#91 - Aki Balogh, CEO of MarketMuse - On why it requires 10x impact to thrive and survive in business software

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to scale the impact of content strategists and content writers by a factor 10. My guest is Aki Balogh, Co-founder and CEO of MarketMuse

Aki is a software developer and VC with a focus on AI. Prior to founding MarketMuse, he held sales and marketing roles at InfiniDB, evangelized Big Data as an investment focus for OpenView Venture Partners, designed Decision Support Systems as a management consultant, and worked as a software engineer. Aki holds three pending patents in semantic analysis.

MarketMuse is a SaaS platform that lets marketers execute scalable demand generation campaigns through AI-driven content. The promise: realize 2-3X gains in productivity and 2X-6X improvements in search traffic within the first 6 months. This triggered me, and hence I invited Aki to my podcast.

We explore what’s broken in the market of content development and digital advertising: The cost of customer acquisition is consistently going up on every single paid channel – and as such, it’s not sustainable to keep throwing more ads at people without getting better results. Something has to change.

Here are some of his quotes:

I love the idea of teaching people information and not just blasting them with different types of ads. It maps to how people use the internet. What's the first thing you do when you want to buy something? You start googling it, you're researching it, reading about it, you're educating yourself.

So, when searchers find your content, they're actually getting a lot of, what I think of as, information value out of it, and that's essentially what our platform helps you do.

A content strategist or content writer with our data is twice or three times more productive right off the bat. And the content that they write is twice to six times on average, more performant on search.

So, you drive two to six times more leads with the same content because the content is that much better. It speeds them up. It drastically improved the ROI on a human, but it doesn't replace the human

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That a lot of challenges in business software can be solved by giving people context rather than just information. Information without context isn’t actionable and hence doesn’t drive business value.
2. Why a lot of customers stay where they are because too many business software solutions on the market (start-up and traditional) fail to deliver the so-called ‘10x shift in value’. The financial and reputational risk to move or migrate is therefore simply too high.
3. Why every tech companies should have an abominable ‘No-Man’ that would just says: ‘Nope, Nope, No, No. It’s ‘No’ with a corollary: it's no, but prove me wrong, show me business justification.