Pitch Please

00:03.34
mike_flywheel
What's up everybody. It's Mike back from pitch please today I'm here with David from momento I'm excited to talk about all the things that you guys are doing I'm probably going to learn a bunch because I use your product. But it's been like two or three weeks since I've had a chance to go back and do some things in there. So I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot of new things today based on the speed you guys are moving at David maybe we just start with like a quick introduction on what your role is at momento and then we'll spend a little time learning about you and you know your your journey to where you are today.

00:32.90
David Salib
Sure? Yeah I'm the co-founder of memento along with my brother Daniel we actually both studied ah at the university of waterloo I studied computer science business and psychology and he studied mecharonics I've been a computer geek my whole life in the second grade I would bring. Computer parts of school and we dissect them with my friends in the fifth grade I started building websites for small businesses and then in the seventh grade I had a teacher and he asked me. It's like what you want do when you grow up I said I want work at Google he said son? no. Start your own business I was like okay so then moving it forward in a few years around Twelfth Grade I did start my first business we were building software for ontario family health teams mainly to help them manage their metrics and goals. Um I did build some software for the christian space helping. Make all the texts in the Christian world more accessible to the average reader and then going through school I entered a bunch of places I worked as a software engineer I did end up working at Google for an internship thankfully and I worked at playstation as well and a few other companies and coming out of school my brother and i. Really start to get excited about the video and podcast base we were talking a bunch of our friends. We'd be telling them about great podcasts and they'd have no idea what those were about and when we started getting closer to the creators. We realized that by the time they're done ideating recording editing publishing their content.

02:00.65
David Salib
They don't have any time to do the growth work. But in contrast take an example from hollywood they spend as much money promoting the movie as they do producing the movie. So. It's this huge gap for creators and our world today is so dominated by content. It's like well if we could help creators. Speed up that growth process give them tools hey maybe an ai assistant. We could help get a lot a lot more great content to reach these great audiences.

02:30.27
mike_flywheel
That's amazing I want to learn a bunch more of your background. So um, maybe let's dial it right back. So you said high school um and up until grade 11 grade 12 elve roughly you were saying you know you had this dream by the way you know. Work at Microsoft so I guess we're gonna talk Google for a bit but it's cool. Um, you had this dream of working at at Google you were like a huge like tech buff. Um, but before that generally it never.

03:00.69
mike_flywheel
Considered entrepreneurship like that moment in grade 11 grade 12 where your your teacher sort of said listen David you will become wise one day and this is not your destiny before that you never thought you'd be an entrepreneur.

03:04.68
David Salib
And.

03:13.57
David Salib
No I I really just loved computers. You know I loved tinkering with them I was just amazed by what they could do and and even now I I don't think starting a business was ever the thing I was inspired to do I just wanted to build stuff that people loved I want to build something that. Someone uses it for the first time their eyes light up. They have a sigh of relief. They're excited and when I grew up and became bit older. That's when I realized that you also need to pay the bills and things things that also make people excited and give them a sigh of relief are things that also make a lot of money. So you realize that there is an intersection between entrepreneurship and building things that people love in some way. It's kind of like the Steve Jobs Steve Wozniak ah mesh they both want to create things people love woz like to do it from the technical perspective Steve Jobs really cared about the user and how they feel and those 2 things together.

04:11.81
mike_flywheel
I Love it. So I think what also is super cool. Is you've had experiences leading up to your time being an entrepreneur that took you through some highly reputable and amazing companies building products people. Love.

04:11.98
David Salib
Create a business. Ah.

04:31.39
mike_flywheel
Um, can you tell me what your favorite one was so like I actually maybe just list a couple of them again for people and then let's just tell me what your favorite one was and why.

04:41.34
David Salib
Yeah, so I worked at a few different ah different companies as an intern some small ones like Frank and oak a clothing company based in Montreal and another small one called chalk and education company in Waterloo and then some big ones like Googleplaystationyelp I think my favorites were yelp. And chalk. So Yelp one of the larger ones. Um I was a product manager there working on the search team. We was responsible for helping users find what they're looking for whether it was a taco shop or a place to fix their phone so that was a lot of fun because it's a main entry point to the site. Yelp was in its heyday back in like 2016 people were using it to find whatever they're looking for that was that was just a great time. Had a large team.

05:19.85
mike_flywheel
And before that there was that thing called like the white pages or yellow pages right? like crazy. Yep.

05:25.18
David Salib
Yeah, and there's back then there's also like foursquare people used to use stuff like that and then chalk which probably no one's really heard of and the smallest company I worked at I got I like 20 people.

05:37.56
mike_flywheel
Like how like how small Okay, so like precede.

05:43.68
David Salib
20 people. Yeah, they were just taking off they were building software for teachers to help them do lesson planning attendance, grading etc and I had a cool role there where I was half product half engineering. So I'd work with the team to define roadmap and. And shape the future of what we build for students and teachers. But then I also built a lot of cool stuff there and a lot of the engineering skills that I gained was from the mentorship I got at chalk I came came out of that startup with an appreciation for a small company with great engineering skills and with product skills that have now helped me in a lot of my journey. So I really. Look back on that job as a really fortunate one to have had.

06:21.44
mike_flywheel
And so do you think it was like you know you learn probably a lot of an approach from some of those bigger places but it was like the rolling up your sleeves and not having anyone to do.

06:28.15
David Salib
And.

06:35.47
mike_flywheel
All of the things like you have to pick up way more in these really small companies and work alongside people just figuring things out. Do you think like that's what was so transformative for you is like running in the trenches with the other small team at chalk really learning from the ground or was it something else.

06:51.18
David Salib
Yeah I think that's a big part of it I think when I tell people about the difference between working at a startup and working at a larger company I think the difference is that each person has a much larger amount of responsibility and the impact of every person's work. The impact of every hour everyone spends. The company is so much more impactful on the final trajectory at a large company. You can make mistakes you can do something you can do nothing can do a lot of things but the end outcome can sometimes not be as as significant but in a startup the weight is really heavy on every single person. So you feel that the smaller and smaller it gets and definitely you know our team now is sub 10 people I definitely feel like every decision I make now makes a difference.

07:37.60
mike_flywheel
That's amazing and so you're working with your brother. You said a younger brother older brother. He's 2 years younger and um is he also technical in nature are you both like 2 doubly technical co-founders how how did that work out and what's it like working with your brother. Yeah.

07:40.46
David Salib
2 years younger

07:54.77
David Salib
Yeah, so I'll be up. Ah I'll be the first to say he's the smarter of the 2 he studied mecharonics I did computer science so we're both technical but he's just got this incredible aptitude to.

07:55.36
mike_flywheel
So okay, he doesn't have to listen to the podcast. Let's be honest.

08:10.25
David Salib
Crunch down really hard problems and solve them really effectively. He's also he's also the kind of person who can be lazy in a way that he wants to get things done fast so he's the kind of person who wanted to get his homework done to play games which we always told him as a kid that hey it's going to hurt you in the future but turns out it made him really effective at solving problems. Just knows like what do I need to do to get this problem solved so I can go and do what I want to do so. It's it's pretty cool working with him. He's super smart. He has an insane velocity. He manages all of our backend and infrastructure. He was previously working at Tesla managing all the audio video data that came from all the cars so that they could do all the legal work for that and then he was working at a startup that did a bunch of cloud stuff. So I can say many many good things about him and I'm not saying all the bad things but many good things about him working together has been exciting I think working with your brother means.

08:47.59
mike_flywheel
Wow. So.

09:01.92
David Salib
The ah the understanding and the flow is very high. You really get what you're doing and where you want to go. You're able to disagree and then move on from the disagreement because it's really just like what we're talking about what's work. Let's get over with this and then it's fun. It's like someone you've known your whole life and you understand.

09:10.71
mike_flywheel
Yeah.

09:19.25
David Salib
Yeah, understand each other's quirks. So it's kind of unique to get to start a company with with somebody. You know so well.

09:23.80
mike_flywheel
Its, it's Cool. There's like a few that I've recorded and a few coming up and there's like a lot of like family businesses that are also startups and super Cool. You talked about you know the the Trust. And the communication being really good parts and some of the fun that you're able to have with someone so close to you? What are some of the things that you'd say are like harder or considerations you know for people that maybe do have like that trust and um, you know love for their family and have thought about it or always bounce ideas together. Um.

09:44.91
David Salib
Any.

09:57.27
mike_flywheel
There's definitely going to be challenging days I'm sure but like what would you say is like the hardest part or like the advice you'd share on something like that.

10:04.84
David Salib
I'd say 2 things ah 1 it becomes much harder to separate personal life and work when you work with someone you work with your family so trying to create those distinctions I know I have a friend who started a company with a close friend. Not family but he actually had this orange vest that you had to wear.

10:08.77
mike_flywheel
And.

10:22.75
David Salib
After work hours if you want to talk about work so he kind of tries to create this distinction between personal life and the like yes yes, exactly exactly and I think the other thing is some of the things you'll take for granted at ah at a company.

10:25.40
mike_flywheel
Like So there's like an awkward moment. So if you want to talk about work outside of work. You have to make it really awkward and be very clear for that period of time I like that it's kind of cool.

10:42.21
David Salib
Kind of fall fall away when you're working with family so like formalities and certain ways you write emails and stuff like that and that's great early on. But then as the company grows you're going to have to rebuild those things and when you have this like casual, friendly environment.

10:54.64
mike_flywheel
You.

10:58.75
David Salib
Ah, you might have this transition period going from working with someone you know, really well to now actually having to build a real company with infrastructure that can support a team and and a goal you're trying to achieve.

11:09.71
mike_flywheel
That's special i. Love it man um for both has he always been entrepreneurial too or did he have like the same teacher in business school in Grade Eleven that sat him down and like listen I talked to your brother two years ago I'm gonna talk to you now. Like and what was his like path. Yeah.

11:25.23
David Salib
You know I have to I think back he initially actually didn't want to go into engineering he was going to go into finance and business. He thought he was. He's great at math. Yeah, he he's great at math and he's like yeah I don't really care about engineering but then he he's like wait I'm so good at math.

11:34.75
mike_flywheel
That's a hell of a pivot.

11:43.43
David Salib
I feel like I should go into engineering just not to waste it so he just pivoted into engineering for that purpose but he's done some pretty entrepreneurial things like back in high school him and his friends started a business selling backpacks and they would sell branded backpacks to high schools and they'd print them and and make a profit all them during covid he started an app that helps do queuing. You know there's a few apps that came up at that time helping you queue for the gym and sign up and slots and all that kind of stuff and then we actually did a startup together in college and it was called Mingo you might be able to find online it existed for a few months we went into Orlo's velocity accelerator we were competing for their fund.

12:12.74
mike_flywheel
Okay, okay.

12:21.54
David Salib
And it was a virtual reality headset for patients of the dentist so they could be entertained while they're in operations. We just thought it's really boring sitting at the dentist so you could put this vr ah headset on and you could watch movies and play games and do bunch of stuff we made it through a few rounds of the competition. Ultimately, it's really hard to build hardware. Especially hardware for the medical space. So we didn't continue on it but that was our first experience working together.

12:43.32
mike_flywheel
Okay I can I can empathize I I led hololens and mixed reality for Microsoft here in Canada for about 3 years excuse me and like 1 of the areas where you saw so much idea ideation I will call it. And energy was around healthcare solutions but the challenges of making it work were definitely um, you know like how do you create it to be scalable. What do you do with the hardware. How do you make sure it's like cleaned between patients how a limited ability to and.

13:05.70
David Salib
Yeah.

13:18.35
mike_flywheel
Drive instruction because there's sometimes low familiarity. Definitely a whole bunch of especially it sounds like this is in Canada a whole bunch of other layers of of challenges to get in to create solutions like this in the public care system. So you know what you you learn? what? what would you say is like your biggest like takeaway from that that maybe you're still using today. So.

13:36.53
David Salib
That was the first time I really cold called and walked into like dental offices trying to convince people to use us I remember standing in front of the mirror and getting ready for my first conversation and getting my first few rejections. I made my first phone call to dental dental office saying hey we're a startup building this thing you could we come show you and try and try it out and they said no and I would be like that was really hard I don't even know if I could do it a second time I just felt so defeated after my my very first call.

14:11.24
mike_flywheel
Ah, yeah.

14:12.34
David Salib
I felt so defeated and and still one of the things I'm more of a product design person I'm not a salesperson but as an entrepreneur you're forced to become a salesperson. You're constantly selling your business your team you talking to customers assign to investors. So I think breaking that first wall doing that with Mango was. Was probably something is still carry till today. Yeah.

14:32.83
mike_flywheel
And just like getting used to the nose like the reality is I think people in Sales. Maybe even underestimate it and there are people that deal with it every day like I think one of the most special um jobs. I'll say jobs because like as an entrepreneur you learn it and there's a couple entrepreneurs and startups that we've had on here and there's a couple examples that have been shared whether that be like those college pro painter or something like it or you know like a landscaping business. Um.

14:50.99
David Salib
A.

15:06.94
mike_flywheel
Or what I would say is like a very common job which is like a bdr or business development rep like picking up the phone knocking on a door and getting 8 or 9 out of 10 people saying no to you is so humbling. And the journey of learning and your ability to figure out how to create connections very quickly and you know break from small talk into something more powerful is so special like I actually think it's like the most underestimated skill. That you're not really taught in school. Ah sometimes you're taught like sales class like I've taken sales courses and it's like the art of the overall thing. But no one teaches you that first I'm not even to say minute because it's not even a minute before that door gets slammed in your face. Sometimes it's like that first thirty seconds of pitching someone something.

15:57.94
David Salib
Here.

15:59.60
mike_flywheel
And usually it's about building a connection before you can pitch them That's I What you? that's a little secret by the way you're not if you start with pitching. You're definitely going to get a door slamed you got to like build a connection. Um, but it's such a special skill. So um, speaking of pitches.

16:11.48
David Salib
Totally agree.

16:18.28
mike_flywheel
Want to learn more about memento. Well at least I know a little bit about memento but others definitely are going to want to learn more about memento. So um, the name of the show is pitch please so David your pitch please.

16:29.87
David Salib
Media has always been a driving force in society and over the last hundred years it's progressed from print to digital to now what we call content and you know this being a creator yourself, but there are tons of tools for creating content. But creators almost universally from the smallest creators all the way to big large media codes they still struggle with the number 1 thing which is reaching the audience. Why is that a challenge. It's really expensive. They thought a time effort and strategy to actually grow the content as as we were talking about earlier in the show. There's. Not enough time to create a bunch of content and then also distribute it in in a world where content is not just something people create for fun. It pushes businesses forward. There's blogs podcasts video. There's just so much out there that that people need to be successful with there's a huge gap now where people are creating. But they're not growing so we saw a need for an assistant or a creative Ai assistant that can help humans create ideate and distribute their content. We'll use Ai to analyze the audio video and text and the goal is to understand what is the creator's goals. And then make it easy make it effortless to produce and distribute their content to achieve that goal and the vision is to create a suite of Ai systems that can remove all the barriers between a creator's story and their audience.

17:59.31
mike_flywheel
So I like it now earlier in the podcast. You talked about the fact that you know you sort of knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur. Um, after this teacher had talked to you. You tried working in a bunch of places. What was the Spark. That got you or maybe it was your brother that kind of got the Spark. What? what got the spark to get into this space for Creators. So.

18:21.75
David Salib
Yeah I mean although today we work with both video and audio and we're not not exclusive to either initially we started with just podcasts just like we're on right now and it was going to person after person after person and telling them about great podcasts and them never having heard of it.

18:31.50
mike_flywheel
Okay, yeah.

18:41.70
David Salib
And not talking about small podcasts talk about podcasts that have tens of thousands of listeners some podcasts that maybe had millions of listeners. But you'd realize that people only listen to a few things and it's kind of similar in the content in the video space as well. Ah Tiktok and Instagram and Youtube shorts have changed that a little bit because of the way. Content can grow through these infinite feeds which is exciting but then other content special podcast text content long form video doesn't get the same kind of attention and then realizing one realizing. It's a 2 wo-sided problem the audience misses out on tons of great content. And the creator is also frustrated the creator wants their content to reach the audience and both people exist. There is an audience member out there who will love your show once once they find it or love that article that's written and there is a creator out there who would love to connect so there you go that is kind of the gap and once you saw that and how painful both sides how much pain both sides felt. Said well could we could we bridge this gap and would be really exciting if we could bridge it.

19:40.43
mike_flywheel
That's cool. So do you have like a lot of people that you know, um that are podcasters like it sounds like you started off mostly for podcasts and that's like how how I found Memento But do you have a like a lot of friends or is it just you were listening to podcasts and talking like how did that insight come about.

19:50.18
David Salib
A.

19:57.82
mike_flywheel
That got you here and.

19:58.96
David Salib
No honestly I don't actually have a lot of friends who are podcasters or even creators I'm just a huge well both my brother and I just huge content junkies you know when you listen to 30 plus podcasts on a monthly basis. Get really exposed to a lot of different all different kinds of creators.

20:11.12
mike_flywheel
Wow.

20:16.89
David Salib
And I mean just like a lot of people in our generations. Everyone's consuming tons and tons of content. But always I've always tended closer to content that's been more educational informative. Not your typical viral content. Yeah, that stuff still gets attention but just not as much as entertaining content does. So maybe I felt the affinity. To those creators and that problem set more and that's when be motivated trying to build something for that kind of content and now it's kind of scale to any kind of content because the solutions pretty universally felt.

20:46.10
mike_flywheel
So for sure and so effectively you're solving for the problem of creating scale. It's a scale approach to creating micro content Effectively right is that sort of the the summation Of. At the end of the day What you're trying to sell for like creators have their long form content I Don't think you're unless correct me if I'm Wrong. You're not trying to help them change up how they build their long form content right? or are you.

21:12.49
David Salib
So where we are today. Yeah there you go where we are today is solving the present pain point I think it's how startups and businesses come to be There's a problem in the present that needs to be solved that people have ah a pain they're willing to pay for and they love to solve as soon as possible and that problem today is. Ah, distribution problem. There's 6 or 7 platforms. You need to Gary Commenton in different formats. There's copywriting involved. There's video editing involved if you try to create short form video to distribute on these platforms that have billions of people on it typically most people are limited to only creating 1 or 2 clips you have to. Trim it put into software add captions. Add images render it post it. You know the flow. So the present pain we do fix best is ah distributing and scaling video across many platforms. We also do that for text by helping create blog posts and articles and posts and. Thought leading are posts on Linkedin etc but the future vision is to be an assistance for the whole workflow which means helping you ideate for your next episode helping you maybe write scripts for Tiktok or video helping you write chapters of a book and this way you could take some of your content and push into another direction. And then maybe even helping you live in the editing phase but trying to go from the beginning that the pain points that are barriers to getting a story out there. They start all the way from ideation and the end with distribution and I think the suite of Ai assistance. We're trying to build with target each step of the process to help make that easier.

22:40.61
mike_flywheel
So you want to be copilots for creators is what you want to be here.

22:44.33
David Salib
If Adobe was the company. The digital media space. We want to be the company for the content era.

22:53.44
mike_flywheel
So that's amazing. Well I mean I have to say I ah 2 things 1 is I try to think back I don't think you might be 1 of the first.

23:08.47
mike_flywheel
Startups that I've had on the podcast that I was using before we had you on the podcast. Um, so I think that's actually pretty cool because I found you and it it sounds like we're talking a little bit before the show it. It must have been in the initial days or weeks like. I don't know how many users you had but I'm going to like brag that I must have been at least 1 of the first thousand hundred I don't know but you clearly were solving a pain point that I had and and I discovered you and it's actually like I feel like maybe I'm talking to Celebrity. You know it's like all this tool that I've been using.

23:33.40
David Salib
Have.

23:46.29
mike_flywheel
For my own podcast and I get talked to and and many of the startups I bring on I learn about what they're up to and I you know many of them make their way into my life as well. But I think it's cool that this one started the other way around. Um and we're dialoging over email about ah and not try not to make. Sound bad but like you know in a new startup. There's moments of feedback and something something wasn't working and I'm very tolerant of those things I get the startup journey so I reached out and you and your brother both like instantly replied and were there and I loved it and I was like can I also just like get you guys on the podcast I want to like learn more about this space. So um. You were clearly solving a pain point for creators and at that time my my pain point was I have long form content I am not a I'm a really shitty creator like I I like talking to people but probably everything beyond that I'm like really shitty at in terms of like the like. World of social and creating I think I have okay thoughts once in a while but that's about it and so I need help I need help with editing I need help with you know, creating efficiencies on how do I take this content and break it up so people can discover it to eventually find their way to you know a 30 to. 45 or 60 minute episode of mine and that was the dumb question that I just started binging and googling away at and I I found memento which I think was was pretty cool. Um.

25:10.75
David Salib
I think it's I think it's honorable that you mentioned bing in that being at Microsoft but I also want to say you're not a shitty creator. What I've learned and I learned this from our head of partnerships and marketing his name's Justin he's a filmmaker he used to work at Fox as a producer. And he easy boy indie filmmaker now and he always says people think creators love doing social and marketing. They don't they love creating. They have to do social and marketing but they don't want to but you're forced to because if you're a creator you want to grow. But. You want to create and it's this catch 22 problem where you got to do both but 1 of them impacts the other as well. It takes away time from creating and if you're not good at the growing part which I'm an ah a product design engineering guy I'm not a marketing person. So even myself I'm forced to figure out growth for my business. So I feel the pain almost double. For a creator. It's like I know what you want to do is just create but you're you're forced by nature of the industry and in the market to do this work and it's not It's not what everyone's designed to do.

26:16.74
mike_flywheel
Yeah, that's fair like I just want to do this I Just want to if it's funny like everyone always asked me like what if you won the lottery I told them I'd still probably work where I work now. Actually I would love what I do and who I get to work with I'd probably like scale back on time there but I would do this I would just talk.

26:28.94
David Salib
Yeah.

26:36.25
mike_flywheel
Startups I'd probably have to like you know frame it under something I'd be a vc I'd be a vc so I could just talk to startups all day put a little money into some of them help some of them out with whatever limited knowledge I've got. But if I could just talk to startups. And people in the ecosystem all day about but the cool stuff that they're doing to try to change problems that I see and problems I didn't even know existed that would be super special. So um, thank you for making that easier and allowing me to focus more time and energy on on that and now we talked about creators. Podcasts um, can you give me like the spectrum of who uses this and and you were talking a little bit about video too. So there's I've only obviously used I don't eventually I will use the video in some way but I haven't created any video output. So obviously I've limited myself by not being on Youtube. Yet? Um, maybe you'll be able to solve that problem because I won't need to use this video for Youtube but talk to me about the types of creators that this is for and if it's specifically for individual creators or if like.

27:32.80
David Salib
Ah.

27:41.63
mike_flywheel
Agencies like would like marketing agencies be using momento like talk to me about that spectrum today and maybe where that spectrum is like going. So.

27:47.12
David Salib
Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that in today's world media is driven by content I think what's unique about 2023 more than any other year in the past is that everybody has content. it's not just Cnn that has content it's not just I don't know it's not just like big producers and celebrities. It's people in you know businesses small businesses, family businesses producing content I've talked to a gym that is producing content for with their with their their gym goers. And education. You've got tons of content. You know there's this period of time where everything became digitized covid started turning everyone into content creators. So every industry now is dominated by content all the time. So now. It's almost like everybody has content. Everybody has video everyone can record video as well. All so our users. Span from a small business or even smaller just like ah a mom or a dad creating some content about something they care about whether it's nutrition or learning or sports all the way up to large media companies. You know thinking Canada um, let's a large media company Canada see. Cbc there. We go I've been I've been out of Canada for a few years I'm forgetting the names and think of the american names. They also have millions of hours of content so the problem scales as the business scales. The problem doesn't go away the content grows and you can never keep up with it. So the vision is that.

29:15.20
mike_flywheel
Yeah.

29:22.19
David Salib
Memento is this central intelligence sitting under all your content. So whatever you need to do to be successful with it whether it's repurposing it or looking for something in the past or oh you know I could probably cut a clip from my pitch with John three weeks ago and use it this month that's the kind of work that like professional teams do with humans. And now I think with Ai this kind of works and be done even better with humans and it's going to be democratized and 1 of the things Ai does is think it democratizes things like legal advice health advice marketing strategy advice down to more people and technology always does that it brings intelligence it brings automation. It brings. Efficiency down and and broader to more people.

30:03.27
mike_flywheel
Yeah,, that's amazing and I think we're talking about this at like a certain altitude. Maybe what would be good and I know visual would be probably the best way. But let's like walk through the actual steps of how memento works If you're cool with it. So um, someone has a piece of content. And so that's either like an an existing Um, actually maybe just just walk me through what types of content can be taken into momento and from what sources that.

30:26.98
David Salib
Yeah, yeah, so we meant to ingest content from a few sources whether it's your podcast ah Rss feed your Youtube channel we're doing a Twitch integration or just uploading the video or audio directly as soon as you upload something to memento it is processed. With ai what does that mean it means we take the audio we take the video we transcribe it all into text and we're running something called embeddings. It's an ai term which means turning all that data into numbers computers ultimately can only function with numbers so representing the video and the audio and the text. All separately as their own sets of numbers allows us to not do intelligent things with them. The rest of the process depends on 2 things 1 as a creator you would identify the key ideas of your content and use that to produce into new things. You'll use the key ideas to come up with a great title for Youtube. Use the key ideas to write up your description you use the key ideas to create shorts and marketing assets that will spark curiosity for people to come check things out. You think of a tv show or a movie. They always make a trailer that's going through find the key ideas putting it together that people watch a trailer. And then they want to watch the movie. So once something's processed. We understand the content the way a human understands it because we're looking at it multimodally audio video and text we processed it. We've organized. It. We were showing you as the creator what you could now use and then you're choosing how to use it either. You're using our video editor which looks very similar to canva.

32:01.84
David Salib
So you can pull in elements headlines auto captioning make videos that you see from professional creators but within a few minutes or you're using our chat assistant which if you've used chad gpt. It's quite similar. You ask it hey write me an article about a topic but instead of getting a Generic article. It's using your content and what we do actually for some you know, bigger names some of our enterprise clients is we train custom ai profiles to speak like them and write like them. So then you're getting this ai that knows everything about the content. So the consumer is getting a version a flavor of this Ai where. And knows everything about your content. You can ask it to suggest titles and write articles and and you know create things that will help you grow the show on different platforms and then as we go up market to the larger creators we train custom models to allow them to do that at even a higher level of accuracy.

32:53.93
mike_flywheel
That's super cool. So the outputs and actually like maybe I'll start with the thing that caught my attention. Um, so for me what drew me to momento was your your notion of moments and so it took.

32:58.27
David Salib
And.

33:11.48
mike_flywheel
Long form content which was my podcast which I clearly talk in I know what happened but to go back after and determine optimally timed content which for social is somewhere between 15 to 45 seconds maybe 60 seconds on the long end and to. Find logically where were 15 to sixty second things that seemed intelligent enough that we were discussing that people might want to hear and memento helped me siphon all of my information into what were classified as moments and any given. 45 or 60 minute podcasts might return 12 to 20 some odd moments and then I could and it would pick a title for what it would recommend that moment to be it would highlight the start and end of the text and I could adjust the title or generate a new title and that allowed me. If nothing else to take the 60 minutes of work that I put in doing what I want to do which is just talking to you and it allowed me to say okay, how would you share this in a bunch of bite sized content and it did that very well. Ah. After that and I was just using audio. So I assume just walk me through this because I haven't tried video yet. It would do the same thing for video. It would pick moments and it would maybe find the video clips for those moments as well as the audio and the text and then after that the next step was doing something and so transparently I'd love to learn more because I haven't used it.

34:32.60
David Salib
Yep, correct.

34:44.36
mike_flywheel
Honestly, as much as probably I should I haven't used your written content component yet and and that's probably just my own um lack of time and energy on it. So I'm excited to learn more but I was using the video output and so I don't upload video and so what I was doing next was I was taking.

34:56.72
David Salib
Yeah.

35:03.92
mike_flywheel
Those bytes the moments and memento had a bunch of amazing templates that allowed it to do text transcripted text on it and I could put a still I could use a still image or I could use Ai to match it with the. A bunch of I guess they're open source I don't know you can tell me how but a bunch of video a bunch of video that fit the theme of whatever was being talked about and most of them were perfect and if they weren't you can change them. Um from there I could take that and make it different. Formats I could make it like a wides screen for Linkedin like tall for like a real and Instagram and so that's the feature. Those are the features that that drew me in um and hopefully that helps make it real for anyone that's got a podcast is thinking like how do I use this momento stuff. Can you talk to me about because like I said. Been a few weeks I'm about to dive probably back in this week to keep doing a bit more of my content and play a bit of catch-up what what? other amazing features am I looking forward to when I when I jump in later this week that you know may have been updates and. What sort of where are you going? What other things are you looking to add in if you're open to sharing some of that. Okay.

36:16.55
David Salib
Totally I love that you I love that you touched on that stock that Ai stock media feature taking something that was audio only and using Ai to identify the key imagery that would work and then we layer that in together. So now your your clips don't just become. Text and audio waves you actually have some visuals to capture the audience' attention I love that one of the one of the sides ofmento that is more text- focused that we haven't talked about is that chat assistant so you take your episode potentially the one we're doing right now and you pump it through romento you haven't really published it yet. You're going to ask memento to write 5 different titles. You could use then you might say you know make sure David's name at this at the beginning or make sure it says Mike and David's conversation and finished off my my example, that's the power of using chajgbt as your assistant for your own content then you're gonna say well I need to write some show notes and I want to break down the show notes by timestamp because I want to. Will help people know what's in this episode something that takes a few hours use the chat assistant say hey can you write this out for me says. Yes, you got your you got your stuff and then maybe you're starting a blog and you have the pitch please blog where you're talking about like lessons learned from each entrepreneur and each startup conversation. And that's again where the chat assistant comes in it can help you get that done on the it.

37:31.95
mike_flywheel
So so so actually just to pause there. So actually right now I've been pulling in to memento after I release my episodes and so probably to get the most mileage out of Memento I should take my edits.

37:39.17
David Salib
A.

37:49.35
mike_flywheel
Before they publish because I'm always running like a couple weeks ahead and I should run that through momentmento and actually help me write my show notes and I can probably like I've got you know you've probably seen I've got like a 4 man style but I can use memento plus that style to probably bring them together and get.

37:50.77
David Salib
Yes, so.

38:07.60
mike_flywheel
Some of that work expedit like not all of it because I still like want have my like style on how like formatted it or have a little bit about or maybe 1 momentmento learn that output format that I have okay okay, um, sorry sorry to interrupt so like.

38:18.44
David Salib
It could. Ah yeah yeah, yeah, and most yeah and and most of our creators most of the teams do use it pre-publishing. We do pull from different sources like Youtube and your podcast.

38:24.66
mike_flywheel
Actually change in my own workflow I'm going to now use memento pre-release. Okay, yeah.

38:36.41
David Salib
But's more to help you with your back catalog it it does tend to make the most sense to upload the content to manto first. So that you don't just help with the distribution and marketing work. You can actually have it help you with the publishing work as well.

38:46.70
mike_flywheel
Okay, you probably just saved me a whole bunch of time. Thank you book.

38:51.17
David Salib
The other side of memento that could be helpful for people to know about is the social media management managing your content and your accounts across 5 or 6 different platforms is another one of the timesyncs that creators face. It's the opening every single app. It's the moving the video file from your computer to your phone and posting. It's the writing the captions and maybe the hashtags and the titles and maybe scheduling it and doing all that work. So we built a social media manager into memento it integrates with all the social platforms. It will use Ai to generate captions and hashtags for the post so you don't have to spend time coming up with something for that. They're Seo optimized. So they help with search results as you're putting stuff on Youtube shorts primarily and then there's built-in scheduling so you can schedule stuff out ideally the entire workflow from what to pick how to make a look and where to distribute it to and when to distribute it is end to end available memento so that you're able to do that flow. 5 six seven times per episode and have time to do it that helps enable that growth that we're helping creators achieve.

39:53.22
mike_flywheel
And does it allow me to schedule content not build through momento in there as well. Okay, okay, so like I might actually use this in conjunction because some of the steps you just talked about I obviously have.

39:59.80
David Salib
Not yet. But I think that's a next step for us.

40:10.30
mike_flywheel
Um, because I'm posting out like my podcasts I've got a bunch of different things that I do myself on Linkedin and like I have a lot of thoughts that require some time and then I write them out and then like I get ahead of myself or if I was posting as much as I'm having these thoughts like people would definitely unfollow me so I have to like kind of pace the release a little bit.

40:27.58
David Salib
Um, ah.

40:29.45
mike_flywheel
Um, and so right now I'm doing that in in one tool I'll give him the shout out simplified I'm using a tool called simplified but in tandem to simplified you're saying instead of downloading. All of the files into folders and then like remembering which one I've already scheduled versus not I should just do this all in momento which you know what? whatever time we're spending on this podcast tonight I think I'm going to save this amount of time probably within the next one or 2 episodes I publish out.

41:00.23
David Salib
Love that.

41:02.39
mike_flywheel
Just on the things I'm learning real time in here and it just shows like if there's amazing features of these tools and and you guys are moving fast like I know some of these things are coming like hot every week I log in to something new. So I know ah I knew of three weeks of not being in the tool like a bunch of things. Would have changed and so it's really cool to learn some of that and get past practice is cool.

41:21.10
David Salib
Yeah, yeah, I'm really glad to hear that and I'll I'll give you 1 more like a cherry on top for that. We integrate all the analytics from the platforms back into memento so all the analytics are coming back to memento you can see that in memento and we also use that to help inform what the next best clip will be for you.

41:24.95
mike_flywheel
Okay.

41:39.79
David Salib
So every time you're own memento. It's constantly learning so you're getting truly it. Yes, yes, exactly that's the thing with Ai is the more reinforcement you can give it the more data you can suggest to it the more it truly becomes your personal assistant.

41:41.42
mike_flywheel
So It's better to stay in the workflow because it'll actually be iterative. Yeah. I got it? Um I I know where I think you make money but where where do you guys make money in the process.

42:04.30
David Salib
Ah, we ah, we charge for the processing of the episode and then we make everything else unlimited so you get 4 episodes per month that you can run through memento and they read you every month and we currently charge around $35 a month. And after that, everything's unlimited. So no limit on the number of clips you produce no limit on the social accounts you can connect no limit on how much text you can write using the chat assistant because we don't want to limit your growth on the output and most of our cost is on the input. So. That's how we do our pricing at the moment subject change in case, this. Episodes being listened through in the future.

42:37.90
mike_flywheel
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fair. It's always up to like things change and move and move quickly. Um, but what's been the hardest part of this like you this is I guess for you and your brothers this technically your first other than that one you had ah. Canadian one that was like a bit of hardware based I forget that Mingo you called it. Mingo good memory. Um other than Mingo this is really like 1 of your first bigger startups and so you clearly chose a big category alongside.

42:57.70
David Salib
Yeah mango.

43:12.53
mike_flywheel
Ai which is still super fresh, meaty topic. What's what's been the hardest part so far like what's challenging and if you can share you know, maybe some advice of what you're learning along this journey and.

43:18.81
David Salib
Is safe.

43:24.24
David Salib
For us being in the media content space. 1 of the hardest parts has been trying to meet the needs of our users given that the thing we're helping people work on is something very personal to them either personal to them individually or personal to their brand. So the standard that we have to meet. For creative content is is quite high and I think it's easy as a startup to feel like you're drowning under all the different user requests. The things people need feeling the worry and the stress of how much you're going to need to build to try to meet a certain bar now I think what we've learned along the way. 1 there's a few things that people really really need right now and you want to as a startup you want to find those things that once you have them nothing else. Matters. You know if you're in if you're in the desert you need water you want to find. Water for your customers. What's that thing you can solve right away. That's very very valuable and then they end up creating this loop of feedback and information and insight there's ah another pitfall startups go through often. Is they wait too long to release their product because they're trying to build the perfect product.

44:37.86
mike_flywheel
That's actually and i't want to cut you off, but like the amount of times I've heard that and I like to call it the 80% go so I just want to reiterate that and I'm mean I hate cutting people off so I'm so sorry but

44:38.50
David Salib
The.

44:44.87
David Salib
Here.

44:51.53
mike_flywheel
80% go this is like David I'm excited to hear your perspective but this is like a thing and people definitely overthink it like even when they think they're not overthinking it. They're overthinking it because they're like well what if something goes wrong. No one will use us ever again.

44:59.58
David Salib
Yes I.

45:08.45
mike_flywheel
Okay, unpause back to you I Just need to have that dramatic moment for myself for.

45:10.85
David Salib
You're a hundred percent you're a hundred percent right the thing is there's a 99% chance. Whatever you launch will not be the right thing the pricing you pay could probably be wrong. The product you build is probably missing some core ideas and maybe the whole entire idea was good, but. The idea you need to be a successful startup versus successful business is the great one and oftentimes that first thing you launch if not all the time is just a stepping stone towards what's actually the big pain point because once you launch you get a few things you start getting users. You start getting feedback. You start seeing more of your competitors because you're spending less time. Building and more time trying to go to market and that kind of leads me to another learning It's kind of related to what we're talking about here is startups often spend a lot of time building than trying to distribute but startups need to spend as much time distributing as they do building they should be these parallel processes because. That's another way you kind of circumvent the issue of building something people don't need so much if not everything we build today is something a user as request that requested at some point of time which means we know we're building something people need. The worst thing startup could ever do is build something that that nobody needs and unfortunately a lot of times that's what happens. So ah, just learning to be very customer obsessed learning to be in the market time in the market beats timing the market. You know, find common financial advice I think for startups. It's the same thing.

46:33.18
mike_flywheel
Yeah, and when you do that you I mean as long as the as long as the users are patient. Hopefully they will. Come to love what you're doing more and become advocates too. Um, most people are more understanding than we probably give them credit for.. There's a lot of non-understanding people out there for sure. But if you're solving a problem that really isn't being solved elsewhere. The reality is like okay then.

46:59.37
David Salib
Have.

47:07.80
mike_flywheel
Do Whatever you're doing before because clearly you came here for a reason because we're solving some problem Now. It may not be every problem of yours we will get there but the alternative is nothing possibly or maybe a competitor um which we can talk about that in a second too. But I love that just go because. You know you need to spend time I'm going to try to recapture what you just said, but you need to spend just as much time trying to market and amplify your product as you do building your product is that sort of like a good punchline. Okay, momento is going to pick that up right? Yeah I Love it.

47:37.40
David Salib
Yeah, yeah I think so it sure will you know that you know this episode is getting went through Momenta right after.

47:45.43
mike_flywheel
Um, yeah, yeah, you're going to agree to the backend like triple tweed ch what are all the hot points. It's like a I plus manual David intervention. Um I love it competitors in this space. You don't have to name them but like is this like a hot. Base and I'm almost thinking like I think I brought someone recently that's doing something very similar. There's nuances ah between what you're both doing but like who who or how many competitors are in this space is it is it busy is it still like there's like.

48:16.86
David Salib
Yes.

48:20.12
mike_flywheel
Few that are really breaking through what's what's your thoughts on that and how are you guys thinking of you don't have to give away all your secrets. But how are you thinking about competition I guess generally in your moat.

48:28.57
David Salib
Somebody taught me once a few years ago that if there's no competitors in your space. It's probably not a good space. You know you can't be the first person who thought of something and if you if you are, you're probably insanely you know very lucky. You're very smart. So yeah, there's definitely competitors in parts of what we do and. I think as a side note relevant to where we are today in 23 when it comes to ai if your biggest competitor isn't human labor. It's probably not the right ai idea it's probably just a feature or some other product if it's not truly something that can help save people time or help them do their jobs a stepwise function better. There are competitors that do automatic clipping that try to find the best clips there are competitors that try to write a bunch of stuff about your show. There are competitors that do social media management. There are competitors that will help you create video. We are focused first and foremost on quality and I think that's when we think about competition.

49:23.30
mike_flywheel
So.

49:25.73
David Salib
Always't be competitors. We're focused on picking the best moments giving the best experience having the best creative control over the content and the streamlined effect even though we have competitors in different parts of the product I think we pride ourselves on being a really high quality end 10 solution and then also when it comes to the creative space. We've been in market longer than most of our competitors and 1 thing we've learned is quality will always win and I think that's a lesson that Apple has learned and taught very very well that quality always wins so people are always going to build things with AiTheyEncompPlay ideas they'll try to create things that are similar. But just focusing on the long-term quality is how we look at competition right now.

50:03.41
mike_flywheel
So I love that so you're gonna really focus on building your your mode around being the highest quality so there might be comparables but people are just not going to be able to get the same output quality and workflow quality and efficiency compared to where you guys are going. Next six months like what's what's in store for you maybe 12? you got your 12 but I know things move fast like what's sort of like a milestone that you as a team collectively are working towards over the next six six to twelve months

50:37.41
David Salib
We've been in market for about two months now so live as a product prior to that we were in beta there is such a huge flood of user requests. Ah you know I'm going to look in the data and find out.

50:44.47
mike_flywheel
Okay, wait Oh so was I was I a Beta user. Okay, okay I Love it.

50:52.70
David Salib
We it. It wasn't an open vta side I'm not sure if you could have got in. But maybe you found a way in there but you definitely in our first batch of users. You're definitely very early very very, you can say your beta I no no one's match we um.

51:00.55
mike_flywheel
Um, as I'll pretend even if someone someone asked me just he eyes yeah was beta. Okay, no, 1 ne's fact checking us.

51:11.83
David Salib
So we're we're fairly young as a product we spent again back to that point of quality we spent a lot of time in beta almost like four to six months and you could say hey you spent a long time getting into market. But while we were in beta I spent a lot of time growing the beta I was actively reaching out to creators to bring people in so in a sense we kind of were in market in sense. We weren't. So when we launched people were really surprised about how comprehensive the product was for such an early product but the truth of the matter is we were developing for a while also well before Chad Jp came out you know months before Chad Gps when we started building this stuff I think now we're in this maturity phase. There's a bunch of obvious features that we need to build. To really be the solution. We want to be for creators. There's some really exciting things happening with Ai that we'd love to capitalize on and start investing in for the long-term and then there's some other markets that could really benefit from this technology. So our my next job and my brother you know leading the company will be figuring out. When we feel like the product is ready just for purely distribution and the markets we're in with minimal iteration and deciding what the next next best market to buy this technology will be for.

52:18.59
mike_flywheel
That's super cool and you think someone like some of those things will come to reality probably over the next six to twelve months

52:22.18
David Salib
Oh we. We update the product on a daily basis and I think big features launch on a weekly cadence for us as a startup where we've focus on quality but we also developed very very very quickly. So I know users who hop in the product. You know, two weeks ago and they come in. They're like well this looks. Completely different which I think as a start if you know you launch and you just keep building building building iterating iterating iterating until you converge on on that final stage.

52:50.16
mike_flywheel
I love it. Okay, 1 question that came to my mind and I know like I'm kind of really backtracking now but technically momento needs an input though. So like if you don't have like video or audio content. Um. This isn't really for you like could you input text content. You could input text only content like ah like ah an agency could use a brief about a business to help create output content right.

53:11.85
David Salib
You. Yeah.

53:25.47
mike_flywheel
And is that like a ah space for you guys too. So.

53:26.59
David Salib
Yeah, so currently when we train custom ai models for larger clients. We train on their text content primarily to process all their old articles their writing style and and also the content they used to have Ah, you've hit the nail on the head you know video and audio content's huge.

53:32.10
mike_flywheel
Okay, so.

53:42.99
David Salib
But a lot of the content and internet's written and there's a lot of writing influences. So many different parts of the business. So 1 being able to do something very similar to memento for the text audience like text input to text output we can. We can do audio video input and do your text output but going text to that text.

54:01.15
mike_flywheel
Yeah.

54:01.84
David Salib
Potential space and the other is what if you actually a creator who has nothing you just have an idea how can we help you go from pre channel pre-brand pre ah Rss feed to getting to that step and I think that's even earlier in the content lifecycle.

54:06.64
mike_flywheel
Yeah, yeah.

54:21.45
David Salib
But I think there's some interesting things that could be done there as well.

54:24.80
mike_flywheel
So that's awesome. Um wow so I'm excited to actually get back to making more content now I don't know I've been away from using momentmento for a few weeks and and I'm excited to to dive back in. It sounds like there's going to be a bunch of more cool features. Then no when I um, you know took ah took a little vacation for the last few weeks um David any any closing thoughts from your side. Maybe any other final pieces of advice you shared so much knowledge. So much advice has been like. Amazing for me to learn I'm sure audience is going to learn at time but any any other thoughts from your set.

54:59.10
David Salib
I Think only to if you're listening to this and you've always wanted to create whether it's a podcast or or articles or videos get started start doing its all of tools out there to make that easier ai makes it Ai reduces the barriers from going from your ideas to the actual final. Format. So I think it's exciting and I hope more people will start sharing their thoughts and and contributing to the content space and then 2 if you are looking for a tool that can help you write produce video help you analyze your content. Please try Memento or our Url is try Momentmento ai to try memento Ai. And whenever you send a support request. It comes straight to my brother and I So if you ever want to talk to us just go some headach very but and we love we love feedback I've had users send me looms I send them back. Looms looms are short recorded videos I've had someone send me Alumin I Just send them a loom back I'll hop on calls with people.

55:40.99
mike_flywheel
I can confirm that I can confirm that. But.

55:55.89
David Salib
Ah, we're very very user obsessed. So please try Momentmento reach out and happy creating.

56:01.18
mike_flywheel
That's amazing and we'll make sure all this is linked in the show notes which hopefully momento will help us create the show of show notes and we'll create some inputs to make sure all of your your ctas are there. Um man I've had a blast. Dude you you guys are so smart I Love what you're doing.

56:17.76
mike_flywheel
Thank you for for joining in next. It's funny because we're you know we focus on canadian startups. Um David and his brother are canadian but hanging out down south of the border for a bit but also have canadian teams. So we we threw them a pass through a little bit of a pass here. But um, when you're when you. Come visit home. Ah, make sure to let let me know you're in town and we can. We can definitely catch up over ah a a real coffee. No no a I coffee will do real it like real coffee sound. Good man. Awesome! Thanks a lot again. David ah, that was David from memento.

56:47.88
David Salib
I'd love to thank you.

56:54.54
mike_flywheel
We had a blast catch you guys on the next episode.