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The Only Thing That Matters
Welcome to "The Only Things That Matters", where we deconstruct the path to product-market fit of successful founders and extract the principles and frameworks behind their success so that you can apply them too.
The Only Thing That Matters
From side project to software giant with Alexis Fogel (Stonly + Dashlane)
Discover the journey from fun coding project to pioneering password management tool with Alexis Fogel, co-founder of Dashlane and CEO of Stonely.
Alexis kicks things off by sharing how a school project aimed at universal one-click purchases evolved into a leading password manager and digital wallet, thanks to invaluable user feedback and a few key pivots.
Learn from Alexis's experiences moving from B2C to B2B, and the strategic shifts that have played a crucial role in both Dashlane’s and Stonely’s successes.
Alexis reveals the compelling story behind Dashlane's rise, from its early challenges with form filling to its branding as a trusted password manager.
Uncover the pivotal moments, including media recognition by the New York Times, that shaped Dashlane’s trajectory and led to its expansion into the B2B space.
Alexis also delves into the nuances of marketing and funding strategies, offering tips on leveraging press coverage and navigating the complexities of customer acquisition.
In the latter part of our episode, Alexis discusses his transition to founding Stonely, a company focused on automating and personalizing customer support.
He provides a thoughtful exploration of the satisfaction derived from creating something new, the importance of timing in raising funds, and the strategic decisions behind bootstrapping versus early investment.
I would love to tell you that I've done 200 interviews and that I really did that the right way. The truth is, at that point, when I left Dashlane, I started coding this for fun, and so I was not thinking really about turning it into a huge business or anything. I started with my network, reaching out to people and showing them what I had built. So this is also how the product really evolved into a platform, because I was showing what I did and they were like, okay, that's pretty cool, how can I use it? And it was like I don't know how do you want to use it? And having this kind of discovery at this moment, based on what I have built, is how I evaluated it.
Speaker 1:I think that could have been a scenario in which I had built that and no one would use it, and I would have stopped after six months and would have been fine. I would have had a ton of fun, by the way, because I went back to coding with that. I had not coded for a long time, so that was a fun part as well.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone. This is Ariel Camus, and this is the Only Thing that Matters the podcast where I interview successful founders to deconstruct their path to product market fit and to extract the principles and the frameworks behind their success. My guest today is Alexis Vogel, the co-founder and CEO of Stonely. Stonely is changing the game in personalizing and automating customer support processes. They have raised $25 million and they work with big names like King, personio and Global. Before Stonely, alexis co-founded Dashlane, one of the world's top password managers, and helped raise over $160 million while growing it to millions of users worldwide. In this episode, we chat about Alexis' journey with Dashlane and Stonely, the role of AI and the challenges of moving from B2C to B2B. We also dig into his tips on raising funds, finding product market fit and keeping innovation alive in a competitive market. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did and without further ado, alexis Fogel. Alexis, thank you so much for being in the podcast. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Well, you have a few things in common with me, like both European founders. But also we both started a company around 2010,. A new company around 2020. You know, it's like 10 years apart. We also happen to have the same lead investor in our Series A. That's how we initially met and it's been super fun to share each other's journey. But I think today is the day to share with more people, to share each other's journey. But I think today is the day to share with more people and, as you know, I try to focus a lot on the very early days of these companies. That would start hoping that we can help other entrepreneurs like us avoid some of the mistakes or learn from some of our own lessons. And you first built a company that I think is quite epic I mean, a lot of people know it and it's Dashlane. Now you're working on Stonely very different products, but I'm sure there will be some kind of connection there that I want to get there. But let's start in the past. You started Dashlane. Was it like 2009 or around then?
Speaker 1:Yeah, 2008. I started working on it, yeah.
Speaker 2:All right, 2008. All right, I'd love to hear that story. I I tried to find it online and I couldn't find the origin story of dash lane. Uh, I found some information that started in like 2010, 2011. Maybe you launched back then like, yeah, I want to go back to the 2008. Um, what were you? How did you come up with the idea? And then, of course, if you can share a little bit what Dashlane is in case someone doesn't know. Yeah, of course, of course.
Speaker 1:So, to start by this, I actually am a password manager in Digital Wallet. The whole idea is that you save information in it and you don't have to type it anywhere when you are on the web or in a mobile app, and everything is very secure. Everything is synced, so it kind of makes your life easier. And you know when we started? We started pretty young, we were still at school. The reason you don't find anything is that I think for a long time, it's not that we were ashamed, but it took us some time to release our first product, and so every time we were talking about it, we were talking about when we launched as kind of the original date, so that it doesn't feel it's an old company with a product that's just shipped. What was the year when you launched? We launched really publicly in 2011.
Speaker 2:When you launched. We launched really publicly in 2011. Okay, so like three years after you started working on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, two, three years between when we started working on it and when we launched. But the thing is that we started we are still at school, so we are finishing our studies, and so it was kind of a part of a school project. We knew that we wanted to make it a company, but it was part of a school project. And it actually started with Bernardo Liotto, who was the founder of Business Object and now is a general partner at Balderton. But at this moment, basically, he had just sold Business Object and was not yet a partner at Balderton, and he was an alumni of our school engineering school and so he had this project about automating everything online, basically saying, hey, when I should buy something, I shouldn't have to go through all this form and everything. Everything should be one click, like the one click of amazon, but universal, which was kind of a kind of the idea. And so we were students, we started working on that idea with him and he said, hey, if you, if you prove me that there is business, that you're the right person, I'm happy to, uh, to start this with you and to invest in at the beginning. So this is how it started. And so you see, it's funny because it's really started as a broad idea of saying I'm going to do universal one-click purchase type of product and we ended up doing a personal manager. And it took us a long time to admit that we were doing a personal manager because at the beginning it was like hey, we are doing a personal assistant assistant, something that can have all your information and automate actions uh, online for you.
Speaker 1:We developed a tech that was uh for this, like analyzing web pages, being able to automate navigation, um, and it never worked. It never worked. It never worked for two reasons First, it's very hard to make it universal because the web is so complicated and there was no AI at that moment, so it was really about understanding in-page where you need to click and all this. And second of all, from a customer standpoint, having something that is automating everything for you is actually kind of scary again, especially at that time.
Speaker 1:And what we realized is that to some extent, what really was painful for people was not that much the navigation, but it was more the form feeling in general. So, because we had built that big technology to analyze everything on page, we had actually a very, very powerful semantic engine that was allowing us to do things with high quality in terms of performances, and so, little by little, we focused on okay, what is the major endpoint for users? And it's really about filling forms At some point, what are the forms that you are filling in the most Passwords? And so that's how we came to build it.
Speaker 2:Was there a moment in that journey where you were kind of refusing to admit that all you had to do to potentially build something successful was to focus on one very tiny piece of the whole idea you had?
Speaker 1:It took us a very, very long time, because you know like even now, when I introduce it to you, I said it's a password management and digital wallet. Because you still have this idea about yeah, okay, it's password, but it's not just password. You don't have to enter any payment information or any address. We can autofill everything.
Speaker 1:But from an acquisition standpoint, if you're in a room of people, actually when I was doing conferences at that time, I was asking people who had an issue with filling up a credit card recently and you know some people were raising their hand saying yeah, and I say okay, who forgot a password, clicked on the forgot password link in the last six months and everybody was like whoosh, and so it's just the way people are thinking about it is much more related to password. There is really that thing about oh, I need to remember the password and all this. That is critical From an acquisition standpoint. I think it really really changed when press started to talk about us a lot more and they always described us as a password manager. At some point I say you know, I mean at some point, this is how people are talking about us. This is probably how we should talk about us as well.
Speaker 2:That is fascinating. So basically, it was not you as a team that decided we are X. It's that the media started describing you, which I imagine followed what users were probably telling each other what Dashlane was right. They were already saying it's a password manager and the media started saying that and just said like okay, maybe that's what we are.
Speaker 1:Basically, if you think about metrics and how your journey with Dashlane starts, you start with password. You enter a password, you save your password, then, if you are hooked, usually you start generating passwords with Dashlane, so you don't know your password anymore. Dashlane is taking care of it for you High level of trust and then you start using it for other type of information addresses, payment information but I think it helps having a stickier product, but it does not help with acquisition. With acquisition, it's really about password, because this is the pain that we are solving. And now, by the way, dash and is also a lot more used as a B2B product for companies to be able to share passwords and to manage passwords inside your company. You know, this is really focused on the passwords a lot more than it is on the other personal information.
Speaker 1:Now, if you ask me, I still believe that it would be very beneficial for the world to have kind of this digital identity provider like dash then, where you could start all your in from personal information and that you could transmit the way you want to different services without having to type the information all the time. And all this, and one thing that is very important, you could tell me like well, but somehow it's Apple Pay or something like this. The difference is that Dashlane is a zero-knowledge architecture, so nobody at Dashlane knows anything about you. We don't store anything that we can access, and so the whole thing is that when you have something like Dashlane, you have a tool that belongs to you, data that belongs to you, and you can use it the way you want. You show the reason. It's not like. Dashlane is not taking a cut of your payment when you're using it to fill in a credit card. It's just part of the flow.
Speaker 2:I feel like we could probably talk about password and identity management for an hour. It's wild that you started this company in around 2010, 2011, and it's 2024, and we're still going nuts with passwords and with passkeys and all this new technology. There seems to be some promising future. It's still not there. I still struggle with passwords every single day.
Speaker 1:And Dashen is very involved in Passkeys, by the way and this is our vision of saying hey, you've got something that is a lot more universal and, if you want something funny, actually when we started Dashen, there was 10 years before there was already a quote from Bill Gates saying passwords is dead. Nobody will ever type a password on the web in a couple of years. So it is a de facto standard. It's cheap, it's anonymous, it's very hard to replace. It's like your keyboard. Why your keyboard is a QWERTY keyboard, it's not because it's very hard to replace. It's like your keyboard. Why your keyboard is a qwerty keyboard, it's not because it's more powerful, it's just because this is the way it is and everybody is used to to use that, and so you know the the story of it is irrelevant, it's just the way it is. It's de facto standard today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the cost of changing there is super high, probably even higher for the qwerty, like keyboard, but also for pausa, I mean, if you have to change all the passwords and all the platforms, like it takes forever.
Speaker 2:But I also feel like we're going in the not necessarily in the opposite direction. Like we are gaining more security with, like you know, two-factor authentication, all this stuff, but at the same time we're adding more steps and more complexity and it's just like annoying, like of course, like you know you, you left uh dash lanes a few years ago, which we can talk about, but you clearly still have a lot of passion for the company that keeps running and it's an amazing business. But do you think there is new opportunities for new players in the market? Now there seems to be some kind of trust issues with some companies like LastPass having security breaches. There seems to be promising technology with Passkey. There seems to be definitely new opportunities with AI. Is there like a? You know, when we ask or when we talk to investors, they always ask you know the why? Now, why does this business make?
Speaker 1:sense now.
Speaker 2:Is there anything in this space that makes sense right now?
Speaker 1:So first of all, I think there are always things that are making sense at any moment. I think technologies in AI is going to allow automates a lot more. We had at some point at Dash and I don't know if you have that something called password changer where you could in one click, change your passwords. I think this is something that can be a lot more relevant with AI, to be able to optimize this. The trust is very important. So Dashend has never been breached. What happened to LastPass never happened to Dashend, and you know it's funny because when I was at Dashend, when it was happening to LastPass, we really kept silent about it because for us it was damaging the whole industry. You lose trust in password managers in general, but if you go on the Wikipedia page of LastPass, it's basically breach after breach, after breach after breach, and I think now we are at the point where they are damaging themselves and not the industry. Now, if you look at other competitors of Dash and like 1Password, they've not been pretty same and they're a very serious company, and so I think that doing things the right way is very important. The trust is very important.
Speaker 1:It's very hard to build a comprehensive product when you're thinking about password because, as you said, it's not just password, it's also two-f. You're also to factor authentication. There's the whole thinking process between your different devices. There is the fact that you need to work on every platform to have something that is really relevant. So you've got the sharing also. That is very hard. So I think there are new opportunities.
Speaker 1:I think that incumbents if we can talk about Dashlane as an incumbent I think they still have a lot of value because if they are able to adapt the new technologies like that's why they invest a lot in Passkey then what they have is that they can manage a little bit of everything and they can also take care of all the long tail. And you know, one of the issues with passwords is that usually when you get hacked, it's not because Gmail got hacked, it's because a random website you subscribed five years ago and you use the same password that you're using somewhere got hacked and they got access to your password by this way and then they are able to access something else. Having something that can help with the long tail is actually very important to secure your most important accounts.
Speaker 2:Makes sense and I can see why the complexity, both from a security point of view but also from having to have this multi-platform support, can be an important mode for the incumbents and make it a little bit harder for the new players convince and make it a little bit harder for the new players.
Speaker 1:Now to be fully transparent with you. I don't participate anymore to any strategy at Dashlane, so maybe everything I'm telling you right now there are some folks at Dashlane that will watch that and say, like bullshit. That's my view of how to show.
Speaker 2:In any case, I mean Dashlane is a company that has raised more than $160 million through a lot of rounds. You left in 2018, I think it's been six years Exactly. I don't think anyone will hold you accountable for some of the more recent information.
Speaker 1:I did my best when I was there.
Speaker 2:That's what I want to talk about. I think it's interesting you're saying, hey, the moat is to be in all these platforms, but at the same time, I have a strong intuition that, as a product leader, you won't disagree with me saying that if you try to compete by doing a lot of things from the beginning, that's probably going to be a recipe for failure. So how did you start in a world where maybe there wasn't as much competition? And was it that that gave you time to kind of like build a little bit of the multi-platform support? Like, where did you start? How did the you know initial customers like um, um, took the value that you were providing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so really, we started with one platform. We had the Mac version and it was desktop because at that moment, you know, we had mobile. Mobile was starting to be out, but people were not using mobile as much as they are now, and so what was very important to them was now I can access my accounts online, and so this is what we started doing and we really. The first two things that were very important for us was the technology to be able to fill in form automatically, because that was, again, this is something where you are analyzing the page and you are understanding what is on the page to be able to fill in the right information. And again, you know you can have a password field, but sometimes you're in a registration mode, sometimes in your logging mode, so you should not have the same actions. If you ask, give me your card number, the card number can be, you know, a social security card number or a payment card number, and you cannot afford to put the wrong information.
Speaker 1:There is a lot of technology there that is involved, so there was that. The other one was security. On security, we actually did something that is is patented today is uh in terms of the, the zero knowledge architecture that we've built that allows you to transfer information from one device to another without the server knowing what is this information. Basically, everything is always decrypted locally and there are different ways of doing it. The way we had done it was pretty innovative back in the day.
Speaker 2:Ah, that makes sense, right, if you don't want to have the information in the server, but you still have to pass it. I can see how there's a lot of complexity here and maybe I want to do an exercise with you here. Let's assume that we were to start. We are super frustrated with passwords and we decide to start a company to fix that problem. I'm not saying that's a good idea. I can see why there are many reasons for that not to be necessarily a good idea right now. But from a product building point of view, how will you go about prioritizing where to start? Because back then maybe there wasn't as much competition, maybe you could afford something just in Windows. Probably, if you were to do this just for Windows or just for Mac today, it wouldn't be enough. I suspect customers will say, no, I also need it on my phone. How will you do that? As a founder, as a product leader? How would you prioritize? Where will you start here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think today there are many libraries that are open source, that we could reuse for that technology to save a lot of time, and so what I would do is I would try to see what is out there, what I can reuse and how I can build differentiation in my product. I would look at, basically, what's missing in the market that is not solved by Dashlane, one password or another. Do something that is not just a copycat, but that can be like hey, yeah, sure, here's where you should choose us instead of them. So, yeah, probably I would try. If I was looking at uh now I would say, okay, what is uh, am I able to do with the new technologies now that we're not able before and that they are not going to adopt right now because you know they have their whole things to support? So probably I will look at this and I will try to find something that might be small but that can be very uh, uh differentiative makes sense.
Speaker 2:So you will still have to build the multi-platform support to a certain extent, but that part you will like copy. You know, reuse as much as possible, yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't think you get anything that is today very differentiative about the UI itself on an app. I think at some point you're going to display your passwords and things like this. There are also many things that, thanks to companies like Dashlane, like One Password, have evolved. We've worked a lot with Apple back in the day so that now you can auto-fill your passwords from Dashlane in an application on an iOS device. It was blocked by Apple in the past and, you know, while our kind of tools started to gain traction and market shares, we were able to have a seat at the table and have the discussion about this, but now this is available for everyone, so this you don't have to work on, so you can save a lot of time by this. So you need to see what's the most important and I would also, of course, look at what is my first market so that I build things for a specific market. Maybe I don't, maybe not everyone needs everything.
Speaker 2:Makes total sense right. Like if you don't know for whom you're building this one, it's really gonna be really hard to communicate it, but also it's gonna be much harder to find the people to differentiate yourself. So, like it makes sense Talking about that, how did you find the first customers for like Dashlane? How was growth in the first few years?
Speaker 1:Yeah, at the beginning it really started with press. That's basically. We are doing a new tool. I think at that point people were talking a lot more about new products maybe than now. I don't know, maybe it's still happening now and I'm just not in the B2C market.
Speaker 2:I think it's happening even more now, except that there are so many people building new products that I think it's really hard to make some noise that someone will listen to.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know you would say press does not do anything because it's just like a pick, but it can be part of your strategy when you actually have things to say a lot. And there were a lot of breaches security breaches and so we were able to insert ourselves into the dynamic of, hey, something is happening here and there and there. And then again, one thing that really changed probably the trajectory of the company is actually one article from David Pogue. David Pogue was the editorialist for Tech at the New York Times and we didn't know about him, but he wrote an amazing piece of why you should use Dashland and why it was the the best thing that you should do if you are working with computers and phone. And you know that just happened and that changed everything, because then everybody that was looking at the New York Times then they started writing also reviews about it, talking more about the space and all this, and so that was something that really mattered.
Speaker 1:And then, you know, at that point we started something that was a big, big change for us. At the beginning. Dashnet was free and we started launching our premium offer at that moment, so we started having money and so we were able then to pay for acquisition. So we started doing paid acquisition and worked a lot on this. So, combination of inbound marketing, paid acquisition and press was still PR was still a biggie for us because, again, we were doing surveys that we were sending to press.
Speaker 1:Every time we had something new we were always trying to do. You know, every time there was a new feature on the phone, for instance, every time there was WWDC, we were trying to contact press about hey, here's what you can do with the new things on Apple that you can do with Dashlane, do with the new things on apple that you can do with dashland. So, uh, you know you had, for instance, when there was the first touch id, we reached out and said, hey, look, how you can use touch id now to log into your uh, different apps on ios, things like this that were always a way to talk about us I think that's one of the probably the only ways for press to work.
Speaker 2:It's if you're really good at finding the hooks. The hooks not for you, the hooks for exactly the audience, the readers of that, the media outlet and uh and security breaches is something that people talk about yes, yes, but you have to be always something that was good it was.
Speaker 1:We are running something every year where we have the top 10 most infamous examples of people losing their passwords, or stories that people talked about like a president that was having a post-it behind them with a password or something like this when they were filmed on camera. We had also we were testing actually, password policies from websites to say, okay, here are the websites that really care about your passwords and those who don't, so things like this.
Speaker 2:They were pretty good and that's pretty cool because it's a topic that sparked some kind of like like you know, hate for passwords or, like you know, funny stories for, like you know, poor management of passwords. I can can see why that was an interesting approach. And also I was thinking did you end up raising some initial seed funding Because you were not making revenue at the beginning? Did you raise some money?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean it's funny because we raised actually all Series A with a product that was not making any money, that had no business model, and actually that's the reason why we were raised in the US. In Europe at that time we were not able to raise money with this and Roventure and Firstmark Capital. They invested in our Series A and they invested on the technology and on the vision that, yeah, identity is going to be more and more important on the web. So they have something that seems to be a very good product and they are in a space that seems to be a very important one.
Speaker 2:But I imagine you started with press before the Series A in 2011,. Right, yes, we had a little bit, not that much, to be honest. Okay, now I was wondering if, when you don't have as much capital, right, you have to be more resourceful right and you don't have capital. All you have is your time, and with time there's stuff that you can do, like, for example, pr where it's doing ads. If you don't have a lot of funding, it's just like very difficult.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Also. I mean, things were cheaper at that time. Pay acquisition was cheaper as well.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. But also funding rounds were much smaller. I remember a Series A of like $1.5 million. $2 million was already a very decent Series A.
Speaker 1:Yours was significantly large, it was 5 million and it was a pretty high number of 4 series A at that time.
Speaker 2:Today, you know if you do a seed of 5 million people are like, oh yeah, good for you, that's good, that's good, yeah, I know, and it's interesting because, like, a lot of things have gone cheaper in some ways, like, for example, there is so much technology to reuse and to use like we were saying before, a lot of open source libraries but I feel like customer acquisition has become much more complex and expensive because both advertising is more expensive but also at least from my perception there's a lot more competition, a lot more entrepreneurs and products being launched.
Speaker 2:Some people are really good at building audiences audiences and some people are not as good. So, like, unless you develop that skill or you have a lot of capital, it can be, can be tough at the beginning. Um, for you, I can see like and it's funny, like this was the first way we actually acquired our like with my first company. It was around the same time. It was a mobile app and we got to around a million users and I would say the million users was a combination of pr to build kind of the spikes that helped us build the brand but also to help us build the position in the apple store and then that created the like loop for the organic traffic uh, to go to the App Store and find us at the top and then brought a lot of the inbound.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the bleeding basically, and that was the whole strategy at some point where you were launching some ops so that you could be on top of the App Store, because when you are there, then basically things were coming in. For us, for instance, one thing that had been very important was getting editor choice both on the Play Store and on the App Store, because then you are put in front of people all the time. Something, by the way, we are suffering from a competition standpoint is that one password was really close from Apple and Apple was for a long time putting one passwordword a lot more prominently on the app store.
Speaker 2:I remember that and my guess as an outsider was probably that design had something to do there. I feel like they were very obsessed about great design, which, if you look at competitors like LastPass, you can see why that would give you an edge, right? If you look at competitors like LastPass.
Speaker 1:You can see why that will give you an edge, right? So, on top of the design, it's not only design, it's also being played by Apple's rules and there is something that, because you can do a great design, but if you don't use the app guidelines, they won't put you in front because that's not what they want to promote, I mean, except if you have something that is truly amazing. But yeah, I agree, I agree. Yeah, lastpass, they were playing in other directions. They were really like okay, let's do a lot for cheap and trying to get there as fast as possible.
Speaker 2:I. I was also thinking in terms of acquiring users in a more organic way. It was New York Times that said the article that was written. I think one huge advantage of a product like Dashlane is that every person that uses a computer needs it or, in theory, will need it, and not only that, they need it every single day of their lives when they work with a computer or with a phone right.
Speaker 2:Like my first company, one of the biggest challenges we had was that it was very seasonal. It was like a travel type of product. So while it was consumer and a lot of people travel people only travel like once, twice a year, three times, and that made staying top of mind really hard and having recurring revenue being really high I can see why something that's used every single day, of course, is more likely to have competition as well. But if you combine this daily usage, the importance of passwords and your security, with new technologies and complex technology at a time that was needed to enter into the market, that can be an interesting place to start. I can also imagine being the naivete of like being you know fresh grads from you know saying like well, you know, we'll just like build it right, and it can't be that hard. And then, like three years later, it's when you realize I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I knew nothing about nothing. So I think for me I was almost considering it as a kind of your last internship before you get to somewhere. I'm like, okay, it's a good experience, no matter what, so let's do it. I was lucky I had two co-founders that were very, very smart and that were very different. The three of us we met at school. We were not friends. Before starting really begun that friendship, uh, starting the, uh the company and uh, yeah, I've been, I've been very lucky, uh, to have them around as well how?
Speaker 2:how did you connect, like if you were not like like really good friends? Uh, by the time you started the company, what was the thing that brought you together at the moment? That brought you together? Entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:We wanted to start something. Uh, we at our school there were a um, there was an entrepreneurship course or something, and so we had to start a project. And we decided to start a project together and we were actually five at the beginning and we ended up continuing three of us, and I think one thing that is. So we are very different, as I said, very different types of people, but we had common values and that made the discussions always easier, because even when we disagreed which happened a lot we were always, when they are fighting about the like, what was behind your mind? It was always about the problem that is at stake. So we could have like strong arguments and then go for a beer and just be like oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, I respect you as a person and I understand we just disagree and that's fine. So, yeah, that was cool.
Speaker 2:Did you know about this before you decided to work together? Or it was something you found out and you were just lucky that?
Speaker 1:you had. I think it's a bit of both. I think we could feel at that point that, yeah, you know these people. They seem to be nice people and to have the same value as I have, but I had no proof of it. You know, and I think you know, you see, that a lot in companies that are failing because there is a disconnect between the founders or you know they are splitting, I mean, yeah, again, we've been very lucky.
Speaker 1:And today I mean, so there's still one that is still at Dashen and to that left and we're living in different places and everything, but we still are very much in contact and I mean they are part of who I am today and I'm still very, very grateful for everything we've done together. So, yeah, no, it's a big plus in my experience at Dashen, in general, people have been a big plus. I mean I've met a lot of great people. I'm happy about how people left with the idea that at least when I was there again, I kind of took for what it is now. But when I was there, I think people were. They were happy about what they were doing, but they were also happy about the connections that there was in the company. It was a nice feeling, I think.
Speaker 2:That's so important, and I guess Dashlane is an example of a successful company At least you know it's still going strong today.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But most startups don't end up there. Company, at least you know it's still going strong today, yeah, but most startups don't end up there. They, you know, end up in like failure, whatever that means. But I've always have like the idea or the belief that if you've enjoyed the journey, you know that's not failure, like it can be a failure as a business, but as an investment of your time. If you've enjoyed what you did and a big part of that is people then that is a success and to me that's an important thing because as entrepreneurs we put so much risk, we take so much risk by starting just one company and giving it all during like so many years, that if your only definition of success is I need to have a big exit, sell the company, go public, something like that then most likely it's a very risky bet. But if you put it on creating a great culture, a great team, choosing the right co-founders, people that you enjoy working with, that is a much safer bet and probably a much wiser choice for life.
Speaker 1:It's true though I think I'm talking about this in retrospect but when I started it, so first of all, when I started it again, startups were not that famous, so all this idea about big exits and everything was not there.
Speaker 1:I think for me it was more a question of working on something I enjoyed, and before this, I had done an internship in a consulting firm and I was very unhappy. I was like, okay, that's not going to be my life for the next 40 years I'm going to die before that. And so I think, for me, entrepreneurship was more of a way to find a different path for a different career and everything that happens with people. I think I realized that after, and you know, today, for instance, one thing I'm very proud of is looking at the career path of the people that have joined Stony when they were very junior. You know people that I hired as interns that are now chief protocol officers of company or entrepreneurs themselves. I mean, that is a big, big plus for me, and you know I was hearing a podcast interviewing someone that was at Dash, and at that time they was talking about this and what they learned at Dash, and you know I felt very proud of this and so, yeah, it's good things, I guess.
Speaker 2:That is, I can share that feeling From the first company. Then after that I've had people working at Meta, people working at Amazon, and seeing the growth has been like an amazing joy in my life. And I think you know they say that starting a company is like doing an MBA on steroids for founders. But I feel like for a lot of the team members, the speed at which you have to learn to survive this journey it's super intense. And I've had the experience of after that, going to work for a company where I was not the founder, like a larger company, and thinking like, well, first of all, I don't enjoy it as much, but secondly, I can learn and I can move so fast compared to almost everyone else because I come from such a high-intensity environment. And that is, I think, an experience that so many people could benefit from. And again we're talking about the definition of success If you spend a few years of your life learning at this speed, even if financially it's not the big hit, I feel like for the future, it will have a huge impact on your life. Yeah, yeah, totally. And you started talking about some people. That has been part of Stonely and I think this maybe makes for a good transition.
Speaker 2:Talking about transition, you left Dashlane, I think in 2018, more or less Yep. How did that happen? So that was getting into learning about like your new company yeah.
Speaker 1:So, um, I left dash and everything was going well. Um and uh and I think that's one of the reason, uh, I left. I I couldn't have left action when things were tough, and at that point we were I mean, everything was, uh, was okay on the company front. So I was like, okay, I've done this and it works and and that's cool.
Speaker 1:I think, when I left, I had the feeling that the like, the challenges for the company were going to be less on the product side and more on the distribution and go to market side, which I'm not saying that it's true, but that's the feeling I had back in the day, and I wanted to start something fresh, working a lot on the product, on the core product, because when you have a product that is LG and all, you've got a lot of the product world.
Speaker 1:That is about optimization, that is about how you manage the retention, how you will push the right message at the right time, and I think we wanted to work at that point more on innovation, and so that was one of the things that was very important to me. Also, one thing is that I started Dashen when I was at school and so, as I said, I had no experience, and I think at some point it was like OK, can I? If I build a company today, can I do something better because I've got a bit more experience? I think also the fact that we had recruited a CEO at Dashen and so I wanted at some point to start something and do it my way, even though I learned a lot from that CEO and I'm also very grateful for everything that he told me. But yeah, at some point, I think you know, I wanted to have a reset and so that's what I did.
Speaker 2:What were some of the metrics at the time you left in terms of like revenue, number of people, number of customers the metrics at the time you left in terms of like revenue, number of people, number of customers.
Speaker 1:So I think we are 150 in the company. I don't remember in terms of AR, but we were probably around 30, 40 million in AR and around maybe 15 million in terms of around maybe 15 million in terms of 10 to 15 million in terms of users. So, yeah, you know, it was already a lot more than anything I had expected when I started.
Speaker 2:Not a bad. You know place or moment or you know accomplishment to leave behind. So yeah, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:And, as I said, you know I was happy and also I thought. One thing also I saw is that I thought the company could really be successful without me. I think that was something that was important as well. I could see how someone else having also different ideas about a product, bringing something new, could actually be something good for the company.
Speaker 2:Makes total sense and I mean there is a reason I started this podcast and it's that. The zero to one stage. It's freaking fun, right. Like that innovation, the fact that you can create from like nothing something that suddenly helps people, like it's super powerful, and I can understand why you wanted more and more of that. So, like, tell me, like what is Stonely and how did the idea, how did you come up with it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so Stonely is a platform. It's a knowledge platform for customer service that is basically automating customer service. And it really started, as I was at Dashlane, with how do you scale your support when you start having 15 million users? And you know those 15 million? They are not the same. They are using your tool on different platforms. They are going to be more or less tech savvy and they are going to maybe use it professionally or personally, so plenty of different use cases.
Speaker 1:And so I was at that point. I was thinking how can I build a better product in terms of support? And I wanted to improve our help center and have something that would be a lot more dynamic, a lot more personalized, that would adapt to the people, and so I wanted to build that internally at Dashlane. But, as the chief product officer of the company, I couldn't convince myself that I should work on this versus the core product, and I was looking for tools to do that and didn't find any. And I was like, okay, well, if there is no tool and there is a need and I can feel that need, maybe there is something to do.
Speaker 1:And so really at the beginning, I really wanted to find to build something simple. That will be just how can you create adaptive contents. So, instead of pushing the same five-page long articles to your customers, how you can build something that is more adaptive to them. And that's how the idea came, and from this it evolved, from that core functionality that is still the core functionality of Sony, which is basically you can create interactive decision trees, like guides, that are going to be adaptive depending on who is seeing it, what's their profile, and automating getting the right information to them right away. But now there's a whole platform around it how you distribute it, how you create a knowledge base, how you distribute it inside your app, mobile or web applications, how you segment and target the right people, of course. Now how you build this with AI so that every time someone has a question, they can type a question in natural language and they've got not only the right answer but really the right resolution process, because sometimes it's not just another.
Speaker 1:You know you'd say something does not work. Uh, I mean, the answer can just be oh yeah, too bad, have you tried this? But it can also be okay. Here is how we are going to help you solve your issue. We have some information about you, so we know in what situation you are Now let's go through troubleshooting with you.
Speaker 1:So basically adapting these experiences for the people, also doing proactive support. So basically being in a situation where, hey, I'm not going to wait for people to have issues and contact me. I know where they are going to struggle, so when I've got a complicated form to fill or things like this, I can push the right help at the right moment for the right person. So all these things is how, to some extent, you automate more of your customer service. We also have something for agents, so basically how your agents can automate some tasks so that, instead of having to change things in your back office, you can focus on what matters, which is the relationship with the people and the problems that are the most complicated All the time. They can be solved automatically. They should be solved automatically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, makes sense, and you mentioned that at Dashlane you saw the problem, so you were your own customer in some way, even though you built it after you left. Was Dashlane the first client or not? But also, how did you validate that this problem that you were facing was a problem that was worth solving for other companies and building a business around Was just Dashlane? Knowing that you were a user, was that enough? Or you had to go and talk to a lot of other companies and building a business around Was just Dashlane, like knowing that you were a user, was that enough? Or you had to, like, go and talk to a lot of other companies to see if you were not an outlier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would love to tell you that I've done 200 interviews and that I really did that the right way. The truth is, at that point, when I left Dashlane, I started coding this for fun and so I was not thinking really about like turning it into a huge business or anything. It's only when it was really that, of course, dashlane used it. But then I started with my network, reaching out to people and showing them what I had built. So it was really an MVP, but this is when I started doing it.
Speaker 1:So, basically, my first validation were my first customers that were using it for this, and this is also how the product really evolved into a platform, because I was showing what I did and they were like, ok, that's very cool, how can I use it? And I was like I don't know, know, how do you want to use it? And having this kind of discovery at this moment, based on what I have built, is, uh, is how I validated it. I think that could have been a scenario in which I had built that and, you know, no one would use it, and I would have stopped after uh, after six months, and would have been fine. I would have had a ton of fun, by the way, because I went back to coding with that. I had not coded for a long time, so that was a fun part as well.
Speaker 2:Did you put a team together? Did you raise any money?
Speaker 1:or it was just you having fun building things on your own and then suddenly a few people wanted more of that yeah, so I started by myself on the coded side and I had a my co-founder in poland that was doing the design, and very soon I hired two people one back-end engineer and one front-end engineer, so we were four, and at the beginning it was my money.
Speaker 2:When you say soon we hire, at which point?
Speaker 1:I started coding it in April and the back-end engineer he joined in July part-time and September full-time and september full-time had you had.
Speaker 2:You had some of these companies already telling you hey, how can I try that? Or was that you hire? And then you got to that point yeah, no, I hired first, okay okay, but that was my money.
Speaker 1:So you know, it was uh, it was my, my project. And you know, I uh, I basically put 50k and it was like, okay, I'm going to put 50k and try to use this 50k to go to the first stage. And so we went there. And when we went there and had a couple of customers, then we we did a small precede with some business angels, uh people I knew and we raised uh, not that much actually, I think like 400, and with 400K it was enough to really launch the product. We did a product hunt. We were product of the month. So a lot of you know you're product of the month on product hunt. You've got a lot of people reaching out to you saying, hey, what's this about? And so, and then we were able to grow like this.
Speaker 2:First, they say money doesn't buy happiness, but it certainly can help you start companies without having to raise money, right, yeah, I mean at.
Speaker 1:Dashlane.
Speaker 1:I had no money when I started Dashlane and there's someone that invested.
Speaker 1:But the difference I'm going to be very transparent here for everyone that listens there the big difference is that I've got a lot more shares in stolen than I have in dashing because I had no money at the beginning and so, uh, basically most of the equity it was from the uh, it was from bernard was having, uh, a bit of equity, but I also had a salary because I had no money. So I needed you know, I needed to sell some money right away, and my co-founders, they had loans, so they had to pay their loans, and so this is something that you need to take into account as well when you are building a startup. When I built Stony, I had more money I had not cashed out from Dashlane, but I had some money that I had saved before, and so I was able to start it with uh with my own money, knowing that this is at the beginning that you get diluted the most. So if you believe in what you are doing, that's the uh makes sense to to invest a bit make sort of sense.
Speaker 2:so what you're saying is, if you raise money too early, you're going to do it probably at a much lower valuation, so the valuation will be much higher for the little money that you will raise.
Speaker 1:I'm saying that, but I'm not saying it's a problem. For instance, it's funny because I remember some people telling me like, are you not disappointed that you don't have more shares at Dashlane? And you know I mean at that today, without Dashlane I would have not done what I'm doing now and all this and it's all part of the story. So my take is that, at any rate, if you start thinking about right away, about, yeah, all the shares and everything, I don't think this is what is going to really matter for you At some point, if something is a big success there's money for everyone.
Speaker 2:If it's not, there's money for no one. Yeah, absolutely. They say right, much better to have a small slice of a very large cake than the whole cake. When it's really small, I don't know if it's better or not.
Speaker 1:To be honest, I think you should make the right choice depending on where you are financially, personally and whatever works, career, the importance of the equity, of what could be useful when you grow. And so at that point, because I had the ability financially to bootstrap and because I had that knowledge, that's the way I decided to do it that knowledge.
Speaker 2:That's the way I decided to do it what, what will have you done? Or if someone is listening who is like a first-time entrepreneur they're young, didn't have a lot of savings, but they had found this same opportunity helping with customer. You know service like how will you do it if you didn't have any money?
Speaker 1:so, first of all, if you are a young entrepreneur, you also don't have a, probably don't have a family yet, and you, you know I, one big thing that you have, a big advantage when you are young, is that you know you can even, as I said, you can consider it as the end of your studies to some extent. Consider it as the end of your studies to some extent you can have a loan and you can say whatever you get you're going to put maybe one year or two years before you can have like a small amount of salary or something like this, or raise money and things like this. So during that moment, even if you don't have a lot of money, try to find co-founders so that also you're not alone. If you are alone and you don't have any money, then everything. Find co-founders, so that's also you're not alone. If you are alone and you don't have any money, then everything is on you.
Speaker 1:I think it's really hard. If you've got, if you are three, you start. There are three people nobody's paying themselves at the beginning, but three people you can already achieve a lot and so that's already something that you can start. Then it's up to you. I mean, there is this whole debate about should you raise money or not? My take is that it's again a very personal decision, depending on what you can afford. If you cannot afford to build a company by yourself, I think starting Raising money with former entrepreneurs is very good.
Speaker 1:You start with people that know what you are going through. You don't need to raise $5 million right away. You can raise a little bit and see how it goes and then, if it goes well, then you've got two solutions. Either you optimize to little by little, be cash flow positive and grow like this, you want a space that requires more investments, or you want to go faster, or you've got the opportunity, or you're okay with the duration. It's up to you and you decide to do it. My take is take it one step at a time. What is for sure is that what is going to matter at the beginning is the vision of the story, the quality of what you've built, the quality of the team, so you should focus on this first yeah, makes total sense.
Speaker 2:Um, in the case of stonely, you went from building a b2c company dash lane that eventually started doing b2b as well, to building like a pure b2b company. Um, in which ways was that different? For example, we were talking before about like user acquisition and how you know, press was super important. There was inbounds and ads. How was that different? Ads only, and and how. You know what was the? What were the lessons learned there and how did you find the first few customers?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think it's a. It's very, very, very different. Uh, so I don't, I don't know know if it's what is the most different, if this is because you are doing B2B or because you are doing PLG or not, because at some point Can you explain what PLG is for those that don't know it's basically, to some extent, big numbers a lot of people that are coming to your product.
Speaker 1:You don't talk to them. You don numbers a lot of people that are coming to your product. You don't talk to them, you don't know them all, you are not selling to them. Versus sales driven, where, hey, I'm going to get people and have five meetings before they start even touching the products, and so, basically, if you have a sign up for free and they can try the product and at the end of the, the trial, they can put their credit card more, more, more, a lot more plg, because basically, your product is selling itself.
Speaker 1:Uh, that's, that's something that is very important. At the beginning of stone, it's uh, I wanted to do a plg play because that's what I knew how to do, I knew how to optimize and all this, and right now we are actually more sales-driven company. The reason is that for a company like Stony that is optimizing all your process by automating your support, the bigger you are, the more value you get, and so for us it is worth working with bigger companies and with for us it is worth working with bigger companies. With bigger companies, you don't have 5,000 companies where someone is just trying out your product and getting a purchase of their 400K a year. That doesn't work like this.
Speaker 2:Makes total sense. And how did you start with the large clients? We started with smaller ones. How did you find the first ones?
Speaker 1:We started with smaller ones because we were on product hunt and saw a lot of small companies starting using our product and things like this. That was good, but what really changed was we started having a couple of big customers that reached out and we worked with them and we realized, wow, if we're able to get more of them, it really changes the game. And so we wanted to do both at the same time at some point and we decided to do more on the sales driven because that was easier for us to maintain as a company.
Speaker 2:Let's talk a little bit about Product Hunt and, of course, we're talking about the. Yeah, it's some kind of press in some way, right. Like it's a website where people like launch products, but it's no different in many ways than an article in some media outlet. Like did you find customers that were willing to pay there? Like, I imagine there is a lot of like individuals there. Some of them have businesses, some of them, uh, don't like. Um, how how was that for, like, a b2b use case?
Speaker 1:so you do find a couple of people that are ready to pay because, but you need to have a product that is pretty cheap at that moment. So we had an offer that was cheap and so, yeah, you know, 50 bucks a a month. People were like, yeah, sure, I'm going to give it a try. Product hunt, for it to work, is a lot of visibility. So, and it's also you know, when you start a company, I think credibility is one of the most important thing when you need to recruit, credibility when you need to raise money, credibility when you need to talk to, when you need to raise money, credibility when you need to talk to be your customers, credibility. And so you get the credibility from where you can.
Speaker 1:You know, at Stoney I had the slight advantage that I already built another company. So you know, I was always introducing myself by hey, I'm Alexi, the founder of Stoney, and all prior to I built a company called Dashlane and hoping that people would know that. Oh, yeah, I know Dashlane. Because I was like, ok, cool, the conversation is going to be easier. And product hunt was something where, for a long time, it was like, hey, we've been product of the month on product hunt Because it means something to people. It's a recognition at some point.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, that is very useful and this it's also a very competitive market, right, like customer service, there are a lot of very large companies as a new player in this market. You had a very specific kind of like use case pain point. But how do you compete, how do you enter a market like this without, like we were saying before, with password management, without having to build you know a lot of different pieces of the system?
Speaker 1:So we came with a different approach. I think we were one of the only ones that were starting with a content approach. Like, the way you build content is too static and you need to have something that is a lot more dynamic. And today, if you look at you know you take Zendesk. If you go to a knowledge base or a help center from Zendesk, it's going to be flat articles that are all the same no matter who you are, and for most of the companies it's like this.
Speaker 1:So our difference was that we could adapt the content depending on the people that we could automate. You know it's not only a decision tree, but it's depending on who you are. The decision tree is going to navigate automatically by itself, and so being able to do that was our differentiation, and we have today. We've got a lot of customers that are using us on top of Salesforce, Zendesk, freshdesk. They are using us jointly with Intercom, and so it is a very competitive market.
Speaker 1:But this is a market in which people are trying to get the best ROI. So as long as you can tell them like here is your situation now with Stonely you can get maybe less ticket, happier customers, less cost. Then, as long as you're able to prove that to people, then that's fine. They don't care about what else they have, they care about what you are going to be able to people, then that's fine. They don't care about what else they have, they care about what you are going to be able to provide to them but if you, if you're building a replacement to the other tools, there is also the cost of switching right.
Speaker 2:How did you overcome that part?
Speaker 1:yeah, sometimes it's not a replacement because, for instance, if you you know, as I told you, we can push content directly inside the app. So if you say I'm going to do proactive support on top of my ticketing system, that's something that is next to this. If you say I am building decision trees and processes for my agents inside zendesk, that is something that you are adding that you didn't have before. So you could say, yeah, they have articles that they had building the build before. But they could say, yeah, they have articles that they had built before, but they know it doesn't work. They know people are taking a lot of time or they don't read it and they get two errors. So they don't want to do that. So we build on top of what they have.
Speaker 1:Now it's true that if you take someone that has a big knowledge base and they say, okay, I would like to switch to you, but do I need to recreate all my content? We say no, first of all, you can import. So there are things that you can switch very easily, for sure, but on top of this, maybe to start, you don't need to do that. Maybe you just plug some AI that is going to scrap what you have in terms of content and using it with an LLM, and you are going to use Stony for your 10, 15 most important issues. For this you are going to have, when people are asking questions, either it's a generated answer or it's following a process that is defined within Stony, and that's good, because then this is something that you are again adding as one more tool.
Speaker 1:One thing also is that for us, because our product can do a lot of different things it's a question of what how you meet people where they have a requirement. Right now, we do a lot of land and expense like this. People they start maybe internally because they have needs to have the agent and they're like, oh, but actually what I did for my agents, my customer could do it directly. Like, yeah, sure, we also have a way to do it externally then, so working like this with them, you.
Speaker 2:You've mentioned, um, ai briefly were llms, and, and I found a quote from you in an article from like 2019. I'll read it, but I'm sure it's going to be a very interesting conversation. So, like, I'm trying to take the opposite stance of chatbots. Um, the issue with chatbots is that the technology is not good enough and you often end up searching through the help center and, wow, like, this was like like four years ago, but I feel like these last two years have been very like, have changed the whole game. Uh, I'm super curious, like in in.
Speaker 2:In many ways, I imagine it's like going back to the zero, to one stage, and reimagining how to build or rebuild the product with this new paradigm of like llms in mind, but, at the same time, you already have a product that is working, that is generating like millions of revenue. How do you, how, like, how has this changed the business and how did you go about like? Um, what is this saying from amazon? I think it's like you know, so, like always day one, like you all, you always stay in that stage of like innovation. How have you integrated that into stoneley?
Speaker 1:well, first of all, thank you for finding that that's uh, that's very interesting and this is true. I mean, at that time the technology was not there, and today the technology is there and, I think, chatbots today, first of all, we don't call them chatbots now, we call them AI agents, because basically, this is something that is a lot more like automating what an agent will do. Before, the issue that you had was yes, most of the time we were asking a question and the answer was oh, sorry, I don't have the. The answer to your questions here is a help article that looks like what you are asking, and it was pretty poor. Today, with LLMs, as long as you have the right contents, you have the ability to grab some information.
Speaker 1:Now, two things are very important here. One is that, no matter how good your AI models are and your overall AI pipeline is, the quality of the answer is always going to be based on the quality of your knowledge, and so we've been lucky, because what Stoney does is structuring knowledge and creating better knowledge, and it's also easier for AI to use. Now, what we are offering with Stoney is the ability to do these AI agents. Where you type an equation, that question is going to use different sources to create an answer, but if this is one of the process that requires to follow a certain guide or something like this, a certain process, then we can launch that directly. We can recognize that this is this and that you need to put someone there. So, basically now, the big difference is that someone can ask a question, any question and there's always an answer for them, either generated by LLM, depending on the knowledge that you have, or because this is part of the process that you know is very important, that you have worked on, and also, if you don't get an answer, because that still happens, we track that so that, little by little, you can really improve your knowledge and have this that way. So for us, yes, it's true that it is kind of getting back to zero to some extent for some of the staging that we had.
Speaker 1:Now, everything that we've built before it gives us, I think, a lot of advantages compared to solutions that are starting AI first, because AI first is great, and you know we talk a lot. There's this whole debate about hey, should you be AI first? Because AI first company I they are, they are breathing ai and so they are going to be a lot better than other companies. Future will tell. What I can tell you is that, uh, back in the day, I remember there was the discussion about how you mobile first and everything is going to happen on mobile, but in reality you had some. I mean, you know, airbnb was not mobile first and actually I remember, like I don't know if this is still the case, but for a long time, people were still booking their Airbnb on their computer. They were using the Airbnb app when they were traveling, but when they were booking, they were booking on their computer. And so I think here that's kind of the same is that AI is going to have to rely on things the same way. Like Airbnb, the value was relying on everything that the listing and the way it was printed and the overall offer. Ai in our domains is going to rely on the knowledge and the quality of the knowledge and the organization and the knowledge. So if you are able to have a tool that allows you to do this, then the way you are building your AI products is going to be a lot better.
Speaker 1:Another thing is that you know, when you talk to customers today I mean AI today most of the AI offers are very reactive. It's a bot. You ask a question, they answer you. But, as we discussed earlier, there's a lot of support. That is not about this. It's about being proactive and helping people before they have an issue. So having one platform that can have all this there is a real benefit. And today, when we are against people that are AI first, we take a step back and we say that's true, here's what you can do and here's what we can do. And this is comparable. Here's what you get with us that you don't get with them when you are thinking 360 about your knowledge strategy and help strategy for your customers.
Speaker 2:I mean, at the end of the day, it's like the old saying of like, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail right. And if you're obsessed with the technology, which you know, there are good reasons to be obsessed with AI. Right now it's very powerful, super, you know, flashy, but then you might end up finding a problem to justify building that AI thing, rather than finding a problem and then seeing which role AI can play in solving it. Right, and I think, as some kind of incumbent here, not a native AI-first company. Then you need to leverage all the strengths that you have already built, all the context, all the information you have and then innovate by integrating AI and moving fast so that you don't end up with an AI-first player that will then build the other part on top of that, but will end up with a superior product. And I guess as long as you move fast enough, then you do have a lot of advantages over those players.
Speaker 1:I mean. To me, the core is the differentiation. How do you differentiate? Because I mean, as you said, it's a very competitive market and people being built AI agents or AI bots. There are many, many companies that are doing this, and so the question is what's different about what we are building versus other? Others are building, and so today we are pretty unique in our offering, meaning that there is there is no product that is doing exactly what Stoney does. Then it's a question of whether we are able to convince people that it's a better way to go than others, and this is something that I mean we've been pretty successful so far doing it, so I think that people are seeing that positively.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you can differentiate yourself on price, but that's a pretty hard game to play.
Speaker 2:Someone can always charge less and make it very difficult for you.
Speaker 2:You can differentiate in user experience and I think on the password management side we've talked a little bit about that and then you can differentiate on on not just like features, because other players can always build more or the same features, but on the on the flavor, the style, the approach, the paradigm to solve the problem right, and I can relate to that.
Speaker 2:I'm building right now a product where, like, we are getting people to speak english fluently by focusing a lot on getting people to talk to each other, whereas most schools will focus on giving you the theory, the practice, the classes with the teachers and at the end of the day, we're solving the same problem that others are trying to solve, but we are applying a very different approach. Whether that approach is for everyone or not, I don't know. We don't know if a Stoneless approach is for every company, but if you don't do something different, you won't be able to get any customers and like it's better to risk it with something that is different and see how that evolves than just trying to do what everyone else is doing.
Speaker 1:And also you know that there are enough people that want to speak English, that it's a large market, so there is probably a subset of people for which your offer is good for them, and so it's a question of how you find these people, what is the right segment and how you can target it, and that's the same for us. I don't think everybody will choose Tony for many reasons, so it's a question of finding the right people and have the right message for them.
Speaker 2:I think that's super important. Right Like you, can self-operate within a very large, large, competitive market, and that's actually a good thing. That means it's like there are needs, there are problems, there are users, there is, you know, money and then find your niche within that market. That, because the market is so large, the niche is still very large, but it allows you to do something different. I think that's a that's a powerful um like framework to start thinking about where to start, so that you don't end up in a very tiny market with a niche approach and then you're not going to be able to build a big business or in a large market by doing what everyone else is doing, because then that's going to be really hard to compete. So, absolutely, hey, alexis, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for sharing your story and your journey. I'm excited for people to listen to this one. Thank you, yeah, thank you very much. Thank you so much for tuning in. Your support means the world to me. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review. It's one of the best ways you can help this podcast get off the ground and help more entrepreneurs like you. Thank you, and until the next episode.
