Thomas Peham - Otterly.ai

speaker-0: We already called it Otterly AI because I was asking JackGBT for some animal names that have great eyesight and also cute animals. As a monitoring solution, you need to have good eyesight. We started with a thousand users in 2025. We ended 2025 with about 20,000 users on the platform. And the question I receive a lot from brands and marketing teams is, is my website even relevant in six months? Right? Is my marketing, as I all do marketing right now, even relevant in six months or in a year from now.

speaker-1: We all have to change that old phrase of like, do you see the company in five years? Because in five years at this pace, it feels like I have my Apple contact lens and my SpaceX earbud, whatever.

speaker-0: Hey hey, hello.

speaker-1: What are we doing? got the black and we got the AirPod Max's. On brand. Yeah, exactly. brand.

speaker-0: so far? Busy, sunny, but good. mean, busy is always good. So I don't want to complain.

speaker-1: Totally. It's great. mean, just holding on, you know, we're moving fast and so many parts and pieces and everything's coming together. That was basically the idea for since January, we've just been basically heads down building. so now we're starting to see all the fruits of that, is fun. So. Cool. Well, I'm excited. Thanks for.

speaker-0: How's everything in your end? Nice.

speaker-1: taking the time and coming on. want to hear all the Otterly stories. before we dive in, think I'm interested to hear your background, where you grew up and especially the journey from pre-Otterly into entrepreneurship and what led you into that path, whether it was, you have family that- Did startups or started their own business or was it really more of a thing that you just had ⁓ baked in from the beginning and things like that? If you're good to start with your background and history.

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, where to start, right? So I'm not, guess, this typical startup guy who always knew that he want to start a business eventually at some point. So I grew up in Austria in a, I guess, working class family. ⁓ None of my close family, no my, basically, wider network where any were related to any business of any sorts. I went to typical high school and after high school, I originally planned to study law to be honest, pretty much because I was kind of interested in potentially becoming a lawyer eventually. I guess some people, some friends say that I have a helper syndrome in a way, right? So I'd like to help others. And I think this was one of the reasons that me closer to law and studying law. But eventually, right before my university kind of programs of action started, I was like, no, actually, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if I really want to go down that route. And to be quite frank, back then, I didn't really know what to do in life. was kind of a bit lost after high school. So what do you do when you're lost? You study business. You start studying economics and business. Um, that that's what I did. And, um, we're talking here 2007, 2008, something like that. And, um, while I was studying business, I, again, I wasn't really hooked by any, any, any, any of the different areas, um, neither finance nor accounting, nor marketing back then. I even, uh, I still remember and it's kind of funny looking back now. The first internship offer I received during my uni times was within one of the largest publicly traded companies in a marketing department here in Austria. And I was like, marketing? No, I'm not doing that. I don't want to do marketing. That's not my thing. So I kind of declined that internship offer and did something else. But I guess what started getting... starting to pick up on the hobby interest side of things was building websites. I don't even remember why I started it in the first place, but I do remember just for fun back during my study programs, I started building websites, ⁓ playing HTML, CSS websites. First for fun and then for after I did it for fun, I showed it a couple of friends, I showed it to some uni colleagues and they were like, ⁓ actually, that's interesting. Thomas, can you build that for my local business? you, can you build that for, for the business I'm working for? And I was like, yeah, sure. ⁓ I need to make some money to, finance my, my uni, my uni time. So why not, why not do that? So I, I just built websites and I, I mean, I did it for the money. Yes. But I pretty much did it because I really enjoyed doing it. I really enjoyed building, building websites back then. And because of that, after the first websites were built and were put live. The next question from those business owners most often were, well, we really liked a website, but how do we now rank on Google? How do we now make sure that people find our website on Google? And I mean, we're talking 2008, 2009 here. So to be quite frank, I think it wouldn't have, if it wouldn't have been... that interests that topic, ⁓ probably wouldn't be here today. ⁓ I wouldn't be here talking about AI search because this, this interest in building website that interest in, in what then later turned into a search engine optimization got me my first real job after university because of, because, because I was doing that, was then writing my uni thesis about search engine optimization, ⁓ because I wanted to learn more. wanted to learn more how technically it works and how the whole theory around search engine optimization works. So I did that. I secured because of that. I got a job offer at a full service marketing agency. And for the next four years, I I was working as as a project manager, as an account manager in that agency, helping them with various digital marketing projects. But quite frankly, that's how it all got started many, years ago.

speaker-1: That's amazing. And I wonder how many both careers and companies were spawned from the same sort of HTML, CSS three book, you know what I mean? Like press, cause I was the same. was, I worked in web hosting and it was working for inner land. ⁓ and, and I was selling web hosting, I didn't really, I did when I started, I didn't really know much about it, but then I started seeing these companies selling. doctors and lawyers and real estate agents websites, know for exorbitant amounts of money and and then the dot-com, know the the bubble burst and and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do and I overheard someone say I got to get a website and I said I'll build one for you and they said how much I said Five thousand dollars and they were like, alright, let's do it. And I'm like, ⁓ I gotta figure out how to how to do this but like it was so interesting how HTML and CSS is that sort of gateway into like how you could sit and just create something, you know, and launch it on the internet. And that's so great. I love that. ⁓ And interesting to go back to like, from a business perspective, I still think, you know, it's, hopefully it's getting a little bit better, but I think it's still such a disservice going straight from high school to be like, what do you want to do? And you're like, business. Like there's just this concept of business and people do things and make money and trade things and then the same about like marketing or advertising. It's such a broad brush and you don't have any idea of like the, you know, of where you could plug into that. So I love that you sort of found your, you found this specific niche, but now obviously you've taken it to the nth degree now. ⁓ That's awesome.

speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, you know, with, mean, you're looking back at university, right? It's always like, well, what's, what's the point of studying, right? And I think it's a bigger, even a bigger topic these days. I mean, obviously there's the, the, the social aspect to it. There's the self development aspect to it. But for me, business, was all theory, theoretics, right? Like starting business, learning about the theory of marketing. It was quite boring to be honest. couldn't see myself going into a marketing career. ⁓ But yeah, to your point, the creative aspect got me hooked. Let's do, let's build something got me hooked in the first place. I mean, even today, I think I've worked for both big and small companies. And what I really enjoy in my current setup is that I'm getting the chance of building, right? Building something and then... putting in front of so many people's eyes and getting feedback, be it positive, be it negative. And that's the rewarding part about my job today, I think. But yeah, I think marketing is also a lot about building and storytelling. And I think many forget that in a way.

speaker-1: And the fusing now, mean, marketing and storytelling also fused with delivery through tech and the tech implementation of it. like understanding how that, even if you've got a good story, how you get it out there and how it's received and how you figure out how to get feedback on it. So you started in that through line, then got you started into a more traditional career in working for, what was the sort of job path once you started? executing against that through line that you pulled on.

speaker-0: So I started at this agency after my bachelor degree and I didn't want to go after a master degree right away because I wanted to gain some exposure in real life. So I worked two years in a full-time project manager position and it gave me exposure to so many different digital things like from building websites in typo three back then one of the leading content management systems here in Europe to running newsletter campaigns for big B2B companies to running some first social media campaigns for B2C. This was at a time where Facebook really and Facebook apps were a big thing. Um, and I still remember today, uh, like in 2010, 2011, during, during those first years, was like, Hmm. Maybe I'm too late for the whole Facebook thingy for the whole social media trend. Now kind of looking back, it's funny, right? Because you're never too late in a way, but I still, I still remember that feeling of, well, I missed, I missed that Facebook thing by, by a few years, but anyways, so I did all different types of digital projects and it was really cool because I learned so much, so many things by working with many different industries, B2B, B2C and different types of digital implementations and I then started studying Paltarn. So I, I decreased some, work amount at the agency. started ⁓ getting more into the media side of things. So I took a class in media management. And, ⁓ because I did that, I ended up in Dublin for half a year or so as an, as an, as an exchange program. And again, it, it changed, it changed my perspective on what, what do I want to do in life? ⁓ I, got me. At a reflection point. And when I came back from, Dublin, after that, I decided to quit my job and ⁓ go into media. So I joined the second biggest media company here in Austria, again, on the digital side of things. I, this was at the time where. Yeah, the New York Times and others released subscription programs, right? So how do those traditional media make money? And then first started experimenting with subscriptions and whatnot for like digital subscriptions for the newspapers. I helped, ⁓ I was part of a team and of a project where we did that. We did that for some of the largest newspaper companies here in Austria. Again, super great learning. got me exposed to building things at scale, right? When you build something that's used by millions of people, there's so many implications and also complexities around it. So I did that, but I also realized quite quickly that media is rather conservative in a way, right? And I also asked myself, well, is that really the niche, the industry I wanna be in long-term? ⁓ I was still studying on the side back then. And before finishing my, my university program, I also decided to quit that quit that job. Back then I was also moving, moving, moving in with my now wife and we were relocating to another place. And because of that, I was, I was opening up my, my job search. And to be very honest, this was the first time I got in touch with software, with software startups. and it got me hooked. It got me hooked because I realized that. Like those tech guys, those tech founders, they're really my people. Those are my types of people that I enjoy working with. And I applied for one of the software startups, PLG lad product lad company called usersnap, usersnap.com. They were basically offering ⁓ user feedback for websites and products. And I joined that little startup as the first marketer. ⁓ Again, I really enjoyed it. Now looking back, it's kind of easy to connect the dots, but back then I was also a hobby blogger just on the side. was blogging. I, I wrote about stuff that I was interested in and because I was blogging and I had my SEO experience, I kind of joined this startup with no money. Basically they had no marketing budget of any sorts. And I was like, well, how can I help that software startup grow? can help them grow by content and SEO. Right. ⁓ I basically did content marketing. I wrote tons of content pieces, blog posts. We reworked the website. We did lots of SEO optimization and that's how we grew. That's how that startup basically grew from zero to a million year in quite a fast time. It opened up, it blew my mind quite frankly, because we really had several marketing budget. It was just me doing content and we had a couple of developers and tech guys. I realized how powerful PLG, how powerful it is to build something for an international scale, for an international audience and how amazing and fun that is really, to be honest.

speaker-1: That's amazing. I really like what two things that stand out. One is how I always think that from an entrepreneur perspective and startup founders, there's this level of both curiosity and learning, but also this sort of generalist, you know, this drive source sort of generalism and understanding and gathering all these skills. So you start to think back between your HTML and your CSS and your... and your SEO and how engines work and your product marketing and then your media and then your content writing and how all that sort of starts to culminate. You can almost watch that funnel sort of driving towards, you know, founding and building something, which is cool to see in this journey that you're taking us on. Yeah.

speaker-0: No, I think back then I didn't have those labels in a way in my mind. I didn't know that this was content marketing. This was product marketing, right? I was just doing it, I guess, right? And we were just executing it and we were having fun along the way. I think what I'm really grateful for is that the founders gave me the freedom to test, the freedom to experiment, right? I was just coming from university. I was finishing up my program and They gave me the chance to build up their inbound funnel. that's, I think as I look at marketing now, You marketing is always an investment in a way, right? Yes, it is also an ROI and revenue driver, but it's an investment upfront and you need to trust your team. need to give your team the freedom and ideally also the budget to test and try and yeah, see what happens. But I think. I think I'm really grateful for that experience because yes, for sure. It taught me a lot about content and how you can build PLG businesses on the foundation of content and SEO. But really it also gave me some, good people skills and some good leadership lessons along the way. I did that for, for about four years. We, we, we were able to grow that team and also the business really nicely. I then after four years, I decided to move on to a company called Dynatrace. Dynatrace back then was pre IPO. They were, I think when I joined, were already thousand people or so, so totally different scaled. then the startup I worked prior for, and I joined the digital marketing team. ⁓ it was quite an, it was a short period of time, but a super interesting learning because suddenly I was exposed again to scale. We had millions of budget for Google, Google SEO, Google paid ads, LinkedIn ads. And ⁓ four months into the job, my boss basically told me, well, he's going a different route. He's leaving and I'm becoming the interim team lead for that team. So suddenly I was leading a small team who would ran millions of Google ads, who would run millions of LinkedIn ads and would have quite some big SEO budgets. Again, fantastic learning, fantastic. I'm still, I'm still very much in touch with, with many team members there, I, I then also because, because of that scalability, also then ask myself really, sometimes there are those moments in life where you ask yourself, well, what do we really want to do in life? Right. Because I was basically realizing I either stay at that company for a few years, right? I make a career in this big company. we eventually, I mean, the company eventually IPO'd and whatnot. I'll either do that or I'll go back to square one. I will go back to, to one step back and do my own thing. And back then I had a big, I guess my first business, my, first business entrepreneurship motivation to, to do my own thing. I left the company. and became a freelancer. went on a freelance route. I called myself CMO as a service. Now everybody is calling themselves fractional CMOs, fractional marketing leaders. I didn't know that this was a thing back then. I positioned myself as a CMO as a service. So as a marketing lead that you can hire for service. And I did that for a few years. So I helped different software companies here in Europe with their inbound marketing strategies from small startups to some scale-ups to some large enterprises. And, you know, it was really fun. It gave me so much exposure to other software businesses, their marketing funnels and whatnot. And I really enjoyed doing that.

speaker-1: I'm curious about the, I think this is something that also hinders a lot of people who want to go into doing their own thing. Do you feel like, what was the pull and the draw to your point about, and I'm curious about this because I think there are some people that are either built this way or some people sort of get pushed in this direction, but to, you've built this sort of career and you've gotten to this place where you've taken on a team and you're over. you know, bigger budgets for LinkedIn and Google and things like that. And to your point, you even said, I have this decision where I can sort of like keep pushing into that and stay into that for years. Or I have this mental picture of basically walking down to the bottom of base camp at the bottom of the mountain and saying, I'm starting over again. And think there's a lot of people that see that as a, you know, well, I've, I've, I've gone this far and I've built this career. And I always find it fascinating when, when people take the other path that says I'm going to walk all the way back down from scratch and see what I'm sort of made of to go down this other path. What do you think? Like what was the decision or what was the thinking there when you decided to sort of start over from scratch in that way? Yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, great. I think it's a great question and a great topic. I think for me, I never, I think I realized back then that I don't care about job titles. I really don't. I don't care about job titles. I don't care if I manage big budgets or small budgets at the end of the day, it's just numbers and some spreadsheets and numbers in some activities. But I learned, I think what I learned back then about myself is that I don't care about those things and I pretty much cared about learning. think for me, it's all, I'm driven by how much do I learn in a particular role in a particular company about a certain, about a certain area, either about my leadership skills, how can I do better as a leader? How can I do better in this particular area of, of marketing, of the different marketing disciplines? And I, I kind of was making up this pro and con list in the sense of Do I learn more going freelance and starting from zero or do I learn more by staying in this role and doing that for many more years? And I, yeah, I kind of realized that while it is maybe more riskier, I'm also the risk reward thing is higher for me because I'm learning so much more. And, you know, at the same time, I also have to admit I'm rather risk abhorred in the sense of I didn't, I didn't just quit my job and then went all in on this freelance thing. I was, I was building this up on the side, right? I mean, I had this agreement where I could take on small side projects. did for a few years, I even got invited to some universities to do some workshops, to do some talks and whatnot, right? So it gave me exposure. It gave me the relationship with people. I knew when I started my freelance business, I knew I'm not starting really from blank, right? I had. I had my network, had a couple of projects. I was like, well, those projects, they sustain me for a while, right? And in the worst case, yeah, maybe I need to look for a job in a year, but then I've learned something in the last year and I'm grateful for that. So that was kind of really the thinking of me starting and going down that freelance route.

speaker-1: I love that. can remember very specifically a moment in my career where that happened, where I had started a company and in a two year period, I had gone from project manager to sort of overseeing operations for an 80 person ⁓ division of a larger organization. But I got to a point where I could feel that this was now turning into one of those sort of corporate type things where it's like, I wasn't learning anymore as fast. and I just had to kind of hang out for a couple of years before I could get another title. And so I left and I remember interfacing with this person who had been at that company for a long time. And it was like, ⁓ how long had you been here? And I was like, ⁓ this was my second year. And they were sort of like, like, you you gotta, you gotta really hang out for another five or six years and then you could make this sort of like, you know, executive director type role. And I thought in the back of my head, That sounds terrible because I don't like what I don't want. I don't want that title. What I want to do is like, I want every day and every week to look back. Boy, I'm just getting pushed to the limit and I'm learning so much and I'm just absorbing. And if I'm not doing that, I don't, I really don't want to fast forward my life to, that executive director title or whatever and say, well, I got that. You know I mean? Like what I want is, and, and so, you know, I. I cherish those moments when you can almost just drop your luggage and just leave it and walk away and then go do something else and see what you can gather in terms of knowledge and expertise. So you started to walk away, started doing sort of now you're sort of on the entrepreneurial path of doing it yourself and doing the freelance piece like.

speaker-0: Absolutely.

speaker-1: What was, what sort of led into when we, when we go to leading up to Otterly, like the, the, you know, I love those moments where it's like, you have this idea, you start exploring something and then you start getting into like, I always, I always love these moments of like buying a domain name and being like, who would I be? Like you buy a domain and you're like, ⁓ there's a thing I think I could do. ⁓ you know, what, what was the sort of piece leading up to Otterly? Yeah.

speaker-0: So I think leading up to Otterly, two things. mean, I did the freelance thing for a few years and I always told, said to myself, there are really two options. One option, I'll find an amazing company. I'd love to work for full time. I'd love to go all in again. And I'm going to do that. Or option number two, I'm gonna, I'm gonna find this one idea that I'm going to build myself. This one thing I'm going to build myself. You know? What happened next was option number one. ran into an amazing founder called Dominic who started a company called Otterly. I don't know Otterly, sorry. Who started StoryBlock in 2017. I met him in 2019, 2020, and we started working together in 2020. He basically approached me back then and he was like, Thomas, I need someone who can help me build out my marketing team. StoryBlock is a headless content management system. Back in 2020, it was a few people working at the business and he was starting this amazing growth journey. I think he raised a seed round in 2019 and he was basically starting to invest in sales and marketing. I was like, yeah, Dominik, I really... I really like you. think we got along quite well right in the beginning. He was a super humble, but super, super visionary founder. And we started working part-time together because I was like, Dom, I'm having my own freelance thing. I don't want to gift it up. So he was like, give me, give me any work hour that you can do for us and I'll take it. So we, started working together part-time in 2020 and you know, I realized the the setup and how amazing it was back then. And I joined full-time in 2021 as VP Marketing. We started out as a small marketing team with about two, two and a half people. And over the next few years, we went on this amazing growth journey. We, the company raised a 150 million along the way from Series A, Series B, Series C. I left the marketing role in 2024 when we had about, I think 30 team members on the marketing team. whole company has grown from 20 people to 20, 250, something like that. think now the company's like 350 people or so. So yeah, in those four years, I built out inbound marketing at the business. And again, we did SEO, we did content as a content management system. Obviously you have to do exceptionally good content, content marketing, right? That's what we did. And ⁓ I am very grateful for that experience because it got me exposed to so many challenges and growth challenges along the ways. And I built out this amazing team, a team of people working there in a fully remote setup. But what led to Otterly, right? I think at some point, and this was not one, one, one aha moment, right? I think it was multiple aha moments along the way as, as we were growing. The team at StoryBlock also the marketing budget got bigger and bigger every year, right? And we spent more and more money on Google. We spent big money on paid programs and we had dedicated team members just doing SEO. would have agencies in the US and in Europe helping us with our SEO strategies. So as we were in a way obsessed with Google, I kind of realized that there's a new thing out there called Jack GPT, right? Jack GPT launched end of 2022. I wasn't paying so much attention in 2022, but throughout 2020 screen, I started thinking around with that thought of, well, what is really going on there? How do I know as a brand, as a company, how we appear on these new search channels? Because I kind of realized and had this. theory that our consumers, our audience, which is a very technical audience would be on JetGBT obviously, and they would use JetGBT to research and do their thing. So I kind of, I kind of asked myself that I kind of saved it as a note and I had this, this, this note pad with many other startups idea that eventually at one point I'm going to start. This was one of that. And I still remember me driving the car, listening to a podcast and The guy on the podcast was talking about that, about that SEO is changing and SEO is becoming a thing for Jack Chibity. I was listening to the podcast and it hit me in that moment. It hit me because I was like, now I know how to call this thing, right? What this is. So I paused that podcast. I think I replayed it five times while I was in the car. That's awesome. Afterwards I was like... I need to do something. I need to build something. So I started putting together some mockups. I'm not a techie, right? So I started wireframing and drawing up some ideas. I built a list of early potential customers. Basically it was my network of marketers. So I wrote down all the marketers I know. I was like, let me ask them if they have the same problem, the same challenge. before, I mean, I built a wireframe and I think Miro and Then the next thing was we built an ⁓ interview questionnaire for those marketers because I wanted to test my idea right before building it. I wanted to understand, is this just me thinking about this? Are other people thinking about this as well? this is, mean, this is just me doing that as a weekend project really. So I had my full-time job, but I was like, I want to explore that. I want to explore that further. So I think by end of 2023, Um, I was slowly building this, this mockup. was slowly building my, interview list and by early 2024, I started reaching out to people and I basically asked them, Hey, um, is that a problem you, you also see in, in, your marketing area? And everybody was like, Ooh, that's an interest. Ooh, that's an interesting problem. You, you're kind of right, Thomas, but we never really asked ourselves if, that's a real problem we have.

speaker-1: Well, and you were early too because it was mid to late 24 before really Chai GPT sort of got into the zeitgeist and the people were talking about it. So you were almost two, three quarters early in thinking this is where the conversation is going to go.

speaker-0: Yeah. I mean, now looking back, I think I thought too long about the whole thing, right? Between 23, 24, lot has happened, but yeah, I think in 2024, I got some first feedback and people were like, yeah, we would explore such a product. We would be interested in such a product. So I actually teamed up with my now co-founders, Joseph and Klaus, which I both know from my very first software startup. The funny story there is that Joseph, who's now our ⁓ tech product leader and tech leader was back then my boss, right? So he was my boss at my very first SaaS startup. And I teamed up with them because they sold their last software company, The Accident, and I knew he might have a bit of time to help me out on that. So we started talking. We started talking and brainstorming and long story short, it took us until April, 2024. So by April, we were like, we need to ship something, right? We need to, we, we, we spent too much time thinking about the problem, talking to users, users kind of confirmed the challenge, but they had really no idea how to describe the challenge and the problems. We're like, let's, let's just put something on product hunt. Let's just launch. Let's just do it. So we did that. We launched on April 30th, 2024 on Product Hunt with our first product iteration. We had no pricing. We had nothing really. We had a super scrappy product. ⁓ We already called it Otterly AI because I was going to Chatjibiti, asking Chatjibiti for some animal names that have great eyesight and also cute animals. You know, as a monitoring solution, you need to have good eyesight. ⁓ So that's the whole story on Otterly and why we named it after that. But then we put it on ProductHunt. To your point, the domain Otterly.ai was still available. We took that and we launched it on ProductHunt. And the nice part about that is we got, I think we got 200 signups in the first day and throughout the whole week, we got about 400 people signing up for it. And we're like, ⁓ wow, now we have real people on our product using it. No pricing, didn't really work, but we got so much feedback and kind of the first validation. So we were like, oh, okay, that's a sign. We should stay with the product, with the idea. But since I had a full-time job, a whole lot didn't happen. we just were in maintenance mode until October, really. By October 24, I left my marketing role at StoryBlock. Um, I, I also took hit pause on, on, on, on life a bit. spent three weeks in Italy, did nothing really. And after I came back, I, I was motivated again to, basically build and do stuff in 2024. mean, now looking back, it's, crazy what happened over the last couple of years, but in 2024, end of 24, actually, check to BT introduced web search, right? So the whole web search kind of thing only, only came end of 24. And also Google introduced Google AI with use mid-24 and then gradually rolled it out amongst many different countries in 2024. So by the end of 2024, we started to gather interest from people who wanted to understand how AI with user really doing and performing and helping or not helping them in their organic data. Back then, people were seeing already some first decline of organic traffic for some search queries as Google AI. Google was pushing for Yahoo views. And at the same time, people started noticing, um, chat, Chibity with chat Chibity search. so we, long story short, we, we built the whole platform in October. We, launched it in November. And, um, I think we got our first paying customer end of November, early December, something like that in, 2024. And we were like, Oh, finally after, after a year, we got our first paying customer. Yeah, but I think the more incredible thing that happened is we scaled to a thousand users by the end of December on the platform and TechRange covered us. And we got a nice piece on the whole thing by I think right before Christmas 2024, TechRange published an article about Otterly AI and the whole topic. So yeah, we kind of started the new year with this. Again, I mentioned this earlier, I'm rather risk averse in a way, right? So I was, I was looking for those signals. was looking for those market feedback for first paying customers for, mean, it, took, it had to take me a TechRange article to basically say, tell me I need to do this full time. I need to go all in, in, in audacity. That's what we did beginning of last year. So beginning of 2025, we were Joseph Klaus myself, we were getting together and we're like, this is a proper business. This is, this is. This is going to be big. So we have to do something and we have to go all in. So we did that. We started the business. we, we, um, actually the, company, the company Otelia was, was formed in, um, March, 2025 and we went all in and it's now looking back, it's crazy, right? Because we started with thousand users in 2025. We ended 2025 with about 20,000 users on the platform. And yeah. I mean, the rest is history in a way. We've grown to a team of 17, 18 people full time at the company. didn't take any VC money and yeah, I'm proud that we did it in this sustainable organic way. yeah, now looking back, I'm incredibly grateful for what already has happened, but I can't wait for the next years to come because it's gonna be fun.

speaker-1: That's awesome. ⁓ my gosh, that's the best story. I love that. ⁓ What do you see for, you know, into the future six months? You know, I know it's hard to, I think we all have to change that old phrase of like, where do you see the company in five years? Because in five years at this pace, feels like, you know, I'll have my Apple contact lens and ⁓ my SpaceX earbud or whatever, but like, ⁓ Where do you see the evolution over the next, six months to a year for Otterly?

speaker-0: Yeah. I mean, it's, incredible, right? How, what's, what's happening in the whole AI space in general right now. think the last three months really have been crazy and have been February 4th.

speaker-1: Opus, right? From that point forward was like, forget about

speaker-0: open claw, the whole open claw thing, the whole cloud, co-work thing, cloud code. mean, it's crazy, right? So next, I'm really bad with predictions. most always understating things, I mean, I think AI, I try to see AI positively in the sense of, yeah, it's going to be this big enabler for marketing teams, right? And I look at this in the sense of We're still so early in this whole AI game. and it's, gonna be massive. It's gonna be massive. And the question I receive a lot from, from brands and marketing teams is Thomas is my, is my website even, even relevant in six months? Right. Is, is, is my marketing as I all do marketing right now, even relevant in six months or in a year from now. ⁓ I always mentioned two things. I really believe there is a role, like there will be marketing managers, marketing people working in businesses, obsessing over the creative side of things, the storytelling side of things. And then there will be technical marketers doing, doing technical things, being implementing agents and whatnot. But one, I do believe that the marketing is evolving for sure, but has a big role also in the future. And second, also believe that websites are not going away, right? ⁓ I do think we need to change maybe some way how we do content, how we do websites these days, but it will be still a thing in six months, in a year, in two years. ⁓ What do I mean by that? When I look at the traction of our own website, for example, right now we see that about 15 % of total traffic is coming from agents. from the app bots. So 15%, and I think it's a big number. was basically zero six months ago, right? It is 15 % of all users are agents, ⁓ be it the check to BT agents, be it the cloud agents and whatnot, coming to our website, engaging with our website content. So we as marketers, we have to think about the technical aspects. How can we open up our websites for those agents in order to consume our content, engage with our content? Perform a conversion, right? mean, we, we operate in software businesses where agents are able to sign up for product, test the product, set up their own account. And then at some point, a human being takes over eventually. But at the end of the day, we, have to think about those agents as personas. have to, we have to provide content and content experiences that, that they can crawl, they can engage with. At the end of the day, it's a new user funnel we are building out here, but the foundation is and always will be great content and will be a great tech setup in the first place that allows those agents to engage with our content. So long story short, I think it's six months. I don't know, maybe it's 50, 50, right? 50 % of traffic coming from agents. think every industry will see different numbers and different speed to those numbers. ⁓ I truly believe that I as a, and this is a subjective opinion, I as Thomas, I still love to browse the internet, right? I also think in a year from now, I will engage with my smartphone, with my computer to browse the internet. I'm a hobby runner. I enjoy looking for running products, for running shoes, right? I'd love to geek out about that. I don't want to outsource everything in that user journey to a bot, to an agent. Maybe there are other parts in my life where I'm less passionate about that I can outsource. want to outsource to an agent, but there will, in some form or another, I would like to stay engaged for some parts more for other parts less as a human being.

speaker-1: That's the thesis from a stack list perspective. Two things. One, think the website will die in the traditional sense of home, about us, contact us, these large just sort of chunks of brochure text versus the stack list how built in such a way that it imagined atomizing all of your brand content into the little pieces and basically giving AI a sort of mall directory. saying, let me show you where everything is. I can show you where the LinkedIn content is. I can show you where the YouTube content is. And being able to sort of give this blueprint for all brand content versus relying on, ⁓ you've got a large brochure website, but then you're kind of relying on the AI agents to go to LinkedIn, then to go to YouTube, then to go to TikTok to like see what you're up to, that you're aggregating it in this front door. and that hub is the front door for a person or a brand or a company. then to your point, think Stacklist also evolves into, and this is where we're positioning, evolves into the social curation network that you're not browsing websites like you want to look at running gear. You don't go to running.com and then you also go to amazon.com and then you also go to What you do is you sort of browse this curated network of people that you know that are also into running and you see what they save from different places. And the AI that powers Stacklist or your own basically can traverse that little network and go, let me see what's out there in your network that people have saved that are running gear or running podcasts lately versus you just going to Google and go, okay, what website should I start looking at? And so this idea of the 10 blue links going away, but we're all sort of connected in this atomic molecular structure. And that is what the idea of the evolution of content with stackless powering it is. that's where I want to sort of you know, that's where I want to own enabling that for everybody.

speaker-0: I love it. think it's like composable content, content blocks, right? You wanna make sure that you support the discovery process of your consumers, of your users, right? And we would like to get inspired. Maybe we're at the stage where we'd like to get inspired. We'd like to gather information. And at some point we're as consumers in a stage of comparing running shoe products, right? And finding the best ones.

speaker-1: But not just on TikTok or not just on Instagram. It's basically, it's content aggregated from anywhere, which then really lets you sort of traverse the internet versus like you having to bounce around eight or 10 different platform ecosystems to see what you can find.

speaker-0: I love that thinking because as marketers, we've been always thinking about funnels, right? It's the marketing funnel, the website funnel, but the reality is that's not how a user journey works, right? In most businesses, there are both in P2P and P2C, so many different touch points where people jump between channels. They jump between discovery. They jump between content platforms, social media channels, YouTube, whatnot, right? And it's never linear, right? So at the end of the day, I'm a believer that we as brands, just need to provide an open door, right? An open door policy where people come in and they discover, they can discover content, they can discover products and we just need to make sure that our products, our content is discoverable, be it with Stacklist or our website or any...

speaker-1: not fragmented. You think about how it is now. If you would like to find out more about our brand, feel free to look at us on our website or our Substack or LinkedIn or TikTok or YouTube or Instagram. I'm basically like, here's 12 channels, just browse them as you wish versus sort of having this like, hey, here's us and let us help you sort of see the best based on what it is that you want to get into. So.

speaker-0: absolutely.

speaker-1: Well, this is amazing. Thank you. I love hearing the story of, you know, I love nonlinear paths. But also what's interesting is that when you really listen to the story that you told us, the sort of there are those through lines that always kept bringing you back into. It's almost like you went out and you learned some stuff and you came back into this sort of flow. And then you went out and you learned some stuff and you came back into the flow. And then you took all of that and it just felt like it was such a ⁓ the right moment, ⁓ especially when chat GBT hit ⁓ and it wasn't right moment, right time. That was the whole process of you essentially gathering everything you needed for that moment.

speaker-0: I think so. Right. And I'm very grateful. It was good. It was really good timing. ⁓ it was a good moment, but I also learned you can't, how do you say you can't, you can't overforce things. Right. So it, also luck has to fall on you in some way. And I think the timing has been, I mean, I, I loved the space. I was eager and very much working in that space for years, but in some way luck also plays into that. And I.

speaker-1: I

speaker-0: I'm happy that it played out the way it played out, but I'm also trying to always think about the things I can control. And obviously I can control the knowledge I gain in a particular space. I can control my network, the people I want to engage with, and I want to connect maybe more with in the future. But I can't control external factors such as market or such as timing in a way.

speaker-1: Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you again for the time. This was so great. Yeah.

speaker-0: Thanks so much for the chat.