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Hello there!

Lots to unpack this week 🙌 

• Podcast: Healing for Entrepreneurs: Life Coach Jaguar Heart’s Reflections

• Success story: The Techie Taking on Google

• 7 Best Lead Generation Software Revealed

Weekly Business Challenge: A Luxury Vehicle with an Open Source Code 🤔

But first, a tour of the headlines…

Weekly Catchups

News | Industry Insights | Trends

• 🛎️ Reddit to Go Public

  At 40,000 words, Reddit’s prospectus for its initial public offering is longer than Meta and X’s risk factors combined at the time of their listings. That’s probably because the company relies on unpredictable users. Reddit must keep its users satisfied. But efforts to expand its limited, not to forget unpopular, advertising formats could send users packing. 98% of Reddit’s revenue is made up of advertising income. Investors will be eyeing this, expecting more “diversity sooner than later,” says Bloomberg’s Dave Lee.

• 🟢 Curtains Fall

  US TV and film mogul Tyler Perry has pressed pause on his $800 million studio expansion after seeing the capabilities of Open AI’s text-to-video AI model, Sora. The studio expansion would’ve added 12 sound gates to the sprawling Atlanta property. But thanks to Sora’s features, “you could spend a fraction of the cost to do a pilot that would’ve cost $ 15 [million], $20 million or even $35 million,” said Perry. “A lot of jobs are going to be lost,” he warned. 

• 🤭 End of the Road for Apple EVs 

  Apple has pulled the plugs on its plans to build electric vehicles. With this, Tim Cook this week waved goodbye to a decade-long project. Apple leadership revealed internally that the company was abandoning plans to develop its own fully autonomous EV. Most of the 2,000 employees tasked with R&D on the project have moved to the company’s AI division.

Uncharted Horizons

Personal Development | Success Story

The Techie Taking On Google

It was 1998. Jeff Bezos persuaded Google co-founders to accept his $250,000 investment while it operated out of a rented garage. Since then, Google’s search engine business has known no bounds. Founder of Perplexity AI Aravind Srinivas hopes to unleash a prowess greater than Google with the mighty hand of Jeff Bezos, 25 years after he contributed to Google’s skyrocketing success. The Amazon founder invested in Srinivas’ startup in January this year.

Founded as early as August 2022, Perplexity AI has notched 10 million users and is arguably one of the buzziest AI entrants in Silicon Valley. The company recently raised $73.6 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $520 million from investors, including Nvidia, the Amazon founder himself, and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke. 

The AI-powered search engine seeks to sell itself apart from Google’s keyword-based search by providing direct answers rather than generating a list of web links. Srinivas is an IIT Madras and UC Berkeley alumni. In 2014, he had one month to learn everything he could about machine learning. Andrew Ng and Geoffrey Hinton kept him company as he watched their Coursera lectures on a loop. At IIT Madras he conducted extensive research, being taught by world-class faculty. 

The Birth of Perplexity 

Aravind says there was no eureka moment giving birth to Perplexity. He and his co-founder were trying to address a largely known issue. For Srinivas, it was about translating diverging ideas about large language models to build commercial products. They realized how they were scrapping data in a roundabout way and needed to create a more efficient solution for AI models to conduct reasoning when prompted with a question, Srinivas revealed in an interview. 

Not Another Google

Aravind says he wants to advertise the right way. “If we corrupt the quality of answers [AI-generated] to make more revenue to satisfy shareholders,” he says. Srinivas is willing to be experimental but with a little patience.

Strategies | Tools | Marketing Tips

Nurture Your Leads

A crucial step for any sales strategy, lead generation is integral for success in sales. But not all marketers get it right. Over 61% of marketers find lead and traffic generation their top challenge. Skilled SaaS marketing agencies can help you avoid some common mistakes. 

#Mistake 1 Chasing the Wrong Audience

Not everyone one encounters is an ideal customer.

• Target your message and develop products for a specific audience. This allows you to deeply address their concerns. 

• Focus on attracting potential customers who hold a genuine interest in your offering, not casual web surfers 

• A low click-through rate indicates that your message is failing to reach the right people.

#Mistake 2 You’re Not Nurturing Existing Leads

Just because someone expresses interest, it doesn’t guarantee their conversion into a paying customer. Do not let them slip through the cracks of your sales funnel. 

• Use email marketing automation to send targeted emails based on their behaviour/ interest 

• Offer valuable content like case studies and product demos to nurture leads then move them closer to the conversation. 

#Mistake 3 Following a One-Size-Fits-All Approach

Not all leads are created equally. Treating every potential customer in the same manner spells trouble. 

• Lead Scoring: Sort leads by engagement to focus on the most promising ones first. Leads who have signed up for a free trial attended a webinar, or interacted with your support team signal higher engagement as opposed to leads who have only visited your website once.

• Personalise Outreach for Customer Group: Say you offer a SasS product that targets both small startups and large enterprises. Startups will be interested in messaging conveying streamlining on a tight budget. For enterprises, highlight scalability. 

• Spend Marketing Budgets Wisely: Analyse data to point-point platforms (Google Ads, LinkedIn, X) that are converting your ads at a higher rate.

#Mistake 4 You’re Not Using Marketing Automation

Manual lead generation can be extremely time-consuming. 

• Explore marketing automation platforms aligning with your specific needs and budgets 

• Through these tools, get accurate information required to produce higher conversion rates. 

• Suggestion: 7 Best Lead Generation Software of 2024 (to Get More Leads)

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Networking | Business Development | Entrepreneurship

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