The Two Ways to Sell AI: Lighthouse or Landgrab?

Yeah, and I-- and this, this piece actually all stemmed back from an observation that I had actually driving up the one oh one freeway.

Maybe this is three, four, five months ago, I can't remember.

And you just realize that you have the same kind of two competing companies, like one's on one side of the freeway and the other's on the other side of the freeway, and they're selling the exact same piece of software.

[chuckles]

And for some reason, they all have decided that the only relevant companies for this piece of software are in San Francisco and driving on the one oh one freeway.

And then this has gotten even more ridiculous.

It's obviously every bus has been wrapped and every-

Mm-hmm

... it's like planes are flying up above-

Yeah, yeah, yeah

... and they're now towing startups.

And so I think it's all very clever, but it's all targeting the same kind of sales motion.

The reality is you don't always have to do that.

Yeah.

You don't always have to sell to the same companies in San Francisco.

And so what I wanted to try to do is just tell founders like, "Hey, here's the framework for evaluating which playbook should you be following." There's this very obvious one, which is like go after the very obvious companies here in San Francisco, in New York City, in a major metro, that probably have some sort of proof or social value associated with them, or go out and sell in Ohio, go out and sell in Chicago, go out and sell in St.

Louis.

Find people who, who need your solution.

And so that was the whole point of the piece, is you don't always have to go sell these notable logos, and we'll see how that plays out, but that's why.

And, and just to get a little bit deeper, like when does it make sense for a founder to, you know, go and buy a giant billboard that you see when you're driving from SFO into the city? When does it make sense for you to kind of do a more targeted sales activity or motion elsewhere?

Yeah.

And I think the way that we tried to make this make sense, of course, we did very consulting style with a two-by-two matrix.

I did never work at a consulting firm, but I'll do my best.

And so we really were thinking about, okay, what are the axes that we should be kind of mapping opportunities against? And so we decided upon the Y-axis is really what we called the buyer's exposure.

And it's intentionally called exposure because there's the exposure of making a mistake with the solution that you buy.