[00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer. My name is Jay Aigner. Today. I am lucky enough to be joined with Zach Rattner. He is the CTO and co founder of Yembo. he's an author is a really cool book, about AI stuff from startups. he's a founder. He's a dad. Zach, hello, my friend. How are you, buddy?
[00:00:46] Zach: Good morning, Jay. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:49] Jay: It is morning there, isn't it?
[00:00:50] Zach: morning for me afternoon for you.
[00:00:52] Jay: I'm ahead over here. so tell me, where did you grow up and did that have an impact on you being, this really kind of successful founder, later in life?
[00:01:02] Zach: I believe so. I moved a lot growing up. I was born in New York in a suburb of New York City and actually spent about 6 years in early high school on to, college years in Vermont, kind of in the middle of nowhere, not even really near a new city. So we're in a plot of land. That was about 10 acres. And I got to spend a lot of time playing with, computers, because there wasn't a whole lot of other things to do there.
So I would say I got exposed pretty early on, and I feel like that kind of set me up well for everything that happened next, by having a little bit of more experience than maybe some of my peers getting into college. When you're practicing, writing software engineering, disciplines, when you're having coding problems, things like that, having like the experience of just kind of fooling around with it, playing around as a kid. it's all been kind of, related. I feel like it's very difficult to separate out professional life from your personal life. It's all kind of woven in together. One in the same.
[00:01:57] Jay: Yes, I agree. and I'm also kind of from the middle of nowhere. And it's funny when you said that, I guess you don't really relate those two things together, but there is nothing else to do. And if you grew up like in that age of, you know, the internet and computers being like this new, cool thing, you did spend a lot of time on it, if you lived in the middle of nowhere.
So I'd never really connected those things, but all right. So let's fast forward to yambo. where did the idea come from? You know, how do you get started? where did this thing come from?
[00:02:25] Zach: Sure. Yambo is a computer vision company and we have customers in about 30 countries around the world. And what we do is we've focused in on. Property inspections for home service companies. So if you are a professional moving company or a property insurance company, all these industries have a lot of manual work that it takes to go inside someone's home, physically inspect what's there and give a quote.
So if it's the insurance world, you need to give a. You need to price a premium correctly. And if it's moving, you need to identify the size and number of items so that you can bring the right equipment and do a good job on move day. So we provide computer vision services where someone can click a quick link on their phone, scan quick videos, 20, 30 seconds of each room is usually enough. And our AI will analyze that and we provide the results back to the service provider. So what we're seeing is people are able to do like three to five times as many inspections in a day. When they use YEMBO versus when they don't.
[00:03:21] Jay: Where did the idea come from?
[00:03:24] Zach: The idea came from sitting at the intersection of these two different industries, AI and home services. So my background is a software engineer. and I've been a software engineer about 16, 17 years now. I was working at a big tech company, Qualcomm, you may have heard of them, the telecom giant, and I was working on AI there and my wife was working at a moving company and she was a particularly good mover.
and. When, we got married and moved out to California, she went in and, tried to resign because we're going to move across the country and they liked her. And they said, don't resign, work remotely from home. And one thing led to another, and that made our living room, the back office of a moving company. So I got to come home from work and see the nuts and bolts of how this industry worked. And it just kind of. Sparked a light bulb moment. And one thing kind of led to another and eight years later, here we are.
[00:04:12] Jay: Wow. And where did the name come from?
[00:04:16] Zach: Well, you might be able to tell from this, that I'm an engineer. The name came from writing code. I
wanted a five letter name. I wanted a. com available. I want it to be number one on Google and I wanted it to be able to be a verb. If you think about Googling something and these kinds of things, people don't reach for tissues, they reach for Kleenex. So I tried to, I bought a couple of branding books. I don't really know how to do this. So I was trying to read and see what other people do, but it didn't really like anything. So I just wrote code that would spit out different five letter combinations and YEMBO stuck. We still didn't really, like, love it when we first saw it, but I told my co founder, I got the dot com, I checked, doesn't seem to mean anything offensive in foreign languages, so we're going to use it for now.
And if you think of anything better, just let me know. I'll be happy to change it. And that was eight years ago. Here we are.
[00:05:02] Jay: That's a great way to get a name, to stick. It's just, we'll keep it for now. And it'll always stay the same. so, how did you guys get your first customer?
[00:05:11] Zach: Since we're building AI, we did a waitlist model. So building AI is very complicated. if you think about Tesla is still working on building a full self driving car where you don't actually need a steering wheel. So what we did was we wanted to make sure that we were able to. Provide something of immediate, tangible value, but being able to identify everything that people own is a very complicated problem. And we didn't want to run out of time and money before we got there. So what we did was we built a products that solved the drive time and the AI couldn't detect very much could maybe detect three or four different items. But we found customers that were interested in not having to go and physically drive out and do the inspection. And I thought that was pretty key because your first customer is crucial. they put you on the trajectory, they start making, giving you feedback, they make support tickets and you kind of start aligning where you're going with what they're asking for. So I think in hindsight, we did some things wrong, some things right when we were starting out.
But I think one of the things we did a pretty good job on was being very strategic around who that first customer was. And we did that by going to an industry trade show, demoing the technology and saying, Hey, we only have bandwidth to take on three customers this summer. And in the fall, we'll take on five. And we had people drop in their business card and sign up. And then we basically interviewed them. We talked to them, asked more about what their pain points were, what problems they were trying to solve. And that was pretty helpful in just sussing out what the buyer psychology was. What made people want to use this?
Because the kind of person that wants to be first is usually not mass market. They generally want to be pioneers. A lot of times people asked about exclusivity because they wanted to keep their competitors out of it. And a lot of times they were more interested in being first with something. And the. Business implications around how good is your onboarding? How fast is your training? All these important things kind of came later. So when we were talking, some people presented really well at the trade show, but you talk afterwards and you realize that they were kind of expecting a more polished product than we had. And we were just honest and said, Hey, I'm sorry. I don't think I can do that yet. why don't I like slot you in? We'll touch base in like six months or so. And we went back and talked to everybody, but I think being really strategic around. Who is the kind of person that I want to make a rockstar by being the first, and then going and searching and running a clean process and finding those people was really key for us.
[00:07:35] Jay: It's like such a textbook question. Blake still like way to do that. did you guys have coaching to figure that out? Did you read a bunch of books? Did, was your co founder strong in some of those areas? Like, how did you know that kind of very methodical approach was exactly how, you know, everybody tells you to build a company like this.
[00:07:54] Zach: I guess no one told us explicitly how to do it, but what happened was, so I guess to give a little background. So we're at this trade show, it's a moving and storage trade show. And the booth next to us was, I think, selling cardboard boxes. So there wasn't a lot of technology that would come to these events. And what we did to prove our technology was we trained in AI to detect people. And we had this big TV and a camera on top. And we paid a little bit extra to put the booth right at the end of like the buffet lunch line. So when people would come and they'd put their macaroni and cheese or their salads or whatever on, and they're picking up like the cutlery and the napkins, they get picked up by the camera and like the corner and I would draw a box around and say person 98 percent confident. And naturally they look up, they go, what is this? They walk over, we explain, Hey, we just did this as kind of a gimmick, but our actual product does this on furniture and we can use it to do pre move surveys. And it started that conversation and naturally people's eyes were opened and there was a lot of interest. So it was really just to kind of, I would say, protect ourselves because we do, we didn't want to be stretched so thin. That we're saying, okay, I can't go reply to everybody. There's like a hundred and something people who are asking if they can get a login. And I don't think we've ever had more than three people log in at once before. And we just kind of, decide, okay, if I have to be selective, who would I select? And that's what kind of caused that to happen. I wish I could say it was all premeditated textbook plans, but I think in reality, we didn't even know if we'd go and anyone would care. So we just wanted to get it out there, see what people would say and then figure it out from there.
[00:09:22] Jay: that's a genius idea where, who came up with that? Like where did that idea come from to do the ai, or do the people tracing. where did that come from?
[00:09:31] Zach: I honestly don't exactly remember. I mean, my, we had, I believe we had two employees at the time. So we're all engineers and we're just discussing how do we make it so that someone can easily get what we're doing? Cause I, when you're at a trade show, people are busy. They're just walking by and they may not stop and talk to you for 60 seconds to learn.
So we just wanted to do something kind of visceral. And then we started just experimenting with a couple of different things. And we found that people probably aren't going to be lugging furniture. So if I train an AI to detect a sofa, they're not going to go by, but we figured people do. And, I think it was not, we didn't exactly know how it was going to pan out, but I think it got the point across enough that even people came over confused, Hey, I was 72 percent person, but my colleague was 80.
What's going on with that? But like perfect segue where you can go and talk about your product. So I think it was a lot of like thinking on your feet a little bit, but it was mostly What's that event that's going to make someone turn their head. And then we just kind of improvised after that.
[00:10:27] Jay: That's great. that's a cool story. and I love that you had cardboard boxes next to you. the contrast there is a great, mental picture. All right. So what does your client look like today as opposed to back then? And maybe not your client specifically, but the profile you're going after, how has that evolved from the first, you know, a few customers that you guys pulled in?
[00:10:45] Zach: Sure. So our brand has evolved over the years as you would hope and expect of a startup. And in the early days, we were focusing more on grabbing people who wanted to be first to market. And all the way down to our color scheme and like the user interface, we were focused on being fun and inviting and coming across as futuristic. But now we have people that depend on YEMBO to get their jobs done. Like they retrained their workforce. They've brought people in house. And a lot of times they've even hired different backgrounds of people because when the AI is doing some of this work, it's easier to hire people in different industries with different backgrounds and train them. So what we're noticing now is we are focusing more on. consistency, repeatability, quality, making sure it never goes down. It gives the same results, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and that's allowed us to open up and focus more on larger companies, more established processes and companies that really care about being efficient. And it's still interesting to like use AI and give them thought leadership opportunities and things like that. But I think there's a lot more focus on the here and the now, and it's more of like a show me value in the next. after onboarding and not so much around just like the idea of being able to say that you're working with AI.
[00:12:00] Jay: Right. No, that makes sense. is like, is U Haul or like some of these big, like moving companies? Is that kind of your Holy grail that you're, you know, one day would love to have a contract with? Is that where you guys are headed or is it more towards like storage companies? Like who are you pitching this at from a, you know, kind of industry perspective?
[00:12:17] Zach: Sure. Our, I would say cream of the cop customer is if you're a moving company that provides full service moving companies. So these other clients that just will rent you a truck or something. They don't generally have a full time person whose job it is to survey. They just push it entirely to the customer. So if you go to our website, you can see we have some of the largest moving companies in the U. S. Like J. K. Moving is the U. S. Is largest independent mover. They're one of our clients. but I think they realized the most value out of the tool because they have people who. Before yambo could maybe do three or four surveys in a day and a survey is a precursor to an estimate.
So if you're a commercial, if you're a commission based sales agent, being able to only do 3 or 4 jobs in a day is pretty limiting. so if you have a team of folks like that and say, don't do that, instead, have yambo. you can really grow fast. You can expand into new geographies because you don't have to have physical infrastructure boots on the ground to be able to go do the estimates. You can spend your time building rapport with the clients and closing instead of asking like how many boxes is it going to take to pack these books you see behind me. And, we've just found that the companies that are, you don't need to be huge, but you need to be large enough to have a sales organization. To be able to really realize the value out of having this kind of AI co pilot kind of workflow.
[00:13:37] Jay: I mean, it's not often I get, I get products that sound like they really are revolutionizing kind of like a stagnant, you know, old space. But that is usually where the big innovation happens, right? It's like somewhere that like nobody was even thinking of. Like injecting AI is into how many, you know, books you have behind you to fit in a box, to go into a storage unit or whatever.
Like, that's a, it's a cool, application of modern technology. And it's as you know, it's kind of few and far between with the flood of just. You know, everything that's come in. It's like the real game changer stuff is still cool. Really? Yeah. to see that. So, so tell me about the book. why did you want to write one?
what does it meant to you to kind of write one and just give me a little bit of the story of where it came from.
[00:14:18] Zach: Sure. So I got one here. by the way, send me your address after I'll hook you up with a
[00:14:22] Jay: Oh, yeah, I'd
[00:14:23] Zach: grow
[00:14:23] Jay: that. I love the cover, by the way.
[00:14:25] Zach: Thank you. Yeah. One of our, the, our artists on our team put it together. The name of the book is grow up fast lessons from an AI startup. And I wrote it because I mean, we all just lived through 2023, which was like, it feels like there was a new AI discovery every minute that happened in the past year or so. And I was getting asked a lot of questions from other founder friends that are looking to bring in AI. I had a few friends quit their jobs, start their own companies. We've promoted a few folks on the team into management positions. And I was. A little bit frustrated by the fact that there wasn't a lot of material out there on how to put together an AI startup.
And if you look at my resume, my background, I'm a software engineer, but I'm not an AI engineer. And I think the key is you don't need to be an AI researcher. In a lot of these business models, Your audience probably has companies that maybe you're sitting on reams of data, and data is really what makes AI companies interesting.
It's not just about making new algorithms. And I was just seeing a lot of people counting themselves out. Oh, well, I don't have a PhD in that. So AI is cool, but maybe it's not for me. And I wanted to kind of debunk that a bit. And say, here's our story. Like, here's a guy who married someone who worked at a moving company and was able to turn that into this.
And here's how we did it. Here are the things that we tried that didn't work. And the trade show story is in there. Just getting out there, being able to put yourself in front of customers is pretty key. And, just wanted to kind of open source what we learned and make AI more accessible to people because you don't have to have a PhD to be able to put it to work.
[00:15:53] Jay: I love it. well, I want to hear a little more about,what's next for you. I know you're doing keynote speaking and stuff. What is, What does personal brand mean to you now as you've been in the industry and just kind of been a professional, you know, whatever for however many years, what is, what does your personal brand mean to you now, as opposed to, you know, when you first got started?
[00:16:15] Zach: I think it's important. For pretty much any company to think about this, especially an AI company, because people have pretty crazy perceptions of AI. It's all across the board. Some people are optimistic. I fall into that camp. Some people think of Terminator in 2001, a space odyssey, and they don't have the greatest feelings when you say AI. So I think at the end of the day, it just comes down to trust. And what a personal brand means to me is people don't buy just a tool. They want to understand who am I partnering with? Where are we going? And what are the ideals of the leadership team? What do they, what's the world that they're trying to make? And I mean, the features that people sign up for are important, but I think more bigger than that is, are these the kind of people that I want to work with? And. I think if you do it right, people should get more educated when they read your content and see what you're talking about. They should walk away with a more open mind, things that they can go try to do.
Whenever I do a keynote speech, I always ask myself and try to do focus groups, even if I can. What could someone walk out of this talk and do differently? Like a day after they get back to their office, like don't have it just be like pie in the sky concepts and ideas that are like maybe pump you up and make you feel good, but practically someone should be able to walk away and say, My job now is different because I heard Zach speak. It's like a tough standard to hold yourself to and I don't always, I'm not always able to hit it, but that's like an ideal that I like to shoot for, is give something of value so that the person walks away and says, that was a good use of an hour.
[00:17:46] Jay: I love that. so many speakers are, desperately missing that kind of, Dedication to a core value like that. So I love that. all right, well, let's finish with this. if you could do anything on earth, non business related, and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?
[00:18:04] Zach: I've always been infatuated by accomplishments that have far outlived the person who did it. Like, if you think of the pyramids in Giza, Like, I don't know any of the people there. I don't know their names. I don't know their personalities. But like, you look at what they did and it like, inspires me each day. So I don't know if I would try to build a building, put something in space. But it's like something that could stand the test of time. And once I'm gone, that people could continue to be inspired by it. I think that would be, that'd be pretty interesting.
Unfortunately, as a software engineer, probably everything I do will get deleted.
So I should probably diversify out.
[00:18:41] Jay: Yeah. We'll have to get you some physical, something you can do though. You know, Stay on the ground for a while. That's a great answer though. Jack, I know you have a website, and you're on LinkedIn and everything else. What is, what's the best way for people to reach out to you directly if they, you know, want to talk about something they heard today or just want to reach out to you in general?
[00:18:57] Zach: Sure. Yeah. I'm most active on LinkedIn. So if you go to LinkedIn, look for Zach Rattner, that's the easiest way to find me.
[00:19:03] Jay: Beautiful. and if they want to find out more about YEMBO, how do they do that?
[00:19:07] Zach: Well, if I did my job, right. If you Google YEMBO, we should be search result.
Oh, beautiful. There you go. Right at the top. ai, YEMBO. com, YEMBO. us. they all point to the same place. You can check out YEMBO. All
[00:19:18] Jay: Beautiful. Zach, you're awesome. I love your story. And you guys are an inspiration of really doing some cool stuff in a, a new space, a different space. And I love it. So thank you for being on today and I'll talk to you again soon. All right.
[00:19:30] Zach: right. Sounds great. Thanks Jay. Talk
[00:19:31] Jay: Thanks Zach. See you man.