Episode Transcript
Kyle James (00:01.068)
Hey, welcome to the AI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Kyle James. And today we're going to be diving in headfirst into how a software development company called Steerco 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 just struggling to get your AI to stop hallucinating? Speak to GPT trainer.
GPT trainer literally builds out and manages your AI agent 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 is going to take you to get it finished. Just isn't 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 Zach Hawley, who is the founder of Steerco, a platform that builds QBR decks, does deep customer research and automates success plan tracking. So customer success teams can stop drowning in homework. Before this, he led enterprise customer success at a public SaaS company and got tired of doing it manually. So, so excited to have him on the show today. Hey Zach.
Welcome in, how are you?
Zach Hawley (01:27.025)
Yeah, I'm great, Kyle. Thanks for having me.
Kyle James (01:29.238)
Yeah, super excited to have this conversation. So give us some background, Zach. Like how did, you know, you worked before at a big public SaaS company. Now you're, now you started a company called Steerco. Like how did that get founded and what was the whole purpose behind it when you first started the company?
Zach Hawley (01:42.449)
Yeah, you I was leading a really big customer success team and spending half of my life helping them out in slide decks and pre-meetings and spreadsheets. And honestly, every presentation that we had to do for a customer just felt like homework and it was a real pain and we couldn't get to everybody that we wanted to get to because of it. So we looked around and there was nothing that could do what we wanted it to do. And so I ended up building something that automates all the parts of the job that ultimately
Nobody wants to do. And other people started saying they would pay for it and they wanted it. That was the spark.
Kyle James (02:18.766)
So making that jump going from working, I mean, it's just like a public SaaS company and, really, especially like any sort of public company where they have so much great benefits, like making that big jump from working for a public company to starting your own thing. Like, what was that like? And like, what was going through maybe your head when you first made that leap?
Zach Hawley (02:35.613)
Yeah, it's terrifying, truthfully, especially as someone who has, you I have a small family, I've got kids, a wife, a house. And I've been telling people that it's so hard, you know it's going to be hard when you do it. And the hard part about it is it's actually 10 times harder than what you thought. And I think you should do it not only if you feel like you have the right idea, but you really feel like you have to.
Because it's so painful and the why behind it needs to be so strong So if you really feel like what you're working on is is is powerful and you can do it More power to you, but it is it is a tough decision to make and it's it's very personal. So It was great
Kyle James (03:18.988)
Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel, do you feel like it was like steerco, like the, idea of steerco initially, like was that, was that strong enough? Like, mean, obviously it was cause you made the jump, like, was there other ideas that you're like, I could do this. I could do that. But like, then you finally landed on steerco and then it just took off. So like, walk me through what that was like.
Zach Hawley (03:31.181)
yeah.
Zach Hawley (03:35.461)
Yeah. know, there's money is something that will always cloud your judgment. You know, if you're aiming for money, don't start a company because you're not going to make any, especially immediately. There are easier ways to make, make more money. You know, really the idea was, was very strong. It was something that we, really felt a lot of passion for, and I felt a lot of passion for, but truthfully, it just, it felt more right.
than anything. I've had a bunch of ideas. This is not the first idea I've had. I have a Google Drive full of terrible ideas. If anyone wants to, if anyone wants to talk to me about those, I have so many that if you want them, you can have them. There's probably something in there. But this was the first idea that I felt really emotionally attached to and felt like it could really improve the lives of the people that I had managed throughout my 10 plus year career. It was a constant annoyance for them. And we felt that if we could nail it, then
Kyle James (04:09.442)
Yeah, I there for you.
Zach Hawley (04:33.691)
this would be something really positive.
Kyle James (04:35.406)
Yeah. So, so right now it's your car. You're using a little bit of AI and I love what you guys are doing. Tell me a little bit, like, why did you decide to start using early implementing AI in the first place within, within steer co. And then like specifically what types of challenges were you trying to solve maybe internally or even externally with some of your, your customers.
Zach Hawley (04:56.101)
Yeah, so there's a couple of different things that we've benefited from. One, building a company right now allows us to be completely native AI. We're not taking a built-in, we're not taking a frame that existed and trying to shove AI into it. We built from scratch using AI. So, you know, I built an initial MVP using lovable just to get the idea out there. You know, you can talk about an idea, but the second you show someone something, it resonates so much more.
Kyle James (05:08.686)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle James (05:21.25)
Mmm.
Zach Hawley (05:22.735)
And so being able to build the MVP really quickly using, using lovable was, was fantastic. And I'm not a technical founder. it's just not something that I've done. and then we were able to build up, bring on an engineer who, we, he uses cursor to help build our product. and we have another engineer that we've just brought on as well. And I, you know, I've been, I've grown up in software throughout my career, past 10 plus years, what they have built, by themselves.
Kyle James (05:29.848)
Mm-hmm.
Kyle James (05:38.38)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Hawley (05:50.277)
would have taken a team of like 15 engineers five years ago, maybe two, three months to do. And they were able to do it within a few weeks. So it's been, it's been a remarkable game changer for us. It helps me write content. It's a great writing partner. It has helped me from all the areas that I know a little bit about, but I'm really weak, like from a finance perspective. You know, I literally just used it before jumping onto this call to expedite my EBITDA calculations, trying to figure out like,
Kyle James (06:00.152)
Yeah.
Zach Hawley (06:20.209)
You know, how do I get, you know, I had to, my financial model in the model, I just put EBITDA in one of the columns and said, calculate EBITDA across the row. And it just did it. Right. So I don't have to, I could do it, but I don't have to spend the time building the formulas. So that's how we use it internally, just to expedite all these tasks that we need to do. It's how we stay lean. It's how we're able to grow with a team of four people. Now, you know, we're really, really, small, but mighty. can do so much.
And then on top of that, we're kind of using our experience and how we've been able to save time and do more to help other companies do that. You know, what we do is we take that experience of all the stuff we don't like doing in our day job. We offload that to AI. And then we've basically been using that feeling and that experience in talking with prospects and saying like, listen, we know you don't like building presentations for your customers. We know the people you hired are really smart, really talented and really charismatic.
Kyle James (07:12.782)
Mm.
Zach Hawley (07:18.213)
You don't want those people barricading themselves in a conference room for eight hours trying to resize the font of the text that you just gave them, right? Yeah, so what we do is we allow a user to come in. What Steerco offers is a user can come in. They can either enter data that they have about a customer or they can let the AI roam free across whatever's publicly available. They quite literally sign up through like a Google OAuth or a LinkedIn OAuth.
Kyle James (07:25.262)
I love that. Restarting the app.
Zach Hawley (07:47.869)
put a company name in and they could build a presentation within a couple minutes if they wanted without having to worry about any other details. And it would be one that if you say you just started at a company, for example, and you were about to meet with a customer, but you didn't even know anything much about them at all, you could just walk into a meeting, press a button and present to them right away. You don't really have to do any edits to it.
Kyle James (07:53.399)
Wow.
Kyle James (08:04.974)
you
Kyle James (08:10.734)
Wow. Wow. And so, see, abetting the AI, sounds like what you mentioned earlier. It's like, it's not just like a, we're trying to shove AI into it and make it work. It's like from the ground up, you've been using AI building into on the backend for, for like your team, then even on the customer support side, like for your customers coming in. But like what types of, and I don't know if this is something you can measure if you've had it already embedded, but like what types of results have you been seeing maybe from like your customers when they're like, wow, I just clicked the button and.
All of sudden, like I had this QBR deck or this slideshow that just, I mean, what are the feedback that you've been hearing since, since doing something like that?
Zach Hawley (08:48.605)
It's such a great question and it's I love talking about it because it we've really started to find our footing in terms of what people want and what they want to see I had a prospect introduced me unprompted to a colleague of theirs at a different company. They haven't bought yet, right? They haven't bought they're just a prospect but after our demo her exact words were I just got off the phone with Zach and what he showed me made my jaw drop that is
One statement from one prospect. Another one told me, Hey, this is great. I used to call these meetings that I had to prepare for a hundred thousand dollar meetings. Cause every time I went into one, we, we estimated it cost us about a hundred thousand dollars. You're cutting that cost down by like 90%. Right. and the reason is it's not just one person's time to build these presentations. You're often pinging other people in the organization to get data, to get perspective, to get ideas, to get a narrative.
Kyle James (09:38.262)
Hmm.
Zach Hawley (09:41.245)
We gather all of that already through the integrations that you have with us. And so when you press that button, it is doing that from everything that you've put in already, as well as what's publicly available. It contextualizes it based on what you've done in the past and what you're selling to that customer. And it puts together something that saves, we think, and on average, every rep about 500 hours per year. So imagine getting 25 % of your time back, 25 % of your time back every week.
We like to think we're inventing the four-day work week for customer-facing representatives right now.
Kyle James (10:15.082)
Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's crazy. I'm sure the person out there, I feel, I feel sorry for the person out there who's being told by their, you know, C-suite like, we need you to prep a presentation for this, this 500 million revenue client of ours. can you, can you take the next two weeks and start, you know, be a, be a lone wolf sail off the seas and, you know, come up with a good presentation, come back to us and let's, let's pitch it. this case, it's like, you can save that amount of time and get to a draft at least within.
Zach Hawley (10:28.443)
Mm-hmm.
Zach Hawley (10:32.283)
Yeah.
Kyle James (10:44.238)
I would imagine a couple seconds.
Zach Hawley (10:44.357)
my gosh. Yeah, it's not just building one now. You can build three or four before you're done with your morning coffee. So you can get the ideas out there real quick and the bad ones out there real quick. Maybe you wanted to spin it one way to get it into a deck form to present to other people would have taken you a week prior. We just had somebody who sent us a deck. was 42 slides. And they said, we build this every quarter for this particular client.
We actually have to offshore a lot of that work to workers in India right now. And it costs them a lot of money. They said it also takes a lot of time to get that back. And we have to do many, many revisions. With the process that we've introduced to them, they think they'll be able to cut that cycle time down from about three weeks to about a single day, which is incredible. Which also means that when they present this data back to that customer, the data is up to date.
Kyle James (11:33.838)
Wow, game changing.
Zach Hawley (11:40.337)
They don't have to say, by the way, this data is as of three weeks ago. They can say, this data is refreshed as of 10 minutes ago. So if you have a question, we can talk about it and make strategy decisions in real time rather than delayed.
Kyle James (11:43.884)
Mmm.
Kyle James (11:53.004)
Yeah, I love this. I love this man. So when going into, guess, this next year or two, even like five years, what do you foresee maybe Steerco when it comes to AI being their next initiative? And then also, where do you see AI maybe playing the biggest role in your operations in these next couple of quarters?
Zach Hawley (12:13.041)
Yeah, so I think outbound, we're messing with a couple of really fun things for our customers. We're experimenting with a lot more agentic workflows. So not just things that will build something on your behalf after you press a button, but things that know, hey, you've got a QBR coming up. We've already prepped the QBR prior to this. It sent you a draft. It took your revisions. It did it again, right? It's a real thing that works with you. It's almost like an employee that every rep can have. That's one.
We also had a prospect come in that said they want us to experiment with video QPRs. So using things like Google's new flow or Veo3 to develop an AI avatar that actually reads and interacts with the customer on ACSM's behalf. So you have an AI person who can help deliver a lot of this information. So those are some really fun initiatives we're messing around with right now. Not ready yet. We haven't launched them, but they're kind of where we think the market's going to be going.
Internally, we are really excited. We think that we're going to have more AI agents, AI employees than we will, you know, people, human employees. So we've already started that process of how do we build agents into every single department and every single workflow to ensure that we can keep our burn rate low and maximize the output that every single person has.
Kyle James (13:38.988)
Yeah, I love that. I want to say it was like Sam Altman, the CEO and founder of, chat, GBT open AI. mentioned that that same exact thing. Like we're going to start having more employees that are actually AI agents. And then the humans are going to be even actually less. So it just goes to show like the capacity. And I mean, of course that's an AI company, but I think Microsoft said a couple of similar comments, like this going towards that space of where, Hey, you have your AI, AI agents, numerous, and you also have your humans.
that we're kind of working cohesively together. So I think I love that mindset. And hey, and for those listening in Zach, I appreciate your time today. It's been a solid conversation. Where can they go to learn a little bit more about you and maybe a little bit more about SteerCo?
Zach Hawley (14:21.115)
Yeah, go to www.getsteerco.com. That'll give you all the information that you need about who we are. It is free to use. You won't have any integrations with your company data, but it's free to get in there and start using right away. And we have seen dozens of users right now coming in since our launch six weeks ago, coming in and starting to build QBRs and saving 10 hours per click that they have with us, which is pretty incredible.
And then if you want to talk more, feel free to email me, Zach, at GetSteerCo.com. That's Z-A-C-H at GetSteerCo.com.
Kyle James (14:56.95)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Zach. was a pleasure to have you on brother. Hopefully we'll have you on again next time in the future. And for those who are listening in, remember if you're looking to implement AI into your business today, don't try and do it yourself. The time and stress that AI could cause just isn't worth it. Schedule a call with a professional at GPT trainer and let them build out and manage your AI for you. Go to gpt-trainer.com. Signing off for now, Zach, I appreciate you brother. It's been awesome today, man.
Have a wonderful rest of your day and looking forward to seeing you on the next episode of AI Chronicles.
