#139 - Matthew Schmidt, CEO of Peoplelogic.ai - On taking the pain out of rapidly growing SMB organizations

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that gives SMBs a position of advantage by leveraging technology typically only available to the Enterprise. My guest is Matthew Schmidt, Founder and CEO of Peoplelogic.ai

Matthew is and experienced entrepreneur and operator with a history of building and launching products and growing businesses. Early in his career, he led DZone’s media business unit, responsible for DZone.com, a popular website and publisher for the global software developer community. He was the architect behind its community platform, AnswerHub, and attracted a global audience of millions of technology professionals.

Today, he’s the CEO of Peoplelogic.ai, a startup that’s on a mission to make growth scalable. Peoplelogic is an AI-augmented mission control for SMB teams. It monitors, alerts, and predicts outcomes around immediate risks and opportunities within a business so they can focus where it counts and get ahead of problems before it sinks them.

This resonated with me, and hence I invited Matthew to my podcast. We explore the challenges SMB organizations have due to the lack of information and insight– and how easily they get off track as a consequence (especially when they grow). Many can’t anticipate the big waves that can take them out, let alone take advantage of opportunities before the competition does. We also dig into the key question of what’s required to build a remarkable software business and keep living up to that.

Here are some of his quotes:

What I set out to solve originally with Peoplelogic was really: How do we make better managers? How do we use technology and data to be able to augment our managers on their way to better understanding their people and to help them maintain growth and be able to not slip, and fall, or trip over their shoelaces as the company's growing.

We come from selling enterprise software, but the businesses that we ran, were high growth startups. And to be successful, a lot of things have to happen correctly along the way. There are so many opportunities for failure. What we saw was that if you can stop even 20% of those from happening, or from having a big impact on your team, or getting you off track, you're going to be that much more successful.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why technology is only a piece of what makes your company successful.
2. How to thrive if you’re launching your new product at the start of the world’s largest pandemic we can remember
3. How to carve out your own blue ocean by democratizing technology typically only available to the enterprise
4. Why you should avoid comparing your company to others

For more information about the guest of this week:

• Matthew Schmidt
• Peoplelogic.ai