AI-Drive Content Curation | Ralph Pahlmeyer from Vestorly

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Ralph Pahlmeyer 0:00
Just saying, Hey, here’s a bit of content you can use is not helpful to a business, right? Because then they have to sit there and figure out which which articles are good or bad.

Alexander Ferguson 0:14
Welcome to UpTech Report. This is our apply tech series UpTech Report is sponsored by TeraLeap. Learn how to leverage the power of video at Teraleap.io. Today, I’m very excited to be joined by my guests, Ralph Pahlmeyer, who’s based a company is based in New York, he’s in California. But these the CEO of Vestorly, which I’m excited to dig into today, Vestorly is all around focusing on helping organizations increase engagement, generate leads and scale communication by using AI to surface and create that content. So welcome, Rob. Good to have you on man. Yeah, happy to be here. Now, as as this company, your website, you said curate content for whatever way you want to use that content help me understand what was the problem that you initially set out to solve, and, and are really focused on? Yeah, so we started out as a marketing automation platform, and have moved into an API focused business, I’m a business focused on, you know, going direct to channel relationships and enterprise. But again, like I said, we started out as a marketing automation platform. And the original market that we were going after, was the financial services market, and more specifically, financial advisors in the wealth management industry, and we realized that they faced a growing problem, and that most were doing zero marketing. Why? Because they didn’t have any content.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 1:42
So there were all these solutions. So we started the company back in 2013. And at the time, you know, of course, there’s marketing automation was a big thing, you know, people had heard of constant contact, MailChimp was pretty new. But someone like a financial advisor, or any sort of professional service provider, basically, you know, small business, they would sign up for those types of solutions. But ultimately, they would fizzle out maybe because they didn’t have anything to say, didn’t have any content. You know, of course, there’s exceptions to the rule, some financial advisors, you know, see on, you see them on CNBC, they’re talking heads, but for the most part, there were hundreds of 1000s of these financial advisors, and, you know, certainly millions of other professional service providers that really didn’t do any marketing because they didn’t have any content. So that was the original problem that we set out to solve is provide them with a marketing system that they could actually use.

Alexander Ferguson 2:35
There is industry specific application for them, that they, you know, what they need, and being able to provide that content for them that automation,

Ralph Pahlmeyer 2:42
right. So the original idea was a industry specific marketing automation solution, right. And of course, there were other different differentiation points that the financial services industry needed with a market automation solution, namely around compliance and that type of thing. But ultimately, the focus was really on content, providing them with content and really easy to use tools. That was that was automated and intelligent.

Alexander Ferguson 3:10
From there, what how did how is it now developed and kind of your direction of the use cases now in the API,

Ralph Pahlmeyer 3:18
so we we extended that business, you know, so we started out as a fledgling tech company, and we went through the the classic route to raise capital Angel round seed round series A. And we grew the business quite rapidly. And what we found that is, is our key differentiation point. And you know, what we really spend a lot of time on was our content engine. And there were so many other features that we needed to build that we didn’t want to build, because it was duplicative to what was out there in the marketplace. We want to focus on what our core offering was what we were really good at, you know, what we’d spent years and years on your getting the patent and that type of thing. And that was our content engine. So we decided to move into a space where we focus directly on licensing our content engine to other market automation platforms, can you can you dig a little bit more into the content engine of how it works and the and the dark side behind it. So it starts by aggregating content. So we aggregate content from all over the web, pulling in publicly available new sites, blogs, science journals, industry publications, and that type of thing. We aggregate all that content. And then we’d run it through a our system where we would read the full text, the full HTML of all that content, you know, extracting images, taking the metadata, but most importantly, reading the full text of it, to figure out what it was about. And so we call that our content engine where we’re pulling in all this content, reading it, figuring out what it’s And then we provide a set of tools, where you can go and create a feed of content on any topic. You know, whatever, whatever you’re, wherever your imagination goes, you can create a feed of content. And you can think about that as like a Pandora radio or Spotify. But instead of music, it’s for news articles and other information online. So say, for example, you’re interested in Bitcoin, right? You can create a feed of content on Bitcoin. And our system takes in all the best sources. And because we capture so much data on content interactions, are able to identify the pieces of content that are most valuable, and ultimately are able to sort a massive pool of content by you know, what’s most likely to be engaging.

Alexander Ferguson 5:50
There’s the growing trend of a growing trend, there’s so much content out there. That is the key now is curation of knowing Okay, what is the right content for the right viewer at the right time, especially when it comes in there, there are other platforms that allow for aggregation. But it sounds like one of the differentiators here is you’re taking care of of already looking at everywhere, you don’t have to say, Alright, you have to go out and find all the places I want you to pay attention to here and here. And here, you’re already looking at all of them.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 6:21
So one of the big things that we do is, we take in this wide array of content, but what we do is we don’t just say, here’s a firehose of content, we’ll actually, you know, select what is going to be most valuable. So and we do that through a set of of filters, you know, we call it classifiers, wherein, we can basically learn what content is gonna be most engaging, what sources are going to be most engaging, right. So oftentimes, you’ll find the same article in the Wall Street Journal, as you know, the New York Times as your local newspaper, right, they’ll write about the same type of thing, you don’t want to show that same article about the same exact thing three different times. So we’ll, we’ll automatically select, you know, what article is going to be most engaging. And then we can do a variety of of interesting filtration methods such as, you know, removing competitors, reading sentiment. So for example, we can actually find out what content is positive or negative and tone, what content is more or less evergreen, what content you can provide a list of of what your competitors are, so that no console ever mentioned a competitor. We can also, you know, figure out what content is going to be compliant or not compliant, safe. We provide filters on detecting political sentiment, violence, hate speech. So we can automatically remove all that content, because we score every article based on the probability that it fits with a certain paradigm of classification. The end result is a hyper curated feed of content that’s business ready, so that the business can literally set up fastly, and then automatically get a feed of content that’s going to be its content that’s high enough of a high quality to just trust in automatically scheduled out on social media, or automatically put it into client newsletters are automatically displayed on their website.

Alexander Ferguson 8:17
This, the power of being able to quickly cut down to the noise to exactly what you want. And in this case, we’re looking at a business use case, right? So most of the platforms and tech that we interviews in the b2b space, and I’m imagining here as a business leader, if I want to help automate the content that’s going out to capture that my audience’s interest, how can I do that most efficiently and make sure it’s the right thing that my competitors? That’s why I find fascinating, you said you can actually filter out all those different things you may not want. That’s not there’s other solutions out there. But I haven’t really heard that way of being able to fine tune in so many pieces.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 8:55
Yeah, because we found is that just saying, Hey, here’s a feed of content you can use is not helpful to a business, right? Because then they have to sit there and figure out which which articles are good or bad. So with masterly you can set up this feed of content, right? That’s really it’s going to figure out what articles are good or bad. But you can also get in there and you know, train it train the feed. So think about, you know, on your Pandora radio, where you can thumb up and thumb down songs, you can do the exact same thing with bestir Li. But what’s more important is that when that content is actually being used, meaning when it’s actually on a website, or in the public domain, or in your email newsletters or on social media that’s really is tracking every single interaction with the content. We’re fingerprinting that activity. So that way, we can learning actually, you know, what actually is being engaged with what’s actually working or not working. And then ultimately, what you’re able to do is that you can then go and say, Look, okay, here’s my pool of content, right? I’m I like these sources. I like these topics. I want to make sure content doesn’t ever mention these types of things. And then ultimately, best really can say, Okay, here’s the perfect feed of content for Bob versus Susan versus Fred. And that way we take the step to allow for personalization, right. So not only are we actually curating the content, but we can then go and personalize it based on who the person is, or based on where the content is being consumed. And this is the end end viewer, not not not the business that’s using your API, but the the ad person who’s actually consuming it from that organization. Right. So if the business goes and connects masterly to their email service provider, that truly will then be able to go and return dynamically returned different content to different recipients.

Alexander Ferguson 10:45
Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Can you share any use cases or or case studies of companies that you’re you’re out there, okay, for you sharing their name?

Ralph Pahlmeyer 10:54
Yeah, sure. So, we work with a company called thinking New York Mellon. They’re a big, you know, multi national bank. They have an arm called purging, where they custody hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. And they use Esterly, to automate what content is going to what client. So they have clients across the number of divisions, they have content across a number of divisions, and what they were doing before Vesta leaves, they were sending out dozens of separate news, news, but dozens of separate email communications, right, based on what those clients the type of business that they conduct at the firm. This obviously had dozens and dozens of different people at Baker, New York Mellon, figuring out what content building those emails sending those emails. And that was obviously very time consuming, they had issues with clients, either missing information, or got some lines planned about getting too much information. So really, they you know, they were in also, they were obviously having to pay for multiple divisions of labor to go and do this. So they started using nationally, we aggregated all their content, we read all of their, you know, preferences from their CRM, and what you know, basically, what these clients were doing, what business they were conducting with the firm. And then we basically consolidated, you know, 12 different email campaigns into one, where we basically dynamically are generating different content to different recipients. So not only have we saved a ton of time, but we also help them increase their engagement by 3x. So that we increase their click through rates by 3x. So customers, were suddenly able to get just the content that was relevant to them, and not be blasted with, you know, five or six different emails.

Alexander Ferguson 13:03
Taking a step back here for a moment and looking at the whole space of content marketing, and and the relation to how technology is changing the way we interact with content. How does just look social media in general, like Facebook? How is AI used to curate right now? And how do you see that changing? Sorry, can you repeat that question? Yeah. So tell me I understand, like for social media, Facebook, for instance, just let’s think of the root case of of how is AI being used to curate, and that relationship between people interaction with with that AI to help curate content, I just want to like set a base concept of around that for a moment.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 13:46
Yeah. So we capture the activity around cons or any content that we provide to a business to share. We track those, the all that activity, so we can basically figure out who’s clicking on it. And we fingerprint that activity based on you know, what their email addresses are based on some sort of unique identifier. And because also, because we know what every piece of content is about, we’re able to build an interest profile on every single interaction. So we track everything that you’ve read, maybe you’ve you’ve received 10 emails, you’ve clicked on 1516 pieces of content in those emails, we then have a pretty solid interest profile as to you know, what you’re interested in what you’ve been doing. And then we’re then able to take that data set and compare that to the pool of content. And that way, we can then match up what you’re going to be interested in based on that pool of content. Right? So we can do it. There’s two ways we do it. We can do it based on tags, right? which really isn’t true personalization. It’s based on Okay, what are your CRM preferences, and how does that match up with the content? Right? That’s one way we can do it. We can do that. That’s not very unique. And frankly not really that valuable. The what we’re really known for, though, is actually doing it dynamically, where we ignore all that and rather take what actually you’re clicking on and what you’re actually doing. And we’re then able to compare that to the pool of content to dynamically sort each pool of content based on whether or not you will interact with it. So the end result is more engagement, less hassle. And significantly, a significant amount of time being saved. So, you know, like I said, Really, it starts by when when someone comes on bestir Li, we basically collect that pool of content. So we say, okay, where’s the content coming from, so we take their own content, so everything that’s in their content management system, everything that their own teams have been creating, we can take additional third party content, we can take licensed content, and then you basic and then then we put all that content together, filter it and establish a pool of content, here’s what we want to be, here’s the pool of available content that we want to make available for this specific email campaign, or for this specific social media campaign or website. campaign, right. And then best Surely, is then installed into the email templates installed on webpages, client portals wherever the contents going to appear. And as those people go to open the email or go to the client portal, that’s generally will be there to dynamically render different content to different individuals.

Alexander Ferguson 16:33
So that’s kind of the overall flow of how it works. Your your space, our use, still heavily focused on on on financial space, it is also applicable to other sectors.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 16:50
So we’re we have most of our customers are in financial services. We’re not a financial technology company. Often we get labeled as that because we sell to financial service people. But we’re a marketing technology company. So we’re folk, we’ve moved into other verticals, we now work with food service providers. And we’re also working with other market automation companies. So the way in which our technology has been getting deployed recently is it’s being white labeled by other market automation companies.

Alexander Ferguson 17:28
So there’s a lot of meaning into their own platform that their customers can do the same thing.

Ralph Pahlmeyerr 17:33
Yeah. So think about like a like, like another marketing automation system, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for example. Right? invest Julie’s integrated into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and can be added on to a Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. And so customers are then leveraging vestir li through another marketing automation solution. So that’s kind of you know, we’re an app stores like that. But we’re also going direct to market automation solution. So for example, another customer use case is company called FMG. suite. They’re a market automation provider that’s focused on financial service industry people. And they fully white labeled best jelly technology. So the end result in that is that bestiality is being used to recommend content that their users go and share out within their own solution.

Alexander Ferguson 18:31
Gotcha, gotcha. Taking a step back here, just looking at the world content marketing, and you’ve been in the space for a long time, eight years of, of content itself, how do you see it changing as we go forward? Even consumer behaviors of how people want to interact with and we label the content? Like, what is content? And how is that going to change going forward?

Ralph Pahlmeyer 18:57
Well, um, what what we’ve noticed, and what I’ve seen is that companies are now much more willing to share third party content with their clients and prospects. Now, more than ever, we’ve been in the space for a while, and initially, you know, we had a lot of pushback, right? They’re like, Oh, I would never share an article like what if there’s an ad of one of my competitors in there or something like that? Or, you know, what if the what if something is written in that article that we don’t like, right. But it seems that we due to the fact is content being people being inundated with content, solutions around kind of targeting and finding the right content for the right people are really valuable right now and the name of the game. And I think the pandemic is only caused that to increase as companies are desperate for better ways to digitally engage their audience, better ways to stay top of mind. And oftentimes, these companies are finding that they don’t have enough content, like even huge, you know, fortune 500 companies that have teams of people doing nothing but create content are finding that they don’t have enough content. So, but the quality of that content is paramount. And that’s really where, where best really fits in. And that’s really where we’re seeing a lot of traction. And I think the, the, the marketing ecosystem is evolving, to be open to utilizing third party content to engage their audience. And you know, we’re we’re right in that sweet spot right now. So it’s been it’s been really exciting.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 20:40
Go ahead.

Alexander Ferguson 20:41
I was saying it shouldn’t use point at the trend, though, of of the growing need for content the same time but but still good content. And it’s hard to keep up because because the noise is there. So it’s just like, how do you manage that?

Ralph Pahlmeyer 20:56
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of companies now. And there’s even if you go and look at, you know, companies like Gartner or Forrester that produce these market research reports, they’ve actually created a whole new sector now called content curation, right. And it’s a very nascent space. But it’s really interesting, because it’s a hodgepodge of all sorts of companies, including Best really, in this space, and usually, if the space is currently, you know, mainly large companies like Adobe, or you know, Big Content Management Solution systems, and not necessarily, you know, smaller companies like that’s Julian. But what we’re doing is just so much more unique. The fact that we’re actually a content discovery, and curation tool, and not just a way to actually curate your own content, but we’re bringing in content from the outside and infusing that with what these companies already have to provide a whole new layer of data and provide a whole new way to, you know, actually better engage their clients and prospects. I mean, our data shows that people are three to five times more likely to click on a third party article than they are the company’s own articles and blog posts

Alexander Ferguson 22:22
and that type of thing. Why is that? Why is

Ralph Pahlmeyer 22:25
it the companies mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, people are much more likely to click on that wall street journal article than they are their own, their own their own blog post or whatever, or

Alexander Ferguson 22:37
if they have a third party validation, is that what it is their ability,

Ralph Pahlmeyer 22:40
exactly, and they’ve got a product that is, is written up in Consumer Reports or a product that’s reviewed, right, that’s really can find that that data and couple it with the company’s own collateral, and dramatically in boosting engagement with that, and ultimately lead to much more revenue. So think that a company is producing a toothbrush, and the toothbrush is written about and highly rated and reviewed, best we can extract those articles that are talking about this, I mean, I just made this up toothbrush shoot, but but you know what I mean? Yes, you can find that those those articles that are are going to lead to much more engagement that can then be paired with, you know, the company’s own, you know, ad or marketing collateral about their product.

Alexander Ferguson 23:31
Rob, I’m just wanting to see a bit more about about you. I mean, like, what, what got you excited about this whole space and saying, you know, I’m gonna invest my, my focus and energy in this.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 23:42
So I think it goes back to just noticing that there was a huge need in it, and it was being completely, you know, left unfilled. You know, we got started with some of the original ideas back in 2012 on the company. And it just been an interesting journey. I mean, what I found to be most exciting is just building something right and creating something that’s new. Honestly, it wasn’t so much just an interest in marketing, right. My background was never

Alexander Ferguson 24:14
in marketing, your backgrounds, like more banking side, is that correct? Or Yeah,

Ralph Pahlmeyer 24:18
I came from I had a, I got a job at JP Morgan college and did that for a few years. It grew disenchanted. But one of the things I had learned about is that how well I got started around the kind of what was called the breakaway broker route. But not to get too sidetracked on this, but ultimately, it led me to realize how big of a industry the the independent financial advisor space was. And again, as I mentioned at the top of the call that that was our first target is we were trying to help them do marketing. And there were literally wasn’t any solution out there that was helpful to them, right? There were solutions that were out there that would say okay, here’s Your you know, great job in your marketing, your website was clicked 1000 times. I mean, that doesn’t mean anything to someone like a financial advisor or a yoga teacher or an insurance broker or a real estate agent, right finding out that you’re their website was clicked on adds no value my. But that was Those were the tools that are available back then the industries come a long way. But ultimately, what really excited me the most is just building something unique building breakthrough technology. And, you know, and growing a company and we really set out to build a technology company. And the only way to build a technology company is to hire the smartest engineers and people that you can find and get them out there to solve hard problems. And that’s what that’s kind of been our DNA.

Alexander Ferguson 25:45
as a as a leader, we’re always learning we’re always growing, always having to innovate, and it’s only from those learning we can can make that happen. If you were to go back to yourself, like eight years ago, and and share anything with yourself, what would that be,

Ralph Pahlmeyer 26:01
um, I’ve been someone who’s had to really work hard on, you know, leadership skills. I think I started out I was someone who, you know, oftentimes would avoid conflict. And, and that, I mean, that’s it just that that’s been something that I’ve worked really hard on over the last, you know, five years to, to, to, to guess just to be better about, you know, taking on the conflicts that I need to take on rather than just, you know, brushing things under the rug. And so what I you know, so I think that going back, you know, I probably would have you tried to stood up Stand up for a lot more the conviction that I had back then and and ultimately listened to more people, right? I think you know, as a as an entrepreneur, you know, you are you read about other entrepreneurs and how bullheaded they are, and you know how, like Steve Jobs did it? And then you think that oh, well, Steve Jobs did it this way, I need to do it this way. But like, Look, you know, not everyone is Steve Jobs. And you know, not everyone can get lucky too, right? So you’re really just listening to the customer listening to the team, and being open to changing your course, right, being open to that criticism and criticism being open to, you know, admitting that you’re wrong. And, and, and really go with what the data tells you. I mean, ignoring data is, you know, 99% of the time it’s ignoring data is going to lead to a bad outcome

Ralph Pahlmeyer 27:38
is that it’s okay, easy on the 2020 hindsight, but you have to be able to make those decisions. And in that moment, listen for that inside the open the inside and pay attention to it. able to keep growing. I appreciate that, honestly, because if anything, business is a journey, it’s not a suddenly you’re there, but it’s that growth in that that mindset. And speaking of that, looking forward from here. What kind of tech predictions would you make in this space? Looking ahead near term next year to and long term? 510 years? What What can we expect?

Ralph Pahlmeyer 28:09
So certainly, I think that more and more, I think this trend is continuing to continue of companies being open to leveraging third party content with with their own marketing campaigns. That’s, it’s a really interesting trend, it actually caught me by surprise as to how much interest would grow since the pandemic. And you know, I oftentimes have conversations where people are like, Wow, I didn’t know a solution like this would exist. And hearing that is is is, is obvious, I mean, music to my ears. That was the type of conversations that I want to have. So I certainly think that this content creations, space, is nascent, but it’s going to continue to grow. And vestel is extremely well positioned to to take it on the other big trend that I think, you know, sound is a lot more obvious is personalization, right? And when people think of personalization, they think of you know getting some sort of spammy ad on on LinkedIn or, or Instagram right or getting retargeted you know, like, you know, when people you know people often there’s a lot of ways that companies are retargeting we won’t get into the weeds there. But, you know, what, personalization is much more is much more deep than that, you know, to be actually having a very few companies are actually doing like personalization in their emails, right. When people when companies are doing personalization now are tend to be e commerce companies. But what that actually is help doing is personalizing just general communications. You know, personalizing just your general email and leveraging machine learning and natural language processing to do that. So what what, what are the actual pieces of content that we want to be sending out, and acting better targeting those to your email recipient list, very few companies are actually doing that they say that they’re doing that, but they’re doing it based on Okay, this person is a client, this person’s a prospect, this person lives in Asia, this person lives in the US. And like I said, That’s called a tag based presentation. That’s not true personalization, right. But who’s to say that I wouldn’t be interested in something that you’re sending out to your Asian clients, right, I’m in the US, I might be interested in some sort of some product that you’re offering to your Asian clients, right? That’s true, we can find that better, you can connect the dots there. And, and, you know, it’s really exciting, you know, we were continuing to improve our technology, we’re about to push out a release that we lead is going that we think is going to lead to another order order of magnitude improvement on targeting and engagement. So I think that like I said, this is a really nascent space. There’s, they’re in there, but there’s a lot of interest, a lot of room to grow. And, you know, we’re really excited about the future. Anything you can share on that that order of magnitudes about that new launch? Or is it still kind of hush hush right

Alexander Ferguson 31:13
now, until until it goes live? Um, well,

Ralph Pahlmeyer 31:19
I mean, the data is very preliminary. I mean, what we see today is oftentimes a two to 3x increase in engagement. But we’re looking to to double that.

Alexander Ferguson 31:31
Wow. So lots of room for growth still in the room for content curation and, and, and be able to find it, I appreciate being able to hear this journey of both that you’ve been on where you started, where you guys are at the moment, and the power for more platforms, or folks that want to be able to use it as an API focus is right now. So for your ideal folks that that would use your platform? Can you can you describe them just again, briefly. So those are listeners out there, they would say, Oh, that’s me.

Ralph Pahlmeyer 32:02
So what we’re selling to other technology companies, primarily right now. So the companies that we’re looking to sell to are companies that provide various marketing services to their clients. So companies that so any sort of email service provider is a good fit. Any sort of social media automation company is a good fit. Any sort of, you know, website marketing company is a good fit. Those are companies that we’re looking to sell to, as far as on the enterprise side, right. So that that’s the channel side, as far as the enterprise side. Any company that has multiple email lists, and multiple email campaigns that are going out and are sort of decentralized? You know, that’s really you can take all those, combine them and increase your engagement. So

Alexander Ferguson 33:03
all we have here, yeah, the two sides, both the channel partners, those if those are out there, there are software, tech companies that have this option you like, wow, I could, we could only do so much. So it’s we’re getting to a world I think is fascinating. We’re tech is built on Pantech avant tech. And it only makes more sense. We’re we’re this new industrialization, that that we can rely on other tech platforms to grow our own offerings. But then also to know for enterprise options where you just have so much going on that you need this type of technology, it doesn’t make sense for you, you have to manually

Ralph Pahlmeyer 33:34
Yeah, now a more simple way to put it is if you have customers, or clients that don’t have enough content or the right content. That really is it could be a good fit, right?

Alexander Ferguson 33:50
That’s really a more simple way to put it. I like it I like well, for those that do want to learn more, you can go to Vestorly.com that’s VESTORLY.COM and look, we can get a demo there and be able to learn more. For this full episode. Definitely go back to UpTech Report comm see that content of more interviews there. Thank you again, Ralph, for spending your time with us. It was great to have you on. Yeah, thank you so much. I really I really appreciate your time. Absolutely. We’ll see you guys on the next episode UpTech Report. That concludes the audio version of this episode. To see the original and more visit our UpTech Report YouTube channel. If you know a tech company we should interview you can nominate them at UpTech report.com. Or if you just prefer to listen, make sure you subscribe to this series on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcasting app.