Stop doing this to your customers through social media. Do this instead! (w/ Serena Lam, CEO Fuzzy)

About This Episode

From IBM strategist to startup founder, Serena Lam is building Fuzzy AI to reshape B2B sales with hyper-personalized outreach. In this candid conversation, she shares her founder journey, lessons from building in AI, and where sales tech is heading next.

👉 Expect practical founder advice, the realities of building with limited resources, and insights into how design thinking and AI workflows are changing the game.

⏱️ Chapter Timestamps

0:00 – Intro & why Serena flew budget class from Singapore
4:33 – How IBM shaped Serena’s mindset as a founder
8:32 – First startups, painful failures & losing money early
13:02 – The hardest part: finding (and keeping) the right tech co-founder
17:48 – Inside Fuzzy AI: turning content & trust into 5x higher conversions
22:01 – Killing the “spam cannon” & making outreach human again
26:41 – Why Serena prototypes in Figma before writing a single line of code
31:38 – AI tools Serena swears by (Claude, Perplexity, Bolt & more)
35:54 – Which jobs AI will replace… and which remain uniquely human
40:30 – The future of sales: cultural nuance, agentic AI & trust-based buying

🔑 Key Takeaways

🎯 Startups succeed when founders go all-in — half measures don’t work.

🤖 AI isn’t just automation — it’s strategy amplification when applied right.

🛠️ Design thinking + scrappy prototyping can save you months of wasted work.

đź’ˇ The future of sales = humans handling trust + negotiation, AI doing the grind.

đź’ˇ Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe for more AI founder stories & weekly Digital Nexus tech breakdowns!

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Episode 35 Transcript

Stop doing this to your customers through social media. Do this instead! (w/ Serena Lam, CEO Fuzzy)

Thank you for joining us on the episode today. Thanks for having me. You’ve made a long journey all the way over from Singapore. I want to say it was just for us, but it’s definitely not the case. Um, how was your flight over. What’s the, um, found a life at the moment. So, uh, budget airlines all the way? Oh, yes. Oh, God. Who’d you fly with? Scoot. Uh, but I had a poor man’s business class. I think because it was such a last minute flight. Yeah. Um, it was the premium option of the of the class. So then I got three seats to myself in exit row. Oh, basically business class. That is basically business class. The last time we flew, it was over to Queensland. Um, it was for a friend’s wedding of ours, and it was the same thing. It was like you’re looking at the flights, the days leading up to it and seeing how many seats are filling up. And you’re like, alright, I’m going to plan my seats, I’m going to put one there and then put a gap there and put the other person there. And please, no one fill up the this smart and like fifty percent of the time, depending on how big the flight is or what time of the year, like, you’re going to get the whole row to yourselves with you and your partner. It’s a good it’s a good otherwise. Yeah, there were some fat person sits in the middle of it and then. Yeah, it’s not a good odd. Yeah. Fat shaming some people out there in the flats, but it’s true. Um, uh, and the last couple of days we’ve been at Soas, we were there. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah, yeah. Super fun. How’d you find that? Yeah. Um, some of the talks were really good. Um, one of the things I was talking to me about was like, I think always every time I listen to talk, it’s always, um. The ones that I find the most interesting is problems that I haven’t faced. And getting really to the real problems, like, not the surface level. And I think I really appreciated some of the, um, the, the speakers who did speak, they went to, I guess, the real stuff and not just the surface level. Everything’s great. And so for me, that was a really great learning experience, especially the series A founders, which I found really cool in the second day. Um, and then I think some of the, um, facilitators, the ones that I really liked, were the ones that like asked the hard questions, got into the details exactly the tactics around it, so I could have tangible things that took away. So yeah, there were some ones that I liked more. Um, yeah. Overall was good. Met some really great people as well. So always fun. Nice. Yeah. I found there was like a lot of these events that were going to more and more. There is it’s all panels. Mhm. And like it needs to be a bit more of a mix of people who are actually showcasing and demoing or experiences and ways of working, rather than having four people sit in a room and nine times out of ten it ends up just being a marketing plug for whatever product that they’re servicing. And you’re sort of sitting in the back just going, no, we’re not getting anything out. So one of the things that I’ve liked for a lot of tech events that I’ve been going to, because I like seeing how other people build, like cursor events. I went to amp code, I went to um, v0 one as well. Um, is they do demos. And so I try to always look beforehand because you know, founder time you don’t have much time. And so you want to see who’s building what they’re building and what sort of workflows. And so it was really cool going to their office seeing getting the people to demo what they’re building. And then off the back of it you’re like, okay, I’m probably building something similar on my workflow is kind of similar. What are the sort of problems that you might face, like they’re facing? And Facing, and generally I have something similar or they’ve already figured it out because I’ve got a much bigger team than I have, and I can just pick their brain. And I find it the best, because sometimes mentors and advisors wouldn’t even know because they’re not building like, like a lot of mentors and advisors have made their life. They’re kind of retired. They’re really good with the strategy piece. But the tactics wise, because they’re not building every day, they can’t help. And so it’s always like the engineers and the people who are at the forefront. That’s really helpful. One of the things that I like, I don’t go to a lot of events now, um, purely for the reason, is I’ve also seen so events can be good and they also can be bad. Some of the talks I go to, um, you realize that the knowledge or the things that they share are there is a bit old. Um, and it used to when I was younger, I’m like, oh, I’d love talks. I’d hear them and I’d be so amazed, but older than, like out of date. Out of date. Yeah. Out of date. Because things are so much so exactly. And things are moving so quickly. And I was talking to one of my investors about this in the space that we’re in. Right. Exactly. And one of my investors is like, Serena, you’re at the forefront right now. You’re the one creating this change. That’s why it hasn’t been documented. It’s not even the podcasts, not even in the articles. And so the people that are presenting, they have a polished version that they’re packaging up to to do brand awareness. And he’s like, you’re the one that’s also making the mistakes along the way. So you’re forging part of that future journey, what that looks like. And so that’s why you don’t learn anything. And so events are a mixture of like like when I find that helpful is like demos use cases and what tactically what actually works. Otherwise it’s kind of like a marketing speak marketing marketing like buy my product. It’s validating though, right, for the stuff they do because you realize that you’re on the right path, you’re doing the right things, you’re on the right path, you’re making the right experiences. And the biggest thing like which I love that you said there, is that learning and adapting on the way. Yeah. Like as founders and entrepreneurs, I don’t think you ever hear a story of a founder or an entrepreneur going, yeah, I did it right the first time. It was awesome. I went in, made no mistakes, or if they do it, they were lucky and they’re stupidly unsuccessful the second or third time because they got cocky. And so that happens as well. But then they just get too cocky. And I’ve seen so many. I’ve met founders who raised a fifteen million dollars seed round, got super cocky and had the right connection and series, and then had no revenue to series A, which is crazy. And then they tried to raise another round but like end up getting like fifty K of revenue for the whole year. And it’s like most pre-seed. Well, a lot of pre-seed companies can do that. So yeah, it’s just if you’re raising fifteen mil for some kind of B2B or B2C product and only having fifty K of revenue, I think your directors are going to have a bit of a problem with that. Um, we we trailed off into something that’s really interesting, and I really want us to continue that, but I want to, um, talk about you first and what you’re doing. Yep. Um, you’ve got a really interesting and awesome background. Obviously, you worked at IBM. We’ve got some friends. In a similar vein, I was speaking to someone yesterday about how many people from IBM consulting were actually at the the Startup to Scale summit, and it was they would drew a comparison to being an Olympian. It’s kind of like, you know, when you when you go to the Olympics, it’s not like you used to be an Olympian. It’s like you are an Olympian for life. It’s like once you’re in IBM, it’s like you’re an IBM for life. It’s kind of like that mentality. So, um, but, uh, IBM background, you went out and started to explore. You had that entrepreneurial spirit pretty much from the get go. And now you’ve launched your own business, fuzzy, and which is doing pretty well for itself. Like, tell me, tell me more about about this experience that you’ve been going on and what you do. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Um, where do I start? I think I’ve, I’ve always knew I wanted to be a founder. Um, it was like I knew I wanted to be successful. And I think growing up watching TV, like watching suits or whatever, I used to think it was a CEO. And then I watched the how good is watching, literally, I’m like, I’m going to be this like, exactly. Um, but I think it was when I watched The Social Network, I might be paraphrasing the scene, actually. Um, but I remember Dustin and Mark got in trouble and they went to the dean’s office and they said every university in the world would try to create really great CEOs from their universities. But at Harvard we create people who hire CEOs. And that just like blew my mind. I’m like, I would love to build something to hire really great people around me. And like, I’ve realized my best career moments is when I had I’ve had really great people around me and a really fun team. And I think the best way to have that at completely is when you build your own company. Because when you build your company, you can choose your leadership team, you can choose the people that work for you, and work just becomes so fun. Um, but yeah, it was that moment that made me want to do a startup and I when I was twenty, I got into the Monash incubator program. I was like one of the first accelerators that was around Australia. So I was like ten, fifteen years ago. Um, and then off the back of it got into incubate, um, then applied for startup mate. Actually, I think that was the only accelerator program at the time. Um, got shortlisted, made it to the finals, flew up to Sydney, uh, from Melbourne. And then, um, yeah. The only reason we got like. Everyone really liked us. And it was back then it was only ten companies per year. Really small cohort met. You know Nikki all them. They were interviewing us as well. And I remember back then, um, we were doing a dating app. And, uh, the tricky thing with dating is. There’s no longevity. So if you’re a successful, then they leave. So you don’t really have frequency in terms of customers and retention. Um, if you’re doing a good job. So obviously there’s like tricks around that as well. Um, but our developer at the time ended up leaving because he got a grad offer. And I think we were quite young right then. And then it was really hard to meet like engineers who wanted to risk like a great software salary to, to come work with us. And so, yeah, um, it’s one of the experiences that I’ve had is trying to find a good developer who can go on that journey, but knowing that they also have their needs as financial the day to day. At the same time that happened with one of my first co-founders. Taking a risk to jump in with a startup is like a big thing for sure. I mean, it’s a big risk for anyone, right? It’s what separates entrepreneurs and people who just want to work. I think it’s trickier when the software engineering salary is so attractive. It’s like, do I come work with you? Exactly, exactly. Do I come to do I leave my two hundred two hundred fifty K job, or do I come work with you? That will might only get me one or two k a month, maybe. Right. Plus equity. Like living for the long term. Seven, eight year dream. Like, you know, my first co-founder, I think I told you, um, he. I think it was two or three months in. Um, he said he had to leave, and I completely understand he has children commitments and stuff, but, um, I think there’s a false narrative on how fast you can get to the unicorn or get your first million. And so I think that makes it really hard when you are bringing in tech talent early on, when you don’t have a lot of money and then you’re trying to sell the dream. Yeah. Yeah. So true. It ends up coming for the people that can’t find those types of people. It’s like it’s the same kind of mentality as a sales person. It’s about the grind of just continually going out there and just talking to more and more. Eventually you will find that one person who’s like, you know what? I’m going to come on that journey with you. Exactly. Whether it’s full time, part time, or, you know, at least some kind of contribution to get you off the bat, and then you can pick up the next person, pick up the next person. Yeah. Um, sorry I derailed, so. Yeah. No, no. Did that did IBM. Great thing about IBM is it could fund my side projects. And really great thing about IBM is you have this huge network. I was able to go to the US, go to China, go to India. Um, I think I had one of the best experience out of all my friends in terms of the ability to travel and have different experiences of IBM because of IBM, they flew around. Yeah. So my first time I traveled business class. Oh, there we go. I was like, they called me Miss Lamb when I came in. I’m like, oh, I feel so fancy. Like, no one called me Miss Lamb before and now and now the founder. Like you’re back now back on scoot, scoot. Jetstar all the way. It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’ll be. I’ll be back in school one day. I know, I know, I see it. Um, but yeah, that was. Yeah, that did that. And then, um, very lucky. Worked across a lot of projects and because of that, my network, every city I go to will have someone that I know that I used to work with. So now I’m in Sydney. I know a lot of people here went out for dinner. I bump into a lot of people as well. Um, and then I did other side startup projects. So I think I’ve done about ten businesses as well, like I did did a crypto one. I’ve done like an Amazon was all the rage. I’ve done that. Um, I’ve done I got really into nootropics. Um, I got into, uh, I did a lot anyway. Failed a bunch of times, lost a bunch of my own money. I was gonna say, how did how did you map balance going? You know, you’re in a business, IBM consultancy. Quite, you know, high profile, obviously quite busy and very hard. And at the same time, you’re trying to balance this entrepreneurial work life that you have doing. Obviously outside of IBM. How did you find balancing that? Did you have a process or was it just a grind or. Yeah, I don’t I think Jeff Bezos says is like you don’t really have balance, but you have harmony and you kind of figure out how you work it out. And sometimes you get stretched too much. Sometimes you just have days where you can do nothing. Yeah, I’m kind of like an all in person or an all out, like I’m the two extremes. I don’t balance well, but I don’t think I’ve, I don’t think I can like I feel like structure for me is doesn’t work well for me. Like, I’m not that sort of person. I need to be like, I’ll spend, you know, eight hours, fourteen, fifteen hours a day doing one thing. But I have to go deep or not at all. And I think one of the things I learned early, if I were to redo my journey again, is I would have started early and left it earlier, because I think doing the half half was you end up doing everything half assed, as opposed to doing one thing really, really well and being obsessed about jumping into I was working corporate and. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I was building, building and doing corporate at the same time, and it doesn’t work. And there was a reason why those businesses like they made a bit of money, but it wasn’t big money. It’s because I wasn’t putting in all my effort and everything into it. And now that I’m running, I’m like, okay. It takes so much headspace to do something completely different. So do you think it’d be easier though, because like if you think about it from the perspective of that, that point in your life, you are still needing to make money to make ends meet. Exactly. That’s why I say. Yeah. Do you think moving out and starting a business, not having that security? Do you think you would have been able to do that then, even though you say to yourself, I’d love to have done that at that point. The good thing about Asian families is you stay at home for a very long time. And it was actually it was so funny, actually. On the other end, when I was twenty five, I wanted to move out and my parents got so mad at me, I did it anyway. Uh, yeah. Oh. Asian parents. Um, I did it anyway. Whatever. But, um, you’re absolutely right. I think the other thing that I do tell early young founders is startups sound great, and it’s often glorified, but I think having a steady income is underrated. Um, being able to fuel your passion with money is underrated. The network that you get from any job is underrated. Um, the skills that you get is underrated. Like even frameworks and structure sometimes is quite underrated. I think everyone gets a bad rap. And sure, sometimes it’s quite annoying, but there are good things that you can take out of it. Even working as a team, how to negotiate with different stakeholders. Up the chain, down the chain. Influence people below you. These are really important things that you learn in working with people. Then going straight to a startup. I think you have met a lot of founders that went straight to a startup, raised a bunch of money, and none of their employees are happy because they’ve never had to manage team worker team, and they’ve got this authoritative. This is what you do because they watch it on a movie, or this is how their dad taught them, or this is how they were parented and they don’t know how to run a team. And so what they end up having is high churn, like one of my competitors, a huge churn, right? So then I bring people in and they end up losing money because these people don’t feel fulfilled in the workplace. And these are small skills that you learn in your early career when you are working around people. And so there is a lot of value working with people early on that I think is underrated. Yeah. Um, and then on the other end, Yeah, money is super important. Like, I think, um, it’s important to enjoy things as well. Like, I’m probably I’m on like, being able to do things like have a breakfast. It’s it’s such a small underrated thing, but going to a cafe and having avo toast instead of just having ramen all the time, like, could change your day a little bit, right? Like even once a week or something like that. It’s a it’s a luxury in this economy, but I think being able to have money to support that, I think is really important. So, um, as much about mental health in those moments, right? It’s like if you’re constantly eating ramen and you’re just getting upset by the food, even regardless of what it’s doing to you inside. But if you’re just like, oh man, I’m just so depressed about this, you need those moments to be able to go, actually, this is okay. I can I can do this, splurge on myself a little bit more. But exactly. And on the other end, I think being in corporate is you can see how big things get. So I see these corporate events and I’m like, I can like if I get rich, like if when fuzzy becomes like a unicorn, this is the sort of things I can do. And now you have a dream now. Now you have an anchor. It’s not a fake thing. It’s like, okay, I’ve seen someone else do it. I can do it as well. sir, I don’t know. I think not having having a job is underrated. I really, I really think everyone should have some level of working with a team. Some foundations and stuff taught me about. You mentioned fuzzy now a couple of times, which is. Oh, yeah. Sorry. No, no, this is great. I love this and it’s everything that you said is is really insightful. It’s really important. And I see it day to day with other people who have jumped into starting a business or never actually worked in corporate. They’ve been, you know, either freelancing their whole life and then they want to start a business and you can see the gaps that they have when it comes to dealing with people, dealing with sales, dealing with even just engaging with their current clients and etc.. So everything you said there really, really important and I really love it. Um, but I do want to talk about fuzzy and the journey that you’ve been going on with that. Tell me about fuzzy is. Yeah. So I know I’ve been using it myself. Yes. Which is why I reached out to have a chat with you about it. So. Yeah. So sales, uh, whereas sales, I company. What is it? We essentially help you turn content into paying customers. And so what we’ve seen now is there’s a lot of, um, like, you know, you see Mr. Bees, all the YouTubers, everyone builds a brand first, and they trust you as a person before they buy your product. And we’re seeing those similar trends happen on Twitter, on, um, on LinkedIn. And so people buy from you as a person, not necessarily a company. And so now we’ve thought about what does the like. I spent a lot of time thinking and just researching and then talking to different people on what the future of go to market looks like. Um, I don’t I think sales and marketing will converge over time and there’ll be a go to market function. And I think the roles that we have today are going to be very different to the roles of the future. And so how I kind of thought of it was, um, in the future, what does go to market look like? And then working backwards, what are the roles that we’ll still have, and what are the tools that will be needed to support them? And one of the things that I’ve seen time and time again is I will buy something from someone if it’s one relevant, obviously. And two, do I trust the person? And so using these themes I kind of like worked back. I’m like, okay, it’s all about creating a brand, creating content. And then off the back of that how do you engage your leads? So essentially what fuzzy does is we’re a platform that helps you engage your audience, um, essentially so that you can convert these into paying customers. Um, and we’re purely focused on B2B, um, and off the back of it, we help you do all the live data enrichment, um, we help you figure out angles to talk to them and then have very personalized, value based conversations with each of your prospects. So they already know you. They know who you are. Then we have specific conversations off the back of it, and it’s not some templated hey, I saw a company name blah. It’s very targeted on your passion, your interests, what you like. And I can do that now. Um, and you can tell it exactly what you want it to do, how you want it to personalize. So it’s still like you, but we’re doing it at scale. So it’s not like a one by one message. We’re able to help you create content, schedule content, find the audience, and then off the back of it, create really personalized messaging at scale across that set of customers. And so we’ve found that conversion rate increased by at least five times by following that sequence. Um, compared to if you were to just cold outreach. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so the I mean, obviously the big thing around there is AI is a huge part of, of the foundations of what you guys are building out. Um, from everything from creating workflows and agents in inverted commas there running, managing the process from that first step to last step and how you engage your customer. Yes. How are you utilizing AI to, I guess, bring especially in LinkedIn obviously like people get a lot of they get bombarded with a lot of messages and there’s often a real it’s very clear sometimes what’s automated and what’s not. How are you using it to like bring a more human feeling to the experience? Because that’s obviously a big, important thing for people as they’re engaging with people through instant messages and the works. Yeah. I mean, I’ve even made that mistake before. Like, the reason why I built fuzzy is because, like, I was experimenting and I’m like, I’ve made so many mistakes along the way. So yeah, definitely that, um, LinkedIn’s super noisy, uh, one of like, I think it’s, it’s a it’s a big question. Um, we do a combination of things like obviously use AI agents, we use AI learning models. Um, not all agents are equal. Not all agents are good. I think one of the things like my pet peeve, um, that I actually don’t put on my website, is like, we use a lot of AI, but we don’t say it because not all AI agents are good. Like, I know a lot of, I think my competitors are like, oh, we use AI agents to do data, to do data enrichment. But if you use AI, agents aren’t deterministic in nature, so then you’ll have different responses each time. They’re not super accurate and you’ll end up having bad data coming back. Um, and then off the back of it, it’s up to the AI agent and how well you’ve built that AI agent to interpret the data and then process it in a way that is relevant to you. So and also people don’t realize this, but AI agents are super slow. So you probably you want it for your thinking tasks but not necessarily your tell me all the information about Chris. Um, and, uh, what is he posting about? What’s his profile? And so being very smart and intentional about when you use AI and AI agents and when you shouldn’t. I think people don’t really think about it enough. Um, how we’re using it at fuzzy is we think about more of the thinking layer, but we think about how you think and how you would want to do it at scale. So we normally and you know, you’re a customer is we pull all the information for you. And every every salesperson has a different way of how they personalize, how they reach. You can put your what you want into our product and we just build everything out for you. So whether it be you want to talk to a customer about, um, you know, their what they’ve posted about on their last post, their education, um, if you have any relevancy to your background and their background and finding mutual interest there, um, the industry news reports are, for example, if you’re talking to telcos, what’s on their annual report and how do you match your company strategy off the back of that? And then do a match like the deep, deep thinking tasks. That’s where we see AI going up, but not the data scraping and all that. Like, no. And then the next layer is, um, intelligence around how to make things better. So cultural nuance. So we’ve got customers in Germany, Amsterdam, even within Europe there are very different, uh, ways of speaking. Um, and how you approach customers as well, like Netherlands is very direct and to the point, whereas in Germany is very straightforward, but it’s different types of straightforwardness as well. Um, even within those two countries. And how do you write to them is very different. And so being able to have cultural nuances then obviously industry, the role type finance managers or sales managers, how you talk to them is very different. Um, the the length of. So then how do you then start building these models, then train these models and use reinforcement learning to make these models better so your customers end up having better results and then they get higher reply rates. So over time what we’re wanting to build are building these really great sales models that helps our customers get better reply rates over time and train it within their company context. I love that is the thing about it. From clients, customers, businesses, organizations. Sales is always a really important thing and we’ve talked about it from a B2B perspective. Um, what are you seeing the things that these customers are not thinking about. And when it comes to their sales processes, their workflows, whether it’s even integration and considerations around AI. What what do you see them not doing enough? And how can I guess fuzzy support them in those in those manners if it can? What are people not doing enough? What are they doing wrong about their strategies at the moment? Oh, I hate the spam cannons. I think they call them like the hi, I’m doing this like something that’s not relevant. I think I love that spam spam. I’m going to use that word. Yeah, I hate it. Um, I think at the end of the day, relevancy is important. Like how we think about building fuzzy fuzzies. We want a super easy to use tool to get you to your outcome, but at the end of the day, the person, the closer the account executive or the sales professional will still have the strategy because they have their closest to the customer. They know they have all the offline context on how to build the strategy and how to speak to them. And so even sending like super relevant messages, um, that is targeted based on their interests, what they care about. Um, and is and, and like one of the things actually I just caught up with Dan Brockman just then, um, some early, early work. He was running a sales company, and he showed me one of his his texts. I didn’t even read the thread. And I think there was a he goes, you know, this guy wrote, hey, looking to collaborate and partner, um, with no context. And I was like, I hate those messages because it’s like, it shows me that you haven’t read my profile. It shows me that you haven’t thought about how we’d work together, and then it shows me how you’re going to waste my time in the future as well, because you’re going to use my session to learn about my business, when you should have done that preparation beforehand. a good salesperson would use fuzzy or to try to understand their your prospects, what they care about, what your business does, and then try to find ideas. And so you’re not wasting because the people that we’re targeting don’t have time as it is, and you don’t want to waste their time. So how can you make it super relevant for them so that when you’re on the call, you’ve already done the research, so you know exactly what to talk about, just like how you’ve done research here. And then also off the back of it, how do you then write messages that are relevant to them? Because if they’re senior stakeholders, you don’t want to waste their time like they see a chunk of text. They’re not going to read it. If they see something super generic, they’re also not going to read it. So making something super personalized and relevant, super important. So that’s on the hyper personalized outreach side, which we do. The other side is how do you create credible and trustworthy content? Um, in a world full of noise right now, there is so much shit stuff out there. So I’m going to use our web. It’s all good. There’s so much stuff out there, um, that people don’t know who to buy from, right? And so we’ve now seen Twitter, LinkedIn, um, become a really good means of us getting content. Um, and so how do you then build your brand so that people trust you, Chris, to buy from you, learn about you, learn about the work that you’re doing. And so a lot of the time, I’ve actually had so many customers from people who have never liked any of my posts, never commented on my posts, but they’ve seen the work that I’ve done, the experiences that I’ve had, and we’ve built a relationship even though we haven’t met. And when we meet in person, it feels like we’ve known each other for a while. Well, they know me and then I get to know them. Um, and so we’re seeing a move towards what we’ve seen work really well in the B2B, B2C space, in the B2B space. And so we’re now helping you. We have tools around helping you engage with your audience and off the back of that, then make them become paying customers as well. I love that mentality. And the relevancy thing is, is a really important one. And I was listening to a podcast, uh, yesterday, I think it was the diary of a CEO. I love that podcast. Inspirational for me in terms of a lot of the stuff that we’re doing and talking about now. Um, and, uh, they were touching on sales. In general, when you’re having pitch meetings and discussions with people and it touched a piece of work because my background coming from client services and leading teams across APAC and for an array of clients, you’re constantly going in and pitching new business with these these customers. Yeah. And they were talking about how when you go into a meeting, the worst thing that as a client listening to this, that they hear from these people when you’re having these, these moments presenting is that it’s just a rambling of tools. It’s like, I can do this and I can do this. And the person is just like, yeah, but I only want that one thing. And you, as a person who is pitching, need to understand or pick up on that thing that they need the most and talk about that thing, don’t talk about everything because that’s all they want. If you start rambling about all the stuff, they don’t care. That’s why discovery is so important. Exactly right. And this is this comes back to kind of what you’re talking about is that relevancy piece. And I’m talking about from a pitch perspective. But it still applies from that engagement in social media. You don’t want to have someone reach out to you, as you mentioned before, with the the spam cannons just going, hey, I do this product and I’ve got this and this and this. People don’t want that. They want to go. How are you going to like what’s relevant to me and how am I going to help? Yeah. And it sounds like your tool is able to. Yeah, I guess cut through that noise and pick up on those things and help to serve those back to the to the customers ahead. Yeah. One of the other things that I’ve also like today, I didn’t this morning I did an onboarding just before this call. And um, he’s like, I don’t care about these tools. Like he’s like, I just want to do this. And I like within like two seconds, I was like, okay, let’s spend all our time on this. And how do you optimize this workflow? And then the rest I was like, look, I’ll create I’ll give you a I’ll give you a video of everything else if you ever want to do it. Like I’m not going to watch it. I’m like, cool, let’s just do this. Done. And so I think being able to be very targeted and not waste people’s time as well because, you know, time is super precious, like people pay for time now. And so if we can just get super targeted, what you need to do makes it so much better. How much better do you think he felt knowing that you were able to just focus on his needs? Like, did you notice like a shifting change in I think no, because he he’s a salesperson. I salesperson. I think he just kind of expected it from me, I don’t care. Just, like, just talk about it. Yeah, but I think if. Yeah, if he didn’t, I think he’d be more annoyed that I didn’t. Yeah. I think it would be more the adverse reaction. Yeah. That’s because like, you’re like, I’m chasing that happiness, but nope. Nope. Okay, cool. But it’s not negative. It’s more that’s not negative rather than it’s. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Um, so how long so how long have you guys been in market now for? This is. So we’re still in beta? Yeah. Um, I think it’s more. We have a waitlist, which is great, but it’s also like trying to find the right customers. I think now we’ve, uh, really nailed our. We’re nailing. I wouldn’t say I nailed, but we’ve nailed nailing our ICP. So we’re now clear on who shouldn’t be using it, who should be using who should be who should be using, who shouldn’t. And, you know, we’ll probably be more publicly available once we have more resources to do it. And I think a big part of how we do fuzzy right now is, um, like having a relationship with every customer. And, you know, we do frequent check ins, and I do that with every single of my customers as well. Um, and so with all of our products, we do a one hour onboarding session with me or my CTO, and we try to have that relationship with our customers. Um, but this beta product is about three and a half months old. Awesome. Yeah. Since we switched over, I’ve seen your evolution from where it was and where it’s come from. It’s fantastic. Like, you’ve gone from, you know, simple workflows flows to now more complex workflows, which really means you can be more hyper focused on the things that you want within the platform. Now you’ve got the social integrations for making posts and pulling those posts. Yeah. Um, it’s been really exciting to see your your journey and all that stuff. Yeah. And it’s great. Like, I think we’re now at a point where a lot of our enterprise customers are referring us within the organization. So we’re like expanding our accounts as well. So yeah, it’s been it’s really fun that way. Yeah. I want to pull back to the this founder journey that you’ve been going on with this experience. Right. Yeah. Um, and so you’re one of the things I love about yourself is you’ve got a bit of a design thinking mentality. You’ve got a bit of a design thinking approach to everything which you’ve learned from your IBM days as well, which is something that’s very close to me in terms of how I run and operate. And how have you found bringing that thinking into the processes you’ve gone through to build up a product? Yeah, definitely. As an entrepreneur, I think one of the tropes of a founder and I’ve done this myself as well, is you build the product first before getting to the customer. And so I’ve spent months and months building something, then showing customers, and they’re like, I don’t want it. By that time you’ve wasted time, you’ve wasted money hiring developers or working with developers, and it’s something that customers don’t want. The first iteration of fuzzy was a Figma page. Awesome. Um, I showed the Figma that was a clickable prototype, as if it worked, and then I just kind of said, hey, the integrations will come soon. I just want to show you the flow. And my validation was the moment someone sent me a stripe payment. Um, talk to me about about that. So the pull it back to. Could you explain to us design thinking so. Oh, yes. Sorry. No, no. That’s okay. So design because I see the application there and I’m like, oh, for people who don’t know what this process is, what is UX design thinking? Having empathy with the user, trying to understand their pain point, what problem you’re trying to solve, what problems are actually pressing in startup land? Turning it into now like learning from corporate side to the startup side, is are they the top three problems the customer has on it every week? If they’re not the top three, you’re probably building the wrong product. Uh, if you want to build something that’s completely new, um, in if you want to build like a truly global startup product that people will pay for, I truly believe it has to be the top three products. Otherwise you’re just building a nice to have and it’ll be very hard to charge for it. Mhm. Um, from there um, you do the ideation. So these are all the approaches that we could take. Let’s figure out which one sticks. Um, I think in the context of design thinking in corporate, I’ll go both because I’ve done both in incorporate is you bring in the sponsored users, you get their feedback, you iterate it, and then you build the prototype back and forth. I think in startup land, you don’t have that privilege because sponsored users generally are paid and you don’t have that money as a startup. Um, but the really cool thing about startups is people are very generous with helping, giving back, I think, especially senior people. And so I’ve had very I’ve been very privileged for when I wanted feedback or advice. People were open to giving to it. Um, so in startup land, taking that back is having empathy ideating having all these solutions. Then you as a team, trying to prioritize based off two things impact and desirability. Um, I changed the metrics around startup plan for me. Is the HCD or human centered design stuff desirability, viability and feasibility. So desirability being do people want it? Viability? Will people pay for it? And feasibility being is it actually possible to build um, if it’s impossible to build? There’s no like if I wanted to have a vitamin that could solve every ailment. Like it’s just impossible, right? Yeah. So then you’ll need to rank based on all three of those things. Um, I’m a bit contrarian where, you know, I think there’s a lot of startup plan speak where it’s like, I’ll build something, and as long as people use it, don’t worry about monetization. I’m on the other end. I feel like if no one’s going to pay for it, no one’s gonna pay for it, and it’s going to end up spending years building something like, I think those were Facebook days, social media days. Like, I just don’t think you can do that anymore. I think you have to have the viability aspect, even if it’s five dollars. So I had a customer to me tell me it’s too expensive. Um, and I’m like, okay, how much will you pay for it? And then they said a price and I’m like, if I give you that price today, will you pay for it? Like done put it in. And it doesn’t really matter. I think especially early on, um, what that price is. And I think I did go through a period where I was so stuck on like what the price was. I think it’s more it’s someone’s willing to put a dollar against it. It could be one dollar. Well, not for my product, but other products, especially when you’re testing. It could even just be five dollars. But that’s validation that someone values their coffee money to give to you. And I think that’s a huge validation and shouldn’t be underestimated. So I think building on the like the design thinking framework, the DVF. And then from that you’ve probably ranked to like ten ideas, rank them based on what you think, and then just go through them systematically one by one. I think one of the great things now is you have lovable V0 bolt, and you can have so many like you don’t have to do Figma back in the back in the day last year, um, was so eighteen months ago, um, was so hard to manage and build. Now it’s like you can do it all yourself. Like, one of the things I didn’t like about yesterday is all these pictures. They’re like, oh, you know, we want to raise money for MVP. And I was like, the hell, like, there’s so many tools out there. I as I was watching the pictures and watching, I was building prototypes to send to my customers. Like every time we build something, I can code up something, send it to them as a screen video. I’m like, what do you think? And we’re doing live iterations, so also work through my current process. I would tell they give me give me their requirements, I spec it out, put it into I like v0, but whatever tool you like, put it into v0. Do the workflow kind of sense. Check if it makes sense to me. Once it’s done, I send that link, put it, give it to the customer. I’m like, whenever you have a free trial, like free five minutes, give it a go. Give me some feedback. Then we go back and forth. One of the things I’ve also learned the hard way is, uh, I’ve given it to my developers. We build it, and then the developers are going back and forth with the customer, and my developers get super pissed off at me, which I think you heard heard the end of before when we were walking up here. It was super pissed off. So I try to front load all of that, work with the customer, do the back and forth, and then once we’re good with that, then I’ll do that and then send it. Finally, just because you didn’t V0 doesn’t mean it’s going to work in a real environment. Well, luckily now I know so much about the back end. I know how to process everything. I know what’s possible and not possible so I can work within the frame. Um, what we called it back in the day. Freedom within the frame. So you know what the frame is. But you want to have a lot of freedom in how you do things and make it super flexible. So workflow now is what the problem is. Think of a bunch of solutions, work through a bunch of ideas, see which one’s the stickiest. So which one’s customers like more? Look at engagement metrics and what people are willing to pay for. The other thing I also do is if we were to build this, would you pay five bucks for it? If someone says no, then I’m not going to build it. And then if they do, then it’s an add on and then you make more money as well. We actually haven’t paid. We haven’t actually charged anyone for the add on features that we’ve done, but it’s more of a sense check of will this actually create value? Um, and I think in the B2B context, it’s all about if they’re going to pay for it, then you know that you’ve added value. You’ve also got the mentality of as you’re building out your product and adding more features, especially with the rise of customer expectations, those adding to the, I guess, the feature set that they already have there are paying customers. They expect more and more. So you’re building and maintaining them in the long term by adding a lot of this stuff to an extent. Exactly. One of the other value propositions that we have and that we’ve thought of is our customers, in particular sales and marketing people that have such a huge tool stack. My vision is to have to put them all into one full stack. I don’t want point solutions. I want everything within fuzzy and I want it super easy to use. I truly believe that I can do a lot of the hard work and thinking, and in the future, a lot of the manual stuff will remove a lot of what we have in the current tool stack, and it can be embedded into the embedded in the models, embedded into the frameworks that we have within fuzzy. So my goal is to have the one platform and embedded quite easily to to the end to end process. But yeah, baby steps along the way. You mentioned AI there and obviously looking, taking a step back and looking at that experience you’ve gone through, applying design thinking methodologies of how you build your products, testing, validating, testing, validating, repeat. And um, your the the key sticker there is that AI has supported you to increase, I guess the pace that you’re able to fast track, how you validate, how you engage with your customers, how you learn and evolve. Um, you mentioned, uh, I think Vo was one of the ones that you’ve been utilizing. Like, what other tools have you been able to use to support that process that you’ve been going through? Oh so many. My yesterday someone was like, oh, how many tools do you use? I’m like, I pay for so much. Ah, yeah. Same. Pretty much everything. Uh, open AI anthropic Claude. Um, perplexity. Uh, I haven’t taken the plunge on grok yet, because grok seems more academic, and I think it doesn’t suit in the sales and marketing context. Yeah. Uh, Claude code. Um, how do they fit in with your workflow? Oh. Good question. Sorry. So, uh, day to day questions. If I want to do deep research, um, I normally this is a bit different. I think people have different models for different things because the models change so much so quickly. I kind of put the same question in all three of the models, and I see what comes back. And then it’s also a way for me to test how I prompt across the different models as well, so that when I do in the back end, build it for my customers, I can then prompt and refine and fine tune each of the prompts accordingly to each of the models. So I actually have a framework for how I prompt for each of the models that I need to codify and write it down somewhere, but I kind of know how to prompt each of the models now, so it’s actually good for my learning before I give it to my dev team and they get pissed off at me. Um, we have a good relationship, but, um, I always use a three for everything. Um, every day. Um, obviously perplexed is better for research. I haven’t loved perplexity recently. To be fair, I’ve found it pretty. Uh, I like the deep research for anthropic, and, um, OpenAI has been way better. Um, so that’s like the research day to day tasks. Thought like a thought partner as well. You can kind of like put in really great mentors to put that in. Or another great thought partner that I’ve really liked is um, Lenny’s podcast, the he has a Lenny bot. So I use that Lenny bot. Jason Jason from Sasta also has really great stuff as well. So I kind of like I think they’ve got like an AI version of myself. I kind of talk to them, so like my good mates. Um, and then you can also ask Claude or I think GPT is better to be unfair, um, to pretend to be this person. This is what I’m thinking about. Can you ask me challenging questions? So I make it ask me challenging questions so I can be more mindful and thoughtful so that I don’t have flaws and gaps in my thinking. Yeah, because, you know, you don’t necessarily have time to, like, message everyone. So kind of like use it sometimes as a little bit of a mentor. Mentor. Um, and then I also ask for stupid questions because sometimes, you know, you don’t want to bother people. Stupid questions. Um, I’m like, explain to me like I’m a grandma, and it’ll give me really good concepts. Like, one of the other things I’ve learned explain to me, like a grandma is way better than explain to me than a five year old five year old. They use like, cars and everything as concepts. As grandma assumes, you have some level of corporate knowledge. I don’t know why it does. General world knowledge. Exactly. Yeah. Explain to me like I’m a child. Your child has no concepts of business. Yeah. So it’s actually. Yeah. So grandma has actually been really great. Like it dumbs it down enough, but it gives you real world context. So that’s been really great. Um, so that’s like, yeah, the research the day to day and then design wise. Oh, this is something that I’ve been telling my friends that I’ve experimented with recently. So um, infographics. So I’ve actually had a mixture of Gemini, I Canva I actually. And then, um. Claude. So I’ll tell you what I do sometimes when I’m trying to explain a concept. Um, because I think three things when I write it on paper, it feels very complex. And that’s not the best storytelling mechanism. And so what I’ll do is I’d kind of work with Claude and GPT to think about how I present that information, and I do a bit of a sparring sesh and then off the back of it, then I’ll put it into Canva. Canva, structurally, will make it a really great diagram, but it’s not really good at the specifics. So when I’m trying to do different things, it’s not great. I then put it in Gemini. Gemini. This new release, the infographics and the graphics have been really good. So we’re actually, um, going to embed that into our product as well from the image and video piece for our customers to use, to which I’m super excited about. That’d be very cool. Yeah. So, um, so yeah, Gemini and Canva for the image gen piece. Um, and then yeah, perplexity for those three for coding. Um, front end design v0 uh can get really quick mock ups really quickly. Um, but you can do the same with Lovable and Bolt as well. Um, I tried lovable. I just didn’t like the design. It probably pivoted a lot since then. It was a few months ago, but at that point in time, V0 was great and I’m stuck with it. Yeah. Um, back end stuff, like, I guess postman purse hog, um, super base, uh, MongoDB. Um, and we used Super Base for my projects because there’s a good free plan and then MongoDB for my actual product. Yeah. Um. What other. Yeah. Cold code, obviously. Uh, amp code I’ve used recently as well. What do you see as kind of like, as you’re going through these processes, what do you see as the sort of things that are going to continue to evolve and change how you’re applying this thinking, like, do you think we’re going to be needing to do less and less and less in this space around the design, thinking around the testing and validating? Or do you have any idea around what you see will be the things that impact your workflows and what you’re doing further? Other. Yep. Um, how I kind of like to describe AI is it’s a super smart, super eager intern. Um, so interns don’t really know, like, what the world’s like, the mistakes, how to frame it. But if they’re super smart, they’re really good. So how do you train? An AI is super important. Um, so as an example, like, you know, you know how to ask me about design thinking. But if I’m like, I want to build a product, AI is not smart enough to be like, have you have you used design thinking about design thinking? Yeah. Yeah. Have you thought about empathy? Have you thought about it could get better over time. It could like hopefully the intern graduates to a graduate or hopefully I don’t know. Um, I thought GPT five would be like that, you know, um, it could get context is king in a lot of that, right? So kind of what you’re saying there is that, that top layer you need to be telling it, hey, you are a design consultant. And then it starts to go, okay, I need to consider these things. But as a generic, all encompassing person, it has no context asking it a generic question. You get a generic response. Yeah. And to your point of context, like being able to build agents and very smart building very smart agents, very specific to context is really important because what we’ve also seen as we’re building out is if you dump a bunch of context, it hallucinates and it doesn’t really know what to do, and it does the wrong thing. It’s kind of like how you train an intern, right? If you train the intern a lot of stuff and they’re like on their second day, it’s like, you know, it’s your fault. It’s not the interns fault for giving it a lot of information. So you have to be very specific with tasks because they haven’t done their job before. So being right, it’s like when people are like, oh, I sucks. It’s like, no, it’s how you use the AI that sucks. So being able to do all that in the future, I do think it will get better. Um, and so the roles will change. But I think a lot of the strategy, the thinking, the direction I think still needs to come from humans. And so the way I think about building product is how do you support those intelligent humans to do their strategy? I don’t think I will replace jobs that are manual, that are like I was talking to a prospect yesterday, the phrase like fifteen million dollars and they still have team tame in India. Copy and pasting emails. And I was like, mate, you can use my product. It takes you twenty minutes. Yeah. And he’s like, oh, I know. But the team is so comfortable with this. They have a team of twenty salespeople raise fifteen million. That was crazy to me. And so there are still those jobs will get replaced. Like the fact that you can do it with us for twenty minutes. That’s even cheaper than hiring a bunch of people that are, you know, five people. So you mentioned in a previous conversation you had that like around, I can wipe out like sixty percent, seventy percent of boring jobs. Yeah. And um, but humans are still really important in remaining part of that. Yeah. Um, like, I guess what are the things that you think will remain as only human as we move more into, into this world, particularly as things like fuzzy. Yeah. And take over a lot of that workflow that we’re talking about. Yeah. I’ve probably thought most about in the greater market context. Um, just purely because I’m in this problem space every day. Yeah. Um, I think the closer for the sales person, you can’t replace the negotiation. People buy from humans, not from systems. And so being able to have this conversation and being able to close and be like, this is the product that I want that will never get replaced. Um, being able to understand offline context and all that, it’s also a human thing. So the negotiating and closing always has to be will never get replaced. Um, the strategy very hard to get replaced as well. I mean, a level of thinking can be done by the, the AI for sure, because you can train it to be like these are the strategies that I like. Help me think through this. Um, but a lot of the thinking, strategy, direction, roles I don’t think can be replaced. But everything else, like if you can train an AI to create content the way you want, you can train AI to build workflows the way you want. You can train AI to, um, mirror someone else the way you want. So I think a lot of the I think everyone needs to upskill themselves like every single role except for a trainee. Then actually, you can even use trade. You can even use it to help you like do plumbing better or faster and optimize that. But I really think a lot of the manual like work where you don’t have to think and copy and paste those will will be very, very quickly gone the next year or two. But the roles where you need to have some level of thinking, um, and pause and reflection time will never, ever, I think, will never get replaced. It’s similar like how people are like, oh, I’m worried about like taking over my job as an engineering manager. The best engineering managers understand complex architectural systems, and that’s quite hard to it’s quite hard because. Okay. So one more thing. Context windows are quite small right now. And so you can’t especially for big architectural problems. You can’t feed enough data into the context window. And so you won’t ever be able to replace that unless you’ve had years of experience. You don’t understand what’s wrong unless you’re feeding all those years of experience into that context window, which is like practically impossible. Like you can’t replace that job unless in the future maybe like it will increase. But I think it’s a lot of learned mistakes. And what’s wrong to be able to um, yeah. Like those roles with learning mistakes I don’t think ever can be replaced. Yeah, I think you’re right. Especially in the short term. Like maybe in years to come as the systems get more like bigger, we get more infrastructure that might might change. But yeah, I completely agree. Yeah. Serena, thank you so much for joining us on the episode. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Until next time.