A humble pivot

Last chance to get in before the launch 👀

Alright, alright—the haters did have a point after all. In August, we concluded our offering was too unscalable and made the executive decision to cut ops out entirely from the service. As many of you pointed out, scaling a tech company is hard, and simultaneously trying to scale an agency and a tech company is multiply so. That didn’t stop us from getting to $840K with 70%+ margins in 5 months, though. And obviously we learned a shit ton.

Our new offering is a “one-person marketing service.” That means that a GTM expert from our side meets with a customer a couple times a week, and all they do is use our software together live. The human expert provides taste; AI provides scale.

Our thesis

In the Thelian framework, our “important truth that most people would disagree with” is:
people don’t want to use software anymore.

Specifically, B2B executives do not want to buy and learn software they need to use themselves. Two decades of needing admin-level proficiency just to configure a permission set has soured a generation’s taste for tools. They don’t want to wait half a year for a new software implementation to yield value; they want to throw money at a problem and have the successful outcome land in their laps.

At the same time, AI solutions are not good enough for most enterprise use cases yet. True GTM “service-as-a-software” is about as far away as AGI is, now that the dust is settling and everyone is realizing AGI (at least in the short term) looks less like an omnipotent machine god and more like “expert-for-vertical” or “expert-for-workflow.” Is there any B2B GTM service-as-a-software among us that dares claim full headcount replacement with 0% human-in-the-loop? (Not in the AI BDR space, that’s for sure.)

What AI is good for is scale. In the age of AI, the cost of research is cheap. The cost of duplication is cheap. When it costs pennies to have your AI agents be terminally online scrollers that can synthesize every strain of discourse you might be interested in posting about, select proven viral formats for your niche, and duplicate your voice at scale, what is missing is a human expert’s taste. Which topic should you post about, given the entire universe of topics at your fingertips? What hook should you use, when you have seemingly infinite choices?

This is where the “one-person” part of the “one-person marketing service” comes in. Each customer’s GTM expert is forward deployed with them to learn their upcoming sales and marketing goals for the quarter, devise a content strategy, and help them execute the content generation on our platform. The customer is charged consumption-based billing for how much they consume, and the GTM expert does no customer work outside of meeting with them.

Product

Not to hype it too much, but we kinda cooked with this one.

Imagine Cursor for B2B content, powered by a proprietary dataset and an AI-native multimodal interface. Early users are calling it the best thing since vector search.

Strategic advisors

We’re onboarding strategic advisors before we launch out of stealth in a few weeks, so if you or someone you know could be helpful for—or just have questions about—what we’re building, please email eric@virio.ai. He’s very friendly and doesn’t bite.

Here’s a memo.

P.S. no VCs though pls

P.P.S. if you’re around moscone center today…look for the equestrian 🐎