Chris Donnely: 0:00

What we have today is the worst version of AI you will ever see again. And so tomorrow it'll be better. Next week it'll be better. Next year it'll be phenomenal and so on and so forth.

Joeri Billast: 0:10

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast. I'm your podcast host. And today I'm really excited to be joined by Chris. Hey Chris, how are you?

Chris Donnely: 0:22

Yeah, very good. Thanks very much for having me on.

Joeri Billast: 0:25

I'm excited, Chris, because I've seen what you have been building. But guys, if you don't know Chris, Chris Donnelly is a serial entrepreneur. He has just launched Searchable. It's a platform powered by Agentic AI that gives marketers a view into how their brand is read, ranked, and recommended by LLMs like ChatGPT. Chris, yeah, let's dive straight in. I'm curious actually, what was the moment that you realized AI search would become a completely new discovery layer for brands?

Chris Donnely: 1:02

I think a specific moment for me was sometime last year. I worked in an office where lots of different businesses share the office, and so there's always music in the background. And the solution we all had was why don't people get sound soundproof headphones? And so I went on and I looked for soundproof headphones on on Google, and for some reason I was just a bit frustrated that it wasn't recommending what I should have, it was just giving me the links. Anyway, I then went on to ChatGPT and ChatGBT recommended me Bose sound deafening headphones. And I like turned to the person next to me and I was like, I've just bought these headphones, I'm I'm so excited to try them out. And they had a pair of those headphones around their neck. And when my headphones arrived, maybe three days later, I remember saying to people, like, these headphones are so cool, they have like white noise, like they're really high quality. And like half the people in the room had the same pair of headphones. And so I do remember thinking to myself, it's so interesting how there are clearly dozens of amazing headphone products, but that brand had made themselves apparent within the conversation around sound-deafening headphones, and half the office had bought a pair of them. And I think that was my first like holy moment. But also, just I suppose anecdotally, when you talk to people about booking something or researching something or thinking about a holiday or a travel plan, people are and have shifted to an agentic answer. Whether that's ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexy or whatever, it's just the way that we search, the nature of seeking recommendation and speed has changed. And so I saw that happening over the last year. I looked at a lot of the advancements in the sector, and I thought that for brands, and I've my first business I built was an SEO and PPC agency in my 20s, and you know, I got to like a hundred staff, so it was a big business helping big brands. And what I realized is that brands, it's going to be the biggest change in consumer sentiment, consumer choice we've ever had, maybe since the advent of Google. And so most brands who are not indexing on this right now are missing out because you're seeing it's a bit like the app store happening, or it's a bit like ChatGBT happening for the first time. You're the nature of how we think about buying products or taking advice has shifted. And so, from a commercial standpoint for businesses, if you're not showing up in that conversation about sound deafening headphones, you just don't exist. And two weeks ago, three weeks ago now, ChatGBT released ChatGBT shopping research. And so now you're asking the machine based on your personalized context within ChatGBT to research your product. So if I look for an office chair, it's gonna give me five that fit my query, it's gonna research them so that I'm confident that it's done the research, and I'm gonna pick from those five. That's how much we will trust the instance of AI that's personalized towards us. And so if you don't appear in those five, your brand doesn't exist. And I think for me that was a real watershed understanding moment that small brands have a massive opportunity ahead of them, and big brands have the threat that consumer recommendation has changed.

Joeri Billast: 4:21

Yeah, that's also the way that I'm using in the LLMs too, but not only ChatGPT, I also use Perplexity and the other, so they all have their a bit of their all I would say algorithms. And now everyone that I meet of that are into AI, they understand it. Lots of marketers still think in SEO terms, they still think about keywords. Maybe what what patterns do you see when you speak to people or how they understand LLMs that maybe people, marketers still misunderstand?

Chris Donnely: 4:53

I think the there's two uh areas here I'd really focus on. One is around having very clear, structured contextual information on your website so that a machine can easily understand contextually who you are. The second part is about thinking that the way that we search and interact with the internet will become conversational as a perch as opposed to just keyword search. And so, you know, that that means that you should be thinking about your brand and your product in the guise of many different contexts. And let's think about headphones for a second to stay with the example. But I can wear headphones and love headphones in the gym, I can use them for studying, I can use them for phone calls, and so conversationally, when I'm putting together my brand and my website, my products, and my information, I need to feed all that information so that the LLM crawler can come and pick it up. And I, you know, I I've been an SEO for 15 years, you know. I know that the space is changing. And what I would say to the vast majority of SEO people and to marketers in general is that the shift isn't as big as you think it is. Like it's not like a completely different discipline, it's like a it's an amazing moment in time for SEO people because there's a huge requirement that brands are gonna need, and they're gonna need you to do it. And so for me, I think I just want to help businesses understand that for small brands right now, you can get yourself to a position where consumers are discovering you where they wouldn't have otherwise. You wouldn't have been able to compete in Google in the same way that you can compete at speed right now. And the example I gave the other day was I've been doing digital marketing for so long that I was heavily involved in launching companies' first apps on the app store, or like focusing on like when Facebook advertising became a thing. And it's in those windows of time, the first two to five years of a new technology and a new consumer trend, that they haven't been saturated, that not everyone is doing it. And so for small brands, that's the best opportunity that's ever existed because it's like giving yourself another free shot at goal, basically, to get yourself positioned and ranked properly. And you saw it time and time again with D2C businesses, with Facebook advertising, with e-commerce businesses with influences, like whole businesses and sectors were grown in rapid time, and it wasn't necessarily the businesses, it was playing on an existing trend that was happening with the consumer. And so this is that moment. If you're a small business right now and you want to see fast growth, this is one of those avenues that you can push on, and the door is wide open.

Joeri Billast: 7:35

Yeah, I love that that it brings new opportunities, and I'm now just thinking about something because you know, you have all these big sites like booking.com, hotels.com, and if you have a small BNB or whatever and you have your own website, you know, you are not fine, it's difficult to rank, you know, these days. Do you think it's uh the AI LLMs create an opportunity there to be like mentioned in the answers if someone is looking for, let's say, a BNB in Lisbon, for instance, or in Sintra?

Chris Donnely: 8:07

If someone is looking in Lisbon, for example, and you're a small B B, you need to capture to an extent the personality of your business and your brand and the key, more micro conversations that you're going to uh see your consumer making. And so obviously, booking.com has an incredibly structured data center and will do well within AI search. However, when a consumer is looking for a bee in Lisbon that's near the beach, that's near a rose bar, that's near all of these different things that has nightlife and community and so forth, you will be able to inject yourself into that conversation. You will be able to provide context that when someone is looking, the conversation will cite you and will mention you and will get you mentioned. And that's where that opportunity probably didn't exist with Google in the same way. And so, you know, we know right now that LMs are focused very heavily on the relevance and the freshness of content, and so again, it's like it's playing into the idea that small businesses who you know optimize their site well and understand that context is king here, they have a real opportunity. And so that's sort of for me, in many ways, that's what's driven me to think about launching searchable because it is so relevant to small businesses. But in the same way, these big businesses, when they get going, and I've worked for hundreds of massive global businesses in my time. Once they get going and they get their machine going, it takes them a bit of time. But once they do, they start to really perform. And so that window does close. You know, that window will close. And I think that for big brands that are listening and are interested as to how this can work for them. I'm working currently with an airline, and what's fascinating about what you're able to do is on an airline or a booking site, consumers are keying into the search on your site things they're looking for continuously. They're querying your site. So, what we're doing right now is we're taking that query insight data with the big brand and we're feeding that into their prompt generation, the conversations we want to cover, what topics they should be talking about, what content and context they need to create. And so, if you're able to do things like that, we can get super smart with how we do AI search.

Joeri Billast: 10:27

Yeah. Is there a big difference in, I would say, the different platforms? For instance, an hack that IRET is go to perplexity and you know, ask questions and see what are the questions that other people are asking, and make sure that you answer them on your website. If you see ChatGPG, you see Colorado, you see perplexity. Yeah, should we or are you taking into account or is it necessary to take into account all those different platforms and different algorithms?

Chris Donnely: 10:52

So it's a great question, and I think it has a lot to do with your time and your investment, because you could index and focus on ChatGPT and Gemini and cover a huge amount of the market by doing that and going really, really deep on those. Now, the same tactics do apply broadly across all the tooling. However, there are nuances. So, what we have done in that case is a small business isn't going to be able to understand the individual algorithm, ranking factors, and so forth of all these different LLMs and Google. And so, what we've built is a contextually aware agent that sits on top of your analytics, and you can ask it, what do I need to do to improve my perplexity outcome? And then you can say, I can see that my customers are searching this, or the machine might tell you that your customers are searching this. You then say, Do a query fan out for me, and it will then get do it like an exploding prompt that it will tell you all of the other conversations that are going on around that individual term. So in our Lisbon example, we could find a prompt or a keyword that's driving traffic to your business. You could then do a query fan out on that, do some prompt research, and you could find individual micro conversations and queries that are happening on Gemini Perplexity Claude, etc. And then you can look at the conversation in our tool and ask the agent how to optimize.

Joeri Billast: 12:17

Now I also read, Chris, that you built searchable in about 60 days, so really fast. So what allowed you to move at that speed without compromising on the product quality?

Chris Donnely: 12:31

I never want to set the wrong expectations of people, but this is my fifth company. And so I have built and scaled and sold three. I've built one business that's one of the fastest-growing startups in the UK, Lossie. And over the last few years, I built a huge personal brand and personal brand business. And so I have an audience of three and a half million business owners and markers. And so for me, when I launched Searchable, I thought to myself, what is the smallest piece of functionality I can deliver as quickly as possible and surprise and delight my customers? And then I released a free visibility report if you signed up to our community wait list. And because of my personal brand, I was able to get a 10,000-person wait list, a thousand-person Slack community in 30 days. And so most customers and businesses they struggle to get people to test their products, to give them feedback, to find the bugs, to find the challenges. Whereas for us, we spent 60 days releasing V1 with hundreds of customers. And then we released V2 at 90 days, which had more functionality and accounts. And by then we had thousands of people using the tool. And then we released the product just after 100 days live to the public, which is about two and a half weeks ago now. And because we'd had thousands of people use it, hundreds of people giving feedback, shaping the tool with us, we were able to galvanize an audience of small business owners who wanted to direct the product. They wanted to show up at AI Search. So they're more like product evangelists than they are just customers. And it meant that when we did release pricing and we did launch the product like publicly, we already had a pre-built audience, community, and it's had a bit of a cascade effect. A lot of the videos and content went super viral, and I think in 16 days now we've got to 75,000 a month of RRR, eight and a half thousand users on the product, which means that we're lucky because it's a very big consumer trend that's happening. It's a it's on everyone's minds that you can't just appear in Google anymore, you have to appear in ChatGBT. And so we're pushing against a pre-validated market consumer trend. And then we're able to layer on top of that. My co-founders and I are experienced entrepreneurs and engineers, so we can build and build fast. And AI does allow you to build faster than you historically used to. And then you plus that with the audience, and you get this sort of amazing combination of speed and execution. And so, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't want new entrepreneurs or young entrepreneurs thinking that they should measure themselves against that because we have been doing this for a very long time, and we have a lot of unfair advantages in our audience size and I suppose in our experience.

Joeri Billast: 15:23

Yeah, I love that you mentioned personal brand. Talk a lot about personal brand with my customers and also on the podcast, actually. And certainly in the age of AI, personal brand becomes more and more important. I've written actually a book recently, The Future CMO, talks about the trust in the age of AI. Now, for small entrepreneurs or people just starting out, I think content creation is important. You know, you mentioned a few things already. There will be a blog article linked to this podcast episode. People can find it there. It's also searchable by Google and by the LLMs. Now, when marketers create content, of course. Do they need to rethink their content creation, Chris? Now that you know people are not really looking, not querying, but maybe looking for a conversation. What is your advice there?

Chris Donnely: 16:15

So much to say. The uh you're right, the the nature of search has changed in that we now have sort of search everywhere. Social media is contextually brought into the LLMs as well. And so one of the biggest cited things is like Reddit or LinkedIn on LLMs, and so it's a very important thing for you to think about, but you can influence what your customers see by posting on social, which is, I think, a huge watershed moment for brands in general. I think that I spent years building startups without a personal brand. And I built and sold a big agency, I built and scaled a big health tech company. And then I took a break from work in January 2023 and went backpacking. And one of the things I said I would do is like at 30 years old, I'd sold two companies. I was like, I'm gonna post about this. And from January 2023, I've posted every single day on social media, not missed one day. And I post on LinkedIn, Instagram, I have a newsletter, all these sort of things. And I have built an audience of three and a half million people. I was like the fastest growing account on LinkedIn in the world. There was like a couple of months there where I was getting more traffic on the platform to my profile than anyone else in the world. And if you think about that strategically, I am a completely ordinary, normal entrepreneur who is able to create content and drive traffic to my business. And so personal brand has become this huge thing. And I think that for entrepreneurs out there, I don't think you have to be posting self fees and it's not about the likes and the comments. Like it's not about that, it's not about the ego or anything. It's about strategically understanding that consumers want to trust the thing that they're buying. They want to trust that the company they're buying from has an opinion, that they're reliable, and that and therefore, like CEO personal brand has really taken off. And I would say for me, for example, the my agency when I ran it, 75% of our clients came from my LinkedIn. My businesses since you could say 75% and above have come from LinkedIn. And with Searchable, the entire launch has been based off the personal brand. And so to everyone out there, CMOs and entrepreneurs, it is an activity that is the most compounding effect I've ever seen in my life ever. You post, it grows, you post, it grows, the audience grows, more interaction grows, and so forth. And I actually went to work with Lovable this year and helped on marketing and growth at Lovable. And one of the things I think became very apparent to me there is that Anton, before he started the company, didn't have a personal brand. But as he posted and as he grew, like his personal brand became one and the same with the business. He is now the public spokesperson for that business, and that is so powerful. And then you see Elena, who I worked with, was is also now posting a lot on social media, and it has a massive impact. And that for so many reasons it's important. And to your point about AI, just because AI allows you to release more content doesn't mean you necessarily should. I think that trust, quality, reliability, these are all things that matter. And it is the quality of your content that will determine whether people trust and follow you. And so I've always talked heavily about I want to release educational content to my audience so that it helps them get from A to B, from step one to step two. And if you're able to have a positive impact on someone's life or business or so forth, they will assign trust you, and as a result, I'm much more likely to buy from you and take your recommendations. And that's why I feel so lucky and so privileged that I get to post to my LinkedIn about searchable and drive 8,000 customers and nearly a million in revenue in 16 days.

Joeri Billast: 19:53

Yeah, it's great. It's great. So many followers that you have there on LinkedIn, but also on other platforms. To ask you again about searchable. You have had some clients already. Is there something that you can share with us that you that these early clients have learned about AI visibility that maybe changed their go-to-market strategy?

Chris Donnely: 20:16

Absolutely. So, what we do with clients initially is we help them to understand where they're positioned within LLM search and Google search. And by taking that contextual layer, we then help them to create their own custom agent on our platform. So you get you get your voice, you upload your documentation, you upload your instructions, and then you have effectively a customized agent who has perfect context of your queries, your prompts, your visibility, your clicks, your revenue. And once it has all that data, it can then start suggesting to you the next steps. And honestly, 99% of the time, the next steps are can you create more structured data to give the LLM more context on who you are and the unique differences and nuances of your business. And so normally that manifests itself in can you create an LLM.txt file? And so you can ask the searchable agent and it will write you a LLM.txt file from scratch itself, right there in the browser. You can ask for updated schema. And so if you're an e-commerce business, for example, you can ask the tool to create you schema data for your products. And so when the chat, ChatGPT or otherwise, hits your website, it's not seeing the products visually like we see them. It's seeing and reading that structured content about the product. And so we have seen brands over the last 90 days like four or five hundred percent increases in AI search by providing context to the LLM about the product or the services. And so normally that is the thing that's going to make the biggest difference. Beyond proper strategy, you can sit and you can talk to the agent about what are the 10 optimizations to make to my site, what is the content I should create on my site so I get ranked more. You can do all of that, but normally it comes down to the structured data that you feed to the crawler to understand your website. And this I want people to know like this is not as technical as it sounds. It's about providing written, structured, contextually aware content to your website. That's it. And the watershed moment for Lovable, for example, was allowing non-technical people to build websites. And what we want to do is allow non-technical people to optimize their search. And that moment for us was proven when not only did we have all the signups, but the amount of time that business owners are spending with our agent and optimizing their site has been the real moment of unlock. People want to participate in AI search, and it's not something just for big companies.

Joeri Billast: 22:54

Oh, yeah, that's interesting. Some people are also scared about how fast AI is evolving. What you have built can replace, let's say, or I don't know if you can say replace, but can act maybe as an autonomous AI marketing team. What is there? You already mentioned it a bit about optimizing the website. But how do you believe that human marketers, well, should they focus on maybe things that AI cannot replace?

Chris Donnely: 23:21

One thing that is definitely true is that AI is the worst today it will ever be. What we have today is the worst version of AI you will ever see again. And so tomorrow will be better, next week it'll be better, next year it'll be phenomenal, and so on and so forth. And so my advice to entrepreneurs and marketers in general is that the nature of the game has changed to an extent, which is that you as a marketer, your job now is to use the tools as well as physically possible to execute on your role. And by not using the tools, you are setting yourself up for a failure and having a disadvantage against competitors. And I'm not saying in any way, shape, or form that you should just spin up an AI and use it verbatim, but using it for research, for thinking, for analysis, for strategy, to write the first 80% of something, and then you work on top of it. It really does allow for much more scale and scope for smaller businesses. And the stuff that I have seen possible and achievable with our company and with our customers over the last 90 or 100 days has been remarkable. And the last thing you want to do is to refuse the technology and get left behind out of principle. This is going to happen whether you like it or not. The pus the development of technology, if you're not participating in that, it's not going to stop it happening. You raging against it won't stop it happening. The big AI, open AI, et cetera, companies are moving forward at 100 miles an hour. And so my only advice to marketeers, and it's mostly what I talk about on my channel, is that this is the moment to get ahead. This is the moment to really put in the time. And I can honestly say that after I took time out of work a few years ago after stepping back from Lossie, I was like, I don't know AI as well as I should. For someone who's like a marketeer, and I spent half an hour every single day upskilling myself on AI, and then ended up getting a job at Lovable. And then from Lovable, what I learned took me to this moment of launching Searchable. And so it is really compounding. If you get into using AI, if you get good at using AI, you will start to see that it isn't replacing you at all. It's just augmenting you.

Joeri Billast: 25:30

Yeah, I love that. That's also what I'm always saying. Now you have an exciting period with this launch. But are you now the most excited about Greece today or maybe for the months to come?

Chris Donnely: 25:41

Suppose for I suppose for me it's like the the things that haven't been discovered yet. So, for example, we think that there is a way to reverse engineer, to almost hold a mirror up to the individual algorithms of the LLMs. And that is currently what we're building. We're building our first iteration of our product is visibility and actions and analytics. So it tells you where you're at and how to improve, and then the steps to improve. What we're doing next, because now we have unbelievably rich data from thousands of websites, is we're tracking all the individual changes that customers are making to the site. They annotate them themselves, and we then see the outcome positively or negatively off the back of making that change. We then aggregate and anonymize that data and are able to understand, like a mirror to the algorithm, which changes and optimizations are improving sites, driving clicks, driving revenue. And so we're using that now to fuel our recommendation engine to tell brands what are the steps with high likelihood chance that are going to increase your search and increase your performance over time. And we released V1 of this product in the last few days, and people are able to sit there and say, okay, if I have a finite amount of time, let's say I have an hour as a founder to grow my business, what are the steps I can do to improve my business? Okay, these are the steps that thousands other businesses took to improve their search to get more traffic. And so why don't you start with these in that prioritized order? For me, I find that fascinating. I find that Google has owned the space for so long, it's been 15, 20 years of the same technology. Google Search Console has been the be-all and end all. And now you have multiple different front-facing technologies: OpenAI, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, etc. And we need an independent Search Console agentic tool for brands. And so that is what we're aiming at, that is what we're building. And I'm so excited to be able to help businesses and brands optimize in a world that has felt a bit unachievable before.

Joeri Billast: 27:43

Yeah. Exciting. Thanks so much for your positive vibes and sharing all this wisdom with us, Chris. If people they want to find more about everything you're doing, what you're building with searchable, where would you like me to send them?

Chris Donnely: 27:58

Yeah, I suppose it's not hard to find me. I'm posting most days on my LinkedIn about how businesses can grow. And so you can find me there relatively easily. For more um, I suppose, personal and business content, I post on my Instagram. We had a kid like five weeks ago, and so a lot of my content has shifted to me and my kid building businesses rather than me just building businesses. So yeah, you can keep up with me on anything. If you want in-depth, more considered, deeper thinking stuff. I send a weekly email on a Sunday, which you can subscribe to, which is called Step by Step. But yeah, thank you so much for having me, Yuri. It's been really fun. Great questions, and yeah, I can't wait to listen back.

Joeri Billast: 28:40

Thank you so much, Chris, with all your positive energy. This is really refreshing for people listening, you know that the future is bright. So, guys, you heard Chris. You will find all links that he mentioned, everything he mentioned will be there in the show notes. So, again, thank you, Chris. Thank you so much. Guys, an amazing episode. I'm sure this episode is useful for people around you. Be sure to share this episode with them because everyone can learn from this, and certainly also small business owners. If you are not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this, as I always say. If you haven't given me even a review yet, if you give me these five stars, this will help me reach an even bigger audience. And of course, I would love to see you back next time. Take care.