Why Ploy.ai is more than another website tool - 60 MINUTES with Bryant Chou

Speaker A: Hi, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Noco podcast. And it's a special one today because we have, uh, a special guest, and his name is Bryant Cho. Bryant, welcome for joining. Uh, welcome, and thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. For those of you who don't know who this gentleman is, Bryant is the co founder and former CTO of Webflow, held that position for 13 years, and has basically sort of responsible for us at noco actually existing as an agency, because even though we're a design agency, uh, webflow has always been front and center of what we do. Uh, even the name is derived from it because NOCO obviously stands for no code. Well, um, so, um, that, uh, explains a lot, Bryant. Uh, you're here for a reason, because you haven't been, uh, sitting still. You have been very busy because you have a new venture. Congrats on that. Um, also congrats on the funding the you raised. Very, very significant. Um, why didn't you just, you know, pack up your bags, uh, and your surfboard and just, you know, travel the world and just enjoy life? Why did you go into another grind?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I get asked that all the time, and maybe depending on my mood, I have different answers. Um, today I'm feeling awesome. You know, I'm sitting here in my summer cottage, and I'm still able to spend time with my young kids. And then I'm also able to work as much as I want. And, uh, I think ultimately it just comes down to what you feel like your life's purpose is. And I think I just have the, um, privilege. And I feel very grateful to have come to the realization that my life's purpose at this point is to. To hopefully, meaningfully influence people's lives for the better. And that's a very nebulous way of saying, you know, I'm uniquely decent at creating products from going 0 to 1. Um, you know, I've done it twice before already, and I am, uh, just, like, finding it so irresistible to actually apply everything that I learned so that other people can benefit from things that I build. And, uh, that's really the mission and vision of, um, Ploy, which is to enable businesses to grow more successfully and more autonomously.

Speaker A: Democratizing marketing, demystifying growth is something that is, uh, a quote that, uh, uh, I remembered, uh, from another interview. Now, that sounds all very nice, of course. Right, but what does it actually mean?

Speaker B: Yeah, great. I love how the Dutch candor is coming straight to the point right now.

Speaker A: Sorry, can't help myself.

Speaker B: This is, this is a really good question because you know, when I talk to customers, I talk to agencies about what Ploy is and they go to our website and they're just like, okay, I think I know what you do. Okay, it's a website product, it's an ad management product. But then it also helps you find leads and customers. Like what is ploy? And essentially Ploy is not just a website builder, it's not just an ad management tool, it's not just a way for you to generate leads, but it is an entire platform for a business to run their go to market. And really I am inspired by the companies that have done this for the back office. So Intuit, my first employer, was famous for creating all this accounting software, but then they also had a really large business running payroll, um, and then they started to offer all these other software, uh, solutions for the back office. And Intuit is effectively a back office roll up of all these different tools, just like rippling is. And really I don't think anything exists in that fashion for the front office or the part of the business that is meant to help you drive growth, the part of the business that is meant to help you engage with customers and to convert it into revenue. And especially true that there's no platform that does this for small businesses, there's no platform that can do this for startups, let alone enable agencies to help their businesses and their clients do this. So that's essentially what Ploy is, which is it is a combination of a website, product, ad management product, but probably 25 other things that I can probably bore you to death with that replaces all of these other point solutions. And of course we're using AI agents to make it a lot more seamless and a lot more possible. You don't have to learn all these different workflows, you don't have to learn all these UIs and UX. You literally just talk to the web agent, you talk to the ads agent and you essentially get the ability to kind of turn on your growth lever just by using Ploy.

Speaker A: All right, great explanation. Um, I'm going to share with you a positive or something that sounds inspiring to us and something that we might be, or people might be a little bit skeptical about. So the positive is that your premise, as you just stated, um, is for an agency like Noco, is beautiful. It's almost perfect because um, we exist to bridge the gap, I guess between product, software products and go to market. The core service that we offer is a website, but we have all these other, I guess, silos around it that we're trying to bolt onto that website, like a CRO workflow, like a design subscription. We have a brand, Sprint, in front of that. Uh, but it's all very chronological and slightly static. Um, so when in theory you have a product that combines all of these things in one ui, in one holistic workflow with loops, it learns from each other. I think it also has dream cycles, you know, overnight we're experimenting with our own second brain also has dream cycles. So that is all amazing. M. And love to learn more about that. Then the skeptical part is, what do you say to people who say, okay, there's 25 features in there, or something like that? Don't you spread yourself too thin? Are all of those features at a certain standard where they can actually be useful to you?

Speaker B: That's a really great question because I think if you were to try to build this before the age of AI, before the age of agents, you would end up with very poorly stitched together products, UI and ux. And because ploy is agent first, where the main modality is chat, of course we have some features where you can go and edit, uh, very specific parts of your website or tweak very specific documents. It really sort of makes the onboarding process a lot easier and I'm happy to show you guys. Um, and then second of all, I also think that the way we're building it is very unique, you know, so we are not building products. We're actually building a bunch of batteries that you can attach and then all these batteries. One, uh, of the batteries is analytics. Right. And what do we have there? We just have a time series database that, ah, our agents are trained to go and query. So if you have a question about your traffic spike or traffic drop, all you have to do is go and type in some things. Like, why did my traffic drop yesterday? Oh, it's because this particular ad campaign ran out of budget. You need to go and update your budget here. Or it could be something as simple as, hey, um, this particular keyword started to drop off, um, and you're starting to lose traffic for this search term. And we can tell you exactly how to improve that. Um, so all of these are sort of like batteries that you are kind of getting batteries included in the whole platform. And of course we're starting with the website product, but you're getting all these other things. So you're getting, you know, um, I can't tease away too much because we have a big product, uh, announcement Coming out soon, that's going to be really huge. But you're getting all these things.

Speaker A: Spill the beans, man. Come on, spill the beans.

Speaker B: You're getting all these things. Yeah. You're getting all these things that even if you're to try to bytecode them yourself, you know, there's still a lot of overhead and engineering know how in order to get it really right. And the company is really founded on the premise of trust. I think in the age of AI you really need to establish just like a really high degree of trust with your customers and especially your agency's clients. Because the moment you lose it, then you're just essentially stuck with AI's lock.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: And people don't like that.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that's a very, very important point. And this is something that we talked about in the last episode when we also touched on Ploy, is that I feel that in this AI hype cycle that product gets so much disrespect in the sense that um, everything needs to be Vibe coded. You see every other post, you see your timeline is about this. Claude Skill is destroying an entire industry or niche and you know, but a good purpose built product with people behind it that you know and trust and can, you know, send a ticket and read their blogs and know that it doesn't evaporate overnight. I think that gets overlooked a little bit. Uh, at least that's my feeling. Um, I have a weak spot for product. Just a team of people meticulously crafting features that are for a specific ICP that are being tested and iterated as you go. And uh, I get the appeal of everything being Vibe coded, but I think product is here to stay. Um, to be honest, as in the classical SaaS sense, but maybe it's a bit of a side road, but would love to have your take on that as well.

Speaker B: Um, first of all, I don't think it matters and then ultimately if employee is good at product, if you're good at product, if your customers are good at product, what actually matters now is just outcomes because products are just kind of a vehicle to, it's a tool to solve a problem or to generate an outcome. Um, so the main mission of the company is not go and build the best products. The mission of the company is to help our businesses make a lot more money and to make it more efficient, to help them bring them more revenue and you know, the product is in service of that. So I think the product needs to work well, the product needs to be designed well, the product needs to have solid engineering behind it. Um, but I think with AI, we're definitely in the age now where product is just, you know, uh, it's less of, um, a elitist type of, um, hard to attain thing. It's just like, sure, you have it or you don't.

Speaker A: Right, right, right. Got you. Um, do you have something to show us, Bryant? Uh, can you, um, can you, can you share your screen and show us a couple of interesting things?

Speaker B: For sure. Um, okay, let me see here. I just pulled up a workspace and this workspace is full of different ploys. Employees are essentially synonymous with chats. Um, and what you see out of the gate is, you know, something that looks like a, uh, sort of vibe coding tool, like, ah, lovable or something like that. However, there's a lot of things that are unique to Ploy that the vibe coding platforms just simply don't touch. The first one is just the quality of the code. Right. So I can't necessarily, you know, start a company that prides itself on really clean code and then create another company that has a bunch of shit code. So, you know, what you're seeing here is that every single site that we generate for you is a really clean Astro site. And the reason why we pick Astro is we believe it's one of the better sort of, uh, web frameworks that are out there. It's really easy for humans to understand, it's really easy for agents to understand.

Speaker C: And

Speaker B: what you're getting when you're using Ploy is you're actually getting the ability to interface directly with the design system that is behind Ploy. Um, and this design system obviously is using a lot of the sort of know how that I took from webflow. But it's a theming library combined with a bunch of components that you're building inside of Ploy and you're using inside of Ploy. So this is the components folder. You'll see all these different sections. These sections are all nicely annotated and just really clean code. You're not going to get crazy tailwind sort of numbers in here. So this is like sort of really, really clean. It's not what you're typically going to see, uh, out of the other products out there. And the reason why this is really clean is so that we could build very high quality sites where the sections are guaranteed to be reused if that's the intention. So for example, all these sections like abm, Proof section, Customer Story section, Keyword section, these all have different properties within these sections. So that when you're Going to build a new page that could utilize these new sections. It's going to use that exact same piece, um, exact same component. Just like you would when you're reusing the webflow component.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: This is not something that any other Vibe coding platform has. Right. So the design adherence, um, all of these different ways that we're making sure that this website which I literally just built 47 seconds ago, um, is working really well. And it's up to you know, pro designers, sort of uh, design bar in aesthetic bar. And of course if you need to change something, you can go and click here and say like improve the contrast ratio here for example. You can go in, fire off the prompts to go and fix that.

Speaker A: Yeah, already played around with this a little bit. Of course, uh, kind of the same way uh, claw design works obviously. Just simply talking about the annotations, not uh, uh, uh, the code behind it. Um, Daniel, what is your first uh, thought when you see this workflow?

Speaker C: Mhm. Well, uh, it's similar, right? It's very similar to other um, wipe coding tools. But yeah, when I um, kind of checked out the code I was also surprised that it's very modular and you can find the actual components and the sections. Um, so yeah, that goes kind of into a question that I wanted to ask is um, what we do is uh, at NOCO is that basically uh, our designers create these sort of modular sections in figma and uh, we try to replicate them as much as possible currently in webflow and uh, we want to make sure that those are reusable and like webflow came up with this sort of page builder mode where uh, an editor or a marketer can come in and just craft up a page from existing components. So how can I um, sort of feed um, those components uh, to ploy so that it's always one to one with figma. So uh, would you like suggest like creating something like an MD file or how can I make sure.

Speaker B: Okay, so is this a scenario where this is a brand or company that doesn't have the website built yet and the only thing that you have is in figma?

Speaker C: Uh, yeah, let's say. Yeah, that's a good one.

Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know, maybe let's try it out. Um, I haven't tried it myself but uh, we have a Figma integration. So for example right here, uh, if you go to Settings, you could actually see all the different integrations that we support. So Figma is one of them. Google Analytics, GSC, CRM integrations, Airtable, we have maybe 120 different integrations. Can you maybe share a figure file with me?

Speaker C: Um, let me grab one, let me find one.

Speaker B: Let's just uh, try this one. Um, key deck. Okay.

Speaker C: Yeah, There's a tab called Ready for development.

Speaker B: I guess, uh, let's build a landing cage or Clear Blade, uh, from the figmos file, uh, zip file called Clear Blade website. I've never tried this before by the way.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: The page to look at is. Go and connect my sigma here. Access.

Speaker C: So

Speaker B: we actually haven't uh, tested this because the main use case that we currently solve for are for sites that already have an existing design.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker C: Got it.

Speaker B: I'll pull the key down. I already did. What's going on? There's a connection issue and so it looks like it might be working. Um, so while that's going, the main sort of thing that we've spent a lot of time on is actually what's called the Website Slurper. And the Website Slurper is something that works pretty well actually. So um, for example, um, let me pull up deploy here. Earlier I had just set up a workspace for DocuSign and I said actually I want you to focus on DocuSign.com um and in about 23 seconds it went to DocuSign.com and it actually slurped all of their page into Ploy. And what happens is that we go and visit the site and we deterministically extract all these different sections. So the HERO section, this section, we extract all these hover treatments, uh, we extract all the assets and what we do is we create an entire design system from scratch just off of the homepage. The reason why we do that is then we can ask the user, hey, um, what do you want to do next? Do you want to get found in AI? Do you want to improve your SEO? Do you want to improve conversion rate optimization? I said here that I want to build a really interactive page that describes what DocuSign does.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And let's see what it built. So this particular page was built by Ploy. Um, it's meant to kind of give a platform overview. It looks like um, that already comes out of the box with these animations. It looks like it's reusing some of the assets. And because it knows what every single asset is, um, it's able to use the right asset in the right places. Um, and then also had a built in image generation. So if it's missing a particular asset, it will go and generate a new asset based off of the ah, Image guidelines that we actually uh, extrapolated from your existing site. Um, so this probably took three minutes. Yeah, three, three and a half minutes to build. And it follows uh, what's called a ploybook. And this ploy book is essentially a series of instructions that are human curated that are kind of telling ploy, like what to do when you're going to build a page. And we have a bunch of these ploy bugs that are available when you're signing up to use ploy. So we have a bunch of playbooks for ad campaign management, aeo, um, agent readiness, building a content page. So all these playbooks are kind of like purpose built, sort of selected by marketers and curated by marketers to perform, you know, a variety of different marketing skills. Um, so these are really, really fun, um, that our users really love. So let's go back here, let's see here, let me check my code. I need to reshare the um. Okay, let me try again, see if that works. But yeah. Do you guys have any questions about this page?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, sure. Uh, so, um, yeah, the slurping, uh, that's of course uh, a cool way to uh, name it. Uh, we tried that ourselves with our own website. Just basically just to experience the onboarding flow. Right. Um, I think it's very impressive the way it slurps. Uh, I think that's really cool if you can already see the level of responsiveness, the way it reuses assets, hover states I think as well. Uh, so that's super impressive. I just have a question about uh, I guess the onboarding flow that you've created. So basically the way to go is really that it extracts either your URL or it uses your email domain. That's when it starts looking at your website, uh, scanning your website and then basically rebuilding it. And then you're employ, you're in the deploy ecosystem and from there on out you can tweak the website to make sure that it looks exactly the way either your current website looks or an improved version of it. Then you can save it or publish it probably you can also save it as some sort of draft or concept. And can you then already uh, move on to the other aspects, to the other features like AEO optimization, uh, launching a ploy book for uh, account based marketing to generate those landing pages. And my second question is also that design system, is that also separately editable, like it builds a design system. Okay, got it. But you have to first complete I guess the website step. Right? That's sort of a mandatory thing. Yeah, okay, got it.

Speaker B: We actually also have a code sync with GitHub. Um, so the way this works is if you want to go and use cursor, cloud code or whatever, you can actually go and sync this site that you built, employee or slurped employee, back to your local environment and vice versa. So if you actually have an existing, um, Astro site that you want to bring to Ploy, we also have some magical sort of tools that are coming that can convert a bunch of other websites that you have the code of. You can bring that into play through GitHub. So those are really, really popular because often people already have the code.

Speaker A: Yeah, got it. So what if you have a Webflow sort of our use case, right? There's a Webflow website, an existing Webflow website of a B2B SaaS company. So basically you let Ploy slurp it. Um, you do the things you want to do. You launch the playbooks, you want to launch, uh, and then basically you have to replace that site online. Right? You have to basically, um, you have to migrate some stuff. Probably there are probably some CMS content that you want to migrate.

Speaker B: You do, um, or you don't, actually. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of a reverse proxy, but there's actually a reverse proxy built into Ploy. Um, and the way that works is you can have a bunch of pages or routes, uh, to go point to your webflow origin and you can say, like, hey, these are particular routes that should go and be directed to webflow and it'll continue serving that. Um, so we've had a cmo, for example, of the Series B company, migrate her entire website to Ploy in an afternoon. Uh, slurped all of the CMS content. It, um, put it into Astro collections. And then we also had a different head of marketing at another Series B company that actually went and kept their existing site. And our agent actually set up all these hosting roles for them so that they could keep webflow pages, um, for example, their blog on blog. But then they built all these net new AEO SEO pages on Ploy. So there's actually a variety of ways that you can.

Speaker A: Very interesting, Very interesting that the last, uh, use case, Brian, because so that's also possible. It's also possible to say, okay, look, my current website is in webflow. We're happy the team is comfortable in that. We'll leave it as is. But sort of the AEO content surrounding all the landing pages, all the AEO optimized, uh, long form, blog content, whatever. That's what you can let Ploy handle. So that's also a use case that you're. Okay. That's very interesting.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, cool. So it looks like this Clear Blade site came back. Um, and it looks like there's some issues with this hero where it's being cut off. Um, but it looks like it pulled the brand colors correctly. Uh, there might be some missing images here. It looks like it's still working on the page. It's not completely done, but um, the visual looking good.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it seems like it. I don't know if this exists in the Figma file or not, but it's able to actually export all these Figma, uh, frames and bring them to Ploy.

Speaker A: Yeah. To be fair, I think you picked the key deck as the, as the reference. Right. And uh, Daniel pointed you to uh, the dev ready file which if we pick that one it would probably be a much cleaner build. So in, in defense of, uh. Yeah, I'm saying that correctly. Right. Then you pointed to the, to the other tab in the figma.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, but that's okay. It still generated a page for the key.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So it's for sure it's a good start.

Speaker A: Yeah. I mean obviously.

Speaker B: Yeah, it looks like this other, this other um, tab or this other page in the figure is pretty massive. So the agent would have to really spend a lot of time kind of uh, coming up with this.

Speaker C: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: So yeah, this is not necessarily a workflow that you know, we're optimizing for right now, but this is definitely something that I could see working uh, really well after we spent some time working on it.

Speaker A: Yeah, interesting because it also said in the integrations page for the figma, it said uh, you know, it reach your also uh, reach your components and your design tokens. So it should be. If you have a clean developer ready Figma file, then I could see it, you know, uh, put that to use very, in a very clean way. So. Okay, interesting one. Then we should definitely experiment with that a little bit more. Um, yeah. Wow. Um, can we talk about account based marketing? Uh, Bryant. So what does that look like in Ploy? Because that's obviously uh, a very interesting one and also one that a lot of companies uh, struggle with a little bit. Like how do you create a system that you know, where you don't just. Yeah, I'm just curious about the workflow and the loop that you created there and uh, how it's sort of keeping iterating itself and learning.

Speaker B: Awesome. I'm I'm glad you're asking about that. So I'll bring you back to this example. Um, this is a, um, AVM page. Um, it went and researched Uber, Uber meet this, you know, company is trying to sell into and it pulled in a bunch of things that it believes that was relevant to them. Right. So all the copy here was written on the guidance of a ploy book that we have for abm. Um, let me try and find it. Yeah, this one, Build an AVM landing page. Right. So it actually goes and follows this very detailed sort of set of instructions and it went and go, went and built this particular page. Um, the way this can work at scale is this can integrate with your CRM, um, so we can pull in your named accounts. Uh, or a salesperson could simply just say, hey, go and build me an ABM page for this other account. And because the design system has all these components again.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: So it's pulling from all these components that lives in this directory here. Um, these are full width section components. It's able to build really on brand, uh, pages where all the right atoms of these components are always going to be the same. Um, from the headings and typography all the way down to the actual buttons like this one.

Speaker A: Yep. And um, yeah, it's also very powerful I guess to start, start implementing all these, well, these integrations the right way because you know, user tracking obviously is basically your, your existing marketing stack. Um, you know, connecting it, uh, connecting, connecting it to everything and, and, and okay, no, but yeah, I'm sure you have more to say about this. Right. So do you, do you have a use case where this account based marketing is, um, like can you feed it like an ICP description?

Speaker B: Yeah, I actually want to show you um, something else that we use for our own marketing site. Uh, but before I get there, this is just like the analytics that comes out of the box. This is client side analytics as well as server side analytics. This we tell you top pages, your top refers. Uh, we tell you where your traffic is coming from, mobile versus desktop. But we also have this tab here. Um, so you might have seen this in the YC video. We actually have the concept of visitor, uh, enrichment. So we can actually say hey, these are actually website or these are actually companies that have visited, uh, your website. And here's what we can do with some of that data. So we can actually take this data, we can further enrich it. So we could find people that exist from these companies. We could find a variety of different ways that we can Actually turn this data into uh, a warmer lead. So the best leads are probably the ones that you already have, but they're just not capturing them in your funnel.

Speaker A: So based on this visitor data you can also have ploy built additional pages or additional landing pages based on a certain. That's great because currently we're doing this in Apollo. Right. So there's also a visitor tool in Apollo. You have to add a script to your website and then you can see the companies, you can enrich it there, but that's kind of where it stays. Right. You then have to do something with that data again and craft the page in webflow or something. But being able to do this all in one product and one UI is very, very interesting. Um, and um, yeah, I can see that being very powerful.

Speaker B: Yeah, just to come back here, you know, like if something's broken you can just say hey, go and fix the

Speaker C: layout in the hero.

Speaker B: Um, deploy has built in screenshotting so it could take a, a picture of this and it can go and figure out what it needs to co fix.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So sorry, I have a question about the cms. Uh, well, um, because it kind of goes with the whole um, AEO and the whole um, marketing. So um, as you mentioned the reverse proxy and everything. So all the CMS is basically just file based so you just get these different pages as files. So there's no actual um, template or anything. So you could practically make every page look different. Right.

Speaker B: We have a CMS coming very soon that's actually dynamic database, uh backed cms, um, that'll give you the ability to programmatically add new pages without republishing your site. Uh, you can build in a lot more uh, sort of flexibility, um, and variety. You um, can build like tens of thousands of long tail pages using the dynamic cms. The Astro collections, um, is also a cms, but it's commonly referred to as like a, ah, you know, file based or flat file CMS. Those are CMSs that work really good for blogs for example. So you know there's really, really robust pages that folks have built using uh, ploy that are kind of meant uh, for SEO. And this is like a CMS page. However the actual implementation of this page is actually a react um page. So you know this is a ploy build page that's meant to be super interactive. Right. Um, and it kind of like takes this page to the next level once you know someone's engaging with it.

Speaker C: So you mentioned react. Uh, I'm just curious like um, because they say it's kind of bad if it's a React pitch. Why wouldn't you do uh, this in Astro, uh, as well? Because um, you know, it's getting rendered. I don't want to start a framework or. Just curious.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, so Astro can use a variety of different um, rendering. Right. HTML based rendering, you can use React, but at the end of the day everything is server side rendered. Right. So nothing is client side rendered here. So you know, bots and everything, they don't have to actually have JavaScript turned on in order to read the page.

Speaker C: Got it.

Speaker B: But yeah, looks like, you know, uh, prompt went and cleaned up this hero. Looks like there's still some missing images here. So we just say like. Text here. I can go and fix that up.

Speaker A: Yeah. So this is just the prompt workflow where you iterate as you go. Very intuitive. You can add screenshots of references. Uh, you can uh, yeah, you can choose your model, uh, which is great. And um, yeah, it's basically just uh, you know, iterating as you go and then until, until it's, until it's ready to publish and then uh. So without spilling uh, too much about your feature roadmap, because I know you're not going to do that. Although we have learned that a CMS is coming so we got that one at three years from now.

Speaker B: It's actually more than just a cms. So I'm m excited that I'm not sharing everything. CMS is just one very basic use case for what we're releasing.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: Well, Ryan, you know how to do a cliffhanger, that's for sure. But uh, we're going to find out soon. But without spilling too much about the features. Although feel free to if you want to but uh, two to three years from now, how many websites and I guess go to market motions will be powered by Ploy? I'm sure you have some numbers in your head that you dream about or talk about.

Speaker B: Yeah, I would say in three years I could conceivably see 100,000 businesses using ploy to power automated growth, um, automated ads, and building an entire cycle where the human can still be the originator of the idea, the human can still be the inspiration. Um, and Ploy can really be the operating system for their good stuff.

Speaker A: And are there particular industries that you're very bullish about in terms of uh, how ploy can add value?

Speaker B: Honestly, Agencies. I honestly see agencies shifting and sort of broadening their, their book of services. I think the agencies that are already knowledgeable about growth and marketing are going to be really successful with Ploy because I think you're going to spend less time on the implementation details. You're going to spend more time strategizing with your clients, getting that understanding for hey, what's going to really move the needle for these businesses? And you know, Ploy kind of takes care of like the very aspects of web design of ad generation. I'd uh, even show you guys how Ploy can be used to generate ads because we have the entire design system in Ploy. Um, employee's agent is trained to take screenshots of the pages that it's built. So the screenshots could be of a certain aspect ratio. Right. So for example, it could be 9 by 16 or 16 by 9. It could be Instagram reel or it could be YouTube horizontal and it can essentially create interstitial ads. And then you know, we can uh, we haven't done this yet, but we can also hook it up to video models. Right. We can provide it all these sort of references because that design system lives in play. There's, there's a lot of things that we can't wait to solve for.

Speaker A: Yeah, it seems like uh, there's a lot of potential and also a lot for us to dig into. And I think it's very helpful that you gave a sort of high over overview of what you're, what you're building and especially the sort of the philosophy behind it and how you have to approach it. Uh, so that's super helpful. Um, in terms of the agency. So are you already actively like, are you uh, are you spinning up a partner program preferred, uh, agency program? What is that? What will that look like? What will your go to Market Motion look like? Actually?

Speaker B: Yeah, so right now it's a self serve product. You know, anyone can sign up and triploi, we have a very generous free plan. So I don't know if Daniel, you ran up against your limits but even if you did, I'm sure you got a pretty good taste of what it could do. Um, so anyone's free to try it out. Um, and agencies are a really big part of poise sort of ecosystem. So we have three official agencies, poignancies that we like to call them. Um, one is specialized in performance marketing, one builds web and branding and tonic and another one builds web and branding and also help with marketing and visux. Um, so yeah, we're looking for a lot more. You know there's a lot of demands uh, for Ploy and more specifically there's a lot of Demand for agencies that can help drive Ploy and bring their sort of tactics into Ploy. You know, because, you know, the playbooks that we have, it's really meant to be just like a starting base. Right. There's probably a lot of tribal knowledge or learned knowledge that, you know, agency like yourself knows about web and marketing that you can actually bring to Ploy and um, kind of let Ploy be the orchestration execution layer.

Speaker A: Is there a way to, uh, set up a compile a Ploy book yourself as an agency?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: Submit it to you?

Speaker B: Yeah. So you can actually create a playbook just by. Let me just, uh, show you really quickly. You can literally say, create a playbook from this chat and it will go and read the chat history and it will turn this into a playbook that you could run, um, on the regular.

Speaker A: Uh, right. So I could just. Also, because we do a lot with MD files. I mean we have Claude for teams that we work. That's really like our workhorse. We have no co second brain. We have plenty of MD files. So I could just drop an MD file and say create a Ploy book based of this MD file.

Speaker C: That's great.

Speaker A: Ah, yeah, that's great. Okay, that's very interesting. Okay. Uh, so much to discover. Uh, still, uh, Bryant, uh, how long ago has Ploy been launched? I don't even know that,

Speaker B: uh, Ploy launched exactly one month ago, actually.

Speaker A: That fresh. Okay. Uh, that's very cool. So when did you come up with the idea for Ploy? Or was the combination of ideas and learning that led to Ploy or was it one Eureka moment?

Speaker B: Um, I actually started with a very simple and very narrow vision for what Ploy could be. I thought it could just be like a very sort of agentic version of Squarespace, honestly, that I wanted an agentic webflow where it could actually build really professional sites, um, at a very high quality bar. And that's what we spent the first couple months, um, building. But very, um, quickly, because we wanted to use Ploy to grow Ploy, we started to add all these other features. Um, so for example, the things that we've added here, um, are proactive ploys. So this is kind of like the dreaming stuff, right? Where like we want to see, like, hey, there's a, there's ah, a click. There's an ad with lower click through rate. You know, I want to go and see, uh, what to do here. I want to go and fix the alt text on images. I want to go and engage with these visitors. But these are all sayings that Ploy can tell you about. Um, and then after you know it goes and tells you, you sort of like just reap the words of it. So that's one of the things that we built.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker B: We built ploybooks to help us build repeatable motions. We added all these integrations. Uh, we have so many integrations. In our existing instance we have figma, Google Analytics, GSC, Posthog, Addio, HubSpot, Airtable. These are all integrations that we use regularly. We have the Gmail integration where um, for example when someone submits a contact form on the Ploy AI website, the Gmail integration will send a Ploy agent to read that email, draft a reply and queue it up to be sent. You know, so there's like so many different automations that we've now built around Ploy where Ploy is almost kind of resembling like an open call for us. Um, the big difference is that the website is this living and breathing thing and we turn those signals into really actionable uh, outcomes.

Speaker A: Exactly. But yeah, website, but it's like a living breathing uh, well CMO almost uh, a marketing team that you try to um, harness. Uh, with Ploy, it's almost too big to. You understand what I'm saying? It's almost too big to fathom because with every uh, thing or feature or expertise that you add to Ploy, five new ones, sub expertise pop up. Right. So um, it's almost like uh, it's an everything app or an everything product for marketing. Does that make sense or is that something that you want to.

Speaker B: Yeah, um, I'm kind of building it for us and if we do it right we might be the last piece of go to market software that's ever built.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Interesting and an ambitious statement. Um, yeah, great. Actually one thing that I just saw is those recommendation cards that you showed. That's really cool because for the last year and a half we've been trying to build well a CRO workflow for our customers in the same way. So we use, we have a lot of subscriptions so 50 plus percent of our revenue is uh, MRR. It's subscription based and we have a very clean and frictionless workflow for it. We have Trello as sort of the project board for those subscriptions. So every customer has its own Trello board but we also have automations running there and we have this quite elaborate CRO dashboard that pushes recommendations based on data to that Trello board. So it's a very self built, sort of in house built, way of, of creating a sort of a repetitive motion or a flywheel that sort of continuously uh, enables you to do, you know, micro optimizations of your website and SEO wise user flow wise, whatever. Uh, but that's basically what you're building also in deploy, right. Based on all of those pieces within your marketing motion. Uh, those learnings will be uh, translated into actionable items that you can actually execute by simply clicking on them. Right. Or adding a prom to it like uh, there's a drop off behind a certain scroll point. Uh, the recommendation is that you need to, I don't know, make that section smaller or change the copy or change the visual and then you can almost, ah, in a very frictionless way you can let Ploy apply that optimization is that, do I put that the right way?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think the idea is that we can create a hive mind for all things growth and marketing for a business. Uh, and then once you do that, you can create a lot of synergies between your ads product, your SEO roadmap. Um, you can even start to learn about what type of messaging resonates. Right. So you can actually have it self improve your website copy based off of things that it's learning from performance marketing on meta. Right. So all of these things used to require a lot of human intuition. Right. You have to talk to the performance marketer to see what ad copy is working well and then you have to translate that over to your webflow developer to go and implement or ab test it. Right. But these things can just be automatic.

Speaker A: Got it. So uh, if that's true, if you're changing, uh, if you're creating sort of a hive mind, is it also the case that at some point there will be some layer on top of it? I mean you hear a lot of people talking about building your own brain, right. And they use Obsidian and then they have all the, and they connected to all of these models. We do the same thing with uh, with Outline and then there's a Hermes agent. So we're building all of that internally and it works really well, it's really cool. But will there also be a layer on top of Ploy? I guess or one level higher where there's sort of, that's, that's that marketing brain, um, that you can also.

Speaker B: Yeah, we have actually something that Anthropic told us to do which they said is better than Obsidian or whatever, which is literally just memory as implemented as Markdown. So what you're seeing here is POI will curate all of your memory in this Markdown file and potentially link to other markdown files and it will automatically create your own little mini Obsidian. It's much simpler than Obsidian. It's really just a collection of markdown files that are linked to each other. But all of this is in every single ploy workspace. And the reason why this works really well is that agents are just really good at reading Markdown. Right. They're just really good at updating it, they're really good at synthesizing it. So, you know, you don't have to worry about setting up your own little hive mind. Obsidian, you know, we built that all for you.

Speaker A: So how do you manage what gets ingested in that, in that sort of second brain and whatnot? Because obviously you probably don't want everything to be included or ingested in that, in that memory layer. Right. So you want to be probably very critical about it. Um, what would be the workflow to sort of keep that under control and police that, especially for levels are smart,

Speaker B: the models are smart. It'll know what to keep in context. Yeah, we have a lot of this, we have a lot of evals where sometimes something trips up. Um, at this point we have tens of thousands of users building thousands of sites. Right. So we actually have a lot of data, a lot of chats, and we've built a system to automatically improve itself.

Speaker A: Very interesting that MD based memory. Um, and something good to know, actually. Okay, so, um, in terms of your team, uh, Brian, what does your team look like right now? How many people is ploy? Is it just you? No, I know it's not. But how big are you? Like, this is also, of course, the first time for you building a new venture in the middle of the AI era. Right. So there's a lot of things that you might do differently or could do more efficient or.

Speaker B: Um, look, it's the first time for everyone building an AI. There's no repeat founders in AI.

Speaker A: Nope.

Speaker B: Which is great. There's no one with a, uh, advantage necessarily. Um, I think the only advantage I have is just deep domain expertise in web and growth and marketing. Um, and you know, I'm looking to kind of translate all of that. So we do have a, you know, a small team. I think there's maybe 15 of us today. Um, and we're building a ton of different surface areas. And I would say that the big difference now is before I needed to go and hire, for example, like Lifecycle Marketer, um, my agents and my cloud code and my Codex can go and query, uh, the production database and in A very safe manner. And it can go and generate a CSV of all this data that I could use for lifecycle marketing. And I just run lifecycle marketing as a routine in cloud code. Um, so these are all things that are just very different now. Right. I think like the moat that, um, startups can accrue is data workflows. Uh, you mentioned product earlier. I don't know if product is really something that's defensible anymore. I actually think, like, for agencies and companies like ours, if you're able to run repeatable workloads that can, uh, generate outcomes, that's actually the most valuable thing. Um, so, yeah, the world is very different now that AI is here. Of course.

Speaker A: Yeah. Is there any code written by humans, uh, at Ploy when developing the product?

Speaker B: Um, I would say like 99.9% of it is agentically written.

Speaker C: Now.

Speaker A: Are you enjoying, uh, this journey more or less than your, I guess, your startup journey with webflow?

Speaker B: Oh, way more. Way more, I think. Yeah. And webflow for the first year or so, the constant fear of death, you know, um, it's just very, it was very, very hard in the beginning. You know, we were working non stop. We had to write code by hand. Um, you know, like, what did people do back then? Right.

Speaker A: Um,

Speaker B: but, you know, that said I, you know, I would say it's hard to compare because it's just like a such a different era. Um, I'm just in a very different life stage. I was 27 when I started Webflow. You know, I'm 40 years old now, so, you know, I think I'm just like older and wiser.

Speaker A: It looks like it. You still definitely look like somewhere in between 27 and 40. Yeah, uh, Bryant, I can give you that. Uh, so, uh, that's great. Um, man. Daniel, do you have any more questions for Bryant?

Speaker C: I get the whole premise and I understand the whole hive mind. And it's amazing, uh, how everything just connects. And, uh, you can actually tell that the website is where marketing starts. Everything will branch out from slurping and then creating these new things on top of it. But for us, for someone who's like, uh, a webflow enthusiast, I came into the game and you were also someone who inspired me as well. Um, and seeing you in the community a lot, uh, just wondering, um, what would you tell to someone like me? Why would I want to go? Obviously I enjoy building and I enjoy vibe coding and building and all these things, but someone who's like me, who just likes the granular control, uh, what Would you say, how would I need to approach ploy? Basically say if I really want to be micromanaging.

Speaker B: I think the question that I will answer is, how should you just approach your life, profession? Um, yeah, I think that's what you're asking, which is, you know, like, things are changing so rapidly. If you have a tool workflow, a way of working that is, that is working for you. If you're using webflow, that is awesome. Because there are people that want webflow sites. Um, there will people that want to buy webflow sites. Many of them are much larger businesses that maybe if they look at Ployd, it's just like, oh, it doesn't do X, Y, Z, or I need page branching, or I need freelancer guest access. I need all these features that webflow has. So I think for someone like yourselves and other people like you, um, use the tool that works. That has been how humans have operated for centuries. And I think the only thing that maybe feels uncomfortable about this point in time in technology is that the technology is just changing very, very fast. So, you know, it might have taken 100,000 years for humans to invent fire, and then another 50,000 years for the humans to invent a wheel, but now, like, every two weeks, there is a huge leap in foundational model capability. Right. So, like, the pace of change is just very, very hard for people that, you know, are used to doing a certain way. Um, but I would just say, like, if you're open to constantly learn new things, you know, there's. There's a lot of different ways that you can mix tools together. Like the one that I showed you with the reverse proxy. Right. You can still keep your webflow site, but maybe you can give your clients control over certain pages. Yeah, yeah, it's.

Speaker A: I think that's a great answer. And, uh, I think that's also indeed exactly what Daniel was asking and. But also what a lot of people are asking. Like designers who spend, you know, 10 to 15 years of their lives just passionately, you know, honing their craft. Right. And grappling with the fact that even if they can rationalize, okay, I should be a taste layer now, sort of and sort of more of an art director and sort of a curator now. Even if they rationally accept that I can still see them grappling with the fact that they're not sort of polishing every pixel anymore. And to be honest, I sympathize with that on a human level, I know that doesn't pay the bills at the end of the day. You have to adapt. I have to adapt as well. Um, but the human part of it, that sort of crisis of meaning that you see sort of in micro forms everywhere around you, from designers, developers, etcetera, uh, is sometimes, uh, a bit tough to watch, I must say. Even though we're all in on experimenting with every new tool that that's coming out. But um, on a human level, you see these little crisis here and there. And uh, and that's exactly why you, what you said, it's going so fast. It's unprecedented. Right. It's not a gradual, you know, flow into something new. It's so abrupt, so instant at times. Uh, and that requires quite some mental flexibility I think as well. Um, yeah. What a time to be alive. Ah, Bryant.

Speaker B: Absolutely. But it's fun. We have to enjoy it. I think, like you can either choose to live life in a cave and hope the nuclear winter is going to pass, or you can and you can just like, you know, accept life for what it is, right?

Speaker A: Oh yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, yeah. Maybe this is like the uniquely American spirit versus the European spirit, which I don't want to stereotype anyone, but.

Speaker A: Well, you absolutely are stereotyping right now.

Speaker B: But you know, it's absolutely true.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: I think like Americans are just way more keen to embrace change. And I think, you know, it's beneficial, it's also detrimental. And I choose to be an optimist. I choose to, you know, spend my time trying to help other people by building products to help their businesses. And um, as long as I'm fulfilled by that, I feel like I'm doing the right thing. I feel like I'm solving for a true gap. Right. Uh, a gap that I perceive and a gap that I feel like I uniquely have a point of view on, on not just the why, but the how. Um, and you know, like, again, that's why I think, you know, having agencies be a successful part of Ploy's story is also important to me because I think like agencies, it's sure you know how to use webflow, sure you know how to use like your tools, but agencies exist to really partner with their clients to do something that they can't or don't want to do.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And ultimately what Ploy can do is just really give agencies another tool in their tool belt to hopefully offer different services to help their clients succeed in different ways.

Speaker A: Sure. No, uh, completely aligned with that. And then, uh, in terms of, uh, the optimism that you mentioned, I think that's one of the most admirable things about in General, um, Americans, that perpetual optimism, basically, that's how the country was built. Right. It was built in a very rapid pace with a lot of changes constantly, uh, very adaptable. So I think that's sort of, uh, yeah, ingrained in the. In the American spirit. And, uh, no, definitely, uh, I choose to be optimistic about the future as well. Uh, that's the only way forward. It's the only fun and fulfilling way forward. The rest is just your results in, as you said, like, you know. You know, so you're isolating yourself. You're sort of getting a little bit bitter and overly nostalgic maybe to what has been, uh. I do think, and that's a cool sort of, uh, byproduct of this whole AI boom, is that you get to also. You find, I'm fine. I'm trying to find a new balance in my personal life of doing more sort of things with my hands. I guess that I'm much more conscious of wanting to do that. And, you know, short bursts of time or when you have some downtime because you're so all in on this new boom. Um, so that's an interesting one. Much more conscious about the short moments where you do something that, uh, would call craftsmanship or something, and then the next morning you go all in on all this new, good stuff that sort of amplifies and maximizes everything you can do. Make it go x10 or x100. It's crazy. Um, humans will figure it out, right? Humans will find a new balance. They always have with every hype cycle. And I'm sure that also will be the case with AI And I guess I just want to thank you for taking so much time to talk about your new product and what you're passionate about. I think it's also very admirable that after such a successful run that you're going all in on something new again with new energy, new perspective. Uh, I think that is something that we uh, can all, uh, you know, take as an example. Um, any last words from you, Brian?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, just to piggyback off of what you said, you know, like, I think life is short. Find your life's purpose. Do things that you're uniquely sort of good at. Um, find your. Not just your passion, but just, like, make sure that, you know, you're. You're spending your moments, uh, working on something that's worthwhile.

Speaker A: Amen to that. We'll, uh, be playing around some more and hopefully talk, uh, to you again in the future. Good luck with everything.

Speaker B: Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Ian.

Speaker A: Thanks, Brian. Bye.

Speaker C: Bye.

Speaker A: Bye, everybody.