Pitch Please

00:01.55
mike_flywheel
Welcome back, everybody to the pitch please podcast. It's Mike here again today we are joined by Tanika Mcleod from click or minute skill little bit of a pivot there. So I'm gonna toss it over to you for a quick introduction and maybe can give us a little bit of background on your role. And a little bit of the difference between what minute skill and click are in which we're going to be talking about today.

00:23.45
Tanika_ From Cliq
Awesome! Yeah, thanks Mike hi everyone I'm tanika I am the co-founder of Minuteskill and click so a bit about me I got into entrepreneurship about three and a half years ago now when my younger brother and co-founder. Nathan. Ah, came to me with an idea like he just notoriously has this little book of ideas that he's had since a kid. Um, yeah, it's it's really cute I'm not going to lie. Don't tell him that ah so he he came to me and he was like hey you know we're more financially stable.

00:46.59
mike_flywheel
I Love that.

00:58.35
Tanika_ From Cliq
At the moment. Do you want to pursue one of these ideas with me and um at the time I was finishing my master's he was finishing his bachelor's in ah biomed my masters was in sociollegal studies I have a very nontraditional entrepreneurship background. Ah, studying criminology political science and and law. Um and so around that time I was like fuck. Yeah let's do it like let's let's try this? Um I was a little bit kind of disillusioned with the labor market already. So I was very into looking at entrepreneurship as a way out and um. Actually started in health tech and this was around the summer of 19 hence you know his biomed background and then as you can imagine rough timing. Yeah yeah, really rough timing because shortly thereafter it was very hard to talk to doctors of course.

01:38.59
mike_flywheel
Yeah, rough timing though for a health tech company.

01:50.56
Tanika_ From Cliq
And so eventually we did kind of sunset that and just kind of play around in the entrepreneurship and innovation space Nathan went on to do his masters at Tmu in engineering innovation and entrepreneurship and that's really where minute skill was born. So the idea came from wanting to solve the problem of learning in the flow of work. Like Nathan was doing his masters and it was all online and it was like the worst experience he was learning things in class that he just couldn't apply in real-time in real life. Um, because of the sort of linear structure of courses I think they just cover every topic in detail one after the other whether or not you're applying that at that moment. It's not the best way to learn and so he found himself like really just exploring social media to try to learn these things and we had been doing that for years prior just trying to learn how to be a founder and how to build a startup from Youtube videos and Instagram and wherever we could find information blog articles. Ah, and so around this time we started to join accelerators and they helped us learn from a more reliable source for sure, but the structure of learning was still very much like a classroom where you show up. It's like a long seminar maybe an hour two hour hour 2 hour hour two hour hour 2 hour hour two hour hour 2 hour hour two hour hour 2 hours you're talking about every topic you know one after another. Whether or not you're applying it to your business and so we're like there's got to be a better way to learn in the flow of your work and so we wanted to kind of ah bring together the engaging aspects of social media that draw us there to learn in the first place and engage with people.

03:22.40
Tanika_ From Cliq
And then give it that more structure and reliability of maybe traditional. You know, relearning platforms pull those things together and create more of a social learning network where people can come together learn from bite-s size videos that teach you that specific thing you're trying to learn like 1 step in a process or how to complete maybe like a. A 1 ne-pager for your business if we're talking about a pitch deck. Let's talk about each slide 1 by 1 instead of like an hour-long session on how to create a pitch deck so that was really the vision there and our early adopters. Let us know that like community was really important as well content can answer all of the questions and so we paired that. You know bite-sized learning with engaging communities where you could join other people who were learning the same thing ask questions share your experiences and really just learn from your peers and so that was great. Um, we we I won't get too into the weeds here in terms of our story we can unpack it a bit but. We went to antler with that vision pre-product and they they loved the team and they loved our. Um you know our ability to learn and our disposition towards learning understanding that we don't know everything that we need to know right now in order to build this vision but we are. Wholly committed to learning everything we need to along the way and that you know we're a pretty resilient team. We could overcome challenges think creatively and we weren't easily discouraged so we ended up raising two hundred and twenty thousand dollars at Dantler Canada as 1 of the first 5 portfolio companies.

04:54.86
Tanika_ From Cliq
Ah, andler is a global accelerated Vc fund and this was the first time that they actually came to Canada and that was great. We launched minute skill shortly thereafter and that was around I would say March pretty much a year ago ah I think a year ago maybe five days in five days and that was that was an incredible experience like we did a lot of the typical startup things like over the over the summer going to collision and elevate and all of that and it was towards the end of last year when we really needed to reflect on what we had done with minutes ago a lot of our early adopters told us you know we we really struggle to create bite size content and I'm sure you as a podcaster right? like trying to find memorable parts of your podcast on your own is like fucking impossible. It's harder than creating the actual long form content.

05:46.89
mike_flywheel
Yeah, because you're not just listening to it through once you've got to listen to it multiple times slice everything up. Did you cut it the right moment did it fit the output size of content that needs to exist for the realities. It's crazy. Yeah, so I'm so excited to learn today.

06:01.75
Tanika_ From Cliq
It's crazy. Awesome yeah, exactly it's absolutely insane and so I mean minute skill was created for learning purposes. But we also recognize that like there's a marketing side to educating online right? You got to bring people to your video in the first place and so yeah, just. Creating the the bite size content and then trying to market that content across different platforms was just like impossible and so we had actually started working on click around September of last year so September Twenty Twenty two without really knowing that it would become what it became. We just wanted to um. Create a really scrappy solution to this problem that our early adopters mentioned to us and it was really the brainchild of our ctoena he he was like you know guys I can just scrap something together in like a week and let's just see how people respond to it and that that is like that is entrepreneurial gold you know and you can just. Put something out there see what people think like that's really what you want to do? Ah, so we did that we got some good feedback and then a few months later around December Twenty Twenty Two we had to really think about you know what do we want to do moving forward. Do we want to continue pushing you know minute skill and developing the features that we think it needs. Do we want to take a second and solve this more urgent problem a problem that we thought was more urgent and and relevant and was kind of necessary to unlock the use case for minute skill in the first place if people can't create bite size content very easily. They can't share it in a community very easily. So.

07:33.67
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, we did that we we kind of reflected we pivoted a bit and my team met every single day over the holidays to ideate and build click. We had done some research as well with our users prior to so we just had that info to kind of build this Mvp and just to put it into perspective like. Minute skill as a double-sided platform. Um it it required like 8 maybe like close to twelve months of building just to kind of roll that out click took two months to roll out. Ah I think an mvp that far more quickly.

08:03.99
mike_flywheel
Wow.

08:11.22
Tanika_ From Cliq
Solves the problem that we want to solve for for our early adopters now.

08:16.51
mike_flywheel
So Many questions. Um, maybe let's start by rolling back a little bit I want to I want to address that book that you talked about your brother's idea book and was that something he's had like since childhood and. When he was writing those ideas did you ever think you would be sitting here. Um, as a co-founder with your brother diving in pivoting left and right across these ideas to change the world like was that in your roadmap back then or was it always like you were inspired by his his. You know, thinking around ideas and writing them down and it was nice but you really didn't think you'd be here. What's sort of the background there.

08:54.90
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, it's amazing. You know like this book. It's like this little dusty book now. It's very it's old. But yeah, he's had it forever. He was always a really like entrepreneurial minded person really like great at thinking outside of the box and we actually had a really challenging childhood. Um, and so I think that this was a way for him to like I don't know like see a future and like pursue that future and have something that he wanted to strive towards and I think that that's also what underlies a lot of our like overarching mission which is to have an impact. Ah, in this world in in various ways. Um, it's really stemming from a place of struggle and wanting to make the world or at least spaces or pockets in the world. Um, better for people like us who have maybe come from low income. Who are racialized who et cetera cetera you know, like there are so many different social locations that might alienate people today and so it was really I think for him about having that impact on the world world despite where he comes from and for me, you know, growing up I think. You know we both actually we daydreamed a lot you know like we would we would yeah just kind of daydream to escape sort of the situation that we were in as kids and that has really helped us think that like anything is possible. So for me, it wasn't really like ah I don't think this will ever happen. It was like.

10:22.76
Tanika_ From Cliq
Great hold on to those golden nuggets because one day we'll be able to act on that and I think it was the perfect time when he came to me and and you know, proposed that because we were both more ready to to jump into that kind of world than ever before and I don't think I could have ever imagined doing what we're doing today. I will say and we'll get into it but it's a really exciting world like that we're living in right now, especially when it comes to advancements in gen generative ai and so I never ever would have imagined that me as like a non-technical person would be playing in this space and like prompting. 1 of the most powerful generative Ai models like llms in the world. Ah so yeah, I'm um, it's like a bit of both I knew that we could do something incredible but I never would have imagined what we're doing now.

11:12.66
mike_flywheel
It's cool that you know it's an inspiring story and it's cool that you both kind of went on this quest or journey with the spark of ideas in the book together and kind of dreamed that one or more of them would be something that. You know inspires the journey to really go change the world around you and so it's a really, um, it's inspiring story and it's cool to see the work that you're doing together now now was your brother's first startup um that he asked you to join was that minute skill or was that the health tech one. For it and then minute skill. Um I know we're going to talk more about click today but is minute skill on pause. It still is existing is this a hard pivot like help me just understand that a bit because I know we're going to talk about click probably for the rest of the podcast. So just want to sort of ground and in what what's going on there.

12:03.88
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, so the very first um, project or startup that he came to me with was the health tech one we were just really trying to solve the problem of you know your healthcare information being so scattered in Canada like you can visit a doctor in 1 place a doctor in another place and they just won't even know. Um, what has happened in your medical record and so solving that problem especially for like hospitals and and the er situation and so of course that was not even a thing that could be considered after you know like February of 2022. Um.

12:38.14
mike_flywheel
It doesn't mean it's not useful by the way. It's just timing sometimes on these things is so incredibly important and obviously for you to get any type of audience in that space at that time would have been incredibly tough I can totally imagine.

12:42.31
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, yeah.

12:50.63
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, totally totally yeah and we also learned like as a first time founder. You know it's really challenging to get into certain spaces. Um health tech probably 1 of them. There are just a lot of high stakes there and so we recognize that and we're we're fine with that. Ah, minute scale really came about through his masters and so in terms of where it's at right now we have a few clients who are still using it um like schullich school of business. One of the top business schools here in Canada they are using it right now. So we do keep it operational for them and on our other clients. Um, and we are you know, looking to revisit the problem that we were solving but now we have a bit of a different perspective and I think that also different use cases open up with generative ai and what we're learning with it. So ultimately, we do want to help people learn in their flow of work in a community much more quickly. Ah, then then currently you can today but the way that we solve that problem I think will change from from the way that minute skill currently looks and that is something that I'm really excited about.

13:56.69
mike_flywheel
Super cool. Um antler where how does that play in is is antler for anyone that doesn't know are they like a Vc are they like an incubation hub where does antler fit into this this journey for you and your brother.

14:12.95
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, so antler oh my god it's it's crazy. Um, so we joined a lot of accelerators through minuteut skill. Um, we joined the ibz at tmu we joined tree frog we joined y space a couple of different accelerator programs at yspace. And um, one of our mentors from tree frog his name's Chris Carter might have heard of him. He's very big in the shoelich startup space. He is um, oof don't don't quote me on his position at shulich but he is I think a co-director of their office of innovation. Um, really influential guy in this space. Incredible mentor and he was the one who put antler on our radar. He was like have you heard of antler. We're like never he was like hey you should look them up and they're coming to Canada you should apply? Um, and I think applications were like closing very very soon. So it was a little bit of a rush. Um, but he really supported us in in applying and um, we all had interviews we pitched to them in person. It was a really incredible experience and like I said I think they they really valued the way that our team looked at learning. And that you know we understood our number 1 goal when it comes to building an early-stage startup is learning quickly and adapting quickly right? and even my brother Nathan um hear a saying that it's not It's not the smartest founder in the room.

15:43.53
Tanika_ From Cliq
It's not the most wealthy or those with the closest proximity to capital who win. Um, it is those founders who learn and adapt quickly and never give up Basically that is who I think that perfectly defines our entire team and so that's what antler I think valued. And um, we joined their program in January of 2022 and it's ah like a three month program typically for people who don't have a current startup or co-founders and they're looking for a co-founder and they build an idea together in the program they pitch it at the end of the three months um they make exceptions for a handful of preformed teams. We were one of those and yeah, we pitched at their demo day and we were one of the 5 ah companies who were selected for investment.

16:32.74
mike_flywheel
That's amazing. Well congratulations. It's cool to be in. You know the first canadian cohort. It's even cooler to be one of the fewer that don't get built within antler. Um, but also come in with a team that gets fully embraced by by the antler team and I think it'll be cool to maybe do ah a spotlight on the show on antler for people trying to do a similar thing since I know a lot of people are at that I have an idea to change the world and they just maybe don't know where to start or how to get the other piece of the puzzle. You were fortunate to have that and have someone that you've known for a very long time and can trust and equally are inspired by a similar mission. So which um, which is rare doesn't always happen that way. So maybe let's let's dive into click a little bit. Um. Since this show is called pitch. Please we have to start with your best elevator pitch so when you can to nika your pitch please.

17:28.29
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, yeah, let's do it so the the social media strategy for 2023 is very much about omnipresence right? having an online presence across multiple platforms. But for creators and especially educational creators.

17:45.67
Tanika_ From Cliq
That is really challenging like they don't have the time the resources the money to allocate to that strategy. They're educators. They're not marketers even as you were saying earlier right? like the editing part. That's not why you're here and so that's why we create a click you can just give it a long form video podcast and it will give you. Shareable clips as well as write content for all of your favorite platforms like Linkedin instagram tiktok and even long form content like blogs and newsletters. So that you can be omnipresent without having to either pay a lot of money or put in a lot of time. So we see it as we're helping creators grow their audience across platforms with 1 click see what I did there. It's a little a yeah is good.

18:30.12
mike_flywheel
Ah, we both like puns pitch Please Click. It's good I Love it. Um, So I think you know we talked a lot about how it got started the pivot or. Incremental addition to to get click from minute skill was from from some of your early adopters and I think you started talking a little bit about it there but who who ultimately are going to be the users of this because there's the users of minute skill that your earlier adopters and there's probably the path forward of who you truly see building this. Um, you mentioned creators. But who's sort of like the whole whole space that might use this and who's sort of like your focus or bullseye in in this space.

19:13.42
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, so in terms of the the broader scope content creators generally podcasters people who create webinars to market their their company or their business or their services. Um narrowing that down. More so educational creators Micro creators who are trying to build their audience. They have great um knowledge to share but they're not necessarily like super pro creators or like in terms of the video sense. Um, they're not editors copywriting and marketing may not be strong suits for them.

19:40.90
mike_flywheel
Yeah.

19:47.39
Tanika_ From Cliq
They have a wealth of knowledge to share and so those are really the people that we want to speak to because what we want to do is really like eliminate a lot of the economic barriers to succeeding in social media in this age right? like the idea that. Your content's lifespan on certain platforms can be like seconds right? like on Tiktok. It's like immediately just gone into the ether. So you know when ah when we talk about the strategy being omnipresent being able to share your content across platforms. When we really talk about what that means it means that you either have that expertise or you have the money and that's kind of it. Otherwise it's a huge uphill struggle and so for us we see that as a major economic barrier like creators who can afford to pay people to do that can afford to be omnipresent. And that's just not fair, right? People have a wealth of knowledge regardless of like what resources they have to put into their marketing so we just want to make it like instead of it being like a team sport I think I've heard this recently in another podcast that social media and 2023 will be a team sport. We think that your team can just be. You know you and click. Until you have the ability to evolve into a broader team. It shouldn't be prohibitively expensive for you to get your your like your information and your voice and your brand out there.

21:12.69
mike_flywheel
I'm so excited to learn more because I actually face this problem. Um I love having these discussions I Love finding a variety of other conversations to have I like sharing that knowledge because I think sometimes it doesn't get.

21:18.19
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um.

21:29.76
mike_flywheel
Always the spotlight. It deserves not just the founder stories not just the ideas that people are working on but like not always just the success stories the hardships. The journey are super powerful but I I can't I mean I'm sure I could learn it. But you know my core capability is not audio or video editing or coming up with a ton of social content which takes far longer than people would ever imagine when you have to start to to slice and splice it um now.

21:53.58
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, yeah.

22:00.60
mike_flywheel
Before we dive into the product I wanted to talk about a piece that you mentioned earlier which was the speed at which you were able to create click compared to minute skill and the power of. Ai and llms like large language models did ai play into the speed at which you were able to bring this to market or was it your experience of bringing minute skill to market or a bit of both.

22:31.61
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, definitely a bit of both so starting with the minute skill experience. Um, you know we're still early stage startups or or founders ourselves. So I think that sometimes when people see a lot of like the media coverage on us. They think that we're like super far ahead and we're doing all these crazy things. But no, we're just like we're. Trying to figure our shit out like anybody else. So with Minutekill we did. We definitely fell into one of those early stage founder traps which is that um I think it's like and related to an assumption that you know your product needs to be fully fleshed out and perfect before you can put it into the world. And you know if if you release something that isn't you know your full vision and somebody hates it your customers hate it. You're done. You're done for it. You're like never going to work in this town again like it just feels overwhelming like that sometimes and so with minute skill. We definitely? Um, we overbuilt the product. It was more than an Mvp and not only that but we weren't as closely connected to our users throughout that building process. We weren't getting their feedback at every turn we were getting their feedback like at the end you know after months and months and months of effort and time and resources. Um, only to need to revise and adapt after that point and so we learned a huge lesson there which is that you need to very quickly get your product out there and this is something that Michael Sibel talks about in ycombinator's latest ah Youtube video on how to launch an Mvp.

24:02.41
Tanika_ From Cliq
You need to get your product out there as quickly as possible so that you can actually start learning from your users. You don't really start to learn from your customer from your target audience until you have something in front of them and they can tell you you know, realistically whether that actually solves their problem. Whether it actually helps them accomplish the goals they're trying to accomplish and that's where you learn and iterate and adapt to the market. You can't really do that just in your head or in kind of like an echo chamber within your own team. You must get it out there so that was something we learned with minute skill and we totally took that approach with click. And that is why it took us only two months to really get it out there and truly the build was maybe a month and a half and the rest of the time was just a lot of the marketing the setup the go-to market connecting our stripe is like still a thing. So.

24:47.25
mike_flywheel
Ah.

24:54.95
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, yeah, we we really took that approach. But in addition to that generative Ai definitely played a role um a couple of members on my team and myself are very very very early adopters of chat gp and we were actually working with Generative Ai prior to that whole like big I don't know. Hype around chat gpc. We were already creating video titles and summaries back in September so we just kind of amplified that so it helped us learn a bit more about the space but also a lot of the um. Like copywriting and marketing and the strategic like go-to-market stuff that stuff we were really able to expedite with chat gbt because it really helped us just rephrase some of what we wanted to get out there. We're not I'm not. Ah, copywriter. That's for damn sure you know like I have people on my team like Mano who's a genius in that space but he can't be doing all of that himself. So it helped the rest of our team kind of find ways to articulate. You know the value propositions of the product in a way that was just better suited for our target audience. Helped us as a team clarify our Target Target audience a bit and I do want to say you want to be careful of like hallucinations right? We all know that um like these large language models can just say shit makes it up that sounds compelling. Um so you got to be careful of that. But at a general level when it comes to like writing.

26:14.25
mike_flywheel
Yeah.

26:22.63
Tanika_ From Cliq
It really helped us just get that out of the way which was something that really held us up with minutes ago

26:28.91
mike_flywheel
That's it's funny. It comes back to what we're talking about just before the the show which is a piece that I want to start doing a whole bunch of podcasts just on this bit within the startup space which is use it build it break it. How are startups using Ai. To accelerate what they're building how are startups building Ai into their product set which you did with click and at the same time break it which is disrupting traditional models business models and the one you're disrupting it sounds like correct me if I'm wrong here is. Content development and copywriting at speed for creators in in the world where maybe people had to go you know hire someone full time or maybe do it part time through fiverr upwork you're now empowering the creators to do that or maybe have one person on their team. Still. But they can go do this and many other things way faster like you were talking about manual on your team. Amazing copywriter. It's still a bottleneck when it's only 1 person and so 1 person can do way more. With ai so it's it's cool to see that you've actually been in all 3 of those you're using it. You're building it and you're breaking it and and I love that I want to talk um a little bit about how this actually works and and mostly for the listeners but also for me. Um.

27:48.67
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, yeah.

27:49.52
mike_flywheel
And if you can talk you know from the start of like how someone onboards and then how they go through it to use Click and is it just for video is it for audio only you know, obviously we were talking before the show my podcast so far has been primarily Audio only. Mostly because I'm not a video editor and the video quality has been met and you know I plan to change that So does it require like a fully edited video podcast to work. Can it use audio and sort of walk me through the process for for our listeners and maybe some of that's even in the roadmap but let's let's learn.

28:27.16
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, when you when you log into click um, it's just like a simple signup and then you're on the home page and it tells you to start a project just drag and drop a video like a file. Upload it from your device. You can also upload from Google drive with a link and we are rolling out a Youtube integration as well. Um, yeah, and in the future we will be supporting audio only right now I think it's only video I'd have to double check. But we are looking to roll out audio only as well. So that yeah.

28:44.38
mike_flywheel
Amazing.

28:52.60
mike_flywheel
Okay.

28:58.66
Tanika_ From Cliq
Video or audio only podcast can can also benefit and so what happens after that once you've uploaded your video or your audio. Um it will process that you'll see it in like a projects page. It'll say processing for a few minutes. You'll get an email when the results are up but usually it takes just a few minutes it really depends on how long the file was. And then once you click into that project. You'll see all of your clips that it has generated for you. You'll see your master clip as well and then you can kind of you have like this little simple video editor in the middle of the page where you can see the clip that you clicked on and you can even like trim the ins and outs of that. We'll be integrating other kinds of video intelligence like aspect ratios different aspect ratios for different platforms and even like a dynamic aspect ratio that can just kind of hold your subject even if they move and a few other things like. We're working on recliping like you can clip your clips even smaller and for particular platforms so like 7 to 15 seconds for Tiktok maybe 30 seconds for an Instagram reel maybe 3 to 5 minutes or even longer for Linkedin. So all of that will be coming soon. And on the same page. You also see the written content that you can generate so you'll see a button for Linkedin Instagram and Tiktok right now as well as blogs newsletters haven't come out yet and when you click on that there's just a little side panel with the generated content.

30:27.49
Tanika_ From Cliq
And you can open that up to be a bigger text editor. You can edit that text right in the window you can copy it. You can download all of those assets. Um, you can generate new drafts. So for instance, if you like some of this Linkedin post but you're not quite sold on the rest you can generate another one and see if you can mesh those together. The idea is not for Ai to write 100% of your content but to just get you like 99% of the way there and you do that 1% of editing that just puts the most you know effort or sort not effort um puts the most value into the content. Ah, so that's really yeah, what it does at the moment but we've got some really exciting features that we'll be rolling out as well.

31:07.80
mike_flywheel
That's amazing. Um, so I should hurry my butt up and start getting some video out but it sounds like you'll catch up to my slowness and also have some audio can it. So I guess part of that is.

31:10.98
Tanika_ From Cliq
Are. Yeah, should it be sin.

31:23.87
mike_flywheel
Equally learning here I guess I'll have to have an edited video because part of what it probably does is pans between the speakers. So I need like the full clip of edited audio and video as an input and it goes through and it'll find like moments within the podcast. That are like topic based so it assumes hey here's a good topic that is an entire comprehensive thought that can be put out there as content and then creates it in all the different aspect Ratios pumps it out for all those different things but also can help. Um. Write based on those those clips as well is that sort of the the right thing dick.

32:02.52
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, that's the vision. So right now what it does is it'll cut up the video based on the topics discussed but it doesn't highlight the themes yet. But that's one of the things that we're rolling out soon.

32:08.51
mike_flywheel
Um, yeah, okay.

32:14.89
Tanika_ From Cliq
Which is that you can identify different themes and topics that were discussed and just kind of click on those Keywords and it'll show you all of the clips where you talk about that topic and you can kind of have it smart select clips for you. As Well as for speakers as Well. So if you thought you know like oh I said something that was really cool or tanika said something that was really Cool. You can just kind of highlight that um and create clips that way. Yeah, and um, the the written content is really cool because it also takes into consideration the tone of voice in the video itself.

32:36.51
mike_flywheel
That's cool.

32:47.37
Tanika_ From Cliq
It doesn't just sound like an Ai robot that doesn't really sound like you or your brand. Um, we can really tailor it to your personal tone of voice as well as a brand tone of voice a brand tone of voice will come out later but right now definitely it's it's looking at your tone of voice to write that content.

33:02.65
mike_flywheel
For sure. So like we're talking casual. So the output of the post would be more casual in nature to to highlight that's that's super interesting and does the video auto caption as well. Okay, okay, so approve the.

33:14.96
Tanika_ From Cliq
Not yet. But soon yeah, so we'll be rolling in up some things like yeah yeah, so um, like auto captions and even like captions for different platforms. You know like the Instagram real style captions that are burned into your video things like that will be rolling out as well.

33:26.90
mike_flywheel
Yeah that's amazing I will be I've already opened up your website simultaneously. So im and be signing up to try try this out as as I'm gonna go through that I got I guess I have to start getting on some video too. But. In this space I mean it's so new. Um, are there competitors like how do you see the landscape today I imagine there has to be similarities. But what was your sort of view of the competitive landscape and content creation. Um. At scale and and leveraging digital tools.

34:02.50
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, so I think there will be more closely aligned competitors at the moment we have some competitive alternatives that don't do the full thing so they'll either work with video or they'll generate content but they don't do both in 1 place. And I I don't know why but I do I do think it has it has it's related to some of the inherent limitations of the models that we've had previously like 3 point 5 and prior which is context window. Anybody who's working with Generative ai right now as a prompt engineer like that's your.

34:28.47
mike_flywheel
Um, yeah.

34:36.78
Tanika_ From Cliq
The bane of your existence is this context window which is basically how much content you can feed into the model and how much it can give you in total like those 2 things combined is your context window and it has a token limit of about 4000 tokens um, tokens are just um, like characters of like letters pieces of words. Um, that openai uses to kind of you know train their model and charge you for using their model I don't know too much of that. But it's basically the words broken down and so four thousand tokens is not a lot.

35:09.88
mike_flywheel
Yeah.

35:14.55
Tanika_ From Cliq
Of context you couldn't feed it like a whole transcript of a video. For instance, we're solving that problem really creatively. That's kind of our secret sauce. So I could imagine. That's why there aren't really many people doing what we do right now. I think that may change in the near future as that context window expands. But. Um I think it is really still pretty challenging to work with video in the way that we are because it's deeply connected to the way that we are writing the content. Um, and that's that's a really tricky sort of thing to prompt. That's again, part of our secret sauce. Um, so as much as there are these golias in the. Copywriting space copy AiJasper um they so far haven't really cracked that tone of voice like your personal tone of voice. That's our sort of defensible differentiator in that regard and when it comes to competitors like maybe chopcast. Um, vied io and others who work with video. Um they don't help you do that insane process of copywriting so you can have a bunch of video clips. But you'll still end up spending a shit ton of time writing copy for each of those clips. Um, so yeah, that's. That's what I'm thinking over time we'll see into impersonators of of sorts which is always great. Um, but I think that the way that we do what we're doing will always be our defense or defensible moat.

36:41.78
mike_flywheel
I love it. It is to your point I've seen some of the ones you were mentioning. Um, there's one I have started using which works not for video. Um, it takes only your audio input and. Helps find moments from just the audio input and allows you to basically splice those audio bits and just have the um the captions and then it uses Ai generated video versus your own video I can imagine your own video is so much harder in capturing that tone. And all of the social outputs of text I'll share it after I'm not going to mention their name here I'm not going to give them free ad space yet. Um, but but I can see all of the problems you're talking about where I'm like I'm looking at how challenging it is to even get to perfect on just audio.

37:20.74
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, ah yeah, okay.

37:34.27
mike_flywheel
And how much work I'm still having to do like yes, helping me find 15 key moments in a 42 minute podcast that are like co cohesive thought streams is helpful but I'm still doing so much more after that I still have to write social posts stuff and so if you can integrate a bunch of these things. Your point from 1 transcript super powerful and then if you can get the video editing right? So I'm excited I'm excited to sign up. Um, yeah I love it.

38:00.57
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, and if I can before we move on. Give you a little bit of a sneak peek as to what's coming. Um, so yeah, we we had a conversation with 1 of our early adopters and longtime supporters. Mike Ashy definitely check him out. He's a content creator. He's on Youtube and other platforms. Um.

38:17.30
mike_flywheel
Gonna write that down.

38:18.11
Tanika_ From Cliq
He's great. Yeah Mike Ashey check him out shout out to Mike he actually you know helped us see that we were helping creators grow their audiences across platforms with one click like that was his idea shout out again. Um, and what he proposed to us was um. Ah, user experience. That's slightly different from what we have now and so our team's actually very seriously like talking about this but the idea that you could just drop your video and it tells you how many Instagram posts you have how many Tiktok posts you have etc, etc. It just tells you that gives you those clips gives you the content written.

38:54.12
mike_flywheel
Um, yeah.

38:55.77
Tanika_ From Cliq
And you just kind of review it by clip post by post and just kind of schedule that into a calendar and like set it and forget it and so that's the experience that we're striving towards now. Um, which is like you know eliminating as many of those steps as possible. That one day you can just kind of drag and drop this. Oh I'm seeing a little error message here. You can just kind of drag and drop your content into Click and it will handle the rest basically and you just kind of like a manager you maybe review the work and schedule it to go.

39:29.27
mike_flywheel
Um, yeah.

39:30.64
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, So yeah I think that if anybody is like a content creator even a podcaster if you're creating webinars to um market your business your services Definitely check us out now because we don't have all of this right now. But your feedback is what will help us build something that ultimately serves you best. So I think now is a really great time to join you know and see what's going on and actually shape the future of Click so wanted to mention that and like a shout up.

39:58.18
mike_flywheel
I'm I'm in I gotta to go figure out how to get and maybe I'll I'll get permission from a few of the people even though the the video may not be perfect I think there's a few things I've picked up and something even people have been telling me and and you said it around how you brought click to market this video I mean it's not. Um, newly as good as the bar people have set for video content out there but to your point sometimes just actually getting it out while it's not perfect is actually better than not putting it out. So I might just go back to some of the videos like this and make them work even if they're not perfect and start playing with it and I would love to to. Probably be an immediate customer if if you will let me and and be a part of that feedback loop which sounds like it'll be pretty cool I just gotta go figure out and maybe you even have some advice for this the next step of this is and I guess I'll play around Zencastr a little bit too I'm trying to figure out how to go take. Not a video editor these podcasts and pump them out as edited videos very simply so now that I'm actually exploring that I'll probably look to Zencastr in the short term I think it has some of those capabilities in there and you may have been the forcing function and the push I needed. So Thank you for inspiring me to to you know hurry it up made a little bit of a fire. Um, so how how does click I mean I I think I know but how does click make money. Um off of off of this like what's the business model is it monthly subscription based.

41:15.32
Tanika_ From Cliq
Awesome.

41:30.67
mike_flywheel
Content based let me know how but that works a little bit since I am wanting to join as a customer and I need to know what I'm about to pay here.

41:38.77
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, no, totally? Um, so it's a monthly subscription at the moment you'll have a set number of hours of content or minutes of content that you can upload as well as a set number of content credits. So every time you click you know, generate and Linkedin post or whatever.

41:45.17
mike_flywheel
Yeah.

41:56.51
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, that'll use up a certain number of your content credits and if you ever run out of those you can purchase more like with a 1 ne-time kind of top-up but generally we have 3 subscription plans at the moment they range from $30 a month to around $100 a month. At our most premium at the moment we're offering our early adopters discounts on those prices and they will change over the years as we build out more value in click but our early adopters will have basically a direct line to our product team as well as myself and my co-founder. Nathan. And also those discounts and and some other perks that we've got in the works.

42:38.89
mike_flywheel
I love it. Yeah when I think about just the value you could literally put this alongside somebody that is helping you in just the speed and efficiency like $30 people charge that to create one clip. Um, so it's so amazingly powerful. So I look forward to.

42:50.12
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, exactly.

42:56.44
mike_flywheel
Doing that. So you said and you know you're in early stage but it's is it a closed beta can anybody sign up. Um you know where end of March now probably pump this podcast out in the couple next couple weeks. Um, so around sort of the. You know, late April early may timeframe or maybe sooner where where will things be and what stage are you sort of at in the in the click journey.

43:21.13
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, so right now a click is released to our waitlist we had a waitlist around 50 people but you can join from our website. We offer a free trial to everyone who joined and around early may or or early april ah we will be opening that up more sort of publicly even though it is kind of public right now. So your audience might be getting like some some ah early news on that depending on when this comes out. But yeah, so we'll be opening it up more publicly in April and it's still a beta so it's still like. Very much a work in progress we're we're releasing new features every two weeks and then around like june summertime is when we look to really like publicly launch once we've got a few more core features worked out and we know from our early adopters. That you know it's good to go at that level.

44:18.32
mike_flywheel
That's awesome. Well I'm excited to join that journey with you so I'll be signing up this weekend I don't have any video to pump into it yet. So I'm gonna very quickly get on that. Maybe this will be 1 of the first episodes if not I might even go back a couple episodes to to bring that to life. Um.

44:27.51
Tanika_ From Cliq
Um, yeah.

44:35.82
mike_flywheel
And and make that happen. You've talked about it a little bit but sort of the next six months to year for a click. What does that? What's that look like it sounds like there's some roadmap development in there but are there any other big milestones or things that you're thinking about over the next six to twelve months between you. Nathan.

44:54.13
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah I mean yeah, the product roadmap will be really exciting over the next six months and even the year like I mentioned just kind of creating that new user experience where it's very much like your Ai assistant in ah, video repurposing. Um, but we are looking to to really explore some of the creative and exciting features that generative ai opens up where it can really embrace that assistant type role. You can kind of highlight text and say rewrite it in this way, you can give it feedback. You can just ask it to maybe generate. A few tiktok posts on this topic um things like that really excited to explore with our early adopters. Of course we'll probably be launching on product hunt at some point in the near future that will be exciting. Um, our end goal here is to really solve this problem to the point where any creator can share their content across multiple platforms with minimal effort. And then return to the problem that we're solving with Minutekill and really look at how we can marry those 2 things. So if we're solving this problem for educational creators now we'll have you know a community of educational creators with bite-sized clips who want to share that in a community.

46:13.68
Tanika_ From Cliq
And we can properly revisit Minuteskill and that problem that we're solving. So yeah, that's I think what the next you know year or so will look like who knows the space is changing very rapidly. But yeah, we're very committed to. Exploring generative Ai and really just doubling down on the incredible value that it's opening up for this space and and others.

46:36.89
mike_flywheel
That's incredible. Um, if people want to learn more or help are there any call to actions it sounds like there's somewhere on sign up, but what are sort of your big things that you are looking to drive and where can people find out more.

46:51.50
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, so again for all of your you know content creators podcasters people who create webinars definitely check us out. We want to hear from you. What would make this the ultimate sort of tool or assistant for yourself. Um, so definitely check us out. Um, you can also follow our journey on our socials which have which have been a little bit quiet lately I'm not going to lie if you look at our socials. You can't really tell what's going on. We did that on purpose because sometimes building in public can be a bit of a distraction. We really just wanted to focus on like our early adopters and what we're doing. Um, but over the next few months those should come to life again. So our Linkedin and our Instagram you can follow us there. Um, and that is it for no.

47:34.93
mike_flywheel
What's the what's the handle I'm going to give you a follow right now and is it one click or is it click. Okay.

47:40.26
Tanika_ From Cliq
It's actually I think it's still minute skill so check that out. Yeah, and then well that's um, that's Instagram it's still minute skill and on Linkedin it is click powered by minute skill.

47:48.20
mike_flywheel
Um, yeah.

47:50.88
mike_flywheel
Got it.

47:52.53
Tanika_ From Cliq
Which is likely the branding you'll start to see across all of our you know our website etc. Um, yeah, and you can also follow us personally on on Linkedin I I got to admit I'm not on there too too much because it is very hectic like there's a lot going on on Linkedin. So.

47:56.18
mike_flywheel
Yeah, safe.

48:10.66
Tanika_ From Cliq
Apologies for anybody in my inbox waiting for a reply. But yeah, follow us on those platforms.

48:18.49
mike_flywheel
That's amazing and we'll make sure to drop all this in in the show notes. Um tanika. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm excited about the product you're building not just for the world but for myself selfishly your story has been inspiring. I can totally relate anyone that knows me I don't think I have like a book I have like a onenote but the ideas are are always fizzing and I love hearing the amazing ideas that others are doing to help change or improve the world around them and I'm I'm glad to see an equally passionate person. Doing just that and succeeding at it today's podcast I've learned so much. It's cool to hear how you're you know, using it building it breaking it with Ai and living on the forefront of that any closing thoughts from your side before we wrap up for today.

49:10.99
Tanika_ From Cliq
Yeah, um, for any entrepreneurs in your space which I think you know creators fall under that category for sure. Podcasters Definitely um, you know a couple of learnings that we had which is that. You really do do just have to get out there and learn from your actual market from your target audience speak to the people that you want to serve directly. Don't just hypothesize about them with yourself and your team. Um, but also just to really drive home. Those characteristics of our team that I believe are very important to our success today. Which is that you got to be open to learning and learning is pretty Painful. You know, like learning sometimes requires a little bit of failure along the way and I put that in air quotes because it's never really failure if you learn from it. That's totally part of the process. So don't be afraid to take risks to put yourself out there to potentially fail sometimes. But you have to have that mindset of learning and adapting your behavior to your market that is the key I think to success in entrepreneurship and of course never giving up on your convictions on your mission. Ah, keep a stranglehold on the problem you're trying to solve and the people you're trying to solve it for mostly the people you're trying to solve it for and be open to iterating and pivoting when you need to don't hold onto your solution too hardly like that is the aftermath of understanding your customer. Best.

50:37.80
Tanika_ From Cliq
And the problem that they think is most worth solving when you do these things I think that you know over time you'll start to see that progress that you're hoping to see sometimes it feels like you're running in like a hamster wheel kind of running in circles and I think that learning is the best way to break out of that. And to continue to progress forward. So don't ever give up on that. It's tough, but it's basically the journey.

51:03.52
mike_flywheel
Amazingly wise words to close us out and and to inspire others. Thanks again to nika for joining us. Thank you everybody who tuned in and we'll make sure to catch you on the next episode have a good night.