Andrew Warner: Hey there, freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. You know, lately I’ve noticed that I always have a chat GPT window up on my screen, and if I don’t have it up on my screen, I hit command shift space and I immediately start asking it a question.
And not only does it give me a great answer, it’s lately been giving me sources direct links to where it got the information, which I love. I’ll click the links and what I’ve noticed is at the end of it, it says, UTM source equals chat gt.com, and I think, whoa. It is now starting to both drive traffic to websites and it’s starting to tell the websites how much traffic it’s getting them.
This is like the future of of, of getting traffic to your website. Well, joining me today is someone who realized that long before, for frankly, before it was a realization and long before I did, his name is Chirag Kulkarni. His company Taco helps businesses get into those answers in chat, GPT and Perplexity and others.
Um, and he also does SEO the traditional way so companies can rise up in the Google rankings and even there, he uses AI to help them get better results and do it all faster. Um, the company name is Taco Chirag. Good to see you here.
Chirag Kulkarni: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Andrew Warner: You know, the first question, how much revenue are you doing with this bootstrap business of yours?
Chirag Kulkarni: Well, uh, the good news is that because we’re a private business, uh, you know, we don’t have to share the specifics, but you know, the business is doing several million in revenue today
Andrew Warner: Several million. Like the fact that you added the several to it. Can I take to mean more than $3 million in revenue?
Chirag Kulkarni: You can take whatever you want from it, but, um, but you know, I think for us, like the most important thing is how do we build a profitable monster of a business and grow in a very like disciplined manner.
Andrew Warner: Are you profitable right now?
You are. What are you doing with the money?
Chirag Kulkarni: my, my belief is two things. Personally, what we’re doing with the money is a portion we invest into product and other interesting stuff. But personally I invest in non-traditional assets as well as, um, before the markets took a turn, I was doing a lot of just dollar cost averaging into the s and p 500 and just Nvidia.
So I done, luckily that’s worked out before. Things have taken a turn.
Andrew Warner: You know what, actually, I, I wanna get into the AI stuff that you’re doing and, uh, how you listen to Mixer Energy interview years ago and what happened to you and how you built up this business. But you gotta tell people about the non-traditional part. ’cause you and I have, have been friends and you told me about an investment you’re considering and I think give, give people a taste of where you’re thinking about putting your money or where you are putting your money.
That’s non-traditional.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah, I think like, look, with ai, I mean, nobody knows what’s gonna happen, right? With any business that we have today. And so, you know, one thing I know for sure is non-traditional things, right? Like even like for example, um, you know, we bought a condo last year, right? Like, that’s an example of something like people will always need places to live.
People will need food, right? Like, the means of how we’re gonna create food is gonna become more and more efficient with ai. And so my belief is. You know, make money from AI and invest in non-AI assets. Right. And some
Andrew Warner: Yeah,
Chirag Kulkarni: guess if you say the stock market, so,
Andrew Warner: get it.
Chirag Kulkarni: um, I’m, I’ve been gut getting very interested in even like farming for example,
Andrew Warner: Yeah,
that’s what it was. You were, you were, ping me, you go, Hey Andrew, what do you think of this farmland? And I, I go, farmland, what do you know about farming? And apparently, you know, stuff about farming and, anyway, alright, let’s get into this thing. Um. Gimme an example of what you’re doing with ai. Like what is it that you are doing that makes it, that makes it easier for you to build your business?
Chirag Kulkarni: Sure. So one of the realizations that I think I had was, and I think everyone today is having, is that AI is helping us become more and more effective as business owners, as well as as individuals, right? I saw a really interesting video by Satya Nadella, which said that just like we go to a job and we have skill sets, right?
So we have Excel as a skillset, whatnot. People are gonna bring agents as a skillset, right? And so. I think about a world where you have hundreds of people working for you, and those are hundreds of agents, how can we basically take off a
Andrew Warner: I.
Chirag Kulkarni: of the root work that needs to be done? So for example, you know, when we started Taco, we had writers, right?
And today we have agents that we custom build for each company that we’re partnering with or that are clients of ours, and we’ve actually upgraded those writers to editors, right? And so
Andrew Warner: You mean your old writers are now editors. You have zero writers on staff. An AI agent is writing the first draft, and an editor or human being is fixing it up. How much work is that editor doing? Are they really editing or are they doing basically 40% of the writing?
Chirag Kulkarni: they’re, they’re probably doing, yeah, I’d probably say 40% of the writing. So instead of doing a hundred percent right, so let’s say something like a piece of content would take four hours before it’s now taking two hours, right? And. I’d say that their time is probably better well spent because writing a piece from start to finish today and in today’s day and age and finding out what’s gonna be the right H threes, what is chat GPT mentioning for a specific query and pulling that data into a piece and then deciphering where what should be first, what should be second and third within a piece of content is not something worthwhile for a human to be doing.
They need to be bringing their own expertise and authority into a piece of content, and that’s what we feel is just a more effective use of their time.
Andrew Warner: Okay. That writing part doesn’t feel so special to be honest with you. I’m wondering, is Taco really an AI tech enabled service, or is it using AI just like the rest of us are using it? I mean, kids are using it for their homework. Are you using it at that level or what makes you so special with AI that it’s part of your brand, that you’re the AI company?
Chirag Kulkarni: A lot of what we do, Andrew, is. We take a process and we think about what are the ways that we can use AI to streamline that. So the content example is one example. The other example I’ll give is even when it comes to things like competitive positioning from a search standpoint, right? What we’ll do is we’ll build an agent to go and actually fetch who are the competitors in the space, what are the keywords that they’re actually bidding on and or ranking for competitively that have commercial intent. And instead of the specialist doing all this root work, the agent is doing that work on their behalf so that the specialist has all the data in one place and they can make strategic decisions as to where the focus needs to be for a particular campaign. So tho that’s kind of the difference, is like with a traditional business like an SEO agency, you know, they may be including ai, you know, using off the shelf tools, but all the agents that we’re building are custom for a company.
And that’s the difference here.
Andrew Warner: All right. And then on the other part, that really excites me, and we’re gonna get into how you built up the business and your background. Um, I, I love the entrepreneurial stories, but the other part that really excites me is you showed me a, a tool that you use to tell you how your customers are ranking for different questions in tools like chat, GPT, perplexity, um, et cetera.
What does that tool, and how does it even know.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah, so we, we have some tooling that we built internally. We also leverage some external, like third party tools, right? And
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: basically is we will query chat, gt and perplexity 50 to 100 times a month a specific question, right? So for example, what’s the best business podcast on the web, right?
And how do we get Mixergy to show up? Number one. Um, those are the questions that we’ll query and to determine. Who is actually currently showing and what are the references that we’re pulling from? So we’ll pull all that data so that it’s accurate into a dashboard so that we can see who’s number one, who’s number two, who’s number three.
And then that helps us understand what are the actions we need to be taking to optimize this. So that Mixergy shows up, number one, if it’s not today.
Andrew Warner: And then what are the things that you can, what, what’s the name of the tool that you’re using?
Chirag Kulkarni: So we use several. We use, one is called Profound. The other one is a tool called Scrunch. Um, the other one we haven’t, I mean, we just internally call it as guac. but we’ll use these different tools to give us insights into where rankings currently lie, or we’re what, what it’s actually shifted from is from rankings to visibility actually is, is what this looks like.
Andrew Warner: And what’s working to get these ai, uh, chat experiences to rank a site higher?
Chirag Kulkarni: There’s a few levers that I
Andrew Warner: I.
Chirag Kulkarni: um, are noticing, and there’s some kind of hacker things that I can talk about that we’ve tested and some have worked, some haven’t. Um, the first thing that I think is important is to understand what is the correct content structure that LLMs like to pick up on, right?
And so if you notice the content structure for Google, it tends to be very heavily indexed on keywords, right? For content on LLMs, it’s much more around questions and driving the right intent around what the question is being asked in that piece of content. So that’s the first thing that’s really important. The second thing that’s really important is inclusion and citation. So like you, like you said in the beginning, when somebody asks a question like, what is the best business podcast, right? chatGPT is basically crawling or any LLM, right chatGPT is an example of that, is crawling the open web, synthesizing this information and then reasoning it on their end.
And so when you have inclusion in places like certain high authority sites, right, or organic social, like for example with grok, they tend to cite Twitter, right? Naturally. For perplexity, they tend to cite YouTube chatGPT, they tend to cite Reddit. We need to basically figure out for specific queries, where are the right citations being pulled from, and then how do we get inclusion in those relevant citations.
Andrew Warner: I see. Okay. I, I noticed that it’s a, for my search right now that I happen to have on my screen, I’m gonna interview the founder of Matt Mullenweg, um, in a little bit. And I asked a couple of questions about what’s going on with them with a lawsuit, and it’s a lot of tech blogs and then it’s Wikipedia and Reddit.
And so if it’s tech blogs, do you have anything that you would do to go and and be in there?
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah. One thing that we’ve been doing, which has been fascinating is idea around creating kind of content on those blogs, but also, you know, some, cases it’s been picked up, some cases it hasn’t, is many of these large tech blogs have affiliate type content. And so what you can do is you can go to them and say, Hey, like I, I want to pay you guys X amount of money and I want inclusion in this specific piece of content.
And when you see inclusion happen, you tend to notice visibility on AI traffic. And Andrew, one of the interesting things that we’re anecdotally seeing is. Even though you’re getting less traffic from AI search, your conversion rate is much higher. And what I mean by that is of times you’ll get traffic from Google and the traffic from Google may not have the same quality as ai.
And what, that’s what’s the fascinating part is because when we’re using agents, for example, to do work on our behalf, to actually determine where is the right, for example, product for us to purchase. Say I’m trying to find a GLP one product, you’d go tell deep research, Hey, here are the two products, go figure out like, which is the best product for me based on these health parameters, the chances of you converting to buying is much higher because now the heavy lifting is being done by deep research. Um, instead of us, so.
Andrew Warner: I definitely see that. You know what? I hosted a dinner here for 30 people, 30 speakers from a conference. And so I had a company come out and cater it. Actually not cater it, they just set up the tables and then I hired a catering company. The company that set up the tables on their way out of our property just smashed into the gate.
Now I don’t know how to buy another gate, so I go to GPT. I say I need a gate that is 11 feet wide, that is made out of steel that does this. It gave me three companies. I looked at the first one, it was perfect. I talked to them yesterday, they could ship a gate. It’s f freaking fantastic. And you’re right.
Where ordinarily I might do a lot of back and forth research here, because I gave it so much information, I was able to get a result that is much more customized to me. All right. I’m curious about you as an entrepreneur, um, largely because you had listened to one of my interviews years ago and you reached out to the guest who’s a guest.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah, so. It is probably helpful, Andrew, if I share a little bit about why did I even listen to that podcast?
Andrew Warner: Yeah,
Chirag Kulkarni: when I was younger, I, um, I was just really fascinated by, you don’t have to go door to door to sell Cutco knives. can basically create a website and people will just come to you on
Andrew Warner: yeah,
Chirag Kulkarni: And that to me was really fascinating. And so I started to kind of dive into this world of affiliate marketing. can you basically not even own the product, but still get paid for getting sales? And that led me to this whole world of search engine optimization. And I just started to go online and I found this guy named Neil Patel, and I was like, man, this guy’s making hundreds of thousands a month from SEO.
And he, I remember he had QuickSprout and he was like writing about
Andrew Warner: yeah.
Chirag Kulkarni: his black card and all this stuff,
Andrew Warner: Right.
Chirag Kulkarni: And, and that’s where I, I was like, okay, I gotta learn. And one of the things that I do is when I find someone, need to learn every single thing possible about them. And so I saw, I think you guys did two or three interviews on Mixergy.
He had a
Andrew Warner: A bunch.
Chirag Kulkarni: on Mixergy. So I listened to all that. And so I’m like, all right, I gotta get in front of this guy. And so I’m like, well, I don’t know him. And so I emailed him a ton of times um, I knew some things about SEO, but I knew he was the SEO wizard. And so I was like, I wanna learn from this person. And he gave me a shot. He is like, yeah, here’s a contract for 10 KA month. And you know, the rest was history.
Andrew Warner: Whoa. So he paid you 10 KA month to do what
Chirag Kulkarni: So he had some work that he needed done on Neil patel.com, and I think he just needed the support. And maybe he, maybe he found me, um, enticing or AKA aggressive enough that he’s like, yeah, whatever. Let’s just give this guy some work. Sounds like he’ll do a good enough
Andrew Warner: I.
Chirag Kulkarni: for what we need. So.
Andrew Warner: You know what? He was really good about being public and then having people reach out to him and spotting talent and ambition and drive ahead of time. And one of the reasons why I’ve suggested that you do this interview and why I push for you to do this interview, and I think it took us several months to get this to happen, is because I think you are gonna see what other, um, people who I’ve interviewed will see, which is the more public you are about your story, the more you teach people, the more you’re gonna start to gravitate the right people to you, whoever that is for Neil, it’s a certain type of hustler for you.
I don’t know, probably more of a, like a meditative, very thoughtful, very disciplined type of, uh, type of thinker. Whatever that is, you’re gonna start to bring ’em to you. And yes, the audience gets a benefit, but I found that people I interview get a bigger benefit maybe. All right. Why did you leave Neil and go on to Medley?
Chirag Kulkarni: Well, I didn’t, I didn’t necessarily leave him. I’ll tell you a funny story. Um, I was at Northeastern at the time, Northeastern University. remember being in the back of like a psychology class. I wasn’t listening to anything about the psychology class. I was just busy doing the work that he had had me do.
And he’s so funny because I, I got a glimpse Andrew into how a high performer works
Andrew Warner: Tell me.
Chirag Kulkarni: he would, he would literally, within seconds of me sending an email, call me directly to my cell. And I’m like, this guy, you know, he’s worth millions of dollars, is calling this 17-year-old, 18-year-old at the time and wants to talk about something so minute and specific and so. I learned that, you know, high performers have a very innate ability to zoom out and then zoom in really fast. Right? And I just like watching that and learning from that taught me like, what, what it, what are some of the good qualities to kind of take from any person, right? And so he was like, Hey, like I’m gonna be in New York.
Um, let’s hang out. And I was like, what the hell? Like, this guy wants to hang out with me. Like, that’s crazy. And so I took the Peter Pan Express overnight
Andrew Warner: The bus.
Chirag Kulkarni: the bus. I love the bus, by the way. I still love the bus.
Andrew Warner: I’m, I’m with you on that. There’s some buses that are really high end and, and wonderful, but Okay.
Chirag Kulkarni: Well, by the way, this is not that. So,
Andrew Warner: Oh, really? Okay.
Chirag Kulkarni: and so I took the Peter Pan Express. I got, I got to the Baccarat Hotel, I won’t forget it. And I remember him, he was writing a book at the time called Hustle. he’s like, Hey, I, I have a company that I’m gonna introduce you to. And I was thinking, all right, what?
Like, this is. gonna be some random company. And he did the introduction and it was Expedia. And so I just built like this, like small consulting ish business. I did some, you know, white label work for other agencies and I just like kind of doing a little stuff on the SEO O side. of the companies, um, was Medley and they were like, Hey, like we want you to do some keyword research for us at the time. I think what excited me about them was was an opportunity to be in New York City. It was an opportunity to go from just SEO to learning about full funnel marketing and like, what does that look like? And I felt like at the time I was 21, why not lean into this opportunity and see where this goes, um, learn about healthcare and all this stuff.
So that’s why I kind of like left what I started more or less. I hired a GM to kind of like maintain and just continue the stuff that I was doing. And I joined Medley as their chief marketing officer.
Andrew Warner: Medley is an online pharmacy, right?
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah, medley, um, had brick and mortar pharmacy businesses and then did same day prescription delivery in, in the city. So instead of having to go to Walgreens, stand online to get your prescription, your doctor would immediately send the prescription to medley and Medley would deliver to you the same day for free.
So that was the battle grub.
Andrew Warner: Um, you were telling me about how one of the things that you tried there was social, what happened with social?
Chirag Kulkarni: So look, as a 21-year-old, you’re, you’re around GrubHub and Uber and all these businesses, and they’re spending millions a day maybe on Facebook. And so I thought, okay, you know what? Like these businesses are spending so much on Facebook and Google and these other channels. I need to start doing that. And so. You know, I remember like we set up these indivi individualized landing pages. We said calling doctors from New York City was like the tagline that we used. And I thought, you know, um, it’s a B2B business where we’re going to doctors and other stakeholders and getting them to refer their patients. They’ve gotta be on Facebook and they are on Facebook, right? And so we gotta go reach out to them. I even remember that there was a company that I looked at that sold to chiropractors, and their acquisition channel was on Facebook. So I was like, all right, dermatologists, chiropractors, they’ve, they’ve gotta be one and the same. And I remember just spending so much time optimizing this landing page. We had like a design hire at the time who like created this nice creative of like somebody doing some admin work, um, at their desk. And so I said, Hey, let’s leverage that. And Andrew, like, the campaign just like, just did not work. We were not able to get clicks.
I remember even talking to somebody who ran marketing at one of these companies at GrubHub, I believe. And I even had him come in and audit the campaign. He’s like, yeah, like this is just not converting. Maybe it’s the creative. So like I went to the design person, I went to our CEO and I was like, we need to fire this design person.
Like she’s not able to like match the same tone and voice and creative that we need to actually convert for Facebook. And I just learned like the hard way that, you know what, like the channels and the customer, um, acquisition channels that I would be compelled by are not gonna be the same as a doctor.
And maybe that’s obvious today, but like, I learned that the hard way really fast. That like, it’s just different.
Andrew Warner: Why didn’t they just throw you out and say, listen, you’re an SEO guy. We clearly hired the wrong person. Get outta here. We’ll go find someone with more experience.
Chirag Kulkarni: Maybe they didn’t, they, they weren’t experienced enough to realize that. I think that was one. But I think the other thing too was, um, I. Um, I, I think they liked that I had like an innate ability to learn and just to have a network to, like, I think I learned really quickly that you don’t have to have the answers.
You need to know who knows the answers and extract that knowledge and, and
Andrew Warner: Yeah. So who had the answer?
That’s what.
Chirag Kulkarni: I said that’s exactly like why I was excited to work with Neil, right, is
Andrew Warner: then who had the answer for medley for the solution that got you guys to grow?
Chirag Kulkarni: say, say that one more time.
Andrew Warner: So who had the answer that helped you save medleys marketing.
Chirag Kulkarni: Well, I think what we learned was is that selling to doctors through specific channels, some channels work better than others. And I think any business that raises money, you have to test and learn and most things are not gonna work. And so I think what we learned was. When you build relationships with these doctors and you go to their offices, very similar to like how pharma does it.
That actually was the best way to build relationships with doctors. And then marketing’s job was to support that. But it was also spent on how do we get in front of the right stakeholders such as hospital executives, right? And hospital executives. Again, sending them letters and sending them cold emails is not gonna be the way to convert them.
For them it’s gonna be conferences. And so of it just came down to we’re gonna test a bunch of tactics that work and most of these are not, and the things that do are gonna work. And I think can find that person and somebody who’s had to experience, but what you trade off of is like the technology experience and like the relatability to like how a consumer is gonna think in a technology driven world, um, versus some of these other channels.
So I, so yeah, in theory they could have gone and hired a bigwig CMO and I think towards the part where I ended up leaving, they were starting to think that as the company matured, which is natural.
Andrew Warner: Okay, so what worked for you? It was tchotchkes at the pharmacist, at the doctor’s office.
Chirag Kulkarni: Tchotchkes worked really well. Um, creating like educational leave behind. So like if you’re an HIV patient, having information about the HIV drug side effects, whatnot, and giving that to doctors to give to their patients is really effective. Um, we also did like, um, billboards within the offices that had like information about a therapy and then like, we had like the brand underneath there and that drove brand recognition. we did like, there’s like digital advertising, um, that were specific to certain EMRs. So like when a doctor was in an EMR and typing in the prescription, they could see our brand. So these are the things that worked really well
Andrew Warner: Not at all. The sexy stuff. Not at all. The sexy
Chirag Kulkarni: Exactly. Yeah.
Andrew Warner: the, the company filed, they sold, filed for bankruptcy. I think they were even, um, I mean they, they had some legal issues too. How much of that were you aware of where, um, let’s see. The three executives were charged with fraud.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah. I honestly, I remember I was at home. I had just finished a sales call and I got a text from a friend of mine and he’s like, Hey, um, what’s going on? And I was like, don’t know. And I, and I thought, you know, hey, maybe somebody said something about taco and things were blowing up. And then I saw this, like, I saw this document and I, I just couldn’t believe what I was reading.
And so, I had no idea to, to put it, to put it clearly.
Andrew Warner: Wow. What do you know about what happened to them and why? Why they, why they went bankrupt.
Chirag Kulkarni: So when I left the business, I left the business for two reasons. The first reason was, um, I knew that there was some general like. tightening in the market. There was like a bank, um, restructuring that was taking place and they were trying to get a loan for that. So I think that was one of the, one of the issues. and then the second issue is, unfortunately my mom had cancer at the time, and so, you know, I just felt like, you know, it’s been such an incredible journey to go from a handful of employees to thousands of employees at the, at such a young age. And I also felt to some degree, like it’s time for me to be with my family and take care of my mom. and so that coupled with like some of the financial challenges within the business, I thought it was just the best time to leave and just think about what was next. So that’s why I left the business.
Andrew Warner: How’s your mom doing? Or what
happened?
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah. Yeah. She’s, she’s much better. So during that time, I actually, it was during Covid, so I completely moved to, uh, Richmond, Virginia.
And it was great. I mean, like just being able to, at a young age, take care of your family. Right from an emotional support standpoint, like I would go to the hospital quite often.
Andrew Warner: Hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: are the things that looking back like I wanted to do and I care deeply about. So yeah, she’s doing much better now.
Andrew Warner: You know what? I gotta pat myself on the back for growing as a person in the past in these interviews. I’m so Ratta tat machine gun that I don’t take a moment to acknowledge that someone just said that their mom had cancer and just check in. And now I’m like, all right, I could be a human being for a minute.
It doesn’t have to, uh, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to hurt the conversation that people came in to listen to. Um, I feel good about that. Thanks for helping me grow. All right. And so the way that you came up with Taco was you were at Medley. You saw what that led you to create this agency.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah. So like SSEO was a acquisition channel for us, right? Because when you acquire a, a, a physician, when I say acquire, basically go to a physician’s office. The physician tells their patients about medley. now, you have a bunch of patients and you need to do something with them and, and consumer marketing, it’s not that it wasn’t important, it just wasn’t as efficient as these B2B channels were. And so we were doing SEO and what I found was like we were hiring freelancers. We were hiring contractors. I thought, Hey, I know SEO really well. I don’t need to hire some massive agency. But like as a CMO, you’re doing a bunch of things, like you start to end up hiring other folks. um, yeah, one of, one of the, one or two of the agencies that we hired, I just realized that they don’t really have this like revenue first mindset when it came to search, right?
It’s one thing to drive traffic, it’s another thing to drive revenue. And I think that was one thing that was really critical. second thing is that they were not really search experts. They were really good at a bunch of different things. They knew paid ads, they knew SEO, they knew affiliate marketing.
They knew out of home. being really skilled in one thing, I felt was a differentiator. And the third thing, of course, now hindsight, is. is gonna change. People aren’t gonna go to Google,
Andrew Warner: Hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: lms, and they’re gonna ask questions and aren’t gonna get their answers. And so all of that led me to believe that there needs to be a business that I wish I could have hired, that I can go out there and create.
And that’s why we started Taco.
Andrew Warner: You know, this was two years ago. The thing that happened two years ago was people were saying, yes, AI is coming up, and this was just the beginning of it, but the feeling was that no one would need a link to a website because the answer would just come into chat. Why didn’t you believe that at the time?
What was it that made you realize this is going to be a source for traffic?
Chirag Kulkarni: I didn’t honestly know is the honest answer, right? I believe that search was going to change, but I knew that the one innate thing that humans will always do is look for things. And now even, um, even non-humans, even agents right on our behalf will always look for something. And so I knew that search was going to change. I didn’t know how it would change, but what I, what I did do, Andrew, is I just said, let me just get my, let me just jump into the water and go with the current, and as I’m starting to go with the current, I’ll feel where makes the most sense for us to move to as the market moves.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Chirag Kulkarni: I, when I left Medley and I was doing some fractional CMO work, I, I was like, you know, I’m like the CMO, like I grew a hundred plus million dollar a year business, right?
Like, I’m not gonna fricking do SEO, like SEOs for chumps, right? Um, before, but I think what I ultimately came back to is like, that’s what I know really well. And having that pattern matching experience is like really helpful right? When it comes to stuff like this, especially during changes.
Andrew Warner: You know, I go back and forth on agencies. There are times in these interviews over the years where I felt like agencies are just not worth even interviewing because it’s very much like an individual who has a support staff, not a company that runs on its own, regardless of any of the individuals being there or not.
And then again, I say, well actually agencies are the ultimate bootstrap companies. And yes, there are agencies that bootstrapped and did well and went into the tens of millions, even the hundreds of millions. And then there are many who then shifted into becoming software companies or something else ’cause they saw the opportunity.
But the one thing that’s always been consistent for me is the understanding that it’s easy to bootstrap. You don’t need to have much ’cause you’re doing the service. What you do need is customers. And how did you get your first customers then?
Chirag Kulkarni: So we got our first customers through two ways. Number one, um. You know, through the medley journey, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of like really sharp investors. And so that was like a big way for us to meet just companies and saying, Hey, like I’m a free agent. I’m doing some fractional work.
And that kind of like developed into, oh, like maybe you can help this company with SEO. So that’s one. The second way is just, you know, there are other agencies out there that don’t do SEO, but have the customers. And so what I did is I went to those businesses, I said, Hey, like we do SEO notice. I said, I didn’t say I do SEO.
I said,
Andrew Warner: Yeah,
Chirag Kulkarni: do SEO. Um, I’m thinking about taking on one or two more companies, like we’re very exclusive. Who, who do you have for us that could be a fit? Right? And that’s how we got our first few customers.
Andrew Warner: and from the beginning you weren’t doing the work yourself. You would have other people do it to avoid the issue that a lot of agencies have.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah. From the beginning. I mean, honestly, I mean, this is. Is the truth is that I, I, I know and I knew SEO quite well, but again, to get back into the nitty gritty, you kind of need somebody who has been up to date on what is specific today that didn’t exist a year ago. And that’s the nature of marketing.
Like unlike software where, you know, I can use AI to create a, a website, right? And that doesn’t really make a big difference with marketing every month things change, right? And especially with the pace of ai. And so, you know, I hired a contractor to support on the SEO side and I was spending most of my time just channeling them in the right direction to make sure that we could get the right outcomes for the company.
But yeah, it was like a lot of like building the plane as you’re flying it right in the beginning, um, to make sure that it’s gonna, it’s gonna build, but it’s also gonna go in the right direction. So yeah, that’s how we did it. It
Andrew Warner: So it was you reaching out who should I know? Who should I talk to? What helped you close sales when there’s so many other people, including Neil Patel’s company that do SEO.
Chirag Kulkarni: at the time, the relationship is what helped me close, right? Because if, if you say, Hey, um, Chirag, if you’re, pretend Andrew, you run, you run a, uh, performance marketing agency and you’re like, Hey client, we already work with you. We already have a really good relationship with you. Meet Chirag. He does SEO, he used to work at this company.
He grew this agent, you know this business to a lot in revenue. He was a CMO and I. He wants to work with you. That is what ultimately got us the sale initially.
Andrew Warner: You and I reconnected because you had seen Jesse Pujji, my partner in Bootstrap Giants, do a post on mutual intro. What got you to pay attention to mutual intro and how you use it as a way of getting customers?
Chirag Kulkarni: You know, Andrew, what I was fascinated by is like through the medley journey, I met a lot of incredible people and what I, if I, if there’s one thing I regret, I wish I didn’t spend enough time building the relationship, right? When you’re a startup and you’re an exec at a startup and you’re growing, all your time is consumed in that.
And
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Chirag Kulkarni: but one of the things I found fascinating and, and you know, even when I was doing consulting work before, you know, I didn’t have a real way for acquiring customers. There was no process for doing it. It was just, oh, like, Andrew, can you think about us when you’re talking to X company next time? And that’s not. not repeatable.
Andrew Warner: Hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: that’s also why, honestly why I didn’t stick to the consulting thing. And I also felt like, okay, like medley opportunity as CMO could be really exciting and let me try to go in that direction. And so I wanted a repeatable process for me to actually grow get customers didn’t feel inauthentic to me. And I tried like cold emailing and like, you know, it’s hit or miss. You’re getting on these calls, they don’t know who you are. and I, I don’t know, I didn’t know what other channels were. And so when I saw this guy that I had admired deeply, uh, funny story about Jesse too is like, I actually wanted to work with Jesse when I was at Northeastern. I didn’t cold email him, but I actually, I, I remember there’s like a photo of him that maybe he still has, just like him looking to a side that’s a black and white photo. I remember reading an article about him.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Chirag Kulkarni: like, well, like this, they’re doing something in performance marketing. I don’t know what they were doing at the time, but I wanted to learn this.
’cause SEO is what I knew, but I wanted to learn performance.
Andrew Warner: Hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: so anyways, long story short, I saw that post and I was like, let me, let me, um, learn more. And that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s how we got connected
Andrew Warner: I love that about college, that I had enough time and so much determination to just reach out to people. I would read about ’em in an article and I’d reach out to them. I’d read someone’s book, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and I’d reach out to them. And it felt both like, like I was going in Forbidden Land.
And at the same time, it felt like I was going to my destiny. And that combination of, no, you shouldn’t. Yes you must, is such a good place to live because then you decide with every phone call, who are you gonna be? And I, I remember having incredible access. Who did you get to talk to that was especially exciting.
Chirag Kulkarni: when I was in college. Um. I was there, I was building a software business called Insightfully. honestly, if I give you the pitch now, I, I still don’t know what I was trying to do, but basically what I was saying was, as a salesperson, your network is, your more efficient, is the most efficient place you have to get revenue, but the best way to get business is by helping people. And so what I wanted to do is I wanted to use artificial intelligence and I hired these, hired as and partnered with these two MIT engineers and we basically built an ecosystem in which we pull in data from Twitter, we pull in data from these other places. And it was almost a social listening tool that looked on your behalf where somebody may say, Hey, I’m looking for like a person to help me with and if you can help that person, I. You end up building a tighter network and that’ll lead to better outcomes. And so, you know, one of the guys I met who’s a, who’s a good friend, just like Neil, um, his name is Wayne Chang. Wayne Chang sold a company called Crashlytics to Twitter for I think a hundred million. And that company sold to Google for another a hundred million.
So he, you know, young guy, I
Andrew Warner: Yeah,
Chirag Kulkarni: out to him and being like, Hey, this is what I’m working on. Can I get access to the Twitter API, because he was a GM at Twitter I got to meet him. Um, several people like that, that were in the Boston ecosystem that I just built relationships with just by cold outreach.
Andrew Warner: I used to think that that was only available in college. It turns out even afterwards, if you’re persistent, if you’re considerate, if you, if you’re showing that you’re doing something, not just, you know, picking people’s brains, doors will open up. Um, so then you discovered mutual intro. What did you, how did you use the first, how did you use Mutual Intro at first, and maybe describe it for people who don’t know what it is.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah, so Mutual intro is basically a process that you use your network or people that you may not even know directly, but basically that are part of some network in LinkedIn in this case, to basically get in front of a decision maker that you can help in some way. And so the way that I got started is Andrew, you and Jesse sent an email that had a, uh, Excel sheet attached to it just broke down the process for Mutual Intro.
So I was like, okay, like, let me try this. And I, what I even did is I actually reached out to Jesse to Mutual intro me to a company, and he did, and that company closed.
Andrew Warner: Wow.
Chirag Kulkarni: Interesting. Okay. what can I do now to put some more resources behind this? And resourcing being like, how do I learn about this and how do I actually build infrastructure around this? And so that’s how, um, that, that’s how that came about.
Andrew Warner: And so you actually really, did you put together like a whole infrastructure? How many people are working on finding your ideal customers, asking for introductions?
Chirag Kulkarni: It’s, it’s not that it’s only two people, um, right now,
Andrew Warner: Oh, really?
Chirag Kulkarni: um, yeah, it’s only two people.
Andrew Warner: You know what it’s, I mean, it makes sense. Obviously it doesn’t take that many people to do it. I’ve, I’ve seen Jesse do it with one person who’s working part-time and then get hundreds of these out. I always assume that because there’s so much interaction, there’s so much engagement, there’s so much activity.
It feels like there’s a lot of people, but, um, but it’s not, it’s not. Okay. That’s interesting.
Chirag Kulkarni: yeah. Only, only two people. And you know. One person is spending their time like figuring out who the right people are, creating the list, things like that. The other person is more or less managing some interactions on LinkedIn, the conversation and, and they kind of work with each other, but then the other person is also doing other stuff.
So like maybe if you combine both of their time, it’s one person actually. But yeah, two whole people.
Andrew Warner: You know what I asked chat GPT to analyze me based on everything that it knows. And one of the things that it said, actually it wasn’t one of, it was the only thing, it came back. I thought I was gonna get all this deep analysis about every aspect of my life. No, it all comes down to Andrew likes systems for everything.
Um, and I wonder if that’s a you too. If you have an aspect of your personality that is so systemized that you could get these people who are going to work together to find your potential customers to reach out, to follow up, to then do this, the work for SEO and everything, do you think in systems to that degree.
Chirag Kulkarni: I think, I think more in systems now than I did before. Like one quick story is when I was at Medley, remember our CEO creating a whiteboard, and this is, and he told me, he’s like, I want, I want you to create an SOP for this. And I’m like, SOP, what the hell is that? Right? And I’m like, why do I need an SOP for content if I know how to do it?
Andrew Warner: Right.
Chirag Kulkarni: man, maybe this guy’s just trying to replace me. Like I didn’t know what the reason was behind that. But like, to answer your question, that’s probably where I saw some resemblance into, okay, you’re doing something yourself and everything lives in your head,
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Chirag Kulkarni: not gonna be able to grow. And the only way to grow is by creating a process. Recording that process and then having somebody else follow that process, who will be able to augment it even further than you are able to do. So I don’t think I’m so systems oriented like you are, but I understand the importance. It just doesn’t bring me the energy that maybe it brings others to
Andrew Warner: It doesn’t, it doesn’t bring me the energy to create it. It brings me so much energy to have it, to just know this is something that I know works and I could improve it. And that constant iteration is exciting. In fact, one of the books that I thought about writing over the years is a book on, I would, I would call it Playbook because I freaking hate SOP.
It sounds very much like we’re office dorks trying to, I don’t know, TPS, this and that. But, um, playbook feels a little cooler, feels a little bit more like football something or other, but it’s so, so helpful. Um, one, one thing and then I wanna go into the future of AI and AI search and where you see the opportunity for building companies here, but you also joined the accelerator.
If you already figured it all out from the email, why join the accelerator, the sales accelerator that we have?
Chirag Kulkarni: I, I joined the sales accelerator for two big reasons. Number one, you may know something, but by working a process and learning, you can always learn more. And frankly, it was a little bit of a math equation, Andrew. I was like, all right, if, if it cost, I don’t remember what it cost, but if whatever it did cost, right?
I was like, okay, our, our average customer pays us at least 10 KA month. So if I can get one customer from this, I’ve already made back my money. And I’m not talking about revenue, I’m talking about profit, right? As a true bootstrapped, uh, entrepreneur would, right? And so I was like, okay, like what’s the, I mean, we have enough. Business for me to do this, right? It’s not like I was at zero. So I had something and I also felt like I tried at it myself and I don’t, like, I felt like, okay, I tried at it myself. I’m going to getting here, the accelerator can maybe take me to here, which will greatly change my
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
and,
did it.
Chirag Kulkarni: right?
Like
we generated to date run rate, it’s not exact, um, because people may churn and stuff like that, but probably a little under a million in revenue
Andrew Warner: Wow.
Chirag Kulkarni: from just this process alone.
Andrew Warner: I, first of all, that’s exciting. And second, now, I, I love watching as you build this business up, let’s talk about where you see this opportunity going. Do you think that Google is going to be replaced with chat GPT, and then everything needs to be optimized for them? Do you think that Google is going to replace their main search with Gemini look like?
What? What do you see as you’re looking in the future?
Chirag Kulkarni: So here’s what I see right today. As of March, uh, excuse me, May 8th, Chad GT’s search is ahead of Yahoo search by a hair.
Andrew Warner: Oh, you mean in, uh, in usage,
Chirag Kulkarni: No, no, no. Not in usage, in searches.
Andrew Warner: meaning more people are searching on chat, GPT, then Yahoo.
Chirag Kulkarni: Exactly. So usage is different, right? Usage is, hey, um, here’s an email, rewrite it so that it sounds more
Andrew Warner: Got it.
Chirag Kulkarni: That’s usage searches is I’m looking for the best software for my e-commerce
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: fulfillment, Google is 300 plus times larger from a standpoint compared to chatGPT. Now, what I believe is that Google kind of has that innovator’s dilemma, um, issue right now because they built this massive online, you know, giant quote unquote, right? Who. I believe that they’re going to continue dominance. I think what’s gonna happen is search is gonna fragment, and by the way, the users who use chatGPT also use Google.
It’s not like we are not using one or the other. I just think people prefer the modality. And again, specific users prefer a certain modality over others. Like we have a company, they sell hearing aids. You know, for them Google is like a really attractive channel for them to continue to dive deep into.
Even if you look at meta, do you go on Facebook anymore?
Andrew Warner: No.
Chirag Kulkarni: I don’t go on Facebook anymore, but it’s still the number one acquisition channel for most e-commerce
Andrew Warner: Wow.
Chirag Kulkarni: So I think Google will remain its dominance. I don’t think it’s gonna have 90% market share. It’s gonna slip, but I still think it’s a critical modality to optimize for.
And I think Google is trying to figure out how do we maintain revenue through this traditional paid advertising model While still incorporating AI tools. And I think what the data shows is users are loving Gemini and AI overviews in Google. And so my hunch is that they’re gonna go where the data and the dollars are, and that means they’re gonna integrate more and more.
I just think the way we use Google is gonna slowly change. It’s not gonna be an overnight change because that’s gonna cost ’em their business.
Andrew Warner: Couldn’t they though give you paid search results? In the answer? I mean, they’ve always said that if they did their job right, then the paid results would be better or at least as good as the top search results. They just happen to get paid for the best, for the best reference. So couldn’t they do that?
Chirag Kulkarni: I think they could even, perplexity has started to test sponsored advertising within questions.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: Um, I think the question though is that I. Th their usage base and their users are so broad and diverse that if they move towards a model that’s totally conversational, like chat, GPT and perplexity are, they have a massive risk of alienating a large percentage of their user base and impacting their revenue.
As a result,
Andrew Warner: I see.
Chirag Kulkarni: of their revenue comes from search, so they don’t want to mess that up on, on a trillion dollar a year business.
Andrew Warner: Meaning like even if they could still make money from it, if they confuse enough people who come in expecting blue links and some texts, and then they give them an answer that they have to read, that could be enough to disrupt their business and ruin it or, or ruin it for those people. Okay. So for the,
mm-hmm. For the foreseeable future, you’re saying, I see both of them standing up. Maybe even Google doesn’t lose any, any search, uh, usage, but more searches will be done on these AI tools.
Chirag Kulkarni: Well, I think what I, what, what the data tells me is that from last year to this year, Google’s grown 20% in terms of searches.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Chirag Kulkarni: not that Google is dead, it’s that users, specific users really re really like chatGPT and perplexity and other LLMs for search interface because it gives them what they need faster and more efficiently than Google
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Chirag Kulkarni: I think what’s gonna happen is if you notice Google has AI overviews where they’ll summarize parts of the answer, right? I think that’s gonna happen more and more, and they’re gonna slowly move the traditional SERP from 10 blue links, which it’s not even 10 blue anymore, to just conversational. just gonna take time for them to do so.
Um, but the good news, I think for businesses is that that gives them as much opportunity as humanly possible for more searches. And more searches means more opportunities to reach consumers and more revenue for the business. And so to me, if I’m a business, is a land grab opportunity for you to get as much visibility as
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Chirag Kulkarni: visibility today, guess what? chatGPT perplexity are only increasing in volume. And so if I can solidify my position as the number one business podcast today, well it’s gonna be much better when the tide rises and searches are increasing drastically. And I’m seeing the benefits of that.
Um.
Andrew Warner: You know, one of the interesting things like, we’re kind of coming full circle here because we’re talking about Neil Patel and his strength in SEO and how much revenue he was and he was generating, and what kind of a business he built on it. When he was starting with SEO, it felt like this silly game and it wasn’t worth pursuing.
There was even an interview, you can find it online somewhere of him and Jason Calis debating whether SEO was even a thing. And then Jason Calis eventually moved his whole business model to SEO, which is a credit to him, his ability to be persuaded once he gets the facts. But Neil got in there early when it was silly, small and not worth other people’s time, and just kept building and building.
And I feel like the same thing is happening now with with AI search results.
Chirag Kulkarni: Yeah, and I think Andrew, the other thing people are wondering is, okay if I am using, you know, most of the companies that we work with are. North of 20 million in funding. And so these are, you know these, these are businesses that spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month on marketing.
And so the challenge is, hey, if I’m a marketer and people are not looking at advertising the same on Google, I’m spending a hundred thousand a month on Google and people are not engaging with me in the same way none of these LMS have any type of advertising, I need to do optimizations organic. Because if I don’t, I’m not gonna see that revenue because all of my users are potentially changing behavior towards organic. And there is no paid for chat GBT today.
Andrew Warner: Yeah.
Chirag Kulkarni: I feel it’s a massive tailwind for our business, but also a great opportunity for businesses that, by the way, you don’t have to be dominant on Google to optimize for lms. And that becomes also an opportunity. ’cause now you can play in the SEO world. In the, in the search world without having to be dominant on Google. And that’s exciting.
Andrew Warner: Yeah. All right. I like the simplicity of your website. Usually this is the part of the conversation where I bust people’s chops about their website and like why it’s this long URL. Now, this is short. It’s just taco.co, and I’m looking forward to seeing how much this grows. Thanks for doing this interview.
Chirag Kulkarni: Thank you, Andrew.
Andrew Warner: Hell yeah. Bye everyone.