How Does Entrepreneurship Lead to AI? A Chat with Edgar Brown of Engyne

Edgar:

Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you, Ashley.

Ashley Ashbee:

Mmm.

Edgar:

So when it comes to AI, I think people have many misconceptions, as you mentioned. I think the number one thing is, is AI going to replace all of our jobs? Is it going to take over completely? Are we all going to be out of work? And I think our mindset at Engyne, my co-founder and I, around AI is that AI is a tool that augments work. Ideally, it allows people to spend less time on the mundane tasks that they used to do. It allows people to do more with less effort or less resources. And so it's more of a democratizing access to productivity using technology versus replacement. So to take a tangible example of that, when it comes to content marketing, and obviously this podcast is really big on content and driving inbound and providing value to people, most people would think, oh, if you have like tools and AI content generation, like ChatGBT or Jasper or otherwise, that you would just use it to create this. kind of standard content that is not helpful. And then you kind of have AI content being indexed by AI people. And then like, where does the real value come into play at the end of the day? Whereas for us at ENGYNE, we're very focused on. using the tools again to help founders save time, do more with less, especially on small budgets. And at the end of the day, just provide real value and solve your problems, which is what entrepreneurship is about for us.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah, and I feel like you're more like, people are more likely to understand that element of AI, if they understand like the basics of the technology, like a lot of people don't know that Siri is like an actual voice, like there's an actual person who recorded for Siri and same with Alexa. Same with that automated voice that you hear on Instagram all the time like a lot of AI has like a human basis. And So

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

it's not inherently inhuman. It kind of starts human. What makes it inhuman is how you use it. Like you said, when you're

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

using it to fill in for something that should be human, or you're kind of making assumptions about what it can do. I think if you don't have your content strategy down pat, if you don't have your product market fit down pat, you don't know what customers or prospects are actually looking for in terms of information or entertainment. or value about the product, like if you don't know what keywords people are interested in. Like writing AI is not going to figure all that stuff out for you. You know, you still have to research your market. You still have to, you know, iterate with your user cases. And you still have to put the work in to really understand your market and your product. It doesn't replace any of that. It's actually... So once you have all that stuff down, it can actually make it more human because now you can do all these things that you have extra time for because you're not having to spend time like hand making every single page if you wanna have a programmatic SEO strategy. I think a lot of people probably do that by hand and they don't realize that a computer could do that for them

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

and I think that's really the... where the education piece comes in. I think people are just starting to learn what this can do. And so my question on my rambling, after my ramble here, is for B2B folks, what do you, have people ask you for specific things or do you have specific examples of, because so to just explain people what programmatic SEO is first. Programmatic SEO is basically when you can have some sort of formula or program that can create a bunch of different web pages out of a database or a form. So for example, when a musician puts their music on Spotify, automatically a page is made for them based on the information they put in. So it's a way to get internal links on your product, but it also gives people something to share in their own networks so we can help organically as well with inbound marketing and things like that. And so personally, I know a fairly bit about programmatic SEO for B2C, but I'm still wondering, I'm still learning about what it could do for B2B. Is it memberships? Is it a knowledge-based thing? What does that look like in B2B?

Edgar:

Yeah, great question. And also really resonate with a lot of the things that you shared. So to take a step back first, and then we can kind of dive into the

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah.

Edgar:

aspects of the product, et cetera. But the two things that I wanted to highlight that you said is really around understanding your customers' problems, rooting in value, and then also having real expertise as well. So starting with the area of understanding your customers' problems, SEO or any form of marketing is always about providing value. What problems are your customers facing? What are their challenges? What are they spending too much time on, too much money on? And then where does your product actually come in to solve that? And so when you're thinking about search, customers are usually searching for one of two things. It's either topics related to the problem that they're trying to solve for or problems related to or topics related to the category of product itself. And so usually when it comes to content strategy in general, we break that down into either the programmatic side, which you broke down really well. Those are these kind of templated pages for specific topics that you can build at scale. which is what the original version of our product did. But then there's also the editorial side, which is that long form content thought leadership. education. And our platform actually serves both now. So that's been the latest evolution of what we've been building. So our new framing is Engyne is a platform that helps customers or helps startups get customers through Google search using SEO and AI. And we do that by helping founders website builder to their subfolder so we plug

Ashley Ashbee:

No

Edgar:

in

Ashley Ashbee:

code

Edgar:

two

Ashley Ashbee:

for the

Edgar:

options

Ashley Ashbee:

win, sorry.

Edgar:

like Webflow or Framer. Exactly, huge

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah,

Edgar:

fan of nocode, huge fan of

Ashley Ashbee:

oh

Edgar:

nocode.

Ashley Ashbee:

yeah

Edgar:

And then finally getting up that content so that you can optimize it over time based off of your analytics because one of the biggest hurdles to getting started in the first place with SEO or content marketing is getting that baseline of content out there like those first ten posts related to the topics that your customers are searching. so that you can actually see based off of data what are people interacting with, and then you can update it over time. And we've had customers generate their first organic sales in less than 10 days. We've had customers do hundreds of thousands of page impressions over a six month period, all due to having a sound strategy, but being able to augment the type of content that they're publishing with the Engyne platform.

Ashley Ashbee:

That's awesome. That actually really reminds me of some work I'm doing right now. It'll be published by the time this is out. So I'm comfortable telling you. I know you're not going to steal my idea.

Edgar:

Hehehehe

Ashley Ashbee:

But one use case that just came to mind when you said that was, so for example, I've been researching knowledge bases. that have either natively or through another tool that have really good analytics about what people are searching in a knowledge base. Really good analytics about like are people's questions being answered to their satisfaction? Like are a lot of questions being answered and there's no content for it? Or are people asking questions that are not yielding results? But that's just because we've things in a knowledge base a certain way. So my whole purpose in doing these types of videos on that kind of content is... like for iteration that's genius because you're basically like sourcing, it's basically like having a focus group in a way without actually like having a formal focus group because like you're saying like people search for their problems so why not capture that and use that to create something to refine your product, to change up your content, add content, do less content that people are not liking. being able to get feedback as you go along is amazing. And so that's another reason why I really wanted to talk to you. Yeah, I'm really excited. Is this all, is that

Edgar:

100%

Ashley Ashbee:

data, yeah, is that data all going to be natively in your platform or is it, are you working with some sort of analytics tool to deliver that data?

Edgar:

Yeah, great

Ashley Ashbee:

Like an integration,

Edgar:

question.

Ashley Ashbee:

I

Edgar:

So

Ashley Ashbee:

mean,

Edgar:

we

Ashley Ashbee:

yeah.

Edgar:

start with just, exactly,

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

we start by just integrating into your Google Search Console. What we found is that, honestly, a lot of founders and marketers, myself included, struggle to even understand how to correctly use the Google Search Console tool. So if you think about the amount of founders or marketers out there that are doing efforts but want to measure their results, we'd say like maybe 5% to 1% are actually using Google Analytics effectively, and then an even smaller percentage of those people are using Google Search Console effectively.

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

And that's why you've seen tools like maybe Plausible and others pop up that are just like a simpler lightweight version of that. So eventually we'll have dedicated analytics specific to SEO. That is what at the end of the day feeds our AI because that's the other thing, both in terms of the process of coming up with the ideas based off of the engagement that people are seeing on these different posts, as well as writing high quality content that's trained on your marketing documents. So

Ashley Ashbee:

Hmm.

Edgar:

to Again, lean into the unique value that your brand or your company is providing, as opposed to the standard content that could be generated by any like AI copywriting tool. So on the analytics side, we're starting out with Google Search Console, but we will eventually build that out into a far more robust analytics platform.

Ashley Ashbee:

Awesome. That's really, really cool. I'm really glad. Yeah, I'm a big tech geek, and I totally know what you mean about the Search Console being difficult to use. I mean, even just getting it into the GA4 was difficult. Like, it's

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

not at all an intuitive process. And I actually have been, because I've been offering, you know, to help people migrate from UA to GA4, I've been getting ads like on Facebook from. people who are like have like, you know, we're demystifying GA4, you know, join our webinar or whatever. And so I've been looking at the comment section because I'm obviously that's my wheelhouse so I'm interested in what people are saying and the amount of people who say like, I don't know what to do when I'm in there. Like this is really messed up.

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

And also I've been seeing a lot of posts on LinkedIn from people who say like it's, you know. It doesn't really necessarily capture what we want to capture, and it's not intuitive. And so yeah, it's kind of off topic. I just felt like ranting, basically, because obviously,

Edgar:

Yep.

Ashley Ashbee:

we're recording this late June audience. And of course, July 1, UA stops collecting data. So that's why it's

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

top of mind, just to people are wondering why I'm going to tangent there. So yeah, what prompted you to make Engyne? Like was it a problem you were having or did it stem from another product or another company?

Edgar:

Yes, it definitely stemmed from personal experience, both on my side, but also on my co-founder Sukh's side as well. So both of us have both worked in tech for a while. I've been a founder and early marketing hire at several startups. My first company was a fitness tech company called FitDrive, and we were essentially helping personal trainers manage their clients online. So think like a Shopify for fitness entrepreneurs. billing, scheduling, payments, building workouts, sending them to clients, that sort of thing. And then for Sukh, he was building a Spotify for news app. So more so on the B2C side. Both of us ran into what is usually the number one problem for early stage startup founders, which is that we built a product. We're super happy with how it looks, with the design, with the value that it's providing for us, but then we struggled to get customers. You feel like you're pushing a boulder uphill, we're not sure what the best way is or how to navigate the sea of different things that you think you should be doing as a startup founder. And so that was super frustrating. 

And for me, that spurred, I would say, a three-year journey of wanting to go deep in growth and marketing. So I ended up joining a... an SF based ed tech company called On Deck, which, uh, I joined as their second marketing hire and they ended up scaling from 3 million to 20 million and 30 to 300 employees in, uh, 12 months on the revenue side and on the employee side about like 18 months, which was like an incredible ride of growth. I got to learn marketing growth from some amazing leaders there, the VP growth, uh, someone who was a senior person at HubSpot who led marketing for all of those sorts of things. And then I started doing consulting, both executive coaching, which I do on the side, but also marketing consulting for early stage founders. 

And I just found myself running into the same repetitive tasks over and over again. And so on Sukh's side, too, being like an indie maker, he shipped 30 to 40 software apps before struggling to get customers. We found that it was a super a super high priority problem as all customers or all startups need to grow. And so we decided to focus on that broad space and then we decided to go deeper and actually met through. the On deck program, the On Deeck fellowship in San Francisco, decided to come together, focus on SEO, given content and SEO are so anchored in that idea of giving value, providing value, and organically providing customers as opposed to the paid side, like we mentioned earlier. And that's how we came together. And so we've been building ever since.

Ashley Ashbee:

That's so awesome. Yeah, I feel like I keep hearing that about people who are building in public. It seems like it's always like a shared, a mutual mission that kind of almost magnetizes certain people together. And I work from home and I'm a freelancer. So it's a different world to me,

Edgar:

Hehehehe

Ashley Ashbee:

but I don't know. I find it really interesting. Because I guess I'm technically building in public. Like I'm doing courses and. I'm shifting my business from service to product. So yeah, it's technically

Edgar:

Mmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

that. But man, like haven't, yeah,

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

the whole building public thing is fascinating.

Edgar:

Yeah, let's go a little bit deeper there. Building in public is one of my favorite subjects. And

Ashley Ashbee:

Yay!

Edgar:

I think we actually met through KP from the Build in Public Fellowship, who I actually

Ashley Ashbee:

Ah.

Edgar:

met during my time at OnDeck. He ran the nocode Fellowship there. And then I decided to do his Build in Public Fellowship. And after going through his program, the way that we think about building in public is less about you building a specific product or service, et cetera. but more about becoming the type of person who shares their learnings, their journey, their failures openly and ships every day. And so it's far more of a mindset for how you approach life. If you're building anything like you with this podcast, sharing the insights that you're doing, the work that you're doing to help people learn content and community, et cetera. And you could be sharing those insights with the people like physically around you in conversations or in the communities that you're a part of. We do that a lot in the communities that we're a part of, whether that's building public fellowship On Deck. uh, or other accelerator programs that I'm an alumni of, uh, Indie worldwide as well for, for Bootstrap founders. But actually doing that on a one-on-one basis first, because

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm.

Edgar:

you're anchoring in your potential customer, but just in providing value to every person that you come across. And then when it comes to building it on social or an email, that's just the broadcast version. of the one-on-one impact. So it's sharing it so that everyone can benefit from those same things that you're providing on a one-on-one basis, and then sharing the journey from the beginning all the way to the end. And for reference, if you want to check out what we're doing at Engyne, we share a weekly build in public newsletter where

Ashley Ashbee:

It's so

Edgar:

ever

Ashley Ashbee:

good.

Edgar:

since

Ashley Ashbee:

Sorry to

Edgar:

Sukh --

Ashley Ashbee:

interrupt.

Edgar:

and I met.

Ashley Ashbee:

I'll

Edgar:

Oh,

Ashley Ashbee:

link

Edgar:

thank

Ashley Ashbee:

to

Edgar:

you

Ashley Ashbee:

it

Edgar:

so

Ashley Ashbee:

by the

Edgar:

much.

Ashley Ashbee:

way.

Edgar:

I'm so glad you enjoyed it.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah, I really got into it

Edgar:

That's

Ashley Ashbee:

when I was

Edgar:

amazing.

Ashley Ashbee:

researching you, but yeah. I'll link to it for

Edgar:

Amazing.

Ashley Ashbee:

sure. Anyway, sorry I interrupted you there.

Edgar:

No, no, that's perfect. We really appreciate the support. And it's just been super important for both of us to share that journey from the beginning. Like there's many founders who say, oh, I'm gonna wait until we raise a seed round or a series A or we hit X amount of revenue to start sharing. But

Ashley Ashbee:

Hmm.

Edgar:

those early days of figuring out the product, tweaking the vision, launching the new version of whatever it is, like there's so many learnings in there. And that's so valuable to share with people that are just getting started. And so

Ashley Ashbee:

Oh yeah.

Edgar:

I'm grateful for our team in the way that my co-founder Sukh as well sharing those learnings and teaching, just teaching, teaching. And that's also helped, I think, with our brand, because as a result of us providing so much value for free, people tend to want to support us, whether that's in the communities that we're a part of, or on the Twitter or LinkedIn communities as well.

Ashley Ashbee:

Oh, that is so good to hear because that's basically why I made my podcast. Because I think that's what content, really good content should do. It's about bringing people together. And

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

I totally know what you mean about a lot of founders wanting to only share the victories of, we got Series C or

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

we've never had a higher monthly recurring revenue or whatever they're... threshold of what they call success. But I don't know. I love that you are not just sharing the winnings. You don't just take the little fancy pieces and try to make yourself look cool. It's about the work, really. But

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

it's empowering. It's not boring. Yeah.

Edgar:

Yeah,

Ashley Ashbee:

And I

Edgar:

thank you

Ashley Ashbee:

think

Edgar:

for

Ashley Ashbee:

that

Edgar:

saying

Ashley Ashbee:

takes a lot

Edgar:

that.

Ashley Ashbee:

of courage. Oh yeah, that takes a lot of courage. I was just going to say that, that's all.

Edgar:

No, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I had posted

Ashley Ashbee:

Sorry

Edgar:

a tweet

Ashley Ashbee:

to interrupt,

Edgar:

this

Ashley Ashbee:

but I

Edgar:

morning.

Ashley Ashbee:

just realized I was giving you the finger. I don't know how long I've been doing that, but my apologies.

Edgar:

Oh, you're all good. I didn't even notice that.

Ashley Ashbee:

Okay, good, good.

Edgar:

That's so funny. That's hilarious. But anyways, yeah, so I posted a tweet today on actually a similar topic around confidence. And it was basically like hot take. Faking it until you make it is a myth. Real confidence comes from putting in the reps and When you do that, when you put in that body of work day in and day out, confidence comes from that, both in your actual skill sets of doing the work, but also in the mindset of knowing that you can figure out anything if you put the time in. And I really think that does apply to so many things in life, whether that's business or Twitter or content or social media. just putting in the reps, writing every single day, shipping something every single day, it leads to a place where you just have confidence in where you're going. Like things may change on a day-to-day basis, you may get a customer, you may lose a customer, you could get an investor or lose that investor, but you just know that your trajectory is up and to the right over the course of the next year, two years, three years, five years. And so that's how we really like to... uh, think at, at Engyne is in terms of long-term, like where are we going? And also like, what do we want our legacy to be? Like, let's say as this company continues to grow, do we want to say that we maximize revenue and then talked about it when we got there, or do we want to be able to say that we shared all of our lessons from the beginning, we brought our community along with us, uh, and we were able to just fully support them, be open. and bring them along for the ride. So that's the way that we like to think.

Ashley Ashbee:

Oh, I love that. That's what community should be. Yeah, I can't, I was going to say something, but I forgot it'll come to me like after we stopped recording. So. Maybe I'll put it

Edgar:

No

Ashley Ashbee:

in the

Edgar:

problem.

Ashley Ashbee:

thing after. That's really awesome. And you have that on, I think, sub stack, right? Or no, Beehiiv. How do you like Beehiiv? Is

Edgar:

That's on

Ashley Ashbee:

it easy

Edgar:

Beehiiv.

Ashley Ashbee:

to? Yeah. Do you like using it?

Edgar:

Yeah, great question as well.

Ashley Ashbee:

Sorry I put you on the spot there.

Edgar:

No, no, you're good. You're good. Uh,

Ashley Ashbee:

Bye!

Edgar:

so email platforms, I feel like I'm definitely not the, uh, the expert at email and I feel like most marketers, it's always about just finding something that does the job and then there's a series of individual features that make something better or worse, but. Most email platforms work. So it's about finding what's best for you. Uh,

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

my mindset around Beehiiv was actually just that I asked a few people in one of the communities that I'm in, they recommended it. So we went with that. And then I've found their writing experience to be really clean. I found their analytics to be really clean. Uh, and I think that it's a good option that pulls in some of the more complex features around segmentation, et cetera, that you get from things like convert kit. but they're

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

available when you grow into that place. So they still have their free plan up to 25,000 subscribers or so. Whereas Substack, which I've used for my personal newsletter, I wrote a different one called On the Go Athlete a while back that was more about sharing learnings from sports into startups. Given I have a background in athletics as well, I used to play varsity basketball for a university called McGill in Canada. And I find Substack for pure creators a great option because if your primary goal is to start a free newsletter that converts into a paid newsletter and you can use sub stack notes to promote like different aspects of your brand the same way that you do on Twitter, I find that works really well. Whereas

Ashley Ashbee:

Mmm.

Edgar:

Beehiiv I like on the company side because it has some of the more like in depth features. But there are tons of great options out there. I wouldn't say one of them is perfect. It's just about finding what's right for you.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah, yeah, I'm the same, you know, and it's easier for me because I'm like, I'm a single person, I'm not trying to build a huge product or whatever. So why? Yeah, nothing that huge. So for me, it's like, because some premium products, once you reach the pay threshold, like a certain amount of followers or whatever, it becomes unaffordable or unjustifiable for your particular business.

Edgar:

Right.

Ashley Ashbee:

And I feel like a lot of businesses don't think of that. I remember my first guest. Who was my first guest? Anyway, I remember the first published episode that I did. She basically works, she basically co- is a co-founder, a founder of a, like an startup accelerator. And she says that all people say like, oh, we get this

Edgar:

Thanks

Ashley Ashbee:

for

Edgar:

for

Ashley Ashbee:

free.

Edgar:

watching!

Ashley Ashbee:

And that's why we're able to do this for free or whatever. And she's like, yeah, you're getting it for free, but like, is it sustainable? So yeah, I'm big on that. Like people should just, it's tricky because like a lot of people are just trying to survive. Like they're just trying to keep their head above water. So. They don't necessarily have the

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

time or the bandwidth to think about those things. But yeah, that's why I asked you, because I'm just, it's interesting to see what people choose in the beginning and to see

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

if that changes at all and why and how has that changed. And

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

yeah.

Edgar:

Yeah. And that's, that's very relevant for just as you're talking about, like bootstrap founders or solopreneurs, where you may be a one person team. You don't have a 5K, 10K, 50K marketing budget to spend on software to deliver, you just need a tool that works. And again, that's kind of the reason why we've structured things with Edge and in the way that we did, because a lot of bootstrapped or even like founders that had just raised seed would then reach out to SEO agencies that would charge them quite a bit of money and not always provide the level of support that they were looking for, especially for someone that's just starting out. And so having that like transparent pricing that scales with the business is super important for email platforms, for software platforms as a whole, but especially if you're working with bootstrapped or early stage founders as your primary customer.

Ashley Ashbee:

That's awesome. Yeah, I really appreciate personally as someone who's building products, I really appreciate pricing transparency because the amount of products where you have to dig, dig to find pricing, or it says that it has pricing,

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

but when you click the button, it gives you an email form to, it's like they're trying to use it as a marketing attribution tool. It's so

Edgar:

Dope.

Ashley Ashbee:

common and I can't imagine how many people like me just say, well. This is what it's like when I haven't even signed up. What's it going to be like when I'm actually in your platform? So yeah.

Edgar:

Exactly, exactly.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah. I think you're based in Toronto, if I remember correctly, right? Or somewhere in Canada?

Edgar:

Yep, in Toronto, Canada.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah, how do you find the startup community in Toronto? Like, do you find you do a lot of networking in the city or do you have

Edgar:

Hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

to do stuff online and other places?

Edgar:

Yeah, great question. I'm honestly a really big fan of the startup ecosystem in Toronto. It took me a while to get there though. And I can walk you through the story of that.

Ashley Ashbee:

Please,

Edgar:

So.

Ashley Ashbee:

go ahead.

Edgar:

Yeah, right. When I was working on FitDrive, my first company, I was based in Montreal at the time because I was at McGill University. And then we applied for this program called Next 36, where they choose kind of who they believe to be the Next 36 entrepreneurial leaders of Canada. And they provide a program that supports both. on the business side, so they provide up to $50,000 in funding for companies, as well as on the education side. So having kind of a robust founder development program where they bring in the Harvard Business School venture capital professor, the Georgetown International Trade professor, and really give high potential individuals, think like anywhere from 22 to 28 years old, an accelerated MBA in entrepreneurship, as well as plug them into the whole Canadian like startup ecosystem and talent network. And for me, that was just a huge accelerant because it automatically plugged me into everyone that was based here. And afterwards, I ended up joining programs like the DMZ, which is one of like the world's best ranked incubators associated with the university.

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-mm.

Edgar:

And so now that I've come back to Toronto, I kind of just hang out within those communities and then you can find that very, I would say, tight-knit ecosystem by knowing the right people. Even now I'm also... and entrepreneur in residence at what's called the Black Founders Network with the University of Toronto. And they have an incredible community. We had our launch event last Friday. We had over 400 people there and they were all super high caliber, super passionate, driven, doing really amazing things in tech. But if you're outside of one of those communities, I do find it's difficult to connect with people. And in comparison, prior to going into all of these... programs, I was 100% focused on going to the States. OnDeck, as a company, was fully remote, but with kind of a core based in San Francisco. Another company I worked for, Clay, was New York based, that I did some growth for them. And so most of my network now, I would say, is actually in the US due to either my remote work with those companies or building relationships with people through Twitter and online communities. And so I find if you're based in Canada, you should balance the in-person component of building relationships with people that are here by going to like very specific events or usually

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm.

Edgar:

invited by very specific people to these curated things, as well as building your network more broadly with people that are based in the US and beyond.

Ashley Ashbee:

That's a really great balance. Speaking for myself, I mentioned I was shifting from service to product. And so I've been working, of course, on my content strategy for that and experimenting. And one of the biggest trickiest things that I have is I've been looking for publications that I could, perhaps, do guest posts for or podcasts that I could do guest appearances for. And it's actually really, you have dig to find that stuff. Where is the US stuff? I mean, usually

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

you do any kind of search and it's all American. When I

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

browse keywords in Google search console, or not, what's the one, the Google ads one where you can search to find what the going rate

Edgar:

or Google

Ashley Ashbee:

is for

Edgar:

Keyword

Ashley Ashbee:

each word?

Edgar:

Planner.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yes, thank you. I get them mixed up. I think because they're both searched. Thank you.

Edgar:

No problem.

Ashley Ashbee:

Um, yeah, the amount, the amount of people who ask certain questions or know about certain things or are interested in certain elements of tech, you can get huge results in the US. And it's like really competitive and it's vice versa in Canada, like maybe like 10 people searched it in Google or something like that. Um,

Edgar:

Mmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

and, and also, I mean, I'm, I'm pretty good you know, potential guest opportunities and things like that. But it's hard. Like I feel like Canada is kind of always behind a bit. And

Edgar:

Mmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

I wonder if maybe that's why people, some people in Canada rely so heavily on social media instead of doing like what you're saying, like a mix of really niche stuff in your region, plus online

Edgar:

Right.

Ashley Ashbee:

stuff in internationally, especially in the US. I think maybe a lot of. One of the reasons

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

people don't do that is they just they don't necessarily see that there's a quote unquote audience in Canada, but there probably is. It's just probably really buried. So

Edgar:

Yeah,

Ashley Ashbee:

I don't know.

Edgar:

definitely.

Ashley Ashbee:

Do you do you find the same or is it

Edgar:

Yeah,

Ashley Ashbee:

different?

Edgar:

so there's a few things I'd highlight there. One is that I actually find that the most prolific creators on Twitter are Canadian, and it surprised me at first because I just assumed that they were based. in the US because all

Ashley Ashbee:

Mmm.

Edgar:

of their content sounded like the American content was very similar, et cetera. And then it turned out like people like Arvid Call, who's based in Canada, Matt Gray, who's a digital nomad, but is from Canada. They all have been based here. And when I asked Arvid about it in one of the fireside chats at the Buildin Public Fellowship, It was a really interesting response because he said, hey, like if you're in a small town and you don't know any other builders or makers, you have no choice but to create content on social media or LinkedIn,

Ashley Ashbee:

Mmm.

Edgar:

Twitter, et cetera, to build the relationships that you're looking to build. So it actually makes you a lot more focused in terms of what you're doing and the types of people that you're intentionally engaging with. So that's one. And then two, back to the Next Canada piece, the mission of Next Canada is actually to solve this problem, which is that one, if you have smart, talented people that wanna build in tech or build startups, they'll one, either move to the States. So brain drain has been a huge problem. They'll just move down to San Francisco or New York, and then you won't

Ashley Ashbee:

Mmm.

Edgar:

see them anymore, which was actually my intention prior to going through a lot of these programs and coming back to the city. Or they'll just think differently from the get-go. And so the example that they use is that if you have an equivalent student from a top university, so in Canada, let's say like McGill, U of T, Waterloo, there's far more, as well as in the States, so like Stanford, Harvard, UPenn. Et cetera. If you ask the computer science student there, who's an undergrad, what you want to do when they graduate, the Canadian student will say, I want to work for Google. I want to work for Microsoft or IBM

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

or Apple or others. Whereas the American student will say, I want to build the next Google. I want to build the next Microsoft. And

Ashley Ashbee:

Bye.

Edgar:

so a lot of the work that. these early stage programs do, especially in Ex-Canada, DMZ, all of those, is helping shift the level of ambition of Canadian entrepreneurs so that they build more unicorn companies in Canada and keep. propelling that spirit of innovation. But

Ashley Ashbee:

Thanks

Edgar:

it

Ashley Ashbee:

for

Edgar:

really

Ashley Ashbee:

watching!

Edgar:

has to be done intentionally because the reason why so many people start these companies in the States is just because they're surrounded by it. Like your

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

guest speaker is someone who's built a billion dollar company or a venture capitalist from Sequoia Ventures or whatever it ends up being, right? Whereas

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

just Canada, we have less of those people in those networks, which then... leads the individuals who are coming up to take different career paths. So innovation really happens due to like proximity with other builders and there's ways to solve for that. But I am really passionate about the Canadian tech ecosystem specifically. I think we have so much talent that's already here. And so I try to support those communities as best I can.

Ashley Ashbee:

That's awesome. Yeah, and I do find Twitter really helps too, because

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

it's like a rabbit hole. You meet one person and then you meet like 10 other people from the same region. I think I met, where was it? I think it was Kitchener Waterloo, because I know they got a really big, awesome tech ecosystem there.

Edgar:

Yep.

Ashley Ashbee:

For fellow listeners, Kitchener Waterloo, I guess is like two hours outside of Toronto, something like that. It's not too far. But yeah, it's in the same province, and they've got a cool tech community. I think Montreal does as well. And I do wonder, there's probably stats on it, but I do wonder how many people actually just straight up go to one of those places to live, just to be immersed in or closer to their niche. Because I live in St. Catharines, which is about a half an hour drive from Niagara Falls. And I find I really have to kind of dig pretty deep to find people in my niche. I don't think I could just have a networking event or whatever or host an event here physically and just,

Edgar:

Right.

Ashley Ashbee:

you know, people in my niche would just happen to show up. I think I would have to do a lot of... I'd probably have to pay people first to come here if they're not from the region,

Edgar:

Mm-hmm

Ashley Ashbee:

but no, I'm joking. But also it would just be a lot of work to get... get people aware of this, whereas when you're in Toronto or one of those other places, I mean, you can just sit down and have a coffee and like incidentally meet someone who... So that being

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

said, like I don't... I don't know that it's worth going there just for that purpose. I think if you want to go to

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

one of those places, you really have to put the work in because that is, you know, you are kind of gambling if you're just going to coffee shops and hoping that you just accidentally meet someone who's going to help push your product or whatever. So yeah,

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

it's interesting. It's interesting why people move, what their expectations are, how correct those expectations might be or might not be. how many people just give up because they don't know how to make something happen organically. They just hope that it will happen. So I don't know.

Edgar:

Yeah,

Ashley Ashbee:

It kind of makes me sad.

Edgar:

no.

Ashley Ashbee:

I feel like we're probably missing out on a lot of products because people just probably give up. But yeah.

Edgar:

Yeah, definitely. And the two pieces that you mentioned is one, like the intention of wherever you live, whether that's in a small town, because this happens in the States as well, if you're outside of one of those big hubs like New York, San Francisco, LA, etc. having the intention of wanting to connect with like-minded builders and then choosing the action that connects you with that. And in the case that you mentioned, Twitter is full of them. And so as long as you're posting regularly, as long as you're engaging with people, as long as you're adding value, then those people will find you. They'll feel that intention and then you'll be able to connect with the people that you want.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah, I think that's actually how we met. I think I've posted, because I'd been doing some networking in the tech world in Canada. And I think someone, one of my followers, because I think I asked a question after I was doing my networking or whatever, asked something like, I'm looking for new podcast guests or whatever. And then I can't remember who it was. I should have checked that before I got on here. But that's how we met. It's amazing how that happens. But again,

Edgar:

Yeah.

Ashley Ashbee:

it wasn't like it. It was sort of an accidental thing, but it wasn't. Like I did a lot of networking

Edgar:

Right,

Ashley Ashbee:

before that

Edgar:

exactly.

Ashley Ashbee:

happened. Yeah. So it's

Edgar:

100%.

Ashley Ashbee:

a balance.

Edgar:

And

Ashley Ashbee:

Ha ha.

Edgar:

from, yeah, always a balance. And from

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah.

Edgar:

what I remember correctly, it was KP actually, because KP is one of the best practitioners of that, just constantly engaging, constantly adding value, constantly tagging different types of people.

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

And what he has a framing around building in public or being present on Twitter, that building in public increases your luck surface area. And so because you're just present, you're adding value, these collisions or serendipity or what other people would call chance, they just happen. And just as you said, this podcast is a result of that. Uh, but some people would say, Oh, like I have to get lucky to connect with the right people when in reality it's your intentional networking and engagement. And for myself, the same thing that brought us together, because when that intention is true on both sides, the universe tends to bring those people together in some way, shape or form.

Ashley Ashbee:

Yeah, yeah, that's um, but before it when I was more service based I uh did a lot of consulting around community engagement on social media. Because a lot of times when I would take on a client or audit a client, for example, audit their Twitter, the vast majority of people who would say like, oh, I'm not getting anything out of this, like, what's the point, or how do I do it or whatever, I'd say 98% of those people are literally just broadcasting like calls to action with links to whatever they want people to do. And so I basically would have politely, of course, reroute their thinking around, I mean, it's social. There's a reason it's called social media.

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

But it's amazing how many people still have no idea of the value of community engagement. It's not just that they prefer to just hustle their product. It's like, they literally don't know. They don't know

Edgar:

Right.

Ashley Ashbee:

how that happens. I know a lot of salespeople, like basically one of the reasons it's hard to get, or, buy in from any executive, be it marketing or sales, is like a lot of times the people with that power actually just don't know how it would work. There's still this thinking like the value of social media is you post a link to a product page and then people buy it. So it's like you're opening and closing a sale with this one tweet and that's, if you don't do that, it's not worth pursuing. That perception is very, very out there. It's one of the reasons I created this podcast. Like you're saying,

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

things really do fall into place, but you have to put the work in. And a lot of that work is engaging with your community, supporting fellow founders or fellow entrepreneurs or whatever your thing is. You really can get so much traction by just being supportive. And in doing so, you also accomplish a lot of other things. You can not only create content that can be repurposed in a bunch of different ways. but you get intelligence on your product, especially if you're doing a network with people, networking with people who, as you say, like have a certain problem that you solve, you're more likely to follow, you know, meet those people if you're helping and providing options. And so even if like you're not nearly close to building your product, like even just talking about it, you know, you can get all these people interested and they can, you know, you can have like a you know, subscribe to here when we launch email list and capture that. And so, you know, you can networking doesn't necessarily only have value if your product is already launched. Um, probably doesn't, that's

Edgar:

Exactly.

Ashley Ashbee:

probably, that's probably partly what building product, uh, public is all about, but I don't

Edgar:

Yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

know. Do you, uh, see that a lot that a lot of people just don't understand the, uh, community element of, uh, for example, bootstrapping. Sorry, before, before I let you, um, I just want to explain what bootstrapping is for people who don't know. Bootstrapping is basically when you, instead of relying on funding from external sources to build your business, you basically try to do that in-house on your own. You might sell your product at some point, but at least in the beginning, you're building it like... It's called bootstrapping because you're a little really like, you know, that expression. I think it's called bootstrapping because, you know, you, you know, you're really, when you're really getting into the work, you have to pull up your bootstraps, they always say, you know, when you're really getting into the dirt of things. But anyway, so yeah, I'm really interested to know like, how many bootstrappers just don't understand the value of community engagement. And so they're really suffering because of that. They're really struggling

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

more than they need to, maybe.

Edgar:

Yeah. Right. Thank you for that breakdown as well on what bootstrapping is. And I would actually make it even broader. I would say most founders, most marketers, most people that have an idea about what marketing is don't value community engagement right now because they don't know how to measure it.

Ashley Ashbee:

Mmm.

Edgar:

And if you think about it from a marketing standpoint, a lot of the people making the decisions around budgets, around investment of time are always thinking, OK, what is the ROI? What is the return on investment of this activity? And that's why you see a lot of people lean into paid ads, whether it's Google, Facebook, TikTok, whatever it is, because you can say, hey, I spent this amount of money and I got this amount of customers. The issue with that. is that. That has a ceiling and that is not necessarily rooted in the theme that we've been talking about, which is providing real value. And that's one of the reasons why search or organic search or SEO always ends up being deprioritized over the short-term activities because there's a much longer time horizon. It can take up to six months to see results in the first place. If you're

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

just getting started, we cut that down. We cut that time down. quite a bit with Engyne, but many people would deprioritize all of the other stuff, whether it's content, social, or more. However, community engagement, similar to brand, is one of the most important things that you can do both in the short term and in the long term, because you become known as someone who's helpful. and helpful to solve the specific problem that your customer is trying to do. One belief that I have is that the salesperson, the job of the traditional salesperson over the next 10 years is going to shift from just doing sending out thousands of emails and to posting on social media and adding value and engaging consistently with their target audience? Because would you rather buy something from someone who has shared? 10 content pieces on how to solve the problem that has been top of mind for you every single day? Or would you rather buy it from the person that's cold called you 10 times and found your email through some database or your phone number through some database? And so I believe 100% community engagement is critical and even more so for bootstrap founders. If you're a venture-backed rely on the funding that you have to spend on ads, or you can potentially rely on your investor network to give you introductions to potential customers. But when you're bootstrapped... You don't have any of that. It's just you, maybe you have a team, maybe you can't afford to have a team at the moment. Maybe it's just you. And so you have to build relationships, build a network of people that know you for being someone who is helpful and want to get behind you and support you. And that's exactly what community engagement can provide for a Bootstrap founder. Oh, you're muted.

Ashley Ashbee:

I always do that. I always, you know, I wish there was like a flashing light, like you're muted. Anyway, thank you for letting me know. That would have been annoying if I'd asked the question muted. I think I kind of got a firsthand look at the consequences of not like engaging enough while you're building or whatever. I was fairly debilitated for... I want to say almost four years with a bad neck problem. And so it's been a really uphill battle to expand my network and do all those things, because I wasn't really building as I went along, partly because it just wasn't good for my neck, but also because a lot of things that we're talking about, I hadn't really thought about doing as a freelancer. It seemed more like a founder kind of thing. But. Yeah, there's so many. And that's when I learned about automations. I call myself a workflow

Edgar:

Mm.

Ashley Ashbee:

dork now. It's even on my LinkedIn, because I'm all about ways to make processes really efficient. And I feel like, oh, if I'd known about this, I could have done this while I was recuperating or working on my NAC or whatever. And it's amazing how many things can actually be accomplished offline if you have the right system set in place, if you're not working really efficiently. if you're researching efficiently, I only just started. I don't know if you do this too, but I set up Google Alerts for a bunch of terms, like in Canada that might give me some blog posts that I need to read in Canada, or people I need to network with in Canada. I never did any of that stuff while I was sort of off unofficially. So yeah, I really wanna thank you for absolutely... for making that accessible to people who have a low bandwidth or limited capacity. I feel like there's this really intense culture in the startup world of... like really toxic kind of exhaust yourself. Like you need to be working 20 hours a day and no, you really don't.

Edgar:

Mm-hmm.

Ashley Ashbee:

Like, and products like Engyne is, would be a great asset to someone, even if someone's just building something like after hours, like if they still need a nine to five to

Edgar:

100%.

Ashley Ashbee:

support themselves, you know, there are things that they can do to almost make up for that low capacity, not replace it, but yeah, so. I want to thank you for that and I'm really excited to see how Engyne goes. Are you going to keep posting updates on the

Edgar:

Yes, yes.

Ashley Ashbee:

web?

Edgar:

And yeah, first of all, thanks so much for the kind words. That's really why

Ashley Ashbee:

Aww.

Edgar:

we do it. It's to support the founders who have these amazing products, who have these incredible visions for the people that they want to help, but they just need that level of support. and resourcing and they don't have the teams or budgets to do it.

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

And so with the Engyne product, we aim to help them scale their businesses and ultimately increase their impact on the world. So that's really what we're passionate about. That's why we do what we do. And we're always

Ashley Ashbee:

That's so awesome.

Edgar:

excited to connect with more people. So on the side of what we plan to do next, definitely we're gonna continue shipping those updates. We, as I said, wanna continue to bring our community along for the ride. We have some really exciting ones coming. By the time this is out, our new website will probably be up, which shows our new AI feature on the editorial side. We have a bunch of free tools that we plan to launch as well. So think like specific tools SEO that we're literally just giving away to our community. So no strings attached, just like, hey, if you need one of these things, we built it for ourselves because we needed it as we were going through our own process of creating content. So if you go to the Engyne website, you'll be able to access those tools. And a lot more things coming very soon, all focused on both demystifying SEO and search for early stage founders and early stage teams specifically, whether those are guides, blogs, resources, as well as adapting to the new future. So everything that we've been talking about is like Google Search and SEO, but the AI wave is coming very soon. And so understanding how to optimize your content for a chat-based world, for what we call chat-based optimization, is going to be critical over the next 10 years. Your number one search result may not be. Google, it will probably

Ashley Ashbee:

Hmm

Edgar:

be a chat based answer right above that first option. And so you need to understand how to rank for that world. And so that's something that we're paying very close attention to that we're pulling into the way that we're building the product. And it's something that we want to be able to educate all of our audience on so that they can adapt for this new world as well.

Ashley Ashbee:

Awesome. Yeah, I think chat GPT is really confusing a lot of people and yeah, so it'd be really nice to have constructive conversations about how to do that. Before we go, I just thought of another question. Do you, because I don't know about you, but I've been seeing a lot of posts about on LinkedIn and... I think Twitter about different prompts you can create and chat, be GPT and that sort of thing, and people discussing use cases and whatnot. Has the, have those conversations been useful for you from like a market research perspective, or do you find it's just so off of what you're doing that it's not necessarily helpful?

Edgar:

Hmm. Yeah, so I would say when it comes to content on AI in general, there are two, I would say types of people creating content at the moment. One are the people that are genuinely trying to provide value, that are learning and sharing their insights on building prompts, et cetera. And then there's the camp that's just taking advantage of the hype wave to build their own audience and to

Ashley Ashbee:

My clubhouse.

Edgar:

capture as many people as possible. Yeah, that's an interesting example. And so on the AI side, like most of our experience with it is actually just like, building real tools using AI and then

Ashley Ashbee:

Mm-hmm.

Edgar:

sharing those insights to our audience as opposed to trying to consume anyone else's first-hand experience of it because they have their own incentives for doing it. And that's the thing that I would recommend to all people consuming any content related to AI right now. Just understand who the person is that you're listening to and why they're creating the of salt through rose colored glasses in terms of taking the insights that are helpful to you, but also trying to avoid some of those more salesy things. Like the real best way to learn how to uh learn what AI is like or to learn how to engage with chat GBD is to just sit down with chat GBD and start trying different prompts and see what comes back. And I think that brings things full circle to what we spoke about at the beginning. Like AI is a tool that augments what you already do. If you have knowledge and expertise, you can use that to ask the right types of questions to get the output that you want, but it will not just automate every single thing or provide the perfect answer to every question if you don't actually understand the right questions to ask in the first place.

Ashley Ashbee:

That's such a great way to explain it. And I think people make that same mistake, a lot of people make that same mistake with ads. It's like they don't know what people really want out of a product, let alone like how they talk about that or what their questions are. Or they do, but they don't have any content on their website to fulfill that. So instead of nurturing someone with something that could help them, they just, you know, instead of like having a... a pipeline of information, testing if they want the product and then if they do, then you pitch the product instead of going from webinar sales emails or webinar sales page and a bunch of pop-ups for their discount. There's all these things that you need to do in the middle and you can get so much information out of that. But again, like you said, you can only get there if you have the... the groundwork based. So thank you so much. I hope we shifted some perceptions here. Yeah, we'll talk offline about what I put in the page and everything. But yeah, thank you again so much for doing this. Is there anything else that you need to add or want to say before we jump off?

Edgar:

Yeah, just thank you so much, Ashley, for having me on the podcast. I just love the way that we connected through Twitter and we're able to have this conversation and hopefully share some valuable insights for everyone listening. If you're looking to get in touch with our team, just feel free to reach out to me directly. I'm on Twitter at I am Edgar Brown. So just I am Edgar Brown. Same thing on LinkedIn. I'm just Edgar Brown. My co-founder is Sukh as well: @thisissukh_.

Ashley Ashbee:

I can

Edgar:

wanna

Ashley Ashbee:

attest

Edgar:

get in

Ashley Ashbee:

to

Edgar:

touch,

Ashley Ashbee:

that.

Edgar:

Ashley Ashbee:

Nice.

Edgar:

in touch on any of those platforms. I'm excited to connect with you soon.