I like your reframe that we don't hate work. We just really just dislike the mundane things that a machine should be doing.

For us, I like for, can I walk us through your evolution here? Cause I've had, so I had Zeb from, ClickUp on the podcast and he was in marketing and he had his marketing agency and then ClickUp was born. I had another dude I think he's in Switzerland. I forgot, I'll have to figure out where his location is, but they created a SAS from their marketing agency. So I see this evolution happening as you're solving an important problem within the work that you already are doing.

So that's a testament to the value of work. You did the work. You found a roadblock. You're solving a new problem based on that foundation you built, but help us walk through

that evolution. Like the issue is what you, and your team experienced, but how did you take that idea, which a lot of people here might be listening and have an idea they're in their business. They're in their job. It might be starting something on the side that might be in corporate America. How did you go from like idea to now actually implementing? And I know you're like in your, funding race, but walk us through that.

So I think that I want simple tools. I want tools that are fast. I want tools that are intuitive. I don't want to have to spend a ton of time learning a new platform, learning a new software because it shouldn't like apple. Everybody knows like a kid can pick up an iPhone and figure out how to use it. It needs to feel like that. And business tech has not done that. None of the business softwares have that sort of user experience built into it. And yeah.

The same way that like a consumer product would. So I really just started because I was building it for us. I didn't think that it was going to be something everybody would want. I just knew that I was annoyed and I needed to fix the problem. When I built out the idea, I talked to my clients about it because I was like explaining my annoyance with our current software. I'm actually very close with all of our clients. So it's easy to just ask them things. And all of them were like, I want that.

And so then I was like, Oh, okay. And it opened up the idea of maybe more people want this. So then I reached out to everybody in my network and I was like, so how would you like feel about a tool that functioned like this and every single person not only said that they wanted it, but that they felt like it would completely change the way in which they work and make their work more meaningful.

And that's what gave me pause is the more meaningful aspect and I guess from I talked to 30 or 40 people, the general consensus is that the small tasks that take up a lot of time because they add up actually detract from the ability to do the work that you love. And so then that led me to the concept of.

That's actually the problem with work is if you look on like the Reddit forums and things like that, you'll see that most people feel like the tools that are supposed to be making them more productive are making them less productive. And then, and this is me going on a tangent, but if you think about the way that we have used like chat GBT, we've almost taken the things that humans find enjoyable writing.

Art, creative thinking and giving it to tech as opposed to keeping tech, the tool and giving the more interesting human centric parts of the work that we do

The, incredible, I don't want to use a terrible word here, but just phenomenon of people depending on tech for creativity. Versus actually being creative or being bored and figuring things out on your own versus leveraging tech to accelerate things that are mundane. And that's actually like the thesis of outsourcing or leveraging different tools in AI.

That's the one thing that I try to figure out is how do I if I subscribe to this tool and it's 200 bucks a month, but it's going to do very mundane things for me. And I don't have to do those things. And it automates it like, absolutely. That's incredible for me. So you're trying to do that and piece it in one location, which I think is pretty fascinating. So you talk to about 40 to 60 people, 40, 50 people, you got market validation.

And this kind of goes back to a bigger mission of making work meaningful again. How did you take that? You got market feedback. You got the idea you got. How do you take that to market and to where you're at right now?

So your question was, how do I bring it to market? Getting it to market hasn't been easy because it requires almost a completely different way of thinking. So I basically was like, I want to throw away everything that we have and imagine if we didn't have tech and I was building what I wanted, what would it do? And then from there, I was like, okay. We need to figure out the validation of the tech behind how we would make this work.

So then I talked to someone on my board who specializes in AI and things like that. And she said the AI aspect is definitely doable. And so it was really just, like I said, I went completely like basics, nothing exists yet. What would you want it to do? So we got rid of the dashboard. So there, it has no dashboard. It's prompt based. Like completely prompt based, it will generate whatever it is that you ask for in the software. And it's machine learning.

So it's going to learn and adapt how you work and all of these things. And so there's so many different pieces of it. That it requires having a lot of specialists in order to be able to figure out how do we make each piece of this function on the back end to keep the user experience as simple as possible because I want to take this extremely complex software. Thank you.

And have it feel like the most simple like, breathing as a tool, and so getting it to market once it's built, I don't think will be difficult at all because I'm a marketer, but also because the need is there. You can ask anybody how they feel about their project management tool or CRM, and they're going to have complaints. And I think the issue is that it just, it hasn't evolved. Think about all of the tools that we have and then think back to Seven, eight years ago, they're the same.

They haven't really done anything new. And so I think a lot of it too, is it, we keep iterating off of what we already have, as opposed to asking ourselves with the new technology that we have access, like access to that is available now, how could we create something that's completely new and different that solves the problem in a more robust way?

And I think The actual biggest hurdle has been data privacy. Most people are highly concerned because in order for the software to be adaptive in the way that I wanted to, it has to be able to travel a lot. So we're building out our data privacy in a way where there's a tool that you can use that will actually be able to determine whether or not the information shared is proprietary. So that determines what goes into our model and what doesn't.

And we're building it off of algorithms that are already in use because no one wants to go build out their own their own AI algorithm. But I think getting investors to understand the, because when you think about a pitch deck, most pitch decks are like, we're solving this one problem, right? In order to solve the problem of productivity and like a disenchanted workforce, you have to solve a lot of underlying issues.

So for me, because I have, almost the full breadth of the vision, it's extremely difficult sometimes to figure out What's the part that they're going to care about the most. So we've actually been leveraging video in order to show how the software will work, because I found that you can talk about it all day, but until they can see like what it's going to look like.

Thinking outside of the box, which marketers are inherently like very, good at, and then thinking about the psychology of like how people interpret data and putting those things together to be like, okay, I know you're used to seeing pitch decks that give you like pictures of what the software is going to look like here is not a live demo, but an example of what it's going to function like so that you can have a really strong frame of reference for the.

The generative aspect, because that's the piece that people seem to also get stuck on, is what do you mean it's going to generate and you don't have a dashboard? I'm like,

Do you want to move that other meeting to this time based on it learns how you work and what you normally do when certain events happen. Yeah. So that next time those come up, it can anticipate your needs and then prompt you, Hey, is this what you want to do? So it's very, forward thinking. It's very intuitive and it's, in my opinion, like how tech should be used.

Tech should be used to assist us and make us More effective and better at what we do as opposed to trying to get tech to just completely replace humans. I think that's a big conversation that's concerning for a lot of people. And I think honestly if we continue down the road that we have been, that's what would happen. So the other big piece of what we're trying to do is give a framework of what does it look like when we augment human work with tech as opposed to replacing human work

with tech.

Tell me more about some of the things that have either surprised you or some of the risks Hey, I didn't see this risk coming in terms of like the things that think about, because you took an idea doing marketing and branding. For your clients. And you took an idea to build tech and you're actually executing on top of that. And you're not a technical founder, but you're still making strides and moving forward towards that.

What are some of the beliefs that you have around the work as well as some of the things that may have surprised you in that journey yet

And it's not specific enough to what I'm trying to do in life, learn how to build a business, all of that. I found that mentorship has helped a lot, by the way, in that aspect is sometimes it's much better to learn from people who actually have the experience than to sit in a classroom and just be lectured at. But I think because I already had those experiences of going against the curve of what's expected. I was like What's one more thing?

Okay, you told me that I was going to need like a master's degree in order to be able to start a successful company. No, I didn't. I just learned it online. Like we have such a huge amount of resources available to us, whether it's through our network or through any sort of like data online that we have that if you know how to research properly, it's very simple to learn the things you need to.

And also I took a stab at it and started learning coding and it came very naturally and it wasn't because I wanted to build it out myself. It was. I don't like sitting in a room with a bunch of people who are talking about a problem that I don't have any framework for. Having conversations about what would be the hurdles for the tech really bothered me because I couldn't grasp what they were communicating.

So I took the time to go and learn those things in order to be able to have an intelligent, like problem solving conversations with the people that are helping me.

I think people underestimate the ability, like if you have a really good problem that people hate and you have a really strong solution to it, you'll find a lot of people are extremely excited about it and willing to get involved. And I think it's just, you never have to do something alone. And that's where a lot of people get stuck. Is there it's, I'm in a silo. It's my idea. I can't tell people about it. They'll steal my idea.

And it's A lot of people might try to steal your idea, but it's not going to look the same and feel the same as when you build it. So it's having the self confidence there, but also being willing to go talk to people about it and not be afraid of like the consequences of someone trying to take it from you,

Cause you mentioned earlier around having a board is that, that you learned through mentorship or how did you know who to assemble? Cause you, dropped. A few key nuggets there around the beliefs that you have that 99 percent of the problems are solvable going to talk to a lot of people and that people want to help. So you leverage the natural abilities that you have a moving quickly as well as getting other people involved, which are beliefs that you have.

So I think this is important for us to rewind that section and relisten to that again. But with that, Maybe shifting gears even more here, but you talked about having a board. You had, you talked about having key partners. Was that just something that came up through mentorship or was that something that you knew that you had to prepare so you could prepare for it? But we're, what was some of the thinking around that?

So it gives you the validation that you need for the tech. It shows that you have access to experts and it also validates the idea through the fact that they're willing to give their time because the board is also free, like it's not paid for right now. Like they are people who just think the idea needs to exist. And so they're doing this of their own, like free time that they have outside of their, rather. Robust jobs.

Especially if you come from a place of being excited about their expertise and actually listening to what they have to say. So that was how I found one of my board members. Her name is Summer. She has like a PhD in artificial intelligence and like voice and all of these different aspects that are still very out there for me to conceptualize. But. She's been extremely helpful in helping me understand the actual things that are going to be hurdles.

So things like data, privacy, cybersecurity all of those aspects are things that I knew of, but hadn't really had the full picture. So having the right mentors on your board, just, I think because I'm used to having mentors throughout my life, it comes naturally to assume that you're going to need people. So when I was learning about the kind of startup space, And that there were boards. I was like, perfect. That's what I need.

I think the biggest hurdle I've had around, building the board has been finding people who have the extremely specific pieces. It's taken longer than I would have wanted, finding someone who had the level of skill and knowledge around machine learning and artificial intelligence that she has. It took time. And so I do move quickly, but I think that in the space of startups, people sometimes worry that.

If they're not going the fastest, they're going to fail because someone else is going to get there first. And I would argue that it's more important to move quickly, but with intention than to just run at something like full send without having any framework of these things need to happen in order. And I'd rather find the right people and do it right the first time than have to just keep chasing my tail.