Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:00.961)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. Today we're going to be discussing how a marketing company called The Kill is using AI inside of their own business. And we'll share the exact steps that you can take in order to implement AI for yourself. Now, before I dive into that, listen closely. Are you looking to implement AI inside of your own company or maybe just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT Trainer. GPT Trainer literally builds out and manages your AI for you, eliminating hallucinations for good.
Go to GPT-trainer.com. I promise you, it'll be the biggest time saving decision that you've made all year. Trying to set up AI on your own is like trying to build a house from scratch. Sure, you could do it, but the time and frustration it may take to get it finished, it may not be worth it. It's a thousand times faster and safer to hire professionals. Schedule a consultation today. Once again, that's GPT-trainer.com. Today I have with me Patrick Spychowski, who is the founder of The Kiln.
an agency that specializes in helping mid-market to enterprise companies implement AI thoughtfully. Really excited to have Patrick on the show today. Hey, Patrick, how are you doing today, my friend?
Patrick Spychalski (01:11.298)
Yeah, appreciate you having me on. Doing well.
Kyle James (01:13.121)
Yeah. So give us some background. What, what exactly is the kiln? Give us some context there and like, how did you find the company, uh, from, you know, beginnings in.
Patrick Spychalski (01:22.178)
Yeah, totally. So prior to starting the kiln, I was working at a company called Clay. At the time, it was a very small kind of AI go-to-market startup. And I was helping them with a lot of their content. Clay started to very quickly gain traction and had a ton of customers. And since I was running their content, people were reaching out to me asking if I could help them use the tool.
For those who don't know what clay is, it's a pretty complicated tool to use. It's not very like out of the box. And so I was having companies reach out to me saying, Hey, would you, would you mind helping out helping me out with this? Um, so eventually I, uh, left clay and started the kiln, which was an agency that helped advise people on how to use it. Um, and from there we still specialize primarily in a lot of clay work, but we've kind of extrapolated to more of the residual tooling around it as well, like HubSpot and Salesforce and any data and all the other great AI workflow tools that exist. And so.
Our goal is really just to create efficiency within larger companies using AI. lot of the smaller, more tedious, even at some times intellectual work within businesses can now be automated with AI. And so we use a combination of tools to make sales teams and marketing teams more efficient.
Kyle James (02:33.759)
Yeah, absolutely. And so like, think it's really interesting to go from clay and I've heard of clay and I think a lot of people that are listening might have heard of it too as well. but the complexity that it was on the forefront and just how hard it was for a lot of clients to work with. Like when you finally made that jump, like were you, were you doing some side, you know, kind of side hustle initially and then like, and then transition over or was it like, Hey, we're just going to take a leap and just jump right into it and to start building clients and helping those who needed help on the, complexity with clay.
Patrick Spychalski (03:03.68)
Yeah, so when I started dealing with clients, the Clay team was very much in support of me doing this because ultimately it brought them more product adoption and usability, as well as I was just constantly posting about them. So it kind of spread the good word. So in the beginning, I was doing it in tandem with my work at Clay, just helping because I was a contractor. So I would spend some of my time working on Clay stuff, some of my time working on more contractor-based stuff or like implementation stuff for other businesses. And eventually,
Um, we, got to, uh, you know, high enough MRR to where I could, you know, leave the company and work on, work on it full time. And so, you know, that was back when I was running it myself. And since then, of course, I've hired a bunch of people and have like a real team.
Kyle James (03:46.593)
Yeah, I think it's like really rare for a lot of like, you if you're working for companies, most of time, like if you branch off, it's like, no, no, please don't, please don't like especially if it's like competitive. in this case, cause like, please, yes, we're totally fine with that. We like, we want you to help more people because obviously if there's more traction and their understanding of clay as a whole, then like they're going to stay probably more long-term with as like customers for clay and then also for the kiln too. So you're using AI right now at the kiln. And, uh, I think it's really cool what you guys are doing. Like tell me why.
Like, what are you doing exactly within the AI, and what specific challenges are you trying to solve? Is it integrating with clay.com? Walk me through that a little bit for context.
Patrick Spychalski (04:24.684)
Yeah, so I mean, a lot of companies come to us because they see a lot of the new, you know, shiny AI tooling on like LinkedIn or wherever they get their news and they think it's interesting. They think it could have some value and they want to figure out which tools actually are valuable, like sift through a lot of the tool noise as well as figure out, okay, like with the tools that I actually should be using, how do I implement them thoughtfully? And so the, I'd say the main thing that they come to us for is
to create efficiencies within their go-to-market system. So for example, if they have, let's say, 200 sales team members at a large company working on researching prospects, a majority of their prospect research can likely be automated with AI agents that are going and doing the same sort of research that a person would have previously done manually. And so those 200 sales team members can now allocate their time to higher leverage work that couldn't really be automated, whether it's taking calls or sending very detailed follow-ups or writing.
statements of work with nuance to them. And so now suddenly that thing that they were doing for two to three hours a day is being reduced to maybe five to 10 minutes a day of work, therefore obviously creating significant efficiencies for companies. so, know, AI agents and AI tools like Clay can do a lot of the work that was previously available manually, but of course every company has very different workflows. They have different nuance to their workflows. And so we're kind of like a more custom bespoke solution to solving those problems.
Kyle James (05:51.645)
Yeah. So like for most of the people, like you mentioned, like, suspect that you discover, like they're spending a lot of time, you know, searching up for, you know, back in on prospects and, and, and leads and such. Now, was that something like they came to you like, Hey, we want to do this. Or is it like, Hey, here's our process. And you know, we think it works pretty good within your teams. Like, actually we could automate a lot of this using, you know, clay.com and also with like automations, like what, what's typically like the most common way you see people approach when they come to, to come to the kiln.
Patrick Spychalski (06:21.346)
Yeah, great question. I think, think prospects come to us usually in two different scenarios. The first thing is that they know exactly what they want to build and have a general idea of how it could be built. like they're like, we want to automate all of our research for our sales team members to use the same example. And we, have a general idea of what data points we want and we know what we want the end result to look like. And we want you to advise us on how to build it most efficiently, most cost-effectively, and of course, in a way that people will actually use. So that could be the first scenario. The second scenario is a company comes to us with a problem.
So using the same example as before, companies are saying, hey, our sales team members aren't doing enough outreach. They're spending too much Taiwan research. What should we do about it? So almost like one level of abstraction back from the previous example. And so we can, of course, help advise them on, OK, well, this is what we've done for five other clients to help automate their research processes.
Kyle James (07:11.113)
Yeah. So since working, how long has the company, I probably should ask that, how long has the Kiln been since you've you've branched off from Clay? How long you've been the founder of the Kiln?
Patrick Spychalski (07:25.152)
Yeah, so about two years, I brought on a co-founder six months into the business and then yeah, just started hiring.
Kyle James (07:31.961)
I nice. And what, what types of anything worth noting as far as like results go, like either, either internally with, with obviously you're, you're implementing AI within some of your clients that you're working with, but even like on your client side that you're any key results are like, Hey, wow, they actually, we worked with this client and this is some of the things that results they got from, from working with us. Like anything we're sharing that you would like to share.
Patrick Spychalski (07:53.014)
Yeah, totally. So I'd say like the two main benchmarks we often optimize for when doing work for clients are pipeline generated or time saved or efficiency created. And so on the pipeline generated end, we've generated hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars for the pipeline for all of our clients across the board. For some of our individual clients, we've generated a couple hundred million in pipeline a piece. So like I've done pretty well in creating sales flows that are able to do that consistently. And then on the efficiency end,
We've created workflows, like individual workflows that have saved hundreds of hours a week, and of course thousands of hours over time for companies. they cost essentially nothing relative to the resource they were allocating to the workflows before. And so we've worked with a ton of mid-market and enterprise companies and relatively notable ones like Windsurf and BrowserBase and T-Rock and a few others. I'd say those are a few maybe notable things to note.
Kyle James (08:49.183)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And like, I might be back backwards stepping here. Like, you know, I think a lot of people have heard like maybe like Apollo, Zoom Info, Clay, like for those who are like, I don't know what any, like any of that stuff is like what, you know, maybe they're trying to start a business or maybe they're just, they're getting it up and running. Like, can you walk through like, what, what exactly does Clay do that's differently maybe from like Apollo or Zoom Info or some other of those like popular sites that a lot of businesses use.
Patrick Spychalski (09:14.476)
Yeah, so Clay can best be described as a workflow tool with really good enrichment capabilities. so instead of an Apollo or Zoom Info, which you would see as more of a lead sourcing tool, Clay does really great lead sourcing, but then also can build workflows off of the list that it creates. And so you can create like automated email campaigns, automated research flows, automated inbound lead scoring flows, CRM cleaning stuff. Like you can do a lot of really cool stuff in the tool. And on top of that, it has significantly better data.
than that of any other tool on the market because Clay is really just an aggregate of every data provider on the market. So it waterfalls every data provider for a work email or for a phone number or even for more niche data like financial information from a 10K. And you can find all this data action upon it using their workflow function and of course source leads as well. So it's like this kind of all in one go to market tool that can save you a lot of budget instead of buying like 10 or 11 different like single function go to market tools. You could just
Kyle James (10:11.713)
Hmm.
Patrick Spychalski (10:13.134)
pretty much by clay to do, I would say, to 90 % of the work you would have otherwise been doing.
Kyle James (10:18.377)
Yeah, I had a, I don't know you know this guy or not, but, we're, we're, he's one of our, clients, but it's the Legion J out of Florida. If you've heard of him before, that's where we first heard about clay.com was he had like a, you know, internal, like a mastermind community that we were part of. I, brought some people in from clay.
Patrick Spychalski (10:26.967)
Yeah.
Kyle James (10:40.635)
And you probably were even on, don't know, but he brought some people on clay and like, that's where we, we learned about it, but just like seeing the way the capabilities, like taking the data. Cause we have like Apollo for us, like Apollo is one thing, but like, what do you do with when it's not like accurate data? That was some of the issues I faced is like, okay, this, we think this is accurate. Like we saw that clay would go through and like verify and like multiple different points. And so, but it was, it was really tough. Like you said, Patrick, it was really tough to figure out. so like having someone kind of walk you through that on how to use it was like.
I can see why you ended up branching off with the kill, you know what mean?
Patrick Spychalski (11:14.112)
Yeah, totally. mean, it's a tough tool to use for sure, but there are a lot of great use cases. And even if you do know how to use it to some extent, there are a lot of cost saving mechanisms you can implement. So agencies like ours tend to be somewhat helpful for people just getting started.
Kyle James (11:27.883)
So what are some of the, obviously a lot of change happening in the AI community, what would you say are some of the Killen's upcoming AI initiatives over the next couple of years? Where do you see maybe AI playing some of the biggest role in your operations next?
Patrick Spychalski (11:40.814)
Yeah, so I still think one of the biggest problems people are facing is having to sift through the noise of AI developments and tools that are available and discerning which of the tools are actually valuable or which things are actually innovative in the AI space. 95 % of AI tools are just wrappers on initial workflow tools. Like I don't like to use the term GPT wrapper because a lot has to be done in order to actually create an effective AI model. So I won't.
Use that term, but there are a lot of tools that you could, you could create the same tool in N8n or clay if you spend enough time doing it. And so, I think what we're planning on focusing on specifically is actually figuring out which tools are worth trying or which AI features are worth trying and then recommending them to clients when we deem them valuable and implementing them. So trying to be like a very. Custom bespoke AI consultant that can help you actually do valuable things with AI, kind of like a, I think long-term, like one of those.
Like almost like a McKinsey or BCG of AI is kind of like the place we're aiming.
Kyle James (12:40.769)
Yeah, for sure. There are so many AI tools out there. I knew I've seen some companies like we'll have like a list of all the recommended tools that they use, but like it's gotta be relevant. I mean, you just throw a thousand tools on there. It's like, cool. But like, what's your use case? Like having, I could see that being a big value ad where it's like, Hey, we're already started. Like I see Chad, VTSC, Claude, and Thropic. see, you know, DFC and all these other large language models. Like, okay, but where, like, what do I actually use from this point? That's going to actually benefit my business as a tool. And as we wrap up this conversation,
Patrick, appreciate having you on. Where can people learn a little bit more about you and then maybe a little bit more about the kiln?
Patrick Spychalski (13:16.054)
Yeah, feel free to check me out on LinkedIn. That's where I do the majority of my posting about like new updates in AI and things that we're working on. feel free to check out the kiln.com, which is our agency's website to see some of our case studies and what we've been working on as well.
Kyle James (13:30.739)
Awesome. Amazing. Thank you so much, Patrick. It's great having you on my friend. Let's definitely keep in touch. And remember, those who are listening in, you're looking to implement AI to your business, please don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress of the AI may cause, it may not be worth it. Schedule a call with GPT trainer. Let them build out and manage your AI for you. Once again, that's gpt-trainer.com. Signing off for now. Have a great rest of the day, everybody. And looking forward to seeing everyone on the next episode of the AI Chronicles.
