Introduction
Ryan: Welcome everyone to the AI Founders Podcast Show. Our podcast is dedicated to celebrating the remarkable accomplishments of AI innovators, entrepreneurs, and visionary founders and the captivating stories behind the movements they’ve built. I’m your host, Ryan Davies, and I have the honor of hosting today’s episode, How AI Founders Can Create an Unfair Marketing Advantage, to give them an EDGE with our special guest, Naren Arulrajah. Naren, thank you so much for joining us here today.
Naren Hey, I’m so excited to be here, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation.
Ryan: Naren and I go back quite a ways. I think this is going to be a really fun episode for me as well because it’s always nice to have a friend on the show with you and a colleague and somebody who’s a mentor, being able to bring all of this forward for you but for those who are in our audience who are unaware, Naren is the CEO of both Ekwa.com and Ekwa.Tech. And is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for innovation and a keen understanding of the evolving digital landscape. Naren has established himself as a thought leader in the marketing space, particularly within the dynamic realm of tech and artificial intelligence startups. As the driving force behind Ekwa.com, a leading-edge digital marketing company, and Ekwa.Tech, a marketing hub for cutting-edge AI solutions, Naren is going to bring a wealth of experience to the table, and his experience lies not only in navigating the complexities of the digital marketplace but also in helping AI startups carve out their niche, build a compelling brand presence, create a voice and persona, and really drive high-value inbound leads for companies in the tech and AI space. So this is an absolutely perfect guest for our topic here and to help our founders really grow what they’re trying to achieve. Maybe you could start by telling our audience a bit about yourself and your role as a CEO of Ekwa.Tech, and particularly your experience where AI and marketing kind of intersect there.
Unfair Advantages in Marketing
Naren: Thank you so much, Ryan. I know you share a long list of things I’ve done, and as I start telling my story, the thing that comes to my mind is getting fired four times in a row. I studied computer science in Chicago, 4.0 GPA. My mom wanted me to get that 4.0, so I did it.
I actually have to be honest: I got a B in my last class, so by the time I graduated, they didn’t look at my last semester’s things, so it still was marked as getting a 4.0, and I got the alumni award. So anyway, that’s a long story going back to 1997. I guess some 20-some years ago, almost 30 years ago. Since then, I ended up working in different tech companies, mostly in product management and the last four jobs I had, I was fired, like two in the US, two in Canada. By the time I married my wife, who was Canadian, and moved here, our daughter was born when I was fired for the fourth time I told my wife I could not get fired again because if I did, then I’ll give up on myself. I’ll feel like I’m a loser and I can’t do this, and so she’s like, okay, what do you want to do? I’m like, and I’m going to do my own thing because not because I want to, because I have to. I don’t have any other plan B that is my only plan.
So between 2002 and 2007, I call it learning by making mistakes part of my career, my wife was working. I was the guy in the basement trying to figure things out, and I was making every mistake under the sun that an entrepreneur could make, and then finally, I guess after paying the price, Maybe I should have taken an MBA, but being somebody who likes to figure out my own ways that didn’t appeal to me and also we didn’t have the money or the capabilities to do it at the time. So finally, I figured out, I guess, the secrets of success, and then we were about to go bankrupt. We were running a website called Busy Moms for Moms, and In 2007, the US economy tanked, so anybody in the ad business, unless you’re Google or Facebook, you’re dead, pretty much, so we were one of those about to be dead people walking and a dentist said, okay, you’re so good at SEO, you’re so good at driving traffic. Why don’t you help me? That’s kind of how I got into marketing back in 2007, and the rest is history. We currently have 250 people. We, of course, run Ekwa.com, which is a marketing agency for doctors.
We run Ekwa.Tech, which is a new venture, but something that’s based on our experience, doing our own marketing, using a lot of the things we are now doing for other tech companies. So, of course, for the last four or five years, we have been doing a lot of the things that we’ll be sharing with our clients, and then we know it works. So it’s just a matter of doing that. So that’s kind of a little bit about me. So Ekwa.Tech is a done-for-you agency that focuses on helping early stage AI companies, perhaps without like a 10% marketing team, create an unfair advantage. See, the unfair advantage of marketing is it cuts your cost of acquiring a new client. So, when I look at Ekwa.com and our market, we again are a B2B company. We have B2B clients for Ekwa.com, our cost of acquiring a new client is a fraction of the cost of most of the companies in this space. So, it gives you an unfair advantage. I believe in building a business that stacks unfair advantages on top of unfair advantages because the thing about unfair advantage is it’s unfair, meaning other people cannot compete with you. It’s like having a trump card. It’s really hard for them to kind of beat you when you have tons of those trump cards. So, anyway, that’s a little bit about myself.
Ryan: I think it’s absolutely perfect. Again, it’s a great background, and it really speaks to, I think, what a lot of our listeners, our founders, are going through, are about to go through, have already gone through kind of thing, in terms of maybe learning by trial and error, making mistakes, not sure where to start and one of the great things that you do is really help people get that start and get grounded because this is something you specialize in. So, for our listeners, again, they’re running an AI company, wondering, I don’t even know how to start marketing. I don’t know how to think about marketing. That’s not my niche. We hear that all the time, right? I’m really great at products or really great at ideas, but this is something that’s way outside my realm of possibilities when I think about what I’m skilled at. So, for them, how do they even start to think about marketing and specifically, as you mentioned, creating that unfair advantage with marketing?
Naren: Yeah, I think, as I said, the power of unfair advantage is it is an unfair advantage, meaning it gives you like 5x better outcomes than your competition. So that changes the game in your favor. I was thinking of a dear friend of mine, and he again is a marketing genius, and he believes, and I agree, he will end up with a $400 million company. He’s a serial entrepreneur; he knows what he’s doing. One of the key advantages of creating is marketing-driven. The idea that he’s seen as the leader in that space, if people believe that you are the leader, then that makes a huge difference in when they decide to buy your product versus your competition’s product, and then even his possible acquirers see him as a leader. So that question is, do I want to spend a billion dollars and five years fighting this guy, or am I better off giving him 400 million and buying him? I think 400 million is a faster, cheaper, better answer for them. So they’ll definitely write that big cheque. I don’t want to divulge the specifics and who that acquirer is or who this company is because I didn’t get my friend’s permission of the exact playbook he’s running, but that’s the beauty of Unfair Advantages and unfortunately, a lot of tech companies and AI companies or tech companies, they do the same old thing. They hire an army of salespeople and have them pound payments and so on. On the one hand, they have AI and genius. On the other hand, they have the lowest tech way of growing their business, and it doesn’t work. and every 10 people you hire in your sales team, five won’t work out, and then you’re hiring the next five and then the manager doesn’t work out, and then you’re replacing it. It’s a pain, and then if you look at the cost of acquiring the client, many tech companies would spend one to two years of revenue just to acquire the client just because their sales team is so expensive. And it’s so painful, right? So it’s almost like they believe that’s the only way to do it. I feel like marketing that’s well thought out strategically can cost you literally less than two to three grand a month but give you a real unfair advantage. Of course, your marketing has to expand, but at least to get started, it can really, really give you an advantage, an unfair advantage in your market, and position you as a leader.
Ryan: I think that’s really what it comes down to, right? Being able to understand how to differentiate yourself, as you mentioned, is amazing, especially in AI, right? Developing a tool that can be deployed tomorrow to change the way we do things exponentially faster and more efficiently, but then going to these archaic legacy ways to sell and market that product, and it takes so long to get the message out there. It’s at such a high cost. It’s a great analogy. You and I both love to talk in analogies all the time. I know one of your absolute favorites, too is the Hollywood Blockbuster Formula, right? And how that kind of applies in this area and in this conversation. So, for our audience, maybe explain what that Hollywood Blockbuster Formula is and how that kind of applies to AI founders.
Naren: Yeah, I mean, I’ve been doing marketing for, I guess, 20-plus years, even before I started Ekwa.com in 2007. And one thing I realized is that successful people do things that unsuccessful people don’t. They think differently. I mean, of course, Steve Jobs, the one who even coined the phrase thinking differently, absolutely they think differently. They don’t play the same game everybody else is playing. They play a totally different game. The question is a great one: Is there anything we can apply from Hollywood blockbusters to marketing? Because once you understand it, I think the way you think about marketing will totally change. See, if you look at a Hollywood blockbuster movie, that is a formula, right? There’s a hero. We all know that. There’s a villain. We all know that. Then, the movie is about the hero’s journey. The hero is trying to fight the villain, and there are typically two types of villains. One is the real villain, Darth Vader, and the other one is Luke, his fears, all of these thoughts he has that saying, oh, you can’t do it. You’re not good enough, all of those emotional villains, and then the entire movie is the hero winning, losing, winning, losing, winning, losing, and then finally, after two and a half hours becoming triumphant.
Typically that’s the formula of a movie that makes a billion dollars or three billion dollars. Also, there’s this other character. I’m going to call him Yoda or the guide, right? I mean, the Yoda or the guide is the one that’s kind of whispering in the ears of the hero and guiding the hero, and typically, most successful movies have that type of character, the guide or the Yoda. So that’s a really, really powerful concept, and I think you can apply that in the form of marketing, right? So, imagine doing a podcast, and in your podcast, your hero is the person you are interviewing. Perhaps I’m just going to give you an example. This is an actual client of mine. They do accounting and bookkeeping and all kinds of services for tech companies. Their audience is tech entrepreneurs, tech CEOs, and tech founders, and those people are their customers. So what they want to do is celebrate people just like their customers in this podcast. They want to make him this one person they’re interviewing, the hero of this story, and through the hero, the ones listening are like, I want to be like the hero, and I want to be like the hero, and who’s the Yoda in this entire situation? It’s the company. It’s the accounting company. It’s the one that’s interviewing because they are the ones who’re making them look like heroes. They are the ones along for the chain, never taking the spotlight away from the hero, but the subtle message is every single hero had this Yoda, and that’s this accounting firm that you need to have a similar Yoda, and of course, after a while, you become one of them right. I mean, it’s like Oprah right after she started interviewing all these world-famous people, she is more famous than even Obama at the time, and she could introduce Obama, and that kind of launched his career, and then he became the president, and so forth so eventually, this interviewer, this you will become as famous as people in your community and so forth. Another company that used this technique exceptionally well is Nike right? I’m sure you’ve all seen the new movie about how they signed Michael Jordan. If you’re not, you should watch it if you’re a marketing, you have any interest in marketing. Pretty much what they realized is there were a lot of kids, especially African-American kids, at that time. This is going back to the 80s, who didn’t have a role model and didn’t have somebody to look up to. They all like playing basketball, so let’s find them a basketball star and make this guy huge. Who’s that person? Michael Jordan, meaning bigger than life. And the idea is that they all want to be like Mike. So eventually, the way they can be like Mike is by the shoes. They are Jordans, right? They came up with that, it’s exact same story brand concept. Michael is the hero that everybody wants to be like, and the customers are all those kids who want to be like Mike and the way they’re going to be like Mike is by buying Air Jordans and striving to be a great athlete. The idea is that you can do it, not only applies for sneakers but even in your life. You can do anything you want. But what they didn’t realize is it’s not only going to inspire African-American kids, it’s going to inspire the entire world. Today, I think it’s a $5 billion brand, Air Jordans, and the profit margin is unreal and it’s a lifestyle. I mean, it’s global. I mean, Michael goes to, I guess, anywhere on the planet, there’ll be like a thousand people standing outside if they know he’s on the plane, right? It’s just unreal what they were able to do. So, that is the same concept, but how can you apply it? Of course, you don’t have to have a global brand that billions of people like because you might only be selling to a maximum of a thousand companies. So you just need to become that Yoda in that community. So that’s the strategy, and I know this works because that’s something we have used ourselves in the projects we have done to get our own clients. So it absolutely works.
Ryan: Yeah, and I was going to say, with your platform, Ekwa.Tech, that’s kind of one of the ideas that you’ve brought forward. You’ve taken what’s already been successful, and now you’ve sort of multiplied how you can give that out to other members of the community, in the AI community, in the tech community, and really use podcast marketing to help create an audience and be that Yoda and help to grow not just their business, but their clients’ businesses and become that thought leader. Explain to us a little bit about that, about how podcast marketing can help create an audience and lead generation from that side of things.
Naren: Absolutely. So, if you are like most tech companies, 99% of them, 95% of them, what do you do? You hire an army of salespeople, 5, 10, 20, a manager and VP of sales, all that stuff. You’re spending 20, 30% of your revenues on this team. And they’re supposed to cold call and get clients who don’t know anything about you to do business with you. I mean, put yourself in the shoes of the customer. If you don’t know anything about somebody, you don’t even know who they are, you don’t like them, and you don’t trust them, what are the chances of them doing business with you? Of course, there is a chance if this person is persistent and spends two years, but the cost, that’s why the cost of acquiring a new customer is so high for 90% of tech companies, and it pretty much takes up most of their budgets, most of their investments.
What if you are different? What if you already have started building an audience and there are a thousand people? Let’s say your market has a thousand clients, or ten thousand clients, or a hundred thousand clients and many of those people in that market already know you, already like you, already trust you, or already listening to this podcast that you have created where you are celebrating customers just like them who have done unbelievable things and they want to do those same unbelievable things. Perhaps using that same example that I used before, a case study, you know, this one tech entrepreneur raised $50 million. Interview that tech entrepreneur and talk about how he did it and his secrets. Perhaps another entrepreneur exited a company, and he went from zero to 10 million in five years. How did he grow so fast? What were his secrets? So similarly, like you can tell these wonderful stories, interview these people who are amazing. And so others want to listen to them. And the other thing is, when I make this particular entrepreneur a hero, what’s going to happen? That entrepreneur is going to share it on their LinkedIn, share it on their emails, and send it to everybody they know. All these people who are seeing that are his friends, his colleagues, his customers; they’re curious, and they watch it. Oh, they’re like, I love this. I already like John, and I love this interview that John did. What are they going to do? They’re going to retweet it. They’re going to reshare it. Now, all of a sudden, the other cool thing about this is it kind of gets his own legs. So you are not even finding your potential customers. These people are finding themselves because this one single podcast is spreading widely. Now you multiply it by one a week, one a week, one a week. Before you know it, you become the podcast for this industry. Now, I use tech entrepreneurs as the audience. What about, you know, maybe you’re selling to hospitals and anybody who works at hospitals, interview people who work in hospitals, interview people who have innovated in that industry. Now, the same concept gets shared. It’s good because every industry has a community. So you can pretty much carve out a piece of that community, and now it’s your community. Why? It’s your podcast. You found it. You are the host of the show, and now, on that basis, you can build other things. You can do webinars. You can do events. You can build a mailing list. You can start educating people about your product. You can do so much more. But the difference between you, the one with the unfair advantage, and the 99% of the companies that just go the traditional route of hiring a large sales team and whatnot is your cost of acquiring that new customer would be a fraction of the cost of the other guys. That unfair advantage means you don’t need to raise as much money, especially in today’s climate. When money is tight, you have an advantage. You can really work smart.
Podcast Marketing for Lead Generation
Ryan: And I think that’s a big thing too. The types of leads that come in and come back from that are very different. When you’ve got this cold calling team, as you said, this marketing team that has to go out and reach out, it’s very much like, okay, I’m being sold to, I’m being prepared for a sales pitch here, things like that. When they’re listening to you, you’ve got expertise, you’ve got trust built in, you’ve got authority, you’ve got leadership in the area. So these people are coming to you now saying, I already trust you, I already want to hear what you have to say, you know, just tell me why I should be a client at this stage, right? So it becomes a much more effective, efficient, shorter sales cycle. All that sort of stuff comes into play here. As you mentioned, it is a completely unfair advantage when you talk about it in that sense. For founders who have, maybe they’re already engaged in podcast marketing, they’ve looked into it a little bit. Things along those lines, what kind of key metrics should they be monitoring to see if they’re successful in their efforts in terms of lead generation and brand awareness?
Naren: Absolutely. I mean, a way to think about it is if somebody has heard you once, the chances of them doing business with you might be one in a thousand. If the same person has heard you a hundred times, the chances of them doing business with you are not one in a thousand, possibly one in 50. So you’re getting an unfair advantage. You’re getting a 20x advantage. How you get people to hear you multiple times is to build an audience and give them content that they love. So it’s not about me, my product, my features. It’s about their problems, their needs, their interests. If it’s that hospital, you know, IT exec who you’re targeting, then what are they worried about? What’s keeping them up at night? Who do they want to listen to? Really put yourself in their perspective. Also, one of the principles that Dr. Robert Cialdini talks about when it comes to getting people to say yes is reciprocity, right? When you give them something of value, they trust you. They like you. They think you are one of us because you are helping us, our community. Right. So, it changes the entire game in your favor. So, what are the metrics? How many downloads are you getting? Are those numbers growing? And how many of those videos you are doing are getting reshared? How many views you are getting? So there’s a lot of micro metrics, like at a video level, at a podcast level, like download views, etc. Plus, also, in general, you want to see how many people are seeing you every week or every month. If your podcast is once a week or once a month, how many people are being touched by your podcast weekly or monthly? Now, all of a sudden, you have 1000, 5000, whatever the number of people who are hearing from you. Imagine the cost of getting those 5000 people to talk to your salespeople. It’ll be impossible, right? You cannot even imagine it. There’s no way you can influence so many people and get them to like you any other way. Like if you were to do it with salespeople, it’ll cost you 100 times more to get in front of as many people. Now, many of those people who like you, then once in a while in your podcast, you can say, hey, there’s an information session; come to this. So we are doing an exclusive event featuring this who’s who in your industry. We have 50 tickets who are interested. And, of course, that could be a webinar and given to those 50 people. Now, all those 50 people are really, you know, fans of yours because you gave them that take. Also, perhaps the topic that’s being discussed is the topic that your product solves or is linked to your product. So that way now those people are all potential customers. So that’s how you first create an audience and then convert that audience into possible customers who would buy your product.
Getting Started and Final Thoughts
Ryan: I think we got a lot of people here that are probably listening now saying, yes, I want to create an audience. I want to be a key opinion leader and a thought leader in my area. I want to have this unfair advantage. This is a great way for me to be able to market and grow my revenues without having to build a sales team and spend the time, resources, and money behind that, but it also could be a daunting start, right? Some people don’t even know how do you even start a podcast. What kind of effort needs to go into it? So for those listeners, where do you recommend people get kind of started here?
Naren: Absolutely. I think the very first place to get started is to really, really sit and think, how can I apply the story brand? How can I apply this concept of building an audience and growing that audience in my business? Right. So figure that stuff out. Like, who is the hero? Who is your customer? What would a possible podcast be? Who would you interview? How often would it be? So we do what’s called a Marketing Strategy Meeting where we sit with the people who are interested in this and go through with them and help them develop their entire strategy. Like their entire strategy around what they need to do and all those details. So typically, it’s a one-hour meeting, and at least for the first five, I’ll be doing them personally. So, if anyone is interested, please book a meeting with aifounders.net/msm/.
Pick this apart and help you figure this stuff out. It’s an, I’ll give to you like I’m an entrepreneur, I love entrepreneurs, and I would love to help you think this through. Whether you work with us or not, I think it’s a great place to start. If you were to work with us, we make it very affordable. We understand startups. We understand you don’t have a big budget. So, it can be as low as $2,000 or as high as $4,000, but still, it’s a fraction of what it would cost even hiring a single marketing person, but the unfair advantage you get with this done-for-you solution. So it’s everything right from videos to graphics to podcast bookings to podcast marketing. It’s all done for you. Everything you get with this done-for-you solution is by the end of next year, possibly at the end of two years, you have this unfair advantage that nobody else has. And that positions you, especially in a tight economic market extremely well.
Ryan: Absolutely. It gets your message out there to everybody, right? Again, whether it’s clients or VCs or whatever it is, it is a massive ability. You know, Naren has an incredible ability to do this and definitely take advantage again. You’re here listening to this podcast because of the fact that you want to accelerate growth. You’re here listening to all of our episodes because you want to hear their journeys and the ways that you can kind of get the best practices and learn and this is just another one that we want to be able to help our listeners with. So again, aifounders.net/msm, meet with Naren, and definitely, you’ll have that basis to be able to grow and build your voice, build your brand, build a persona, all of those things that he had mentioned. As we kind of wind down on this episode, Naren, again, you’re a successful tech entrepreneur, you’re a serial entrepreneur, a marketing wizard, and you run a company with over 250 people. Any final thoughts, tips, anything that you’d like to leave with our audience today?
Naren: Yeah, I feel like if you are in it for the long term, if you’re an entrepreneur who wants to do something interesting and you want to be able to, you want to look back and say, you know what, I did this. Here is my only tip: create unfair advantages. And I like to share this in another way with the help of a story. So, I was listening to a podcast recently. He was one of the top VCs at Benchmark, and he was interviewed by another VC. This person asked him right off the bat, like, what do you look for in entrepreneurs? He says three things. Like what do you look for in the first meeting? One, I like this person. I feel like I can work with this person. And typically the people I like to work with are like sponges. They’re always learning like they’re asking so many questions, and they just learn at such a fast rate. So when you give them business, or you back them up with the business over a 10-year period, they’re going to learn so much and they’re going to create so much. And that unfair advantage I want to be part of, right? So massive learners were able to see the world differently. Second, when you talk to them, they paint a picture of the world that’s different from what you’ve ever seen. And he’s like, then I know I have the right person. Because if this person is seeing the world exactly like everybody else is seeing it, then why am I giving this person 10, 20, 30, 40 million dollars and dedicating 10 years of my life backing this person? Right? It’s just like, oh, yeah, I’ll get a consolation prize, attendance price, or a showing up price, but these VCs are not interested in attendance prices or showing up prices.
They want the home runs. They want the 1000X ROI. So when somebody sees the world differently, and if you look at the concept of seeing the world differently, these people, he’s talking about unfair advantages. These companies see something that nobody else sees, and they create these unfair advantages and if you look at my career over the last 15 years, that’s kind of what I did. I tried to focus on noticing, looking for, hunting for these unfair advantages, and then putting them all together. When you put three, four, five, six, seven, and eight unfair advantages together, you are in a very good place. And then you can build on it the next year, the following year, and the following year, and it just becomes like game-changing. So I really, really believe that. You know, just don’t do what everybody else is doing. I mean, that’s easy. If that’s the case, then go and open up, I don’t know, a convenience store, something that’s basic and everybody else is doing. Don’t be an AI entrepreneur. Now, as an AI entrepreneur, you have to keep one thing in mind. The good news about AI is also the bad news about AI. It’s not that difficult, meaning you don’t need to have a PhD in AI to build an AI company. I mean, like even some of the best models, I think there’s like 80 lines of code. So it’s not like that’s not where your advantage is. So anybody can figure out what that 80 lines of code is. One of the things that you also have to keep in mind is the people who buy your stuff are human beings and human beings are influenced and great marketers. Whether it’s Steve Jobs, they’re good at influencing human beings. So I think really focusing on that and really maximizing that is key for your long-term success, this ability to create unfair advantages.
Ryan: I think that’s incredibly, you know, incredibly well said. As we covered so many great things here to be able to talk about how to create that advantage again, it all starts with a kind of getting connected with the rain with talking with people like him. And again, thank you for listening. Thank you for being here, but for our listeners, aifounders.net/msm, just one more time to make sure that you take advantage of that. Get to speak to Naren directly and really start to put yourself in the right position for this. With that, I think this is a great place to leave off here, and I want to thank Naren for this amazing podcast, How AI Founders Can Create an unfair marketing advantage and give them an EDGE. Naren, thank you so much for sharing this with us and for teaching our audience a little bit. Again, aifounders.net/msm. That’s how we’re going to talk to Naren. Naren, thank you so much again.
Naren: Thank you.
Ryan: Wonderful, and thank you for joining us on this enlightening journey through innovation. We hope that you’ve been inspired by the incredible stories shared today. And remember to stay curious, stay innovative, and keep exploring the boundless horizons of technology before we sign off, though. For our listeners, if you’ve enjoyed the podcast, please remember to share it. Take a moment to leave a review. Share it on your favorite platform. It’s your feedback and support that helps us bring you more amazing content and incredible guests like Naren today. Until next time. Thanks, everybody. This is Ryan Davies signing off.