AI for Growth: Lessons from Leaders Philip Cripe

Megan Driscoll: Welcome to AI for growth lessons for leaders. Today I have Philip Cripe joining me, which I'm super excited to have this conversation. Thank you for being here. Yeah.

Tell me, tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your business. Introduce yourself to the audience. Philip Cripe: Thank you for having me. So I grew up between the US and France and got into technology in 2015, been running businesses ever since then in that sphere specifically.

Done a lot of consulting, a lot for blockchain companies, but also we did some machine learning back in the day before it was all AI by everyone. yeah, yeah. Just reusing the wording that was used for something else before. Megan Driscoll: Yeah.

The fancy new name. Exactly. And tell me about your most recent project. What are you working on right now?

Philip Cripe: Right now I'm working on a platform. It's kind of like a reviews platform, but if companies sign up, the main goal is for them to see if they're easily discoverable by LLMs and if their ⁓ reputation is actually really good on LLMs. Megan Driscoll: Cool, excellent. ⁓ Okay, so tell me a little bit about, well, tell me about the startup.

mean, this podcast is designed for small businesses. So if you can sit, tell a little, just talk a little bit about the startup phase. Like, you what were the things you struggled with? What were some of the bottlenecks?

What were some of the issues? Philip Cripe: So I hadn't done software development myself for several years because back in 2019, I actually moved to Ukraine. I was a full stack web developer, webmaster in France. And then I moved to Ukraine and found out that in a year they had learned more than I had in like six and ⁓ they could be in their fifties and be better at code than I was.

So I ended up taking a back seat to coding and getting more involved in sales and business. Yeah. Megan Driscoll: Can we pause on that for a second? Why is that?

Philip Cripe: So it's part of their culture. ⁓ They have an engineering mindset as part of their own culture and the way their language works. So when they're faced with a problem instead of trying to be philosophical about it like the French, they try to actually get into a solution. Like ⁓ one of my neighbors wheelbarrow broke and he came back after soldering it back together and it was like three times stronger.

guy in a village, just a random guy. So they all have these skills. It's crazy. It's problem solving.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like an engineering culture. It's crazy.

Don't invade engineers. They'll make drones in their backyard. This is what everybody else found out after, after I already knew after meeting their, ⁓ their software developers, there was a lead developer I met the first week I was there and I was like, Megan Driscoll: Hmm. It's interesting.

Problem solvers. I love that as a culture. How cool. Yeah, that's Philip Cripe: I was really impressed and I asked the owner of the company, it was French, like, where'd you find this guy?

He told me a year ago, this guy was a Mason. Megan Driscoll: No way. Philip Cripe: And he was in his fifties and switched from building brick walls by hand to coding back end, front end, everything. It's crazy.

Yeah. So that was an interesting experience. And then from there, ⁓ I hadn't actually touched code again myself into, until about two months ago. I think it was after the first time, ⁓ we ran into each other on LinkedIn about AI.

Actually, I hadn't coded yet. Megan Driscoll: Wow, that's really cool. Philip Cripe: this for years. And then I started using, ⁓ cloud code because of this project specifically, I was wondering what technology to use for LLMs to see something as, ⁓ legitimate.

And it turns out the more difficult the technology is. No, it's a large language model like, ⁓ chat GPT or cloud AI. There are a lot of them right now, but they all have their kind of quirks and Megan Driscoll: And just for our audience, describe what an LLM is because they may not know. Philip Cripe: specialties like Megan Driscoll: So basically what you are developing is a process by which companies can be found within the...

Philip Cripe: And they can find out what they're doing wrong or what they can do more to be more easily discoverable, kind of like SEO, search engine optimization with Google was before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. Megan Driscoll: Yeah.

I'm trying to make it so that people understand. So as SEO is to website, the LLM is to AI. Exactly. Philip Cripe: the large language models, the AIs, because the AIs scrape websites differently than Google does.

Now Google also uses Gemini to some extent to do it. So even that's important. And I was actually shocked to see that when we were targeting these large language models to get, to find out how well to be discoverable and have a high reputation, we ended up really high on Google as well. For example, I made a website And within two days, it was on the first page for certain keywords on Google.

Megan Driscoll: So do you think that's because, so why do you think that is? Philip Cripe: I think that's because they're also going down the LLM model more than they were going down the SEO model. So right now you can get ahead. Megan Driscoll: I think ⁓ this is a really important conversation to have, and this is why I was excited to have you, because I don't think people are making any connection to that.

We're not thinking about SEO for AI. Philip Cripe: Yeah, no, that's why, that's why it's like, I'm using it in a completely different way than most people. And it's because I've been talking with marketing companies and they've noticed that if you get a lot of reviews, say on Trustpilot or Goodfirm, so these, these sites that nobody's cared about for 10 years, because they used to be really good for search engine optimization, backlinks and all these sorts of things. If you get back into that and you have say somebody who adds a review for your company every month and it's a good review.

LLMs will notice that and consider your company to be still running, to be still getting users, to have good feedback, and it makes your company seem reliable. And so they'll cite these sites. Megan Driscoll: Okay. So this is, okay, so I really want to dig into this because I think this is really like, again, like a game changer for small businesses.

So what you're saying is kind of like the old is now new, essentially. It's back again. It's back in fashion, right? Right.

We did wear bell bottoms and then we wore them again. Philip Cripe: Yeah, it's back again. What used to work is working again. And for how long we don't know.

Exactly. It's kind of like, yeah, it's kind of like fashion. Megan Driscoll: Yeah, it is kind of like fashion. Okay.

So what you're saying is that, ⁓ AI in our, big models, chat, Claude, whatever, or Grok, whatever you're using essentially is essentially, it does have its own SEO system, right? In a way. And, okay. And it's searching both its other AI as well as websites and all of these, what were previously determined as like Philip Cripe: Yeah.

In a way, yeah. Yeah. Sometimes we call it a yo, but yeah, it's the same. Megan Driscoll: They used to be important, but they're not so important now.

Philip Cripe: Yeah, they used to be considered important signals for your business. And they are again, kind like having a good Yelp page or something. It used to be a really good way to be discovered as a small business. Like you're a small restaurant somewhere and people leave good reviews on Yelp or on Google Maps and it helps people find you when they're looking.

And so this is kind of working the same way, except instead of that, you're typing in perplexity. Like I want to find a good like hot dog stand or whatever it in my city. Megan Driscoll: there and then they kind of fell out of favor. Yeah, okay.

Philip Cripe: And it'll bring the one up that has the best reviews and it fits what it thinks is what you're asking for. And so it's a bit more intelligent and it goes back to the way it used to work when people were thinking up the algorithms. Megan Driscoll: So. Yeah, interesting.

for a small business, what should they be thinking about in terms of like, what are those places that they should go back through and say, okay, I really need to go back to these specific websites and make sure that I'm like keeping up on them again if I had gotten away from it. What's your suggestion? Philip Cripe: Well, a lot of companies forgotten and I was doing a lot of this research with Yaros Belkin, who's like one of the top marketing specialists specifically in web three.

Like he's been around longer than Ethereum was well known and things like that in the blockchain industry. And so he knows all these people as well, but he was ⁓ doing a bit of research and playing around with this and he managed to get his marketing company as ⁓ a top development company in Hong Kong. Megan Driscoll: Yeah. Philip Cripe: Within two days of just asking a friend or two to put some reviews on there.

So it's been left alone for so long that it doesn't take a lot of energy and discipline to get it to work for a small business. You can really get ahead of the big names. Like Hong Kong's a huge city with lots of development firms. And so we're finding this out.

We were expecting things to take months. Instead, they're taking days. Megan Driscoll: Got it. Yeah.

Wow. Philip Cripe: So we're seeing a return on the time we're spending on it, which is kind of like a return on investment in different way, because most of this stuff is free to use. Right. So for small businesses, this is great.

Megan Driscoll: So cool. So, So yeah. Okay. So let's go, let's go through it.

like Yelp, like TripAdvisor, like ⁓ Google reviews, where, where can they give us a list? Philip Cripe: Yeah. ⁓ trip advisor, if you're a restaurant or a hotel. so trust pilot works really well.

Funnily enough, Reddit works really well for getting found. I, so yeah, it is, and it's also very strange to do things correctly on Reddit. So if, if you're going to do something on Reddit, I'd take time to figure out what you want to do and make it. Megan Driscoll: Okay.

So I'd to talk about Reddit if you know anything about it, because I think that's an untapped market. Philip Cripe: do some research first because as a platform, even though I've been using it more or less for years, I still don't understand what the best way to use Reddit is for a business. Like if it's setting up your own page or if it's commenting on others or I'm still not sure what the best practice is for that. Megan Driscoll: Yeah, yeah, I agree.

Okay. All right. So we went back. we're doing Yelp, TripAdvisor, TrustPilot, Reddit.

What else? Philip Cripe: Good firms. ⁓ The BBB is actually really good for AI. love that stuff.

⁓ Design Rush. Megan Driscoll: Okay. What about ⁓ like stuff on Metta? Like if people put reviews on your Facebook page or your...

Philip Cripe: that can help. ⁓ But the easier it is to put a review, we've noticed this with our research is the sites where it's easier to put a review without verifying who you are, et cetera, the less valuable it is for LLMs. So for example, I tried to give a friend of mine's company a review on Clutch. They didn't allow me to do it.

They even refused to answer a support call about it. And so their reviews are worth a lot because it's hard to do. Megan Driscoll: Got it. Philip Cripe: Or the ones where you have to sign in as a business and then leave a review for another business.

⁓ I'm not sure if it's the one, but I'm thinking it would like G2. That's one example that's a little harder, I think, or Design Rush. Those are more difficult to set up and leave a review. Those are valued more by LLMs.

Megan Driscoll: Okay. That's interesting to know. And in terms of, ⁓ are they all like, for example, is this optimization that someone would be doing would it's not specific to either like Claude or chat or, know, whatever. Philip Cripe: No, it works for all of them to a certain degree.

Some of them will value some things more than others. Like they're weighted differently depending on the platform. But ⁓ Grok and Perplexity, for example, will agree on what the main things to look at to see if a company is not a scam, which is fascinating. Megan Driscoll: Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Well, they're just deciding in the backend, whether, you know. Philip Cripe: Yeah, but it seems like it goes beyond like, it's a logical kind of setup.

I'm not even sure the people that made these platforms necessarily made it. So this is what you're going to believe is legitimate. I'm not sure they trained them that way. I think they kind of trained themselves.

Megan Driscoll: Yeah, mean, well, could it be weaponized to take down an organization? Philip Cripe: ⁓ so if, if a company is, ⁓ lying about things that can be really quickly picked up. ⁓ also LLMs are really quick and, and, ⁓ I talked about your us Belkin earlier, but he did a research on this cause he's been attacked using some of this stuff. ⁓ LLMs tend to take everything at face value.

So if, ⁓ five different people write an article saying something bad about your company, it'll pick it up and say it's legitimate. Even if those people are anonymous. Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Philip Cripe: on platforms where it takes three seconds to sign up and create the article. It's trying to be neutral, which I've seen the media fail at because trying to be neutral, sometimes you give a voice to something that's not true. Like this side says this, this side says that. And if you're journalistically, you have any integrity, you'll add that what this side is saying isn't, you know, backed by any facts, for example.

So, so Megan Driscoll: Got it. Okay. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

Philip Cripe: So LLMs, they've tried to train them to be as neutral as possible in that sense. So they don't necessarily do that. So you have to, when you're doing a search on a company, it's good to tell them, to, check that things are verified. Like it's been to court or something like that.

It's not just, ⁓ what's the word, ⁓ a kind of rumor that's being spread. It's not defamation basically. Yeah. Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm.

Yeah, because you could get, you could get, you could get rumor basically is what you're saying. It's very easy to get rumor. Okay. So if I'm a small business and, ⁓ I, I want to cash in on this opportunity, right?

To like, you know, like, how would I go about doing it? Is there like a checklist? Is there like a, you know, how would I go about doing it? Yeah.

Okay. So tell me about what you felt as it relates to, and wait, back up before we talk about how you built it. Philip Cripe: Yeah. That's basically what I built.

That's why I'm trying. So I'm trying not to like push it too much, but that's, that's basically the idea I came to is what you just came to as like a logical end result of all this is like, so what can I do to know that I'm actually hitting all the boxes? And that's what I'm building right now. It's not all the boxes yet, but it's the main ones.

And one of the things you can do is make sure that your website's up online all the time. Megan Driscoll: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. Mm-hmm.

Philip Cripe: that it's as old as possible, basically. older your website, the more it's seen as a real company that's been around for a while. And if people have used it that long and it hasn't gone out of business, then it's probably doing something right. That's the basic thing, just of having a website.

A lot of companies used to say, need to have a website just so people think I'm legitimate. We're back to that. It's funny, it's gone full circle. It's a lot of things that 15.

Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And it's taking into consideration.

Yeah. Philip Cripe: 10, 15 years ago, businesses were like, ⁓ I need to do this. And it seemed natural. it's been kind of left to the side like, ⁓ if you have a Facebook page, it's fine.

It went to that after a while. And now it's back to your company is not seen as legitimate by the large language models. If it's only a Facebook page or something like that. there is a speaking of sites, there's also a kind of a.

Megan Driscoll: Okay. Philip Cripe: how reliable a company is viewed as based on where their website is. Wix being very low, for example, and having a site built on Next.js on ForSell being seen as really, which is very difficult, I found out.

That's what I've been building up. Megan Driscoll: Okay. So what are the good, what are the like a square space? Is that legitimate?

Like what's the legitimate? Philip Cripe: It's ⁓ more than Wix, which is interesting. So you can actually ask any LLM at any given time, ⁓ which seems more legitimate to you, my site on this platform or on this platform. And it'll tell you there's, there are no like secrets here.

You can literally ask every question about this and you can brainstorm this with your favorite large language model and figure it out within 10 minutes, like what you need to do. So that's kind of fun. Megan Driscoll: Can you, okay, so talk to me a little bit about this. Okay, so I wanna go and do my checklist.

come to your, what's name of your company again? What's the? Philip Cripe: ⁓ so our website is, ⁓ Belkin dot marketing. So B L K I K I N dot marketing.

And on, so it's, it's not the same website as the Belkin marketing website. It's one we made specifically for this because he had the domain name and it was actually a really funny conversation because he was talking to me about how crazy it was that all this stuff was working with large language models when he would like what I talked about in Hong Kong and stuff where all of sudden he ends up at the top of the list. Megan Driscoll: Belkin. Philip Cripe: for something that's extremely secondary for his business, just because he got two reviews.

And ⁓ so we were talking about this and he was talking about how all these reviews sites have all these ⁓ old things that don't make sense. If your main target is LLMs, like they're not completely scrapable. Maybe the information gets picked up wrong. Not everything's in one place.

You have to go to all these different places to find out if they're actually, you have to set up an account and test it to see if it actually works. Megan Driscoll: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Philip Cripe: Whereas if you find out it works, we can just add it to a list and say, hey, we're checking this website to see if you have an account there and you have reviews and you're answering reviews and all these different things.

And then when we check that, we see that you're more or less legitimate in the eyes of AI. And so we basically built a checklist of this and we give a score through an algorithm based on this that says, Yeah, you have an account on TrustBilot, you have an account here, you have an account there. ⁓ And then, yeah. Megan Driscoll: And so that, and then that's just helpful because you can say, okay, well, I don't, I don't have, so now I'm going to go and do that.

Philip Cripe: And then you see that your points are really low because you don't have an account on any of these things. You don't have another sign, which is interesting, is your business having a verified address in Google Maps or Bing or Apple Maps, which is actually really hard to get. Megan Driscoll: Yep. Is it?

Philip Cripe: It's actually really annoying. And a friend of mine had a company which he had on Google for years and it just got deleted somehow by accident and he's trying to get it back and it's been months. Megan Driscoll: ⁓ my gosh. So if I go to your, so if I go to this website, your website, Belkin Dot Marketing, I can actually put in my web, you're going to ask me a series of questions.

I'm going to put in this information. It's going to shoot me back a score instantly. And it's going to tell me, it's going to specifically tell me like, you need, and then will it tell me I need to go do these things or like, how does that work? Philip Cripe: Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, instantly. So you'll see in the list that ⁓ you only got a certain amount of points.

And it will explain what things you have that got you those points. so basically everything else, because when you fill it out, you'll see that I ask you for the map location, ask you for a TrustPilot account, ⁓ and things like that. And it goes down the list. Your website, because that way we can check how old your website is and all the who is information on it and all that sort of thing.

So we try not to get too technical. Cause I could take a while, but then we, give you a description of it. And some, some people got flagged as a potentially illegally, ⁓ gray businesses. And what's funny is the first one that happened to is actually a, casino builder, like an online casino builder.

So it actually made sense. So it's kind of working. So, and the first thing we do isn't even using AI. We, we use a.

Megan Driscoll: Okay. Yeah. Philip Cripe: kind of ⁓ a cron search to verify that the, the things that you put in basically are true. And then if you pay like 10 bucks, we go through and do an AI search on everything and make sure, ⁓ to get your scores on all those different parts.

Like your score on these different, ⁓ reviews sites is one of the hardest ones to get and try to get. Yeah. Yeah. Megan Driscoll: Yep.

Well, you have to actually take action there. mean, you have to. Philip Cripe: Because without using a large language model, it's not an intelligent search in it. Megan Driscoll: I mean Right, but I mean, that's, mean, you know, again, it's great for a small business to know this, right?

Because to then go say like, I'm gonna go put effort into something that I know is gonna have a return on the investment, right? So it's like, you're not wasting your time. Philip Cripe: Yeah. Right.

Exactly. it's, yeah. Yeah. And, and we're doing this thing where we've spent probably hundreds of hours figuring this out on our own.

So we're basically just asking for a one time, 10 bucks lifetime thing, just to pay for the AI searches and keep the posting going. And then, yeah. Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Well, if you're up for it, I would like, so what I, what I want to, I'm going to make a little proposition to you. I'm going to go do this and then obviously sign up. And then I think we should do like a guinea pig. Like Ben, how I'm going to go try to do the things you tell me to do.

Right. And we'll talk about this in a second, do the optimization essentially. And then I want to have you back on and we can talk about what happens. Philip Cripe: Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and you can tell me all the bugs you found. Because now I'm coding this, so I'm the one to fix it. So you get tech support right away. Megan Driscoll: Yeah, totally.

Yeah. Super. love this for me. So tell me again.

Okay. So let's just walk through this because I do think this is a super cool, just a concept that people haven't thought. Number one, I don't think people are thinking about this. To be honest with you, I wasn't thinking about this and I help companies implement AI.

So I was not thinking about Philip Cripe: Yeah. It's being forgotten a lot. Yeah, I saw like your post about it and I was like, I'm doing something a bit different. Like I like raised my hand in the back of the class.

Like you want to talk about something unusual? Let's do it. Megan Driscoll: Yeah. But I think it's not unusual.

It's just we haven't got there. Philip Cripe: Yeah, we haven't thought of like, ⁓ LLMs react differently than SEO. Megan Driscoll: Yeah. Yeah.

I don't think anybody is putting those two things together. So the fact that you have is super cool. So, okay. Philip Cripe: Yeah, a year ago, people wouldn't have been coding platforms like the one I coded with AI either.

So things are moving really, really fast. Megan Driscoll: Really, really fast. Exactly. I mean, that's the point of this podcast, right?

Is to try to stay on top of things that affect small businesses. And this is like a really cool concept for a small business. So, okay. So just walk through this.

I go on, I submit my information, I pay you $10. You then tell me all the things that I'm doing wrong, basically, and why I'm not... Even before the $10. Okay.

Philip Cripe: Mm-hmm. Even before the $10, that's just to claim the account and do the AI search. Without the AI search, you can already see a lot of the things you're probably doing wrong. I don't want to assume, but it's what I found out about my own business.

I was like, I can't believe I'm like, my reputation is terrible. So like my score is worse than a lot of the other businesses on there. Megan Driscoll: things that I'm doing wrong. Okay, so let's say I.

I'm sure I'm doing a ton of things wrong. I'm sure. ⁓ That's interesting. Philip Cripe: I've been working on this platform, so I haven't fixed all this stuff for my own business yet.

I'm like, I keep looking at it like, ⁓ I really need to do that. Megan Driscoll: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, again, if there was a return on the investment.

So let's talk about that. So I go and I do this and then you tell me essentially, I get like a list of things I have to go do. So now I go and I do them, takes me what, like maybe 30 days to get through them all? Like what's the timeframe for someone to go and like fix their profile or optimize?

Philip Cripe: Okay. to entering the profile takes about 10 minutes of just copying and pasting your links of different things. And then going through and rebuilding the different things. You might need to ask previous clients to leave your reviews on different platforms and things like that.

It's best not to have everybody go at once. ⁓ Cause they, it's better for your reputation with LLMs if it's over a longer period of time. Megan Driscoll: Okay. Philip Cripe: And so having 20 people put in reviews at once and then nothing for three months makes it look like your business had a ⁓ lot of people at once and then none.

It actually makes it look worse than if you have a few a month, for example. So it's kind of an ongoing thing. And as you have new clients, I would imagine every once in while, you can just naturally do this and ask them to leave a review. Megan Driscoll: Yeah, okay.

That's right. Yeah. I mean, think if people know that it's important and understand that there's going to be some return on the investment for doing it, then they just develop a process for that. Okay.

So let's say I do all of that, right? So I set up some things. I go back and fix any of the bugs that are in there. I make sure that my location is verifiable or whatever the things are that you tell me to do.

Yep. How then do I optimize it? Like how then can I, how then can I, where's the verification process? Where's the, maybe you're not there yet in your development, but Philip Cripe: Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah, all those things, yeah. Megan Driscoll: Where is the thing that is like, ⁓ I'm number one in Hong Kong? Philip Cripe: So we actually recheck on a weekly basis.

So actually more than that, every six hours now. I updated it about two weeks ago. So every time it goes through and checks it again, your ⁓ points will go up unless you got only one star reviews for a month or something like that. But other than that, it should go up.

Generally, that's what we want, right? Megan Driscoll: Okay. Okay. Okay.

Right. ⁓ Philip Cripe: We don't want to get a worse reputation somehow, which I mean, it's possible. Like I said, you'd have to get only one star reviews everywhere for it to really tank your, ⁓ we call it the reliability score. So that shouldn't be too hard in that sense.

Like I said, just getting more reviews and getting things moving and. Megan Driscoll: Sure. But that reliability score, I'm trying to connect it to like revenue, right? Like how do we know that doing actually matters?

Philip Cripe: Right. So the reason I know this is important is because not only does our actual website show up really quickly in the first two pages of ⁓ search results on Google for your company. I mean, within two days, we're in the top two pages. ⁓ Within a week, we might be in the first page.

Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm. And what are the search terms for that? actual company name or you're saying. Philip Cripe: So your actual company name will show up ahead of everything else you've done almost immediately, which is crazy.

Like normally you're, for example, if you have Yelp, we might end up above Yelp within two days. So we're doing something right. Because that's, that's great. I did not expect that.

⁓ Even for my own business, I have lots of other accounts and places and things like that. And then. Megan Driscoll: Yep. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Is there a way that you can ⁓ optimize for the search terms that you want to show up under? Philip Cripe: Well, so that's the beauty of it.

⁓ Our site is extremely scrapable. made it as LLM friendly as you possibly can. And so your business on there is extremely well searchable. the words that you put in as the description of your business, the categories of business that you're in will all help a lot.

And then we have a ranking system. if you're in the top, ⁓ what kind of business do you have exactly? Just consulting? Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm.

Well, so I'm a consultancy. help small companies implement AI. So I'm kind of like the go between, between the bottleneck they're trying to solve and then the actual implementation. So, and I usually hold the tech stack too.

So they don't have to deal with any of it. We're just kind of solving the problem for them. Yeah. That's what I.

Philip Cripe: Okay. ⁓ OK, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So for example, you'd put AI consultancy, and you would enter your part of the world.

It could be your city, your state, country, ⁓ continent. And then it ranks all of those. So AI consultancy is worldwide. You could end up in the top three and that sort of thing.

And each one of those rankings is also scraped and by LLMs. Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm. Got it. Philip Cripe: and dated and archived based on that date.

So every time you're in the top three for anything, it could be your city. As long as there are two other companies doing the same thing. Megan Driscoll: Is there a benefit to being smaller than larger? Like as an example, is there a benefit to a company saying, I'm just local or is it, it doesn't not matter.

Philip Cripe: There is in the sense that you end up on, well, it depends on where you are, I guess, because I found out that a lot of the biggest blockchain companies in the world have an office in one small town in Switzerland as their headquarters. you don't want to start a ⁓ like a web three consultancy company in the same city as Ethereum, Solana, all these super big companies for example. That'd be really strange. Megan Driscoll: Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Philip Cripe: It's like trying to start a small civilian aviation club in the same city as Boeing. And if they had a few other ⁓ companies right there that do their logistics, they would end up higher based on the amount of reviews and everything else. But if you're in a town where, for example, you're the only AI consultancy or only one of three, it's a lot easier to find you then.

Megan Driscoll: Yeah, so it would make sense for, in my case, to say Boston as an example. Like, you know, not do like Massachusetts or United States, even though I can work anywhere, there would be a benefit to being. Philip Cripe: Yeah, for example, Yeah. I didn't know you were in Massachusetts.

I know a, ⁓ an AI company in Massachusetts, actually that, ⁓ one touch, or sorry, first touch, first touch. They, they help, ⁓ with LinkedIn sales using AI. Like, like understanding what the company is like and how to communicate with them to personality type of the person, your, ⁓ profile, the profile that you're on at any given time. Megan Driscoll: Cool, which one?

⁓ yeah, we were talking. First touch, first touch. Yeah. Okay.

Like scraping off the back end or Okay. Philip Cripe: It's like a plugin in your browser kind of thing. It's really cool. Megan Driscoll: ⁓ cool.

First touch, I'll have people that's a kind of a good tip. Philip Cripe: I put you in contact with their CEO. If you want. Megan Driscoll: Yeah, cool.

I would love that. Yeah. I actually do a lot with LinkedIn, obviously. that's one of the, you know, I use Sales Navigator quite a bit for finding leads.

And then I use Scrap, Scrap IO for pulling the leads off, which is, yeah, yeah, yeah. And LinkedIn is actually really finicky. It's one of my least favorite to work with because of the, you can only get a thousand on a list. And it's just really, it's not like Apollo, which is super easy to get names and pull lists.

Philip Cripe: ⁓ okay, yeah. Yes. Megan Driscoll: ⁓ to the list of 30,000 people super easy, whereas it's not that way with LinkedIn. It's so finicky.

So if there's anybody that knows anything about how to make it easier, I would love to talk to them because it's not easy. Philip Cripe: Yeah, so I'll put you in contact with Jared. He's really cool. ⁓ Yeah.

Yeah, I know. That's crazy. I didn't realize you were in the same area. You're probably within driving distance.

I've never met him in person. I've known him for years. Yeah. Megan Driscoll: I would love that.

Yeah, I'll have lunch with them. local. Perfect. It is crazy.

Yeah, that's awesome. I would love that. I'm everything and everything here is. Yeah.

All well maybe we'll FaceTime you when we get on. Well, this is really like, honestly, so I want to have you back because I would like to do a second segment on this. Yeah, I think that would be really cool for people. Philip Cripe: and see how well this goes.

And what I want to see is how much more ⁓ like contacts information you get from people that find you when they're looking for you online after you implement some of this stuff. Megan Driscoll: Yes. Yeah. So I'll be a real live guinea pig, but I think this session has been, I mean, I'm super, super grateful.

knew, I remember talking to you about this, you know, our, you know, our pre-call and I remember getting off being like, this is going to be a really cool. ⁓ Philip Cripe: and I hadn't finished setting it up yet. So I was still kind of like dabbling with it and ⁓ Megan Driscoll: But it, yeah, conceptually, I think this is like such a frontier that we haven't really thought about. And it's just a really cool concept and one that I think is going to be, I mean, when we think about it, the way things are going, this is the direction where people are going to find everything, right?

Everyone, everything is going to be found. Philip Cripe: Yeah, 40 % of when we first talked about 30 % of people were using LLMs to search instead of Google and now it's 40 % and it's only been a month or two. Yeah, it's growing so fast. It's Google might replace its search engine with Gemini at this point.

there's not much we can do about this at this point. It's going that way. Megan Driscoll: It's going to be a hundred percent in a year. Like in a year, it'll be a hundred percent.

Yeah. It's crazy. So I do. Exactly.

think they will. Exactly. Yeah. It's just super, super cool.

So I love this. So what I'd like to do is I'm going to do, I'm going to, I'm going to do it and then we'll see what happens and I'll have you back in like a month. We can talk about, like, you know, whatever period of time we can talk about the success of it. And I can kind of share my experience.

Cause I do think this is going to be really cool for small businesses and a super great tool. super excited that I had you on. Yeah. Philip Cripe: Okay.

Thanks. Appreciate that. Megan Driscoll: ⁓ so just to recap the end so people know where to find you give this the website for the product. Philip Cripe: So Belkin.

Marketing, B-L-K-I-N.Marketing. Megan Driscoll: Okay. And if they want to find you on LinkedIn, they can easily find you on LinkedIn.

Philip, Cripe, Philip, Cripe is C-R-I-P-E for those that are listening and not watching because, ⁓ Philip with one L also. Yeah, exactly. Philip with one L. Yeah.

Well, I really appreciate your, yeah, exactly. ⁓ I really appreciate your time. This has been super helpful. ⁓ I'm really excited to use the tool and this will be a fun follow up.

Philip Cripe: Yeah, Philip Creight. Yes, and Philip with one L for our American audience. Yeah, I've had that a lot. Starbucks actually get my name right.

Great, awesome. Megan Driscoll: Awesome, thanks for coming.