Aki Balogh, Jeff Coyle & Noah Davis of MarketMuse

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Aki Balogh had a project to apply machine learning to help content creators. Suddenly it looked like a business when Jeff Coyle, the VP of Search at an established company, joined him as co-founder. MarketMuse is now a fast-growing startup helping hundreds of companies figure out what content to create.

Aki, Jeff and VP of Engineering at MarketMuse, Noah Davis, were in studio for an engaging interview.

Some highlights:

• Sal Talks about Angel Invest Boston’s Syndicate
• Aki Balogh Talks about Going to Community College at age 15
• Jeff Coyle Goes from Computer Science at Georgia Tech to Content Marketing
• A “Take Your Kid to Work” Day Gets 12-Year Old Noah Davis Interested in Software Engineering
• “I like computer science, but I was not going to be the best engineer. I wanted to do something with people.”
• Jeff Coyle’s First Job Out of College Gave Him Exposure to Entrepreneurship
• “So, I'd been trying to solve the problem that MarketMuse solves by hand, manually, for ten years.”
• “And she asked me if I wanted to see something cool. Of course, I did. So, she slung a few lines of code … and made something happen and appear on a screen that had previously had nothing on it. From that moment, I was hooked-“
• “And some of the things we use APIs for at MarketMuse allow us to move very fast as an organization.”
• MarketMuse’s Founding Story
• “I think you should be at a startup, either running your own or working on somebody else's. And that operational experience would make you a better investor down the line.”
• “So, I started thinking, I wonder if there's a way we can use machine learning to actually help with this content creation problem and help us figure out what to write about and how to write about it…”
• “…oh my gosh, the Vice President of Search from TechTarget is interested in what we do, I nearly fell out of my chair.”
• “If you have that culture of content internally, you can really take this quickly and integrate it in your workflows to be more successful at the planning side, and then even in the execution side.”
• “The search-engine industry has changed in the meantime here to really start caring about content quality too.”
• “…basically we have a software as a service solution that allows you to evaluate the quality and comprehensiveness of any page on any topic.”
• “Processes that would take tens, twenties of hours in the past, the research elements, we're doing in minutes.”
• Aki Balogh’s Advice to Startups in Finding Their First Use Case
• “…we were fully remote because I would just work with wherever I found talent…”
• MarketMuse Uses Slack and Confluence to Keep Remote Staff on the Same Page
• “I wanted to avoid venture until as late as possible because it creates a couple of bad behaviors.”
• Sal Brings Up Wistia as Fantastic Bootstrappers
• “The more data you crunch, the more cases you see, the more knowledgeable you are and therefore the farther ahead you are of your competitors who haven't crunched those particular numbers. This is an interesting-“
• “…your quality of life basically just falls, continually falls as the company grows, because you have less personal freedoms and so on. But it's a very meaningful process…”
• “…40% of a startup is articulating what the software does…”
• Creating an Environment in your Startup for People who Are not Entrepreneurs