Sadok Hasan on Dr. Niklas: Venture Grade

Dr. Niklas: Hi and a huge welcome to you my lovely listeners. So glad you’re here today. You are joining me for a chat with Sadok. Sadok is a growth and AI operator and founder of Bloomberry AI — building Bloomberry. How did you end up there and how far along are you?

Sadok: Well I ended up there because honestly I am really sick of generic AI content. Number two, there are so many talented senior people out here that when they use this generic AI content, it literally dumbs them down. It makes them sound more generic. I frankly, I know it sounds trite, but I really believe in authenticity. And I really believe that voice is the last moat. Your authentic voice at the end of the day. That’s how I ended up there. We’re only two months in, but we’ve already managed to organically scale up a pretty decent user base. We’re about to get an adviser from a Fortune 500 company. We already have three employees, so it’s starting off pretty good. Hopefully it ends pretty good.

Dr. Niklas: And how does it actually work? How can I imagine it? What’s the output that I get when I use Bloomberry?

Sadok: Well, you can think of it as your end-to-end content distribution system. And really, it’s designed for executives, founders, solopreneurs. The way it works is it literally learns your voice over time. And so the more you use it, the smarter it gets. What you can expect from it is — at some point my vision for this is that it will become your full autonomous agent for all your digital presence. As of today, you could either put a thought in there, you could put a link in there, you could take a full article and give it your thoughts on it, and it’ll extend that out into a full content-ready and published LinkedIn post, X post, Facebook post. But it goes beyond that. Once it learns your voice, it becomes really your PR — in a sense your own personal PR — meaning using your authentic voice you can then start scaling that out across all the different channels. You start building your digital presence. And we all know in this AI world with LLMs scraping the data and everything else — for instance, for me I started posting six months ago back when Bloomberry was kind of a little concept. It wasn’t even a full user-facing UI system as you can call it today. And already I’m being cited by Gemini — already I’m being cited for the research that we did where we actually coined the term AI Sentence DNA, meaning the actual structure of how AI usually generates its content.

I think for a lot of people in Silicon Valley, it’s hard to grasp right now because a lot of the feedback I get is “why don’t I just use ChatGPT?” Well, number one, whatever you get from ChatGPT, it’s not going to know if you even posted that or not. So it doesn’t even add to your content library. Number two, it doesn’t track your voice. I guarantee you right now — if you’re listening to this podcast, go into ChatGPT. Tell it you’re an expert at something. Give it whatever you have in terms of your past history and all your expertise. I guarantee you it will start with “most teams start blah blah blah, but really it’s blah blah blah.” And it’s the most generic thing in the world. I’ve seen it over and over again. My vision for this is to become fully autonomous. A full agent that acts on your behalf. At some point I want it to be an actual agent that goes through your accounts and actually starts to build and nurture relationships and community. Because at the end of the day, I really believe in authenticity and I really believe that people buy from people they trust.

Sadok: And if you’re producing generic AI content, they won’t trust you. At this point, people are almost trained to skip over that stuff. I am at least. As soon as I see any post that starts with “most something something, but really it’s this” or “you don’t have an X problem, you have a Z problem,” I’m skipping over that because I know for a fact ChatGPT wrote that. Claude gets a little bit better sometimes, but it’s still very guilty of that as well. And so really, with Bloomberry, we’ve identified at this point 7,000+ cadences, structures, words, and phrases that AI is constantly using. And we’ve systematically built out a system that’s not really necessarily prompt engineering, but a full framework — to not only prevent that from happening, but to understand and learn your voice over time, and then build your content library.

Dr. Niklas: Really interesting. And do you have paying users already? How far along are you in the build process?

Sadok: Yeah, we do. And so we’re only two months in. You have to remember, I’m building this end to end — literally the whole product, all the distribution. We already have three employees. We do have some paying users. One of our users is a VP at a Fortune 500 company. He loved it so much he asked to become an adviser. And so we’re going to bring him on very soon. And I mean it’s been a crazy ride, because this is the first time I’m doing something at this — I hope to be at — scale. But yeah, it’s going pretty well so far.

Dr. Niklas: And how do you finance it? I think that’s also interesting. If you have employees, you need some money to do it. Is it self-funded, bootstrapped now? Did you already bring in investors? Where are you at?

Sadok: I’m not ready for investors and I don’t want them, to be honest with you. I’m seeing a huge trend in Silicon Valley right now where venture-backed companies are under so much pressure. I know so many founders that frankly just seem burnt out because of all the pressure they’re receiving from their venture-backed investors. I’ve been bootstrapping this from day one. At some point once we start scaling — my background is in performance marketing, so you’re talking to somebody who loves big budgets, loves big resources — but at the end of the day, at this point, if I can keep this as organic as possible while bootstrapping it, I’d like to do that as best as I can until we get to a point where it’s worth scaling. But at this point, there are so many things in this product I still want to add. And I have been laser focused on all the user feedback that I get. If there are any founders listening to this — if you have even one user who requests a feature, drop everything you’re doing, make sure you address it. Make them feel powerful at the end of the day. Plus, it’s going to add to your product. It’s going to make your product a lot better.

Dr. Niklas: Yeah, that’s really interesting and I think early stage growth is very different from later stage growth once you have figured things out more. How did you get your first users? I think a lot of people struggle with this part.

Sadok: I got lucky, to be honest with you. My first user was actually the first paying user too. And it’s so ironic because the reason I got him — commenting and building community, right? My first ever comment from the Bloomberry LinkedIn account literally on day two of launch. I had commented on a user’s post. He clicked through to the LinkedIn profile. We had maybe three followers at the time. He clicked through the site, he signed up, and he converted immediately. Which is insane. And so for me, that was either like a sign from God like, “All right, I’ve got to keep doing this.” But ironically, I haven’t been able to even scale that tactic yet since then, just because of how much we have going on. Anyone listening — if you’re bootstrapping it yourself, don’t underestimate the power of tactically and strategically commenting and following on all your perceived ICP, all your ideal customer profile qualified audiences. That’s really how I got my first user, and again he signed up immediately — on day two of launch with three followers on the LinkedIn account.

Dr. Niklas: Before starting to build, I think you have a history with a number of software companies, but also esport teams. How did you end up at Bloomberry? What was the path that brought you there?

Sadok: My path has been very unconventional. Not your typical Silicon Valley AI growth operator path. I honestly give credit to my early start, which was — and by the way, this business model probably doesn’t exist anymore — but straight out of high school I started at a small company. If you’re in Silicon Valley you probably know of it. It’s called Fry’s Electronics. And I started on the retail sales floor. Commission only. You basically sell or you go home broke. And that’s how I started to understand that to convert a user, you really need to get them to trust you. And to do that, you’ve got to make them feel powerful. How you message that, how you communicate that — over time you start iterating and you start understanding what sticks and what works. But that really gave me the understanding of how to read people in person and really how to build that authenticity. You can almost say I learned performance marketing backwards. That’s really how I started to understand how to sell.

That led me to a couple of internships in marketing. Eventually ended up at Fanatics, where I really understood the power of licensing and merchandise and infrastructure at scale. Fanatics — I think they signed like a 20-year deal with the NFL Shop, meaning they are the sole and exclusive company to sell licensed sports merchandise on NFL Shop, NBA Store, NHL Shop, and all the different team sites. That was a huge strategic play. I was there for four years. That company was a spin-off of eBay, and I had one of the most talented teams you can ever imagine. After Fanatics, it was Google. And then Procore, Pure Storage, and then Airwallex. So I’ve had a very healthy mix of B2C, B2B, and sales. I got lucky, and I took advantage of a lot of that.

Dr. Niklas: Your last step before going on your own was Airwallex and you were heavily driving paid growth. If there’s a founder who has been working on organic growth and is now thinking about advertising — what should they think about? What should they do, and what should they not do?

Sadok: Don’t even touch it until you figure out what works. And to do that you have to do a lot of manual stuff that doesn’t scale first. Iterate constantly and design a framework for your iterations. What we did at Airwallex — every single test that we ran, we either killed in seven days if it didn’t perform at a CPA goal, or let it ride. But to get there, Airwallex has so much budget and infrastructure and resources. If you’re not there yet, I would honestly say just start building out your organic reach. If you’re a solopreneur or founder, I really believe that you should do founder content marketing first. Kind of like what I’m doing right now with you on this podcast. Where you can actually start distributing your ideas, your way of thinking — hopefully people resonate with that and it goes back to building trust. But the first thing is start with SEO. Programmatic SEO — build that infrastructure, all your internal linking. If you can get some backlinks that’s great, but I found that internal linking and really the infrastructure that you can build in SEO is super crucial. And just post, man — post consistently, get all the channels going.

I would say honestly don’t even touch performance marketing until you actually find what sticks, if you’re very limited on budget at least.

Dr. Niklas: If I think about paid ads — do you have a revenue number in mind where you would say, start with it? Or below a certain threshold, don’t even consider it?

Sadok: Start smart. Whether you’re at $10,000 in revenue, a million, or $10 million, it’s all the same principle. Start with Google. Start with your lower-funnel acquisition approach. Start with very long-tail, highly compartmentalized keyword groupings. Because the thing is, people are probably not going to be searching your company name — they don’t even know that exists yet. Obviously you’ll want your brand terms covered, but start with super specific long-tail keywords. Go exact. Go phrase match. Do target CPA. Always bid for the actual cost per acquisition. Lower your target CPA if you have to with a very limited budget. Then start scaling it. Google scales. Bing is very cheap. A lot of people are not on Bing. At Airwallex, we noticed that almost 90% of the competition within our auction insights didn’t exist on Bing. You can get a fraction of the cost per click on Bing. But I would say start there.

A lot of people start with Facebook ads. If you have a highly performing organic creative on Facebook or LinkedIn, test that first and start promoting it. Don’t do a boost. At this point, creative is the new targeting. AI is smart enough to understand the creative and serve it to your actual qualified audience. And find what scales first in terms of your organic. If you posted something — an image, a visual, an infographic, a video — and it outperforms everything else, that’s a good place to start testing into Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn is getting a little more expensive now. But just be super systematic. Test a lot, but start very lower-funnel, bottom-of-funnel with ads like Google and Bing.

Look, if you’re in SaaS right now, I wouldn’t touch ads. Do outreach, do organic, start with a few users, talk to people that you think could actually use what you have. Find what sticks and go from there.

Dr. Niklas: For founders thinking about starting in a highly regulated industry like fintech — what do you think is the biggest mindset shift you need?

Sadok: Fintech is difficult to get into. You’ve got to do a lot of boring work first. You’ve got to get a lot of licensing. Licensing is difficult to get. I think Airwallex had 170+ licenses across the globe. And the more licensing you get, the easier it is to get the next one. But at the end of the day, in highly regulated markets like that, if you don’t have actual backing, resources, and infrastructure, it’s really difficult to get into. If your audience are solopreneurs bootstrapping this themselves — just find something easy to get into first and build that up. Eventually you can pivot. But I wouldn’t recommend anybody get into fintech honestly if you’re just by yourself as a solopreneur, unless you want to have the intention of eventually getting bought out. And if that’s the case, find a wedge where your Airwallexes or your Stripes or somebody else doesn’t have yet.

At the end of the day, it’s crucial to choose wisely before you get into anything. And honestly, just find something that interests you. If you don’t know anything about fintech, it’s going to be really difficult to break into that mold. There’s a reason why something like Stripe took a long time to come up — the problem wasn’t new, but what they did is just incredibly hard to do well. Regulated, compliant, at that scale — it’s just very difficult.

Dr. Niklas: When should you raise? What do you think?

Sadok: Not until you hit at least $2K MRR — $2 to $5K, I would say. I don’t think anyone’s even going to look at you before that, to be honest with you. These days at least they probably won’t. Even if you have a really cool concept, a really good MVP — if you don’t have users, if you don’t have $2 to $5K MRR, VCs won’t even look at you these days.

Dr. Niklas: Yeah, I agree. At least if you’re a first-time founder with no existing relationship. And I also think you have to understand that if you take venture capital, you set yourself on a quite clear track. They want their return. They need the outliers. So they need you to grow at all cost and achieve the scale to be a fund returner. From the second you’ve taken the money from VCs, you at least owe them to give it a try and become big.

Sadok: Yeah, I mean it depends. If your product is at least monetizable in the future, I think VCs would look at you if you have a decent user base. But yeah, if you don’t have a backing, if you’re just on your own and don’t have resources or a network — try to get MRR. Try to start getting some revenue at the end of the day. At Airwallex, historically we always thought that our cards product was our primary driver. And then as soon as I got in there, I noticed we were actually producing negative gross profit from the cards product. And I completely reallocated our budgets towards business accounts and global accounts, which is really where our primary LTV cohorts were coming from. At this point, do something monetizable. If you’re not doing that, VCs just won’t look at you.

Dr. Niklas: It’s so much easier to monetize companies than it is to monetize consumers. And there are so few companies in the world who have reliably monetized consumers — like Google and Facebook. Most large companies — like Salesforce or Microsoft — sell primarily to businesses.

Sadok: These are completely different models. Think about Salesforce — the onboarding process to get users to actually come on and custom-build out their own infrastructure is completely different from something like Google where it’s literally self-served. You go on there, it doesn’t matter if you’re spending $5 a day on ads or $5,000 or $500,000. For them, it’s the exact same thing in terms of resources. But with something like Salesforce — or anything that requires a custom build and actual onboarding — that’s going to be way more resources. So try to find something that is self-served, that can scale easily.

B2B I almost feel like is a little bit easier without ads because once you get one customer, one user that you’ve onboarded, from there it’s just about getting referrals. And then the referrals basically start building your flywheel. I can’t express how important it is to build a community, how important it is to start building out your connections ASAP. People in your niche, people who could eventually become partners, investors, angel investors, VCs. So for B2C I would honestly say that ads are probably crucial in the beginning.

Dr. Niklas: The world has become a lot more noisy with AI. Before 2024, it was a lot easier to create and generate thought leadership. These days, it’s just really easy to create content. What would be a piece of advice for a founder starting out to build an audience in an AI-saturated world?

Sadok: Protect the mid-funnel leak. Protect it. And by that I mean post consistently on organic. TikTok is free. LinkedIn is free. These are free to post. If you’re not posting consistently across these channels, you’re missing out on so much distribution. It’s free. At the end of the day, you just pull out your phone, start recording something, post it on TikTok, on YouTube. TikTok especially — the distribution there is insane. A lot of other channels — LinkedIn, Facebook, pretty much every channel I can think of — they will limit your distribution to pretty much your follower base. TikTok, you can start one today and potentially have a video that hits 1,000 views, 10,000 views — you can go viral. Don’t underestimate those. And protect that mid-funnel leak, right? While you’re creating that content, definitely make sure you’re optimizing your landing pages for good CRO. Definitely put your resources into creating as much content as possible. At the end of the day, it’s free.

Dr. Niklas: Would you start building an audience first or would you start building a product first? What do you think?

Sadok: Audience. Audience. I’m a marketer at heart. Silicon Valley seems to think that software is dead and I completely disagree with that. At the end of the day, the only variable that matters is how much value you bring to the marketplace and how effectively you communicate that. You can have the greatest product in the world. You could have probably built ChatGPT before it was even built, but if you have no audience to distribute that to, it doesn’t even matter. So start with the audience. Even if you don’t really know necessarily what the product will be, directionally you will eventually find that out. Keep that as your intention overall. But stick to your values at the end of the day. Just be authentic. And post the right kind of content. Signal the right kind of stuff that would actually get you strategic partnerships later on. Show value of your past, your credibility, your reputation, what you enjoy, what you think is probably the best solution. And start shifting your content and your distribution towards that. And eventually you’ll probably be able to build up enough audience to eventually get a small user base. And if you get a small user base, treat them like your literal lifeline. Because they will then be personal advocates for you. And most importantly, they will be giving you the information that will make your product even better. So to answer your question — for sure, audience first.

Dr. Niklas: If people got interested in Bloomberry and they want to try it, where will they find it?

Sadok: Yeah, go to bloomberry.ai. It’s free to start. I highly recommend — if you’re a founder having difficulty with reach and distribution, very limited on your budget — it’s a good place to start. Look, if you’re a founder or solopreneur and you don’t even have a LinkedIn or Twitter, first start there. Create every social account possible. It’s cringe at first, but then it becomes consistent when you start posting. But I highly recommend for really any founder, solopreneur, entrepreneur — bloomberry.ai — create an account, start for free, and just start posting. Distribute your ideas there. There is somebody out there who wants what you have. A thousand percent there is. And so if you’re not effectively communicating that, you’ll never find them.

Dr. Niklas: Sadok, thank you so much for being on, and you, my lovely listener, see you next time.

Sadok: Dr. Niklas, I appreciate you having me.