#155 - R.J. Talyor, CEO of Pattern89 - On creating extremely sticky technology that marketers actually want to use

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to change the way that marketers create. My guest is R.J. Talyor, CEO and Founder of Pattern89.

R.J. has been a B2B software entrepreneur for well over 15 years. He fulfilled various roles ranging from strategist, director Product Marketing and VP of Mobile Products at ExactTarget, became VP of Messaging Products at Salesforce, and served as the VP of Product Management at Geofeedia. He’s recognized as one of the Indianapolis business Journal’s 40 Under 40.

In 2016, he founded Pattern89. With this company, he’s on a mission to inspire creativity – and to build something that will change marketing forever.

Their strong belief is that AI will make brands, agencies, and marketers more creative, and more human in an increasingly automated world.

This inspired me, and hence I invited R.J. to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in marketing – especially on the creative side. We discuss how marketing is becoming more and more metrics-driven, while we still make creative decisions based on gut-feel (often by the highest-paid person in the room). We also dig into what it takes to build a remarkable software business – creating software that’s extremely sticky – software that people want to use.

Here are some of his quotes:

Marketers spend a ton of time on audience development, on reach, on frequency. Everyone talks about journeys, but they don't talk about creative.

What I saw was that there's a better way to create what images or videos or copy that you see, and machine learning provides marketers with tools to allow them to do that, like never before. So, the big problem is how do we get more efficient at the creative process, without asking marketers to act more like machines?

What they want to do is understand if their idea is going to work or not. And so marketers are kind of trained themselves into machines to try to compute that when we should say: “Hey, no, no human marketer, go create something else. You're the creator, you're the idea person, you're the idea. Machine machines can come up with ideas, let the machines simulator validate what's gonna work, and you human, you do what humans can do best.”

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That very often stickiness of your applications increases not by building a better User Interface to perform a task, but by making it magically happen
2. How you can help your customers make a difference is by avoiding the ‘highest paid person in the room’ to feel inclined to make a decision
3. Why your future success and momentum can be hidden in killing your darlings, i.e., get rid of those things you’re just hooked to.
4. How Data-Coop across your customers can shift from a nice-to-have into your primary selling point

For more information about the guest from this week:

• R.J. Talyor
• Website Pattern89