Listen Labs grew revenue 15x and interviewed 1 million people since its last TBPN appearance — raises $100M

model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Um we have our next guest already in the reream waiting room. We have Alfred back on the show for the second time from Listen Labs. He's the co-founder and CEO. Welcome to the show. How are you?

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited.

Welcome back. I love the energy. We're fired up. Fired up. [laughter] And we got a we got a special We got a I mean, real quick,

reintroduce yourself for people that missed the first appearance. Um, and then we'll get into these special deliveries that you got for us.

Amazing. Yes. So, I'm Alfred. I'm the CEO of Listen Labs. What we do at listen is an AI that speaks to thousands of people and tells you what they want and why. And this helps you develop better products or fix your marketing campaigns. And what you have in the room with you is some incredible products that have been developed using lesson.

Um.

Yes. Yes. So take us uh what what is this? How are you involved? What happened with this crazy?

Did you want John? Did you want John to wear this?

Who are you talking to? You didn't talk to me about [laughter] this, but somebody's

going to put them on.

Yes. Who's who's happy? [laughter]

Um, you know, products are all about finding the right audience. Um, and so, um, these are shorts from Chubbies, which has been one of our early customers. And they used Listen to test their prints, test their fitting. And um actually one of them they developed a new entire new product line for kids uh kids shorts where they used listen to interview hundreds of kids and they figured out like the liner in the shorts that they had previously were very uncomfortable.

Oh very

maybe maybe something for you to wear.

Yeah. Very very fascinating. uh what maybe 10 years ago

what what are some of the challenges with consumer brands when it comes to un like really understanding your customers because I think with

uh you know with with a SAS company early stage SAS company you can almost you can just talk to all your customers many's probably a power law where there's one customer who's providing 80% of your revenue in the first couple

whereas whereas with consumer brands you could go talk to 20 customers and then like you could get like terrible signal because you just happened to to pick incorrectly.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean like you in the olden days you were stuck in this paradigm between you could use a survey but then you would get a ton of people not really paying attention

and they would answer your your questions uh but you wouldn't get like rich deep insights and you could then have one-on-one interviews but as you said if you have thousands of customers it's really hard to do them at scale and so with listen you get the best of both worlds where you have an AI talk to all of your customers and then you can figure out the nuances like which segments work which don't and people are much more honest talking to an AI than talking to a person uh is something that we found out. So you get kind of their feedback is more driven to how they actually will behave in the future.

I have a company that uh that I'm going to email and tell them to use listens. I don't know them at all. It's this company they make uh sound machines for kids. Oh.

And I've had multiple of them. I don't know why I've had multiple of them because both of them uh when you're trying to adj if you just like touch the thing in the wrong way it triggers like a motion thing and it just starts playing music. [laughter]

Like it literally I went I was I was messaging

quietly

I I I felt bad. I was messaging the the support after uh a week ago saying like please let the CEO know that your product makes

uh uh bedtime worse a disaster and I will buy another

I will buy another one but as soon as you fix it but you need to fix it I I'll give you the I'll give you the third chance.

Um and that that just seems like an incident where they shipped a product and then they're it sells well because it's in demand but they're not actually paying attention to like how people experience Do do you feel like you're able to pull out that emotional response from like you you interview a hundred people, they're all like, "It's okay." And then there's that one person that clearly found a fatal flaw with the product, is animated about it, they're aggressive, they're emotional, maybe they're screaming at the AI, maybe they're being rude, you censor the expletives, but you know that there's emotion there. It's valuable. Good. Good on you. Uh and uh and you're able to give that more weight. like how do you think about balancing out all the different uh the different emotions that come through in responses because sometimes they can get collapsed in AI models.

Totally. Yeah. I mean the CEO of Sweet Green I think was on the on TBPN talking about this how like surveys miss the outliers. Uh yeah, that's the protein bolt um that they developed using lesson. But um like the the other methods of collecting feedback miss the kind of the crucial pieces of feedback that really matter and it's often about like one or two or or a couple of people that are part of your segment that will drive most of your revenue and they will be much more animated and care much more. And so the AI is able to detect kind of their emotional um the way they show up emotionally as well as kind of the nuances of um how they answer the question. We have something called uh response quality. So the AI can rank how well this person kind of answers the question and how much they know about their product. So it's able to kind of surface those outliers to you and then like give you actionable recommendations. What is the actual workflow like uh in general in order to actually start talking with customers through listen? Uh I imagine it's also different with um like a kids product line with chubbies like how do you actually facilitate getting a

a parent to allow their their kid to talk to a robot? Um I'm very curious.

Yeah, of course you need um the parents of concerns but u it's essentially four steps. So you start by asking your question and which could be you know SAS tools also use it like replet so they could ask how how should we what should we change in our product if you compare us to lovable and then listen will go and recruit that audience for you so we'll find replet users as well as lovable users and we have 30 million people in our database so we can find like pretty nuanced um recruits and then listen will go and have video calls with them where they could potentially also share their screen. So you can have thousands of those video calls and then the AI will kind of analyze those and give you recommendations of what to do.

Mhm.

Makes sense.

Uh take me back. We didn't really talk about your your uh your earlier career the first time you were on the show. Uh B fake image app. What was the story there? Uh [laughter] how did you build it? How did you scale it? What was the value prop? And how did you wind up selling it too?

Yeah, for sure. Um, so we we my co-founder and I we built this AI consumer app um which was essentially kind of giblify. You could giblify yourself. You could do this kind of image prompts back

style transfer almost.

Yeah.

And the real use case was creating Tinder profile pictures of course. Um and so it like blew up on Reddit. We were on the front page of Reddit and we had 20,000 downloads in one day. And that was the inspiration behind listen because we had these many users and we were experimenting with LMS at the time and thought it would be interesting to let an AI talk to our users and it turned out to be really useful. So we were like why are we making this shitty app like let's just sell this thing and

and then we actually ended up in this limbo state where it did work for us but it still took us 18 months of

like making the product perfect um before it became useful. And that's something I've learned that like being early looks the same as being wrong.

Um, and a lot of people we talked to told us they've already built the product that we were building and it didn't work. And so we had so much rejection. Um, but now since we launched 9 months ago and when I was last on TBPN, we've grown our revenue 15x. We interviewed million people. Let's go. Raised 100 million in total now. So, let's go.

There we go.

Congratulations.

I'm still trying to get used to the energy of, you know, I'm Swedish. I'm I'm trying to amp it up, but

No, I mean, this is night this is night and day from the last time. You you're fired up. I love it.

Great.

Uh what's uh what what's next? Just just scaling uh on the on the customer side, hiring the

whole Fortune 500. You got to get them all.

That's right. That's right. Got to collect them all.

Sweet green, Google, Nestle, Skims, Microsoft. There's a couple going after 500 companies one at a time. But we have like hiring is the number one priority and uh we're trying to do these tricks to stand out. We did the the billboard. I don't know if you saw that where we had

uh you know one one thing we've learned learned is that there's so many companies growing really fast raising a ton of money and so you just got to communicate your culture and get people excited to join. And so we made this billboard that had just black text on on white where that led to a puzzle, an engineering puzzle. And that made it much more attractive for folks to try to join the team because they realize we're a team of like competitive programmers and and puzzle hunters overall. Puzzle hunters. Love it.

Yeah. Yeah. Mike Isaac in the New York Times wrote a whole piece about how like how obscure billboards are in San Francisco. It's like a few people talking to each other. Very in-group. But I love when people do uh fun stuff with Billboard. It's always great. Thank you so much for taking the time.

So great to have you back on. I'm sure you will be back on this year with the amount of momentum you guys have. Uh and looking forward to it. And uh yeah, thanks thanks for this thanks for this protein max bowl. We'll we'll split it. We can each still get like 50 g of protein. [laughter]

That's plenty. That's plenty.

Plenty. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

Cheers. Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. Uh TJ Parker asked a question. He said, "Why are there not a hundred times more weird consumer AI things going on?" Nikita Beer answered. He said, "Hold that thought until Dom Hoffman launches." And Dom quote tweeted and just said, "Sup." Of course, uh Dom is the creator of Vine

and his company is called Sup.

Oh, I didn't know that.

So, but it was a it was a good response. Dom created Vine.

Yeah. Uh and and a number of other things. Uh a fantastic creator on the internet has has created a bunch of like fun moments on the internet. I've been following his career for a long time. I enjoyed Vine. Were you ever on Vine?

Uh I was on it, but I never I never I never like fell in love with

I created the skits, so I add it on Vine. No, not really. But I I was actually experimenting with the Vine format very seriously and I would do these like hyperlapses and infinite loops. You could do this this fun format where you would take a little like basically an image as you went around your house and if you ended at the start it would be an endless loop and Vine was very good about endlessly looping videos. So you could do all these cool fun things with it. Uh I had a lot of fun with that format. It was great. Uh, did you see that Havana syndrome is real?

Apparently, this is crazy. I Smith says Havana syndrome was real and we got the device that causes it.

Conspiracy theory that turned out a number of months ago, the US captured a weapon that has been associated with Havana syndrome.

Uh, Havana syndrome. Let me

disputed medical condition. Starting in 2016, in about a dozen overseas locations, US and Canadian government officials and their families reported symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound. The symptoms lasted for months, including disabling cognitive problems, balance problems, dizziness, insomnia, and headaches. Havana syndrome is not officially recognized as a disease by the medical community. Uh but apparently uh there is reporting in CNN now that there's a device.

Well, there have been a bunch of real investigations into this because it's happening all over the world. People are like, I feel terrible. Why do I feel terrible? I'm hearing things. I have a headache. I can't balance.

Uh and so this was just a great mystery.

CNN now reports the device linked to it was purchased by Homeland Security in the waning days of the Biden administration. And DoD has spent a year testing it. It has Russian components and fits into just a backpack,

which is scary.

Will a defense tech startup build one and go through why combinator? [laughter] Who knows? Stay tuned.

We might see someone commercialize this technology any day now. Uh Tyler,

I want to see um someone if they're building it, I want them to use it on themselves like uh Jake Adler at Pilgrim.

Oh yeah.

Cuts his leg openings.

Prove that it works.

He shoots the VC with the I'm so dizzy. I got to write you a term sheet. [laughter] Uh Als says that jobs exist because important people want to have large pyramids of people reporting to them. Even if the pyramids do nothing useful, AI will not change this. Oh, interesting. Fake jobs. Um in other jobs news, uh there's an opinion here. Our brightest minds are disappearing into finance, management, consulting, and corporate law. And uh is this one of Marinetti says no we are using our best minds to allocate resources optimally. How terrible.

Of course we love finance, management,