Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:03.255)
If you're business owner struggling to get your sales and marketing teams to actually use your content that you're creating, then our guest, Ben Ard, is about to give you a simple win that you can implement today. Ben is the co-founder of Maset, an AI powered unified content library and connected agent platform built to help B2B businesses get the most out of their content. Ben, so excited to have you here.
Ben Ard (00:26.218)
Good to be here. This is gonna be a good time. I'm excited.
Adam O'Leary (00:29.861)
Absolutely. So one of the things that I know I've personally struggled with and I know many other founders have struggled with is Google Drive. I will have folders in folders with sometimes nothing in them. I will have material all over the place. I mean, it's like a bomb went off basically in my Google Drive. How do we fix that?
Ben Ard (00:49.742)
It's a great question. know, obviously content is one of the biggest factors for any business. Everyone needs it. Doesn't matter really what you do. Everyone needs to consume content. The consumer cares so much about content, doing their own research. I think this is a big reason AI is also really popular is people feel unable to actually do their homework and their research all on their own. But, you know, we always joke around with businesses where, you know, they store their content in Google Drive and that's where it goes to die.
And almost every single marketer just nods their head really big. Yep. Been there before. It's a nightmare and no fault to Google drive. It's a cool platform, but it's such a horizontal platform that serves so many use cases that it's not really built for a company to store their content. So for us, we decided to kind of build a solution to build a full library and a new home that, lets everyone store their content in one place and access it and track it.
do all that kind of fun stuff, solve content chaos for a business. that's kind of one of the big things. Like, I care about the solution that we built. I care about other things. But there's a lot of ways that you could tackle this. And every business has a different way of trying to solve this problem. And so we went out there and just figured out a way to productize it and make it really simple for people.
Adam O'Leary (02:09.517)
So tell me how it works. for example, in Google Drive, I'll type something in and I'll usually have to click 10 different things to try to figure it out. Which one's the one I'm looking for? How about you guys? Like what did you guys do? How does this work?
Ben Ard (02:25.548)
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the hardest things for people is they don't want to organize all their content. It can be labor-some and it can be difficult. So we try to make that as easy as possible. So we'll integrate with the Google drives and we integrate with YouTube. We integrate with the Wistia's and the notions and all that kind of stuff. Anywhere you could possibly have content, we integrate directly with those locations. Let you sync that up, push your content into mass it so it has a new home. You can do tagging and categories and all that kind of fun stuff. But on the upload,
AI is indexing all of your content, learning about it, understanding it. We built this proprietary rag system, but really it's just straightforward. You just take all your content, throw it in a mass, use the AI to kind of help you understand it, do your manual tagging and categorizing all that kind of stuff. And then you're off to the races. I mean, everything can be organized and displayed in all sorts of cool ways, but really one of the biggest issues we realized was that content.
kind of consolidation and organizing can be painful. So we threw AI into that process and made sure that everything is really simple for people to get their content into one place.
Adam O'Leary (03:33.359)
That's awesome and I know one of the things that's on my mind right away, and I'm sure everybody else's is privacy. How do you guys handle privacy?
Ben Ard (03:42.2)
Good question. mean, everyone cares a lot about this and we work with some really cool businesses and across all sorts of different industries and they care and it's important because there's all sorts of information and knowledge that's in your content. And the last thing you want to have happen is to make sure that the wrong people get a hold of the content that they shouldn't have. we handle privacy in a lot of different ways. Number one is we've gone through SOC 2.
And that kind of ensures that we as a business, you know, handle data and privacy and take it seriously and have procedures for that. The other element that we really take care of is the way that we approach AI is really making sure no models are being trained, no other businesses have access to that information. Your data is staying with you. But the other thing is we have a whole nother layer of privacy where businesses can assign permissions to individuals in the organization.
So if you have a board deck that you only want your C-suite to have access to, you can create that content, store it and mass it, make sure only the C-suite has access and AI respects those permissions. So no one's going in there and finding content or answers they shouldn't have access to. There's a whole layer about do I have permission to actually look at this content.
So it's not the sexiest or the funnest thing to build all the time when it comes to privacy and security. But when it comes to having peace of mind that my content's in a place that I feel comfortable with, we kind of had to pull out the stops to make sure that everyone felt comfortable having their data in a safe and secure place. And honestly, so no bad actors could get a hold of it.
Adam O'Leary (05:22.05)
I love that. so for me, for example, I know I have about two terabytes worth of material inside my Google Drive. How do you make that searchable? how, I mean, are we going through every single file and then setting the privacy for that? Like how, how are we actually doing this? Like how does the onboarding, guess, kind of look in that sense?
Ben Ard (05:43.63)
It's a great question. And one of the reasons that we do a lot of integrations is when you look at high file storage, a lot of it's video content, your 4K, really extensive video content. But a lot of times people actually want that on YouTube anyways, because that's a great search engine in and of itself. And we just link directly to those resources. But the way that we make it searchable is the categories and tags. So as you put the content in the system, you can manually put that content where you want it to go.
We also support collections. You can group it into kind of use cases and boards and all that stuff. But really what it is is we built a rag system, which really is kind of like a Dewey decimal system for a library, but it indexes all of your content, chunks it into smaller chunks and allows us to, when you get a search inside of our system using AI, like help me find a case study for such and such a client.
the rag and the AI is able to find the correct pieces of information and ultimately sift through those terabytes of content and find exactly what you need.
Adam O'Leary (06:51.844)
That's awesome. Okay, now this makes a lot of sense. And what sort of results have you seen from people going ahead and using your service? I guess what is it like the biggest case studies that you've seen?
Ben Ard (07:04.119)
Yeah, it's a great question. So we're really excited about the fact that when businesses start using Masset, they see a 4x increase in content usage. And what that does is it helps speed up sales cycles, increases close rates, and really builds the alignment between all of the teams. It cuts down on so much wasted time and energy. We have some data that shows that employees at businesses with poor content management
The company is wasting like $8,300 per employee per year. And with Masset, we're saving people time. They're finding what they need in seconds. They're collaborating. Marketing and creative teams and product teams are creating the right content. It's getting used. It's getting tracked. So it's kind of a hodgepodge of everything. Content usage goes up.
which benefits everyone and it drastically reduces the wasted time so businesses are getting more effective employees spending time on selling deals or working with customers or ultimately doing the things that they need to be doing.
Adam O'Leary (08:10.05)
Cool. And how did you come up with this? I mean, this is something I know everybody needs, but to actually have the concept of this.
Ben Ard (08:16.426)
Yeah, it's a good question. Yeah, so I worked, I started at a company, man, it's been like 10, 11 years ago. I feel old when I say that, but I was working at a company. They had just raised, I believe, a Series A funding and I came into the business and I was with them for just shy of seven years. And I got to see them go from Series A to public.
I got to see all the different stages. I fell in love with the technology and SaaS space and really got to see it firsthand from amazing founders and great people and just had the journey of a lifetime. And while I was there, I got to know the sales team really well because I was in charge of demand generation on the marketing side. And so I really worked closely with the sales team. And when it came to content collaboration and alignment,
It just felt like we were, even though we had close relationships that we weren't really figuring out how to align on it. So I started reaching out to other businesses as well that were in similar sizes and circumstances and just said, Hey, where do you store your content? Like, how do you distribute it internally? How do you know what's working? And almost every single one of them was like, are we sticking in Google drive and we hate it. Like there's not a good solution for us in B2B. so based off of that,
The company had gone public. I'd kind of seen that journey, had a lot of fun doing it. And then I kind of turned to my wife and said, hey, are you OK if I leave the company and potentially start one? And I just left with the idea. That's all I left with. I hadn't built anything. And we started it from there and kind of grew it into what it is today.
Adam O'Leary (09:58.082)
Your wife must have loved that. Hey, can I give up a paycheck to potentially make money?
Ben Ard (10:01.332)
Yeah, a paycheck where I had, you know, good standing. had done a lot with the business and good people. Yeah, no, she was super supportive and it's been a hard, crazy journey, but you know, it's been worth it. It's been fun to be close to customers and honestly, I love content. mean, content's so cool. It's how we think, it's how we teach and learn and grow stories and all that kind of stuff. So it's fun to enable businesses to
really give content the seat at the table it deserves. so for us, like, even though it's harder and it's not like the paycheck that my wife used to get from from everything, you know, I think that the satisfaction and the joy that comes from it kind of outweighs all the differences.
Adam O'Leary (10:49.379)
Absolutely. I love that. And I guess as a business owner, one of the things that we're always looking at is right, like what is my actual return? So you're talking about how it gets used four times more, that type of stuff. But like, let's look at this in a tactical way. How can a business owner actually track to see the, the KPI increases, the results, the performance of what they're doing is have you, have you kind of come up with an idea of that already, or does it already exist?
Ben Ard (11:15.98)
I mean, that's the magic question. Like that's always what you want to do. You know, I think a lot of businesses are struggling to figure out just the impact of content in general. And that's one of our main objectives. It's a pillar for us to show the impact that content can have on a business. Now, everyone knows anecdotally that everyone needs content and that people need content to buy and it does speed up sales cycles and things like that. But what we've done is really worked hard to build an integrations and other opportunities.
especially on the sales side of things, it's a little bit easier to track and there's a direct need on the sales team to allow people to find content and track it directly in the CRM. So as people are looking at closed deals, they can see what content people interacted with. They can calculate what was the content's impact on that deal and really just see the usage in the consumption of that content in a whole different way. mean, people have analytics for their website content, but...
for so long they haven't had really a good insight. Are people internally using content? Are their prospects, are their customers, are their partners using content? They've had no idea and now they can finally see it's getting used, it's moving the needle or it's not moving the needle or maybe we need to reinvest. And so we are actively always working hard to help these businesses really see the value of their content kind of in a whole new light, in a whole new way that most businesses haven't ever been able to see before.
Adam O'Leary (12:43.489)
I love that. And I guess for a business who hasn't gone ahead and maybe even looked at content yet, right? Like they have all their content, but they haven't even thought about tracking content or all that metrics. guess what would be the biggest reason why a business should start?
Ben Ard (13:00.352)
Yeah, I mean, there's a point in time where you outgrow Google Drive. You know, right now your content is in one of those kinds of platforms. And what's interesting is you'll start to feel the pain. You know, you'll know it when you have a million Slack messages to your head of your content team. When they're inundated with all the requests, when you're recreating content.
You know, we see it time and time again. People request content that's already been made. They just don't know where to find it. And then even the people that created the content, they don't know where to find the content. So they recreate content. So you've got triples or quadruple versions of the same kind of content because no one knows where to find it. And you lose all the tribal knowledge. When you kind of feel these pains, like you'll know it if you feel it.
That's when people start to explore an option like Masset where we can come in and say, okay, we have outgrown Google Drive. If you're at the point where you're like, no, Google Drive is great, we don't need anything else, I've got everything I need out of it, you're not a big enough company yet. And at some point in time, there's a tipping point and all of a sudden, the headaches start to add up and that's when typically people start to explore an option.
And honestly, for a long time, were only enterprise options. There were only options out there where it's Google Drive, wait until we can spend 20 grand a month on something. And we've kind of filled that middle gap for most businesses in the mid-market to be able to understand and really manage their content without having to pay their entire marketing budget to be able to do so.
Adam O'Leary (14:40.479)
I love that. Ben, when can people go to learn more about you?
Ben Ard (14:44.012)
Yeah, so you can go to masset.ai, M-A-S-S-E-T.ai, and that's probably the best place. Or look me up on LinkedIn or whatever you want. I'm Ben Aard, happy to chat there, but those are probably the two best places.
Adam O'Leary (14:57.461)
Amazing. Thank you so much, Ben. This was a fantastic episode.
Ben Ard (15:00.896)
Thank you Adam, appreciate it.
Adam O'Leary (15:02.424)
Alright, thank you everyone for listening. I will see you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
