Actually Revolutionizing Marketing for Small Businesses

Jeffro (00:01.09)
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, I’m thrilled to introduce Adam Nathan, a trailblazing entrepreneur who’s on a mission to make internet success accessible for everyone. Adam is the founder of Blaze, an AI-driven marketing tool designed specifically for the solo founders, freelancers, and small teams who want to grow their businesses faster without all the overwhelm. Now, Adam’s background spans working at the White House, Apple, and Lyft, so he has a unique perspective on how technology can make an impact.

In this episode, we’ll explore how small businesses can leverage AI to save time, increase profits, and take control of their growth journey. So whether you’re just starting out or you’re looking to scale, Adam has some incredible insights and practical tips that you won’t want to miss. So Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Nathan (00:43.037)
Thanks for having me.

Jeffro (00:44.204)
Yeah, absolutely. I’m excited to talk about this stuff. So let’s start with your most recent venture, Blaze. Tell us what it is and how does it help small businesses kind of cut through the noise and grow faster.

Adam Nathan (00:55.345)
Yeah. So Blaze is an AI marketing tool for what we call teams of one. So small business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, creatives, agencies, anyone who has to do marketing, but isn’t a marketer by trade. And Blaze helps you create social media content, newsletters, websites, and blog posts, all in your brand voice and style that helps your business grow on the internet, basically for you with really no work from you involved. And so it’s kind of like having a virtual marketer on your team instead of spending money hiring a full-time person or an agency or taking a lot of time to learn how to do marketing on your own, Blaze brings all the expertise and skills from a professional marketer from across the internet to your brand, to your company to help you grow awareness and leads and most importantly, sales.

Jeffro (01:41.71)
Well, that, I mean, that sounds great, obviously, but I have questions. So you say with no work from you, what does that actually mean? Like how much time does it take to set it up or to review the posts, things like that.

Adam Nathan (01:52.933)
Yeah. So we actually show you in the product, how much time you save from using Blaze, but, you know, you can basically go from, being a new user in Blaze to having a month or more worth of content, in, less than five minutes. And so, the first thing we ask you to do in the product is set up what we call it your brand kit. And so just by giving us your website or by integrating a social account, like Instagram or Facebook, we can analyze everything that you’ve written and posted so far to create a brand voice for you as well as examine your photo vibes, your logos, your colors, your fonts, so that all the content you produce looks and sounds like you. And that personalization, I think, is what really sets our product apart. It doesn’t look or sound like AI. looks and sounds like you. And we’re really good at that, as I think it’s our customer’s favorite feature in the product. But then we have some planning tools where you can schedule and post up to a month’s worth of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn content. We can write basically an infinite number of blog posts for you or newsletters on a certain topic. let’s say, you know, it’s a holiday season, you want holiday themed advertising for a certain product line you have. You can just in one sentence, ask Blaze to do that and it will write the copy, pick the images, schedule all the content, post and analyze it for you. All without anything involved from you. We do show you the process along the way so that you have a sense of control over what Blaze is doing. But if you didn’t want to, our promise is what we call one click marketing, where all you have to do is give us, Just, you know, at minimum just a phrase and we do all the rest.

Jeffro (03:23.244)
Got it. Well, I mean, that sounds impressive. There are different goals with marketing too, right? So one goal might be just awareness, or maybe you just want to show that you’re alive and so you just need posts on your feed, but you don’t care if they convert into customers right now. But then of course, there’s more direct where you want people to be clicking and engaging and buying your stuff. So how do you kind of navigate that and decide what you’re creating for the user?

Adam Nathan (03:49.267)
I think it’s actually more in the user’s hands as you as you’re saying I think many of our users are at different stages in their marketing sophistication and growth I’d say a third of our users are doing nothing and the channels I mentioned so they don’t have social media they’re not re-emailing their customers they don’t have a single blog post for SEO a third of our customers are doing a little bit in those channels but admittedly they’re not doing great we spent a lot of time looking at our customers marketing the existing marketing before Blaze and it’s you picture of their dog or their kids or a photo of a sunset. They’re not actually talking about their products and services. And then a third of our customers are doing some stuff. It’s working okay, but they really want to level up. So we really focus on people who are really just getting started with their marketing or not, you know, in their own opinion, taking full advantage of the opportunities of the internet. and you know, really where, where we can help with a lot of customers is just building awareness. And so we’ve had customers go from zero to 10,000 followers on Tik TOK or 20,000 followers on Instagram in just a couple of months.

I talked to a customer the other day that went from not running a single blog post to now being on the first page of Google for SEO. We really help with that awareness stage, which requires consistent posting of high quality content that’s targeted at your ideal customers. And all of that often takes a lot of time. You have to do it every single day. It has to be interesting and good. And even if you have the skills, it’s pretty boring work. And so a tool-like place can just help you build that drumbeat of marketing that you need to grow awareness.

But we also help with the consideration and retention stages of a business too. We can help you create marketing landing pages, abandoned cart emails to move people from leads into buyers. We can help with customer service templates for commonly asked questions, FAQ pages, center articles, lifecycle emails to keep customers engaged and coming back. But I’d say, you know, most of the people that we serve are starting at the top of that funnel of how do I just get more leads?

more customers, more sales. And for a lot of small businesses, there’s just a capacity challenge around not having enough resources or skills to grow their business fast enough.

Jeffro (05:56.395)
So you mentioned all the follow-up and emails and things like that. is Blaze also serving as a CRM or do you integrate with other CRM platforms?

Adam Nathan (06:06.099)
Blaise is a content management system. And so it not just generates content, which you can then edit. We have a real-time document editor similar to Google Docs and also a visual studio similar to Canva or Figma. But underneath that is a content management system. So we can schedule and post content for you. to actually post that content, we integrate with different providers. So we integrate with the blogs CMS you might already use, like Shopify or WordPress. We integrate with email senders. We integrate with social media platforms.

We’re not doing the actual posting that’s happening through products that you might already have today. But in Blaze, you can use Blaze to organize all that content. So we have a big calendar that shows all of the content you’re pushing out across different channels. We can send you reminders about when that content is going to go out. And so there’s lots of ways just to kind of stay organized across all your different channels within Blaze.

Jeffro (06:58.836)
Are there any limits as to how much content you can create?

Adam Nathan (07:03.635)
No, think our cheapest pricing plan, I think has some limits around how much content you can create in one go. But, you know, I’ve talked to customers that have generated and scheduled a whole quarter’s worth of content. And I talked to someone the other day that said, hey, you know, I was in the product back in September and I plan to come back again in January. And like, I’m just, it’s doing its thing in the meantime. And so I think that’s the kind of most advanced use of a tool like Blaze where you really comfortable with what it does and understand it. But we also have lots of customers coming in and just creating one Instagram post at a time or one blog post at a time. so depending on how you’re doing marketing, you know, how you want to start to increase your cadence, Blaze can, can, can map to your format. But I personally think the coolest things we can do in the product are helping you go from one idea to many, because great marketing is not about saying a hundred different things one time. It’s about saying one thing a hundred times. And obviously that takes a lot of time to do it. It’s also takes a lot of creativity that, my brain gets tired of doing and it, can feel boring. Just basically syndicating concept, content. We know we have a feature that turns, an audio recording like this podcast, video, like a YouTube, poster or like a white paper, long form content into 200 other types of content. and you know, it can, I know from personal experience that it can take so much work just to create what you think is like a really good podcast or video or a long form piece of writing and then to then have to replicate that in different ways for LinkedIn and for Twitter and for Facebook and for a newsletter can be really annoying and just frustrating and not feel like a good use of time, especially when you have 10 other things going on. So Blaze can also help with that. And I think just reducing the mundane work is a really immediate value prop. We show, as I mentioned in the product, how many minutes you’ve saved using Blaze and often Blaze pays for itself within like the first hour of using it with just how much it can do.

Jeffro (08:57.992)
Yeah, it sounds like, and you actually answered my next question, which was going to be, could I upload a video of myself talking about my product or something and then have it use that? So that’s awesome. And I mean, I know some people have tried AI stuff before and it sounds great. And then they generate some images and you’re like, whoa, why does that guy have six fingers or why are the letters all weird? the background, if I squint, it looks fine. But then I look at it and this guy is like a mutant or something. Does that happen?

Adam Nathan (09:27.739)
we, try to make sure it doesn’t. and you’re right that like a lot of AI products have an amazing demo that you may see on a social media site, but when you go and use it, it doesn’t perform that well. the core reason for that is that, the way AI or LLM’s work is not through what I would call deterministic code. most technology products you use work under a normal set of logic where A plus B equals C, if this, that. If I, if I do this, it does that. and so.

Jeffro (09:34.024)
Mm-hmm.

Adam Nathan (09:56.083)
It requires a lot of code writing, it’s fairly resilient because it does exactly the thing you tell it to do and nothing more. The way AI works is probabilistic. And so it’s saying, if A and B and C are together, then maybe it’s D, maybe it’s E, maybe it’s F. And so it works actually more similar to the human brain, like how we inference using lots of different pieces of incomplete data to come up with a conclusion. But that also means that while it’s more accurate than code can be because it’s encapsulating possibilities it’s less precise sometimes because on the long tail, can be wrong. And so a lot of what we work on at Blaze is making sure that it’s both accurate, but really highly consistent in terms of its quality. so that takes a lot of massaging and we spend a lot of time, you we really care that every single time we produce content for you, it’s really good. And that’s where, you know, why you would buy our product, I think, versus ChatDBT, because we’re really focused on this specific use case for our specific customers, which are small business owners. And so for things like images,

Jeffro (10:50.408)
That makes sense.

Adam Nathan (10:52.125)
We spend a lot of time on the backend, basically interpreting what you might tell us to do in different ways and combining it with your brand attributes to make sure that it’s, again, in your photo style, looks like other things that you posted, has your fonts and colors. And we have hundreds of thousands of users. And I’d say most of our team’s time is spent looking at the output of what Blaze creates for our customers and making sure that we think it’s good. Because what’s ultimately important for us is that over time, Blaze actually grows your business for you through high quality content. you won’t pay us for a long time if what we produce for you isn’t good. And so, yeah, we’re very, very focused on what I would call consistent quality output.

Jeffro (11:33.735)
So what about the copyright issues though? Like what are you training your images on and who owns the generated artwork that you then say here’s your post? You know does that does your customer own it now?

Adam Nathan (11:46.047)
so we use a bunch of different models in the backend. The AI models themselves are not ours right now. So we use five or five to 10 different, models for things like images and video and copy. yeah, all of that is governed under creative commons. And so it’s not, we’re not using copyrighted images as inputs. what we produce for you is also not, technically, you know, if you publish on the internet, it’s also governed under creative commons. so in the same way, someone can, can use it. and so, yeah, we.

You know, for big businesses, I think it’s much more of an IP concern about, you know, what is copyrighted by our big corporation and what if people use it? And I think that has hamstrung AI’s entry into big enterprise organizations. But for small businesses, at least our experience is that they’re not very concerned with things like IP and protections. They’re much more concerned with

Jeffro (12:36.744)
Yeah, with that stuff, okay.

Adam Nathan (12:41.501)
How do I make sure that I can put food on the table next month and cover my bills? so growth is the prerogative. so what our goal is is that, as I mentioned, Blaze does help you grow faster and that it does that through high quality content that your customers engage with. To be honest, we have hundreds of thousands of users. I haven’t heard of a single question or issue regarding IP protection so far.

Jeffro (13:05.704)
That’s It’s a good sign.

Adam Nathan (13:08.785)
is it’s not as important for our customers, for small business owners out there that are just trying to find more sales, revenue.

Jeffro (13:15.047)
Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s great. Obviously with that many users, you would have encountered something by now if it was an issue. that’s a good sign. Let’s zoom out for a minute. know, AI is often touted as a game changer for businesses. We’ve kind of gotten numb to that claim, but what you’ve described does sound like, at least in the area of marketing and social media, this does kind of help level the playing field for small businesses and entrepreneurs. I mean, that’s kind of the goal and why you created it, correct?

Adam Nathan (13:44.509)
That is, and I think, you know, we talk at Blaze about outputs versus outcomes. think the output, that you’re buying from us is, is high quality content. And so as, as we were just talking about, you know, our prerogative there is to make sure that it’s really, really good, a hundred percent of the time for you, which is more than other tools. I think can say, but what you’re really buying over the long-term, the outcome is growth, is more sales, more revenue. and we believe that you won’t stick with us for very long. You might stick with us for a month or two if you’re getting good content, but if you’re putting that content out there and nothing’s happening, you’re probably going to give up. You’re going to get demoralized. think it’s like going to the gym every day and not seeing any growth or progress. like, well, this is not a good use of my time. So what’s really important for us over the long term is that the content that you’re making and putting out into the world is actually helping you to grow your business and achieve your goals. And that’s really what we’re selling, really what people are buying over a relationship with us over six months or a year And I think the proudest moments we’ve had is when we hear from customers, which is really all the time, of how their business has grown due to Blaze. We have a channel in our Slack, in our internal Slack, called Lovewall, where we publish stories of customers who come to us showing graphs around revenue or impressions on a social media site or their SEO ranking that go up and to the right. And the cool thing is not just you know, the efficacy of that, just the effectiveness of the content, but also the cost. Blaze costs $35 a month. And so if you compare the cost of that growth to what it would cost you if you were to pay for an agency or hire a team or do it yourself, it’s like less than a cent often per lead or per customer, which is crazy. And so we’re not talking about like a five or 10 X improvement in terms of the alternatives, but like a hundred or a thousand X improvement. so that makes us happy because we’re leveling the playing field, not just by giving businesses a way to market their products equally against bigger competitors, but also save a lot of money and time in the process.

Jeffro (15:45.606)
Yeah, and I think that’s the biggest thing that makes this so attractive, right? Because it is expensive to hire a graphic designer or social media content manager to do all this manually. And so even if your level of quality on that output is 85 % of the way compared to what a human could do, that’s awesome. Because now you can also just increase volume almost to make up for it. you can put that money elsewhere, right?

other areas of the business to keep on growing even faster. So I like that.

Adam Nathan (16:23.249)
Yeah, I think, know, it’s, it’s, would, know I sound maybe Pollyanna here. And of course we see a lot of really great stuff happening with our customers, but, I do think that AI can help any business grow faster than it is right now, just with the technology that we have. you know, we see that, just in, just on our customer base, I talked to two to three customers every single day. and you know, yeah, of course there’s more things they want our product to do, but it’s, generally working for them. And that’s really gratifying because a lot of our,

We serve almost exclusively small businesses, entrepreneurs, people who have taken a bet on themselves and are really proud about what they’ve built so far, have a ton of creativity and grit and resilience invested in the business, but they’re not professional marketers. They’re not technical. And so we can help them with this thing that they, of course, know that they can’t do. And that’s super meaningful. And I’d say over the next couple of years,

This idea of like a virtual marketer, I think will continue to become more and more real where yeah, today we can help you with these pretty complex jobs as you were talking about around social media and blog posts and newsletters. but I think the sophistication of what we can do for you will continue to grow over time. So it’s valuable right now. And I think it’s a worthy thing for anyone to try, but, it’s really exciting to think about the possibilities for the future because it’s not, we focus us on, what, what is the cool technology out there? And like, what are the cool demos you can make it much more.

How do we use that technology to produce results for people? A lot of our customers don’t care that it’s AI. If you look at our landing page, we don’t talk about AI at all. They care about what they’re buying and what we’re selling is growth and we can do that. And I think it’ll be really cool to see what more we can do in the coming years as the technology improves.

Jeffro (18:09.623)
Can you walk us through one of your specific success stories? You you’ve referenced a lot at high level, but if you could walk through an example of a solo founder or small team who used Blaze, give us the before and after, what they did and how it affected things.

Adam Nathan (18:24.369)
Yeah. so I talked to a customer the other day called rejuvenase, which is a med spa based in, Northern Virginia and Stafford. and they, sell, weight loss injections like ozempic, as well as other, kind of cosmetic, dermatological treatments. and we serve lots of businesses like that. both kind of blue collar businesses like mama pop shops on main streets. We also serve white-collar businesses like financial advisors and real estate agents and life coaches and therapists. But, know, again, they’re all defined by kind of being a small team. And when I talked to this customer, they were saying that they had worked for two years and trying to get their sites ranking on Google, their domain authority higher. And they had spent time writing blog posts, but then the needle, the DA needle wasn’t really moving at all. And in this case, this customer You know, it’s obviously targeting a certain set of customers in a certain geographic area. So things like SEO can be really powerful because if there’s a customer looking for a med spas in Northern Virginia, of course, rejuvenates wants to be at the top of the page on Google. And they told me that within two months of using Blaze, their site went from basically a couple hundred visitors a month to 3000 visitors. And they are now ranking on 4,200 keywords that Blaze researched and wrote blog posts around and they have, course, like a lot of marketing, just one post that kind of went pretty viral and boosted their site traffic with 236 keywords being included in that post that kind of made the difference for them. And they shared their console for Google search showing basically kind of the flatness of their site visits before Blaze and then this kind of really steady and Steve graph up into the right in the two months that they’ve been using Blaze. And so now they get thousands of site visits a month. And, you know, all of that was done by Blaze. Blaze researched the keywords, wrote the blog posts, scheduled and posted them for them, analyze performance over time to improve things. And that was just exciting to hear about. As I do many times, customers that were kind of spinning the rails before Blaze trying to figure this out, not getting very far and then starting to finally get results with impressions and leads.

Adam Nathan (20:45.171)
after using our product.

Jeffro (20:46.691)
for 35 bucks a month, right? All of this. Well, that’s awesome. Thanks for walking us through that. I was also curious to hear before we get too far along, you worked at some of the world’s most complex organizations, right? The White House and Apple, these are both big organizations in different ways, obviously, but how did that background and your experiences there kind of feed into your approach for making this tool? Like, is it related or is it totally separate?

Adam Nathan (20:48.637)
Yeah.

Adam Nathan (21:13.651)
It’s a great question. I think Apple taught me to develop my muscles around taste. I think taste is something that a lot of people are born with. There’s many different types of tastes. We all have a unique perspective on the world, but Apple, I’m sure you know, if you own any of their products, has a really distinct perspective on how to make something easy and simple and beautiful for people to use and reduce an idea down to its essence, remove the complexity so that you get the core of what you need really, really quickly in a way that makes you feel good. And I think I’ve applied, or we’ve tried to apply a lot of those ideas to our product at Blaze. We spend most of our time trying to remove friction from the product and make it really easy to use. And it’s a constant battle as we add more features to make it digestible and even fun for someone to go through. so certainly that’s a…

You know, that’s, that’s in our blood here at Blaze. we also, think just probably like any, hopefully government official really care about the people that we serve. we love our users here. I think you can often feel when companies don’t like the customers they serve. you, can tell that the products, were developed with, with kind of the, every really deep level of care. The marketing might feel kind of sending or, apathetic and I love our customers. I love that, we can really help them, and, and deliver meaningful results and that we’re not just building a nice to have product for a champagne problem that someone has. is what we’re building, you know, is a must have for our customers because they need to grow today, tomorrow, next month, next year. If they don’t, they won’t be able to afford their life. And knowing that we are a small part of that for them is really gratifying. And I know our whole team is really, really focused on our customers and how do we provide the best experience. We work on customer bugs ahead of any new features.

Our engineers pair with our customers when there’s a problem. So we try and reduce the distance between the work that we do internally and our customers to make sure that there’s deep empathy and understanding between our team and what our customers are going through and seeing in the product.

Jeffro (23:23.83)
That makes sense. that’s reassuring to a small business as well to know that you’re kind of on their side. And especially when it’s an AI tool, because I think a lot of people worry about losing authenticity when they’re using AI to generate all their content, right? So is there anything you guys do or recommend to help the business owners continue to maintain that personal touch while automating parts of their marketing?

Adam Nathan (23:48.605)
Well, I think, you know, like a lot of new technologies, yes, AI helps you, it provides access, as you mentioned, to new growth opportunities. It can help you automate things that you do manually, but that just means that the time you spend on marketing doesn’t go away. It just shifts to more important, higher value activities. And so you may spend less time copying and pasting text from one platform to another. But what that means for a lot of people is that that time is then used improving the copy, making sure it feels and sounds exactly like you, putting your personal creative touch on work. And it’s important for us when we built Blaze, it’s not just like a chat bot where you talk back and forth to it. You can see the work that Blaze is doing for you, edit it and refine it at every step in the process, which gives you a sense of control, but also an opportunity to make it truly yours. You know, our goal is to make it 90, 95 % good. But that last five to 10%, we think is always improved with human touch. And so Just because Blaze can automate a lot of the work doesn’t mean, in my opinion, that humans should not be part of the process. I think it actually makes the human touch even more important because anybody can make pretty good stuff if they don’t touch it with AI. And so I think it makes human creativity even more valuable. And I think the best folks out there are using AI and incorporating it to automate out the busy work and stuff they don’t want to do and get to pretty good answers. But they’re still putting their own spin on it to make it just that much better than what other folks are doing.

Jeffro (25:18.785)
Yeah, and I think very soon, using tools like this is going to be the cost of admission because there’s not going to be any way you can keep up if you’re not doing this, especially at the price points that we’re talking about. So thank you for joining me today. Adam, Play sounds like an amazing tool. And I’m going to continue to check it out a little more deeply after we finish up here because I want to see. I’ve got clients as well. I might recommend some people to it. And I think it can be a great tool.

If you guys are listening, can use the links in the show notes to learn more about Blaze or to connect with Adam. I believe you guys do have a seven day free trial, is that correct? Awesome. Well, before I let you go, I’ve got one last question for you, Adam. If you had to give just one piece of advice to a business owner who feels stuck in their marketing efforts, what would that be?

Adam Nathan (25:50.269)
We do, yes.

Adam Nathan (26:02.355)
Don’t give up. Keep going. You know, I love this idea in at least in our space that no startup dies mid keystroke, meaning often no company dies just because they run out of money or time. Companies die because people run out of motivation and they get tired. They want to do something new and exciting and fresh. And, you know, I think if you just don’t give up and you put one foot in front of the other and you don’t look at your feet, but you look up, you learn from what you’re doing, especially your failures, you will succeed eventually. And I think that’s what separates kind of failures from winners in business as people who just keep going until they found traction. And I think that’s what I wish for anyone listening.

Jeffro (26:41.94)
Awesome, I love that advice, I fully 100 % agree. Thanks again for being here, Adam. Thanks to all you guys for listening. These AI tools mean you have no excuse for not getting started, really. So go make something happen and I’ll see you back here next time. Take care.