Adam Torres and Gil Allouche discuss Metadata.io.
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Show Notes:
Metadata.io is the Marketing OS that aims to eliminate repetitive marketing tasks while improving performance at the same time. In this episode, Adam Torres and Gil Allouche, Founder & CEO of Metadata.io, explore how Metadata reduces time spent on tactical execution for B2B marketers, allowing them more time to spend on high-value work like strategy and creativity.
About Metadata.io
B2B marketers use Metadata’s Marketing OS to drive more revenue without all the manual and repetitive work. From running paid campaigns to personalizing web experiences to optimizing everything to revenue – Metadata automates all of this. This means less time spent on low-value tasks and more time spent on strategy, creativity, and driving revenue.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to be a part of our community, head on over to mission matters. com and click on community to apply. All right. So did I have Gil Aloosh on the line and he’s founder and CEO of metadata. io. Gil, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Adam. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. All right, Gil. So excited to get into today’s topic and learn more about metadata. io. And just to get us kicked off, we’ll start off with what we like to call our Mission Matters Minute. So Gil, we at Mission Matters, we amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts.
That’s our mission. Gil, what mission matters to you? That’s not that is that we want to make every marketing department in every B2B company a profit unit and also we want to get marketers back on the activities that they signed up for when they chose a marketing career, not the technical repetitive mundane tasks, but rather the creative and fun work of marketing.
That’s our mission. Wonderful. Love bringing mission based entrepreneurs on the show to share, you know, why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and really what we can all learn from each other so that we grow together. So great having you on. And I guess just to get us kicked off. So were you always a marketer?
Like, like, how’d you get going in marketing? No, not at all. I actually started my career as a software engineer in robotics. That’s when I spent the first part of my career. I came to the United States in my graduate school, ended up in marketing for about 8 years. And like every software engineer, you know, I wanted to automate every part of my work and I ended up automating the job of a B2B demand generation marketer.
And that’s how metadata came to be. Wow. And so in that journey of that process, I guess, at one point, were you, were you always an entrepreneur or did you start off working for somebody else? Or like, how did that, how did that transpire? Like launching metadata? I had a few businesses before. I would say I have an entrepreneurial mindset.
I had It was in your blood? Was it in your blood? I think so. I think it’s in my blood. I always wanted to work for myself. I think most entrepreneurs are not great employees. And I would say I belong to that group. I can work in companies and I have worked in companies, but I always hated the fact that there is a glass ceiling to my responsibility and to my earnings and to my decision making.
Mostly I like the freedom of. Making my own choices and so I always wanted to start a company and a few, most of them were small kind of lifestyle, like an I. T. consultancy and things like that before. But metadata is my 1st. I would say software business. That is growing a nice in a nice way year after year.
Wow. That’s amazing. And when did you know you had something with this? I mean, I’ll speak for myself. I’ll say like, and in terms of, you know, as entrepreneurs, and it sounds to me like you’re definitely in the serial entrepreneur mindset, like you knew you were going to be launching something at some point and that that’s you.
So as entrepreneurs, we get a lot of ideas. We’re like, Oh, this is a good idea. This is a good idea. When did you know that metadata was going to be your thing? Like, you’re like, Oh, I’m going to focus serious attention to this. So I was invited, I think in 2016, if I’m not mistaken, to. Kind of a networking event for CMO in Silicon Valley, and I was, I was brought in to speak about this methodology.
I’m using this experimentation and data methodology. I’m using for me to be marketing and I didn’t have metadata back. And it was just like an idea and a concept that I wanted to make company, but I didn’t have enough data to support it actually happening. And honestly, I also didn’t have the courage just yet.
Just like leave my job and. Do it, but that’s, that’s a big one to jump off the like cliff. I’m like, that’s a big moment. . Yeah. It was a big moment. You know, and you work as a VP in a tech company in Silicon Valley, there’s a lot to lose, right? Like, you know, it took me years to get back to the same salary that I made as CEO, as a VP of marketing, you know, being a CEO of my own company.
But it’s of course, it’s definitely worthwhile change. But, mm-Hmm. , to make a long story short, I was talking in that event. In that event, you know, as I was presenting the methodology and the idea of, of metadata, essentially, without calling it metadata, I had a bunch of. And Razor, who asked me, how can we work with you?
This is exactly what we’re looking for. And I told him, well, it just happens to be that I just started a company in this exact area. And that’s that’s what I do. I’d love to work with you. And in that break in the coffee break of that event, I went on LinkedIn right on that spot and I changed my title from whatever I was doing.
What was it like, like you’re in that break and you’re like, I’m doing this. I’m like, how did you feel? You’re changing the LinkedIn, you’re announcing it publicly. Like, what was that like? It was scary. It was scary. First of all, I made a mistake because when you make a job change in LinkedIn, there’s a small checkbox you can uncheck.
And when you uncheck it, it makes kind of a silent announcement. You know, the change is happening, but only notified everybody. Come on. I made exactly, I made a mistake. It just notified everyone in the network. And I got like. Dozens of comments. It’s not like more. And my friends called me and I got text message like, oh, congratulations, you realize.
And I was like, fuck, . This is not supposed to be , but like, you know, once you make that announcement commitment, you know the rest, the rest follows. So it ended up being . That’s the universe. That’s God right there. That’s the universe. It’s like, yep, , it’s happening. Oh, man, that’s what an amazing story. And then for everybody watches, by the way, not you’ve been just to kind of bring people up to speed.
So, I mean, you’ve been on this journey for over eight years now, right? So this isn’t this is a, I’m taking Joe back in time on this one, right? Yeah, I think this is year seven for me with with method. Exactly. That’s amazing. So let’s, let’s, let’s bring it a little bit further to present day. So what kind of issues and what, cause you’re, I feel that you’re pretty early on on this.
If we think eight years and in the space you’re at. So now when people are thinking about automations and marking all this, like present day with AI and now that’s like, this is the conversation of our time, but you know, you’re eight years in on the, in the space. So what’s interesting to you right now that you’re seeing?
Okay. What I find very interesting, and I love it, is that AI is becoming from slowly but surely something that people are just afraid of to something that they’re afraid of, but also excited about. And hopefully, over time, they’re gonna be more excited and afraid of you know, Chad GPT, for example, brought brought AI to the hands of every household.
And it’s on the path of becoming, you know, one of the most popular technologies out there. And it’s just a glimpse of what I can do. It’s a method that we knew early on that artificial intelligence has the power to not only tell you what to do or give you advice of what to do. And then you get into parallel analysis paralysis, but it can actually skip, skip this.
That can actually do what it knows is going to be the best next action. And that’s how we build around that around that concept of. You don’t need to do all these technical repetitive Monday. You don’t have to wake up at 3 a. m. in the morning and go to a thousand times. You don’t have to spend 7 hours on Facebook, setting up campaign experiments.
You don’t have to have 7 screens open to audit the performance of your campaigns. All of that is. Is the work that the machine can do with pleasure versus a human, you know, kind of like, not really enjoying that kind of the type of work. And so I’m very excited about that trend because it’s, you know, when you build a startup, the first thing you have to do is survive.
You have to survive. To get to the time where the idea that you created your company around is becoming popular and becoming a mainstream. And so the market kind of converges to you when that happens, and I’m feeling that, like, that that moment in time is happening for us. I know the economy is tough, and at the same time, the innovation is happening, and people are getting more and more comfortable with the idea of artificial intelligence doing a lot of the work for them.
And so I’m most excited about that trend. What kind of companies do you work with or industries? If, there’s a niche or specialty. Absolutely. I would say for a startup, if you don’t have a particular niche, that’s not a good time. we’re targeting the meet B2B companies only in the mid market in the mid market range.
So like imagine like 200 CC, 300 employees, up to like a few thousands, but think about companies like Yelp, zoom Juniper network ramps, you know, bricks. Those are the kind of companies we work with. A lot of tech companies, lots of internet companies complex sales process and high ticket price.
So most of our customers sell their product for the very least 40, 50 K all the way to, you know, hundreds of thousands or even a million of dollars per year. What has been some of your, like, your, use case studies, like tell us about some wins and how you’ve and what you’ve been able to integrate.
You don’t have to say the name of the company, by the way, but just give us a flavor for the work. That’s all. it’s and you’re welcome to say the name by the way. I just don’t like to put people on the spot with that. That’s all. No, I appreciate that. it’s published out there. So the company we work with, reason they come to Metadata is because they want to, first of all, they want to they want to guarantee, they kind of want to move from art to science.
You know, in B2B marketing, people try a lot of things and they don’t even know how to measure. Right. The campaigns that they’re running, it takes them a lot of time to run a campaign, and they don’t really know how to measure whether it works or not. Sometimes they measure it on, like, impressions and clicks and all kinds of vanity metrics.
Well, the only important thing in a B2B company, in terms of marketing, is did you generate pipeline and did you generate revenue? And if you did, what was the cost? What is the customer acquisition cost? And so the two things that we work with companies to improve is the economies of scale of their growth and reducing their tax.
we provide them with a system that experiment at scale. It doesn’t run 3, 4, 5 campaigns. It’s run 300, 400, 500 campaigns at scale. And it’s quickly. Fine tunes into the 30, 40 campaigns that generate 80 percent of the revenue and it does that constantly. So it constantly run like an arbitrage and all of your campaigns, all of the channels, all of the campaign types, all of the audience, all of the creative and it fine tunes into the combinations that work the best.
This is something that the human cannot do effectively, but the machine can be very effectively similar to if you compare the way. Stock trading was happening in the eighties in the seventies versus the way stock trading is happening these days with computers. It’s kind of a similar analogy. And so our customers on the other end, what they see is they see predictable growth.
If they want to generate 50 million in pipeline next quarter. Or, or $5 million in pipeline exporter, they can control it and the system will tell them exactly what budget they need to put as an input in order to get that pipeline as an output. And the second thing that our customers see consistently is a reduction in customer acquisition cost.
We have the, the, capability using the fermentation to do arbitrage. Effectively, the system finds the low hanging fruits in any point of time. If there is a particular campaign type that is more effective or you’re not competing against many marketers in this particular audience or channel, quickly diverge a lot of your budget there because you’ll get, you’ll get such better benefits.
And if alternatively, something is becoming really expensive, like a channel is becoming expensive and popular. It will reduce the spend there and find a more more appropriate alternatives. Those are the best outcomes that a marketer can have. The CMO can have because these are the kind of outcomes they can report back to the CEO and the CEO can report back to the board.
And so that’s what we focus on it’s interesting to me because this is so where you were ahead of the curve on this, like, when I think about even in the small business space, when you think about the way that, like, bidding, even just, I guess, just to take one, one small example would be like a Facebook, how the bidding’s working and how, how now, like what you just described, that’s what’s being, there’s no longer going to be this time point in time where it’s going to be okay, you found your winning campaign and you’d never change it.
Like that’s not going to happen anymore. Like the algorithm, everything’s already changing to where it’s not making it happen, because ultimately, if you think about the ad platform themselves, and I’m only talking about Facebook, just as a small niche of ad platforms, right. But just as a, just to start somewhere like for that, they, they ultimately as an ad platform, want you to.
Spend more money with them, right? Mm-Hmm, , like that’s a given. So, so now if you just found this winning, winning ad at some point it’s not, there’s only so much audience for it anyway. So they want you testing, they want you changing things. So if you, this, this ad that you had before, they may, they may show it to less people over time.
So if you’re not, and so now when you think about. Just being more competitive for other people that are bidding on those on those same on those on that same audience, like without this testing at scale. If everybody, if you think about you versus your competition who are launching one or two or three or five or whatever versus hundreds.
Like, it’s just kind of, when you really think about it, it’s common sense as to why wouldn’t the entire industry evolve to that at some point? Like why wouldn’t it? Totally agree. It can’t not. It’s not like, it’s, there is, because it’s too measurable, like everything’s way too measurable and the analytics are only getting better, like even in things like podcasting, like analytics for tracking that which didn’t even exist, let’s say five years ago, now exist, and they’re still in market share from radio.
So if we think about any of, any of these things, it’s like, wow, what you just described, it’s one of those things like, like, you know we, we need, we need you in the small business market too, man. Eventually I feel you one day, one day, two things about that. First of all, right on. I completely agree.
Like. know, experimentation is not not an option anymore. The audience will turn out eventually and the creative fatigue will happen. And so you have to constantly have new I can generate a lot of it. Like, for example, we didn’t have the data. It can automatically generate new sets of text variations for you based on what works and what didn’t work in the past.
We don’t even have to come up with all the inputs. Once you have a baseline, it can automatically create more iterations. The other thing that you mentioned is very, very true. People forget is that. Every advertising channel, it doesn’t matter what it is, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google, they optimize for one thing and for one thing only.
And that is for you to spend more money on their channel. Thank you. Thank you. There’s no altruism there. Thank you. No, of course not. so if you rely on one channel to do the work for you, it’s never going to happen. They always want to optimize. They’re always going to give you some reason why you should spend more money on them.
They’re not going to tell you. Facebook is going to tell you. Well, you kind of exhausted the audience here, you should now go to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is not going to tell you, well, you know, you spend enough here, you should go to Google AdWords, you’re going to get better price. Can you imagine that email?
Go, can you imagine that email? Hold on, I want to think about that for a second. Can you imagine that email from Facebook that says, Hey, you’ve spent enough money with us already, and I don’t think we can hit the objective that much more. You might be better off going to LinkedIn. Yeah, I agree. Sorry, I had to play that.
Continue, Go. I don’t think I’ll be alive for that. I don’t think I’ll be, I’ll be around for something like that. Your friends at Facebook. Yes. Go ahead, I’m sorry. No, no, was it. Like, agree with you to the point that I think you have to always be on experimentation and, you know, constantly do arbitration.
There’s also new types of campaigning. There’s video, there’s podcast, there’s like, there’s the short videos, there’s the side reels. the carousel as there’s so many types that you should also reiterate to them, you know, it always there’s always a new thing it’s very recommended for someone to have some sort of system to go through experimentation.
If you’re stagnating on anything, even if it was a major winner for you a year ago, it’s not going to be the same thing the next year, the year after. If you think it is, then everybody else that’s implementing by using companies like yourself or, or technology in general that are, that are, they’re going to be doing it.
And little by little, you’re going to lose ground. Like, that’s the way I feel like it. If you don’t, it’s not one of those bandwagon things. It’s like, it’s a paradigm shift. It’s a, it’s a complete shift, especially with chat TPT, just because now the, the layman is, is even using the, the conversation of using prompts.
Like I’m like, when I, I haven’t heard it yet, but the day, so I knew Facebook was mainstream when my mom joined and I’m like, there you go. I think there’s a term for that, right? It’s like mother factor or something like that. I don’t remember the term, but it’s like did when, when a certain generation adopts it, my mom was on Tik TOK.
I’m like, okay, there we go. And now everybody’s. I’m telling you, Gil, the day that my mom, which is probably in the very near future, is like, what, Adam, what prompts do you think I should put in the chat GPT? And she’s not going to call it chat GPT. She’s going to call it chat GTO. And mom, GTO was a car. It’s not a GTO.
When my mom asked me what prompts she needs to put into, or no, she’s going to call it a prop. What props should I put in, in chat GTO? I’m done, Gil. I quit then. That’s hilarious. Well. Oh, man. Well, Gil, hey. I just have to say it’s been great having you on the show today, but I do for my audience, I know we just scratched the surface on marketing and on, on talk and, and also in the full the full breadth of what you do over at metadata dot IO.
So if somebody was listening to this or watching this and they want to follow up and connect and continue the conversation what’s the best way for them to do that? Look, as a product person myself, and you mentioned you asked. to have something for startups, we actually do have an offering for startups.
We have a free trial. You get the first three audiences for free. So the best way to experiment with those things, I think to actually experiment with the product and try it out versus reading about it and requesting demos and things like that. So you go to metadata. io, you click on free trial or you click on the meta match and just take a, take a ride on your own and you experiment what, happens when you apply AI to advertising and marketing.
Man, that’s awesome. And for our audience, just to let you know, we’ll put, we’ll put all of, we’ll put the websites and all that good stuff in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over and check out that free trial. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters or engaging in an episode, we’re all about bringing out business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives and having them share their mission.
The reason behind their mission, you know, why they do what they do, what wakes them up in the morning to get out into the marketplace and make a difference. If that sounds exciting or fun or engaging to you, we welcome you hit that subscribe button. We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing.
Gil, thank you so much for coming in the show. It’s truly been a pleasure. Same here. Thank you very much for having me.