Matt Swalley

@0:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

No, I'm excited. In fact, where are you calling in from?

@0:29 - Matt Swalley

Because we're talking about my beloved Raiders and you're a big co-cant. So where are you calling in from that?

I've lived all over the past 15 years. I'm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and then our headquarters is actually in San Francisco from Nikki.

@0:42 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Oh, man. You are in the yellow towel territory right there in the thick of it. So Matt, we're going to be talking about Omni-key today.

But before we get into all that, let's introduce the listeners.

@0:55 - Matt Swalley

Who is Matt? Yeah, so I am cheap business officer. during a co-founder of OmniKey. I joined OmniKey about two and a half years ago, very early stage in the company, which we can talk a little bit more about earlier.

was in polling number three. But before that, I spent 13 years at AT&T, large corporation for many years. It was a fortune 10 company.

I led teams and organizations primarily in direct sales in all over the US. Atlanta, California, finished my last five years in Dallas at the headquarters where I did like a chief of staff role working for one of the major executives that ran the global business side of AT&T.

Then my last two years in corporate strategy, I always had this huge passion for entrepreneurship and took the leap over to an early stage startup, joining a very great visionary CEO that new generative AI was going to continue to get better.

But I grew up in Indiana. That's why I'm a cold fan and moved all around. And I still, it's got a good place to my heart from a sports perspective.

and live in there.

@2:01 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. We'll get back to certainly talk about your experience in the corporate world from the strategic perspective.

I'd love to hear how that has transitioned into this entrepreneurship world. But before we get into all that, tell us what is OmniKey?

@2:15 - Matt Swalley

What does it do? Sure. What OmniKey does is we're an artificial intelligence powered marketing platform. what we do is we take real-time performance data from So think about all the digital places Gabriel that the listeners are at, meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, websites, apps.

have integrations with data and we can help determine what's leading the clicks or purchases. We use that data to feed generative AI and new content.

And there's a couple of big tailwinds and content generation, really. One is today, creative is the major lever for distribution and advertising.

Creative matters more and more because personal information is becoming more restricted. And the second thing is, AI enables greater personalization.

It's not one to one, but you can scale easier. It helps you really well with ideation of new ideas for potentially different audiences.

Like if you're selling a product or service or your SaaS company, you could have 10 different customers like, let's just say retail banking.

You want to have personalized credit for all those different audiences. performs better, makes your brand better, and you can move much faster.

@3:22 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

That's a great point. fact, folks, I really want to point this out. What consumers really want is that concierge services.

They want to fill that personalized connection that your product and your service and your marketing is geared directly towards them.

I've been constantly talking about this on the show recently, is the different marketing tactics that individuals have. One thing, I actually went back to a former episode of From Malarity.

He really was focusing on marketing. I'm thinking about that, that sales and marketing funnel. How important that top piece of that funnel is, because there are so many different touch points throughout

individual's life throughout a day, right? That will spark an interest in a specific product or service.

@4:06 - Matt Swalley

For example, you might see a commercial about Cheetos and then you walk around the store and that Cheetos is right there, right?

@4:11 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And you saw the billboard of Cheetos. So it's all these different things, right, that add up to that sale that I find extremely interesting.

Now, how does kind of on the key, how does it kind of work? How about like if I'm a client, what am I expecting?

@4:26 - Matt Swalley

So there's a number of different ways that technology enables better advertisements. so what on the key is it's a technology platform that we built out this data insights and creative insights all in the platform.

So you mentioned before seeing a Cheetos add and then walk into a grocery store and seeing Cheetos. Well, there's one other thing to mention, attention spans continue to get shorter.

Google and Facebook used to own like 60% of the ad market. continues to decline. And there's new channels that arrive every day.

So OmniKey wants to help brands, agencies, and technology partners follow their customers to all those different places and make it easy.

Imagine like you mentioned each one of those digital platforms requires a different messaging. You want a standard brand experience in safety rails, but it's going to require different messaging like some require user-generated content like TikTok, some omikki basically has a tool, tools that help with the ideation, with AI of new ideas.

What's the tone of the brand? Who are the audiences? What are the platforms you're advertising on? AI helps conceptualize that.

And then it also helps generate concepts, images, a bunch of the other areas, and then piece it together into a finished ad creative.

And the last thing is with AI, a lot of people are very reluctant on the brand safety issue and what's in it.

We have this approval dashboard that gives potentially as many people as possible access to the content before it goes live where they can annotate, edit, and once they click approve, it goes into the ad platform.

So the future, we believe, is 10% human input on the front. Like what are your objectives? are your audiences?

AI can do the middle 80%. The last 10% is review edit approved by humans again.

@6:13 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Wow, I like it. I like the simplicity of it, but I also like the efficiency of it. Well, I think one of my biggest, like my biggest Achilles heel for my own business is the creative piece, you know, spending the time creating content and then putting on different platforms or finding one platform that's able to put it on various platforms and the editing and there's a lot of different things that goes into play.

Now, Matt, I want to take a kind of step back a little bit. want to talk about, because you mentioned you were in the corporate world at AT&T and then you started this role, let's talk about that kind of transition.

What was the aha moment for you? it's like, you know what, I think we have something here with.

@7:02 - Matt Swalley

This meeting is being recorded of different jobs. All that stuff correlates to a startup. But it really was my last two years.

was in that chief of staff role and I went back and got my MBA and I joined corporate strategy.

So corporate strategy is big picture thinking. It's doing lots of research on what are the next waves of growth and technology.

And I got really, really passionate about it was the bullish year when the stock market was going crazy. They had all these IPOs.

And I just got really, really excited about startups where you can jump in and you can make a huge impact.

Everything you do impacts the company. And so I started doing some networking and I met Harry Senju who had, he's a Harvard computer science grad, it's his third company.

He started it in 2018. So he was way ahead of the vision saying data could impact content generation. AI was going to continue to improve.

The messaging was spot on. It's exactly where we are today. So in 2020, we had the first version of the product.

Hikari was running engineering, everything. The very early stages, it's building a plane in the air, learning from the first couple sets of customers, usually they're close to your network.

then after I joined as employee number three as the business leader, and we've went through a lot of transitions from the early stages to raising capital round where we hired a bunch of the next set of leaders that can help us scale the product, specialists in AI and in different areas of engineering.

And I'm always concerned myself, kind of a risk taker, and it was the best decision ever, because there's two different paths.

could have stated that AT&T headquarters, and the opportunity you have at a startup is far greater. If you have that mentality of, you're gonna fail a lot, but...

The sky is the limit. Like you can reach out to anyone and potentially connect with them. That's what I love about it.

And people are very, very helpful at startups where like if they think you're doing something interesting, they'll introduce you to five different people.

Like no problem. You don't get that as much in large corporations. So I've really loved a lot of those aspects of it.

If you go about with the mentality, I wanna help whoever I can with nothing in return. Everyone ends up trying to help you.

It's amazing.

@9:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I completely agree. I think if you put your consumers or in my case, know, the healthcare world, you put your patients in the forefront of your strategy.

You tend to have a pretty good outcome, right? Because you're really, again, going back to what we just discussed in the beginning of this conversation is individuals want to have that concierge service, right?

They wanna feel cared for and about, right? And so that's very important. Now, one of the things you mentioned, right?

Is you're starting to scale this business and you took on some additional funding to bring on some employees. Talk about the scaling piece.

What were some things that you learned there in that process that you wish you would have known before you?

@10:00 - Matt Swalley

started it? Well, there's a number of things. One is any person that's been in a couple of startups realizes how important focus is.

One of the things that was a great lead driver in the beginning and still is is we run digital ads.

We use our own product and it drives in lots of different customers. And in the early days, know, especially when AI was hot, when it you know, we were taking on every single meeting with every customer.

And to be really successful at a startup, you have to really zone in on your ideal customer profiles, because you have limited resources all the time.

what is the most important thing you try to execute on? And we were just meeting with too many people.

And we've continued to refine that process. And we started moving up market more so too, through the as we built the product more just because.

It's challenging with brand new businesses. They don't necessarily even have their ideal customer profiles. They're trying to find product market fit, so it's more challenging.

But those are some of the things is that the next time is you learn how to really identify the right customers that you can learn from and build the best product and become really, really focused on some simple things first instead of being more wide.

@11:22 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You go deep. Yeah, and I think that's a great point for the listeners to grasp onto is, know, kind of narrowing down your focus.

know, you can't really have the shotgun approach every time in the way you mean by shotgun approaches. Essentially, you shoot a shotgun and make a bunch of impacts and then you visit every single impact hole and see which one made the biggest impact.

That is a very difficult strategy you use. That's a strategy I use in the past. It's very time consuming and it's dreadful because you're just, you burn yourself out truth, truthfully, you do.

Now what we're kind of talking about earlier is conversation as well. I kind of briefly mentioned that marketing sells funnel.

Matt's kind of eluding to this. same thing. Essentially, it's like not everybody certainly want everybody aware of your product, right?

But not everybody's going to get that concierge to truly get them into with a purchasing that item because not everybody's your client.

I'm sorry, right? And another thing that you know, we're looking for product market fit in your MVP, right? Bible product.

Make sure that you're asking folks outside of your friends and family because grandma is probably going to agree. It's a phenomenal product, but she might not be your target audience.

You know, I think my buddy worked at Nike. He was calling me recently. He's like, Hey, what do you think of these new shoes?

You know, show me that I'm like, dude, I'm not your target audience anymore, bro. Like I'm used to love sneakers.

I used to buy them all the time. But as I age, I got two kids. I don't I'm not a sneaker head as much anymore.

So I'm not your target audience. much I appreciate you calling me. That's for my opinion, but I have nothing giving you.

know, and so I think it's so important, Matt, I'm glad you kind of brought that out because it's really important to kind of identify who the right.

client is making sure that you know what they want, like what their needs are, but not only what their needs are, but what they considered valuable.

You're not creating value. You're just identifying what they considered valuable and exploiting it, right? And we're working towards that.

@13:15 - Matt Swalley

Gabriel, that was such so insightful the way you said that. And it brings you back to the episode of Silicon Valley when they released their beta to all their friends.

@13:24 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And they're like, it has 99% usability. And then they launch it. It's like, got no one using it anywhere.

Yep, I'm telling you, it's an interesting thing. yeah, certainly and don't, I mean this in the nicest way. Take criticism with a grain of salt, know, don't think before meaning to be rude, but they are trying to help you out and to succeed.

And the last thing they want you to do is, you know, what's the, what's the, what's the definition of insanity is just doing the same thing over and over, expect a different result, right?

don't want you to go doing something, expecting different results. What are some of those moments like, oh yeah, this is it, we're going to take off.

What was that moment like?

@14:07 - Matt Swalley

So when you hear the same problem, we were primarily sales-led growth. We've been primarily sales-led growth. So we talked with over 2,000 marketers last year across enterprise agencies, and we've heard a consistent same problem over and over and over again.

The creative process typically has multiple stakeholders internal and external. They could have a creative strategist, a copywriter, a designer, a distributor, and all this stuff.

And when we kept hearing the same problem over and over again and identifying how the market's changing with like all these new platforms emerging and the challenge of getting content, a lot of these people are specialists in one platform and they can't get to the other ones.

That was really kind of one of our major Eureka moments that focus on the site, this customer profile, build it with these things.

It's not No one else is doing it today. That was probably it just from hearing it over and over again and continually to dig on that.

@15:08 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, that's a great point. one of the things you mentioned too was like, you know, building the brand essentially.

You had like all these different calls. How do you build an AI brand? Like where do you find your clients?

@15:19 - Matt Swalley

Yeah, so it. We've used our product, our own product for digital ads to generate a lot of interest in brand.

So you've asked if you go look at our website, you're going to start to see a bunch of ads and they're all very AI related.

And that drove hundreds of customers from the Fortune 1000 even to us. Like from top of funnel though, like you mentioned the sales funnel, the smaller business customers with our older historical product and model could close very quickly.

So we were able to generate revenue. Some of them would close the first day of a meeting and it was very, very short.

So sales cycle. We continue to use that tool plus resellers has been. a big addition. In the future, we want to do API integrations where we can power content from data.

But one of the major things is we still use the digital ads. They're great for top of funnel, but these larger sales and enterprise, they're going to take six months to a year and a half, to two years to close some of them.

And so that's really been the evolution. And then the second thing I wanted to mention is, when you talk about the sales funnel, we got really granular on when you're using that type of lead generation digital ads plus public relations.

So we were a tech crunch disrupt finalist in 2022 for Gen AI. So the year before we were the first generative AI company on tech crunch disrupt, the next year in 2023, they had a majority of them were gen AI companies.

So these little things, you know, Hikari did really well getting us in and we're the final pitch there. And these things drive a lot of interest.

combination of PR networking this year, it will be partnerships will be a huge one. thing is the product evolves and then API integrations with companies that have a lot of access to a lot of first party data that you could go power with final content generation.

@17:11 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Nice. Now, let's dumb it down for me because I'm not too big of a tech guy. What in the heck is API integration?

@17:18 - Matt Swalley

So it's someone else's technology and they can directly connect to our technology all in their system. So a customer basically is in the same process of using their platform, say your data analytics company and you're analyzing a bunch of purchase data for a retailer.

OmniKey seamlessly would just automatically connect in, be able to look at certain data and produce the content, finished images on their platform.

So the customer doesn't even know like OmniKey's part of it. It's just directly into their platform, someone else using your technology.

@17:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I got to say folks, my wheels are turning right now because I'm in the healthcare space, right? My, my,

job is to go out into communities, build relationships with the community providers, talk about our services, essentially the sales phone, right?

I'm the outreach for that area. How, let's kind of do like a case study, because I love this service.

love AI. I love what it does and I love what it brings. makes my job easier, makes my life more efficient, right?

From, you know, you're really kind of talking about generating advertising and marketing, right? up. How does AI generated advertising?

How do you think it's going to change the future of social media marketing in general?

@18:33 - Matt Swalley

Continue to be more personalized and much quicker. And when I say quicker, you have all this access to this data.

time there's data, most of time there's data overloads, these brands have all this data. They don't know what's actionable.

So one is you have to figure out what are the insights that can actually be used. two is for like, let's just say for healthcare would be, if say there's something on

on news. like this. a major news event happens today that impacts your company better. It makes your company very viable today.

Like, I want to go buy it. Well, you could go from thinking of that idea, seeing the news, using some of that news in an ad, and launching it on digital within a short period of time hours or a day.

In the past, you would see the news, you'd be like, that's great for my company. lot of people are going to be interested, and it could take you three months to go through the process of thinking of the idea.

How can I go think about this creatively to launching a campaign and having it approved? For example, I can give you one for I'm not the creative person or company.

I'm the business person, but I use our product all the time. I'm like trying to figure out how can I, if I can use our product, the end users can use it.

agencies are a big focus of ours today because they have lots of customers with lots of content needs. Like our technology was able to think of this idea of scale content, not ours, right?

Empower your agency teams to do less hours with scaling content to all these places. It also said, put a picture of a team climbing a mountain.

So I created this ad concept within like 10 minutes of a team scaling a mountain, applied motion, know, motion, four second motion to a general AI.

And you have a full campaign for one specific ideal customer profile. And that's just the beginning because you asked the future again.

You have AI avatars now. There's two ways we think of video. One is you have a bunch of brand assets called B-roll and production assets.

You can use AI to help you piece together in the supercuts with your brand assets. The second is AI avatars that are continuing to get better.

Gabriel, we could train AI on you and we could feed it scripts made by AI. That you approve and all of a sudden you could have 15 pieces of.

localized content immediately with you saying it. It's not perfect in some brands don't want to do it, but it's getting better every day.

@21:07 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and I got to agree with folks at AI, the growth in AI the last couple just last year has been phenomenal.

I use it. So folks when you. This is a great opportunity have a shameless plug. So when you're following at the shades of V on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn, all those other folks, all those other social sites, those reals I create, I use AI, right?

And so that really because I again, I'm talking about trying to be efficient, trying to also create value back to the consumer.

And I got to tell you the ease of using it and also just kind of what it helps me do, how it kind of helps me become a little bit more just quicker on what I need to do, right?

No, in your experience, do you feel like AI is going to be a disruptor to the point where people should be concerned about it?

@21:57 - Matt Swalley

The only option is to embrace it. Sit right now because like I said, it won't eliminate jobs. if you're not learning how to use it, you're going to be left in the dust.

It's hard to predict the outcome because we're still in the very, very early stages. people start starting to see like what it can do.

But they haven't successfully figured out how to solve entire business problems with it. And then the technology and the keep improving, and then people are going to figure out business problems.

But the way you look at it is this is a great stat, Gabriel, that I like to say. We even are not 75% of Fortune 1000 companies believe that they could cease to exist if they don't properly integrate AI into their business within the next five years.

The second stat that's interesting is that the average length of an S&P 500 company was 33 years in 1970 or 1965.

It's now like 15 years.

@22:55 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

yeah.

@22:55 - Matt Swalley

Yeah. So it's decreased that much. So what does that mean? Company. These have to move faster. They have to implement technology faster.

old ways of just playing defense doesn't work because the scale effect multiplies right now with AI. you'll hear people say with five people you can have a billion dollar company and stuff.

know, like a lot of people are predicting that type of efficiencies. So the only option is to embrace it and try to figure out ways that you know, you can learn so you're prepared for that moment.

@23:23 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and I think that's a pretty interesting stat. You know, they've mentioned the 15 years S&P 500 because this morning, you know, I was sitting here, you know, watching the early morning news and this commercial comes on about these news, yoga stretch out for women, right?

And it was this very proactive, they're all dancing and they're like, like having fun, right? And I'm like, oh, must be, you know, little lemon.

And it was a completely new brand I've never even heard of and they're explicitly at Dick's Sporting Goods. I was like, wow, it's kind of crazy how overnight these new brands will pop up, right?

And they will scale and they will go big. And to your point, they're using, you know, possibly again, personalized advertisement.

Because again, I'm watching my wife sitting here next to it. She was even engaged. like, Oh, look really cool.

Again, a brand new brand. I always go back to like the ATT commercial when they're in the airlines, right?

Same exact concept. Has nothing to do with the phones, has nothing that commercial has nothing to do with the phones, but they're talking about how the airlines are also charging you extra fees because everybody can relate to that personal issue.

And then the ATT is like, Hey, that's not us.

@24:28 - Matt Swalley

So even though they're not talking about phones, they're talking about a pain point that they're resolving. Yeah.

@24:34 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Hey, you don't have to worry about these little small things because we're not going to nickel and dime you.

And it's just, it's just interesting how the personal advertising is continuously evolving. Now with that, how do you envision?

How does, how does AI help increase sales through AI personalization? Let's talk about specifically, because that's, I think a lot of these folks here, how do I use it to increase sales?

@24:56 - Matt Swalley

Yeah, it's to take those inputs that you have. The main types of customers, data from purchasing their locations, for example, all these are great inputs for AI that can generate content much quicker.

That's really the major immediate one. You can just learn from data quicker. You know your audiences, you mentioned, airlines, retail banking, you can just plug in.

This is the audience. This is the buyer and the company. This is where they're located. They're located in the northwest, Pacific Northwest.

All of a sudden you have this content that's just talking to those people that are in that little area.

You can scale that so easily today with AI. Then just switch certain things out. We'll just continue to get better with those type of inputs.

The second thing is, we're already doing this, but it can learn from how you speak, how you write, how your brand wants to be portrayed.

That's just going to I think continue to get better where it knows you better than you know yourself and it's going to be able to produce a similar type of thing that you're trying to do.

@26:07 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, yeah, it's a great point. it's like, you know, constantly evolving is that entrepreneurs and understanding that you need to also evolve your sales pitch and your sales ideas to your consumers.

You know, I truly do believe the riches are in the niches, right? But that doesn't mean that a niche product doesn't have to create any value, right?

You have to have like, for example, you can sell somebody with lock job gum if you sell them on the value of clean breath.

Now, I'm talking about chewing, right? Talk about their clean breath. Talk about how the value of that, right? And you can sell anybody on anything except you have to find the right value.

And I think this is where the AI personalization really comes into play and really helps you identify what they consider, what their values are and then how you can leverage it.

@26:50 - Matt Swalley

Again, I hate when people say we're out there creating value.

@26:53 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

You do not create value. People already have an expectation of what they consider as valuable. You just need to identify.

what they consider is valuable and then work on that.

@27:02 - Matt Swalley

There's one other point on that as well. I forgot to mention was the platforms in the past, you were able to really target ages, all these different metrics, demographics stuff, demographic items, and they continue to remove that.

So what the platforms have done, and when I say platforms like meta and Google that are selling ad space, is they have these really, really smart algorithms that know all the end users.

Gabriel, if you're looking at those workout pants on your IP address at your home, everyone in your home is going to start to see all these other workout pants on their devices.

So that's why it's so critical to have lots of content now because they perform better a lot of the time than more specific targeting because the platforms are getting so good with directing them to the right place.

@27:49 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, and you folks, made the mistakes when I first was starting out this podcast of no waste Facebook smartened me.

I'm going to pick and click my own target audience because I know. my target audience better. No, you're not.

We're not smarter than the computers, folks. I would be the first one to admit it. was like my target marketing was crap.

was paying all this money for very low clicks. Then soon as I'm like, you know, Facebook algorithm take care of it all of sudden you see clicks increase pretty quickly.

It's so they know what they're doing. Now, you know, let's let's let's kind of talk about the future. What where do you envision your guys going?

@28:25 - Matt Swalley

Well, we are going to continue to build this product that has, you know, many we're going to automate every area of advertising.

We can there's still going to be that 10% human approval at the end review edit approval. But we want to continue to build in today.

We can automate most of images motions. Move more and more into video because multivariate testing includes all this. do video today, certain aspects of it, but none of it's perfect.

Like when you see a generative AI video, it's someone piecing together 10 different created tools and then sharing. Look what I made with AI.

Yeah. Well, if you spend a few hours in piece together, six different tools. pools. You can do it, but it still has like this, I would say it's some of them are cool, but it has like almost like this alien watching a video type.

Like did you see the beer commercial where everyone was partying and like it was kind of like their head, all their bodies were morphed and stuff in the backyard.

It looked really cool, but it's not near perfect. So it's just going to continue to improve. And then we're going to get more into avatars predicting what you're thinking as we continue to add Google glasses and all this other stuff that augments reality.

There's just so much we can do and it's going to be really exciting to see where it goes. It's really, really exciting, it's also a little bit, the parts of it are scary for me is when you have little kids.

I think you mentioned you have two kids. They're so connected to devices today. Like you hope that they can really use technology to make their lives better, then also have some of those things we had when we were growing up that were, you know,

best things of going outside and, you know, building a tree house and disconnecting and, and, uh, cause your brain just can't be connected digitally all the time.

It just doesn't function the same.

@30:10 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's kind of funny. You mentioned that, you know, like, as there's a lot of things like back in the day, I'm like, man, I remember we had dial up internet.

I remember we didn't have internet at first, right? then we had dial up internet. now you're, and now the progression is just like skyrocketing, right?

@30:24 - Matt Swalley

just, evolution, uh, very quickly.

@30:27 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Now with that said, what is, what is one of the things that you wish you would have known before you started out this journey that you know now that you wish you would have known or what maybe what some advice it would give other aspiring entrepreneurs that are listening?

@30:41 - Matt Swalley

Yeah. So one is, you mentioned before I, I, doing a lot of different things in AT&T. I had tenacity.

fail so much. Um, that carried over to here. Like no matter what, there's no immediate gratification. So any startup person, any young person that's starting

something. Just know it's going to be hard 90% of the time and 10% you're going to have these successes in one of the things that I still have trouble doing is actually letting myself feel good during that 10%.

It's like you're always striving for more. So really take that in when you have the good times but no most of it's going to be hard.

Like you hear some of the people like Elon Musk say most people don't want to be me because that's how hard he's working.

Just know that most of it's going to be hard. There's going to be lots of trial and error. I had never been in a startup before this.

So like building a product is such a unique process of having the right pieces. I think just the learning from that after the first time will make it easier because I don't know how else you do it without trying and learning.

The right people to partner to have on your team, how your skills complement others within your company. A lot of those things the next time but I can't really give

advice besides the fact of just get yourself out there and try it and make sure like if you make a mistake learn from it.

And then the second thing is always be trying to skill up like when we talk about AI today, a couple of things I like to mention is read the newsletters.

I have a handful of them, one's bins, that I really like that every day they send me all the latest news on tech.

They give you like 10 applications that are new. I go test out three or four of those free ones a week just to try them.

And then so I have a better understanding of where the technology is going. I think that's a constant thing people should build into their routine today.

@32:39 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

I love it. In fact, know, I'll share with you the 2024 motto folks. It's actually I have it written on my wife board.

So that's what I'm kind of looking over here to the right. It's embrace growth, seek knowledge and lead with purpose.

So that's my 2020 for 2020 24 motto. actually mean that I try to continue to grasp knowledge and learn more like only

be a sponge because, you know, as you alluded to, AI is going to continue to change the future of how we look at things.

And we're seeing it already, right? We're seeing it across the board in a lot of different areas. And you're starting to see downsides in some of these large organizations because we're becoming more efficient using this product.

Now, that is not to scare folks and say, hey, stop. No, that's actually saying, hey, this might be a great opportunity to how can you create something using AI as well, right?

Now, Matt, who would be the typical clients, folks listening?

@33:32 - Matt Swalley

Who wants to contact you and how do they contact you? Or who do you want to contact you and how do they contact you?

Sure. we partner with mid-market slash enterprise businesses across e-commerce, retail, SaaS, health care agencies, anyone producing a bunch of advertisements or copy for different places.

then technology partners that might want to use their data to power content for their customers and have an additional value at.

@33:59 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Nice. And then how can they get in contact with you and then what's the website?

@34:02 - Matt Swalley

Sure. Go to www.omnikey.com. You can schedule a demo there and put on the note you heard about in the Shades of Entrepreneurship.

Second, you could reach out to me at Matt Swally on LinkedIn or email me at.omnikey.com.

@34:21 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

And this is a great opportunity to plug the Shades of Entrepreneurship newsletter where all this information will be. Again, you'll have Matt's email information is contact for LinkedIn.

You'll have the website. You'll also have a transcription of this conversation on the Shades of E.com website. So you can also enter it there.

This video will be posted seven days before airs on Patreon. So if you'd be so gracious to join us on Patreon, it's $5 a month that helps support the podcast.

It helps bring us all these guests and helps with the marketing and all that other fun stuff. So Matt, is there any last words you'd like to say before we leave?

@34:58 - Matt Swalley

For all the listeners out there. If you haven't taken that chance into entrepreneurship and you're kicking the tires, do it.

You can always go back to what you were doing before.

@35:09 - Gabriel Flores (The Shades of Entrepreneurship)

Yeah, I agree. And you can also just do a slow runway if you like as well. But I will say, you know, I agree with Matt and don't beat yourself up if your first product iteration isn't the best.

Nobody started at the finish line, right? Everybody started kind of at the starting line and they slowly got there.

you look back at some of my podcast episodes of some of the marketing, it's not very good, folks. But as I continue to evolve and get better and learn, right?

You know, knowledge is power and experience as well. So get out there and experience live. Don't forget to be kind, drink some water.

And thank you and have a great night.