How One Founder Used AI to Help 30,000 Job Seekers

00:00:06 Mark Smith
Welcome to AI Unfiltered, the show that cuts through the hype and brings you the authentic side of artificial intelligence. I'm your host, Mark Smith, and in each episode, I sit down one-on-one with AI innovators and industry leaders from around the world. Together, we explore real-world AI applications, share practical insights, and discuss how businesses are implementing responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI. Let's dive into the conversation and see how AI can transform your business today.Hey everyone, welcome back to the Microsoft Innovation Podcast.Today we're heading to the mile high city to meet the founder who's flipping the script on an industry most of us never think twice about, which is betting. Please welcome Colin, the Denver-based CEO of Sheets and Giggles, a company that's not only marketing eco-friendly sheets cool, but they're high on sustainability. Our guest has built a direct-to-consumer brand from scratch, turning eucalyptus trees into silky soft sheets, while turning heads with some of the most unconventional startup marketing you'll ever see. Before launching Sheets and Giggles, he was deep in the world of tech recruiting, which oddly enough helped shape his approach to AI and resume building tools. We'll dig deep into mentoring and why it's important and how AI is reshaping the job market. Full links for the show are going to be in the show notes for the episode. Welcome, Colin.

00:01:35 Colin McIntosh
Thanks, Mark. I'm laughing because A, I feel like we put the soft in Microsoft and probably the weirdest guest you've had in your podcast in terms of an industry vertical. And then B, it's just your intro for me is like it's ADHD as I am, where it's like, here's a direct-to-consumer bedsheets entrepreneur who's also built an AI resume builder. It's like, it's so amazing when I hear it. I'm like, oh my God, what am I doing? And that's the hook, like, because my guests, of course, are used to deep talk around some Microsoft particular technology. And why I was interested in having you on the show is one, you've been in the tech recruiting space, which at the moment is becoming prevalent on everybody in tech's radar.

00:02:19 Mark Smith
And the reason for that, like just last night, two people that I have worked closely with in my career inside Microsoft over 23 years, both found they were unemployed as of 24 hours. I know. sucks. Right. So they got the notification, and it's happening more and more. I've spent probably the last month where as Microsoft's gone and laid off 6,000 odd employees, or they're doing these rolling layoffs at the moment, where people that have been superstars in the last 12 months are still losing their jobs because the world's changing. And so here's why I think there's a good match. But before we jump down that path, tell us a bit about why you went from tech recruiting.

00:03:04 Colin McIntosh
Yeah, so my career has a really interesting roundabout path, I guess. So I graduated from Emory University's Goizueta Business School in 2012. And then my first job out of school was at Bridgewater Associates, which is the world's largest hedge fund in Connecticut, Ray Dalio's fund. I promptly got fired in about five months. So best thing that ever happened to me. I was terrible at my job, to be fair, I do not blame them one bit. And I was kind of up a creek without a paddle. I was living in Connecticut. It was 2013. I didn't really know anybody. And like I'm from South Florida, so I'm like far from home. And when you get fired from your first job, man, it's tough. And so I called around and the guy who recruited me to Bridgewater got dinner with me. And he goes, Well, hey, man, I still like you. You're a talkative guy.

00:03:54 Colin McIntosh
You're smart. You're funny. Would you want to be a recruiter and see if you can try your hand at this? And I said, What? What are my other options? So I became a recruiter. I absolutely adored it. And I got nicknamed the recruiting vampire because I would be up at 3 a.m. sending emails to candidates and always got a response from the candidates like, Who the hell is sending emails at 3 a.m.? I ended up hiring myself into one of my open roles. That got me into startups. I was in business development at one of my startup clients. And then yada, yada, yada, I got into Techstars for another company with one of my friends who was the founder of that company, who I'd written the business plan for. So I was on the founding team, super fun.

00:04:36 Colin McIntosh
And that was a consumer brand. So that's where I cut my teeth on bringing a consumer product to market. That was a wearable tech product. I launched the product in Brookstone, Target, Best Buy, a bunch of different stores. And 2 1/2 years later, after we raised a few $1,000,000 and had shipped 10s of thousands of units, we unfortunately were all laid off at 1 P.m. on a Monday as startups go. And so that was September 2017. And I said I wanted to start my own consumer brand. I wanted to be sustainable. I wanted to be something I'm proud of, something funny where I can zig where everybody else is zagging. And this is a true story. I looked at all the domains that I owned. And I thought, what's the best business model that I feel most passionate about from all the domains that I own? I own like 100 of them. Now I probably own 200 of them. And sheetsgiggles.com. And it just was like, So obvious to me, massive market, highly fragmented, growing 10% year over year, no brand differentiation, no brand loyalty, and no good sustainable options. And so I incorporated three weeks after I got laid off, one year to the day I got laid off, we won Denver Startup Week first place. And then two years after that, we hit our first million dollar sales month. Wow. So it's been a wild, wild ride with Sheets and Giggles, yeah.

00:05:57 Mark Smith
Just because I come from down under and eucalyptus trees are a big deal, particularly in Australia, my neighboring country, but I also grow them personally on my own property. I'm from seed. I've grown multiple eucalyptus trees.

00:06:10 Colin McIntosh
Beautiful tree.

00:06:11 Mark Smith
Yeah, how, why that tree?

00:06:14 Colin McIntosh
So there's a number of different reasons. First and foremost, it's cellulosic rayon. So it's rayon fabric made from cellulose plants. And so the first version of cellulosic rayon is viscose, which is bamboo viscose, which most people know as bamboo sheets. And it's got that very silky hand. It's very smooth, it's airy, it's breathable. The problem is that with viscose, you can't make it without carbon disulfide, which is a toxic chemical. And then you put that chemical mostly into waterways when you're talking about, you know, maybe Chinese bamboo viscose. And it can be very toxic for environments. And then Modal is the second version of cellulosic rayon that's made from beech, spruce, pine. Too thin for bedsheets, but it is a wonderful fabric, great for underwear, apparel. It's really awesome fabric. And then Lyocell, which is made from eucalyptus, is the third version of cellulosic rayon, and that's actually made with amine oxide, which can be recaptured and reused about 99.5% every single batch. So there is no runoff, there's no... And even if there were, amine oxide is non-toxic, it's not harmful, and you don't want to drink it, but you know. And so basically, the Lyocell that's made is a super soft, zero coefficient of friction, near zero, hyper-breathable, cooling, retains some humidity in the air, so it's cool to the touch when you touch it. Zero static, hypoallergenic. And so I really, in 2017, when I was bringing this product to market, I wanted something that sounded like magic to the average American. And bamboo, you know, sheets, cotton sheets, like everybody had heard of most of these products in the category. And I did some surveys and only two out of 1000 people that I surveyed had heard of eucalyptus lyocell, eucalyptus sheets. And so I decided to go for it and I kind of popularized the category in the US. And then from a sustainability perspective, you know, eucalyptus trees go to maturity super fast, just in a few years. You can branch them, you don't have to harvest them, so you don't have to knock down the whole tree. They use about 96% less water than cotton, 30% less energy, no insecticide, they're naturally insecticidal. And so cotton by itself uses about 24% of the world's insecticides, including the neonicotinoids, which kill birds and bees. And so it was just hyper luxury products at an affordable price point that was widely considered the most sustainable fabric in the world. And just saw an opening and blew through it.

00:08:46 Mark Smith
Amazing. Amazing. Let's just talk for a sec, because I want to come back to building a brand from scratch, because I think that's epic and it's such a hard thing to do. Tell me, though, about the little tool that you built that's kind of become a big deal as well in the recruitment space?

00:09:06 Colin McIntosh
So sheetsresume.com is what you're referring to. I am the Sheets guy. You're in New Zealand, so I don't know if you know the MyPillow guy here in the US. Everybody calls me. He's kind of an eccentric character here in the US. He's like very politically involved. He's always in the talk shows. And so people always go to me, they're like, You're like the MyPillow guy. Like, you're kind of like... And I'm like, Well, a little less...  Well, I'm kind of crazy, but like a little less evil, maybe. I don't know. But so I'm the Sheets guy. And so everything I've done, my podcast is Sheet Talk, you know, Sheets and Giggles, obviously. And so my AI resume builder is the Sheets resume. That's what everybody calls it. And so, as a recruiter, I saw so often that people's resumes were just awful. And even the best candidates that I talked to, I said, Hey, before I submit you to my client, I just want you to know I'm going to redo your whole resume for you because I want your first impression to be killer. And right now, they're not going to hire you. Humans are such visual creatures that I would sometimes submit bullseye candidates, and clients would just be lukewarm on them because their resume was a mess. And so what I've done with Sheets Resume is I've taken all my best resume advice over the years, and it's kind of like an overnight success story, but I've been working on resume advice on the internet for a decade at this point. I've been giving people pointers, and I've answered tens of thousands of questions.
 My free resume template's been used a few million times. And the AI resume builder that we stood up last year in 2024, my friend and I did this in our spare time. He's a software engineer at Eventbrite, and I've obviously got my company to run. So we did this on nights and weekends. It is awesome. And it basically, you can upload any resume, your LinkedIn, you can start from scratch, and it'll give you a brand new optimized resume in two seconds flat. The best part is because this is not... Now I'm just in the sales pitch, I'm sorry. But the best part is because I'm not doing this for my rent payment, my mortgage payment, this is just my passion project, A, I give it away for free to anyone who can't afford it. I just say, e-mail me, I'll give it to you for free. And B, that lends me so much credibility with people where they feel like they can trust me that it's almost like a reluctant hero. I'm like, I don't have to do this. I don't have time for this. I want and I feel like I need to do this. And so we only offer one format and we don't offer any, you can't change anything. You can't select a different style. It's just, this is what works and here it is and make it easy for you. Yeah.

00:11:48 Mark Smith
So what's the URL for that? Because I think a lot of people will be interested in that.

00:11:53 Colin McIntosh
SheetsResume.com. It's such a stupid game.

00:11:58 Mark Smith 
We'll throw it in the show notes just so people can click on it. Now, just in this recruitment space, the media is full of doom and gloom about the impact of AI is going to have on the world. People are going to lose their jobs. As in the tech space, we're starting to see people lose their jobs. I'm quite buoyant about it. I just think it's going to be a re-skilling of the workforce. The work is going to change. But the other thing is I've noticed is that we're all operating more and more in a global market. I live in New Zealand. I own a company in the United Kingdom. I work across Europe and the US in my day-to-day job. And is a resume enough these days when I was recently engaged in doing a podcast with a company that are hiring 30,000 people at a time, right? No joke. So engineers, engineers, they build airports, they build infrastructure at scale across Asia. And so they'll be bidding for a project for six years. It'll be a multi-billion dollar project and they get the green light. And so all of a sudden they've got to go from zero to 30,000 engineers. so highly skilled people, but they're going to bring them in from around the world and have them all resume ready, et cetera. And so what they're doing is leaning into AI to do first round of, so resume selection, first round interview, second round interview, the only third round only happens with people. And yet the entire interview process is run by an AI agent that's in that interview that has all the data from the others to actually prompt what needs to be asked, et cetera, because they're hiring 30,000 people at once.

00:13:36 Colin McIntosh
I get the, I'm glad that you sound a little more optimistic about this. I get the heebie-jeebies from this. Like I get real dystopian vibes when I think about, you know, the fact that we've got, you know, like I try to do. good with the AI resume builder. I try to help people and I don't, and my builder is not optimized for like the AI ATSs that are the, I'm optimizing for the human. I know what the human wants and I still believe the human is the last great filter before interviews. Yeah. That being said, We're barreling toward this future where it's like AI resumes, AI cover letters, screened by AI screeners with AI either keyword filtering, their language processing. And then you get on the phone call, and I feel like there's this indignity of these people are going to hire you. You're going to work with them. You're going to spend 40 hours a week with them, 2,000 hours a year. And they can't even get on the phone with you for a 15-minute informational interview. They're going to put you on some AI hologram recruiter to screen you out. There's a lot of the valuing of humanity, I feel like, is just going to continue to be lower and lower and lower in a lot of this, and it really freaks me out. And right now, the job market, and I don't know if you're curious about this, this is where you want to go. But from what I'm seeing, and just to give context in terms of the amount of people I see, I probably see about, I don't know, 30,000 resumes a month, maybe about that. And I get personal emails by a lot of these people, and I've seen millions over the years. Both are at their wits because they're being screened out by AIs that aren't even looking at their resume. They're not even getting automatic rejection letters. And then when they do get somebody on the phone, it's now half the time it's like an AI recruiter. So a lot of these, it's a really tough market right now. It's probably the worst I've ever seen it. I recruited back in 2012, 2013 and during the '08 recovery. This is worse because you've got Especially in the US, I'll go a little US-centric for a second. You've got 300,000 government workers getting laid off all at once and tossed into the private sector with no warning. You've got AI replacing a ton of jobs and companies doing hiring freezes all over the place. You've got AI screeners, you've got AI interviewers, AI resumes. And people are stuck in this stasis a lot of times for, job searches used to be two or three months, now some people are doing six, nine, 12-month job searches. And it's just really mentally and emotionally taxing on these people. Breaks my heart.

00:16:26 Mark Smith
How do people survive? As in because it is such a, when it's, if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of need, It's impacting so many points on that when you don't have a job, right? It affects your identity. It affects your ability to earn, to put food on the table, to look after your family. It impacts much more than one person, I've found, whenever there's a layoff or there's a struggle to get re-employed. How do people survive and even thrive in this new world?

00:17:00 Colin McIntosh
Well, so first off, count your blessings, right? Because you live in New Zealand and you have healthcare provided for you as a human, right.

00:17:07 Mark Smith
Correct, correct. I didn't even, yeah.

00:17:09 Colin McIntosh
Here in the US, what I find really problematic is that we have employment tied to healthcare. And so, and then really, and with businesses and tax evasion, the only tax that businesses actually pay for the most part, aside from some sales tax and that sort of thing, is payroll tax. So there's like really one tax you can't avoid, and that's payroll tax. And then one expense, I should say. And then on top of that, you also have the benefits that you're paying for your employees for their health care. So we have a unique situation in the US where employers are incentivized not just with the salaries and payroll of their personnel to lay them off, but also the fact that they're tacking on 10, 15, sometimes 20% of that salary in the form of taxes and benefits. and the complexity as well of offering health care in different states. There's different rules in each state in terms of the coverage you have to offer and what you have to, the 401k plans that are all these different things. But we are basically barreling towards the future. I think we're already in it. And that's why we're seeing so much pain right now and so much confusion. where companies are incentivized in like two or three big ways to cut headcount. And you no longer need headcount to scale. You can do graphic design with AI, copywriting with AI, you can do interpretation, you can do videography, photography, like customer care. I used to pay a quarter million dollars a year for full-time customer care associates, you know, collectively. And now my customer care costs are about $26,000 a year in total for my whole business. And it's horrible, but we're in this massive game of like, it's like a prisoner's dilemma on a gigantic scale. And everybody's doing things that they feel like if they don't, their competition will and absolutely eat their lunch. And so we're just leaning towards these, I think, societally bad outcomes. But sorry, you asked me how you survive in it, and that's where I'm getting really tripped out, is I don't really have a good solution, at least in the US, because I don't think that we value people in the US. We really value profit and capital, and that's going to leave a lot of people out in the cold, unfortunately. And so for me, what I would say is what I've done and what I encourage others to do is Try to embrace AI and amplify yourself with it and potentially start your own company. I think it will be a golden era for solopreneurs in the very near future. That's kind of my one big hope, is that there's going to be an explosion of one-man shop or one-woman shops all over the world, people that can do so much more with these tools. And I think it will, like, my hope is that it will fragment the business space and create more competition. But I am worried eventually the capital becomes a moat and that these AI systems will be isolated for like the largest wallets.

00:20:14 Mark Smith
Yeah, interesting. Couple of things off that. I was at a session with Microsoft recently and I said, what about jobs? And I was in Seattle. And it was a very, like, will AI take my job? And, you know, this is a common question. And the guy said, AI won't take your job, but a capitalist will. And I'm like, that is on point, right? Because that's what it is. It's capitalism now being able to have infinite leverage. As in the past, you had to hire people to create leverage and scale. Now you can have a small amount of people potentially governing a whole army of agents that have infinite ability to scale beyond what we can imagine.

00:20:57 Colin McIntosh
That's what we're entering into now is we're in an era where capital can create creativity, right? Capital can unlock creativity, it can unlock ideas, it can unlock insights, product features, new product development, scoping, scale. It's really freaky because, like you just said, you've always needed humans to scale, and you've always needed to really on some level deal with people in order to scale. And now, capital can just say, we don't have to do it. This is our biggest headache is the human element of this business. And now we can get rid of like 20 to 50% of that headache in a really rapid way that like actually scales better 24-7, never gets tired, like never complains, never ask for a raise. Like, yeah, I don't know where this all winds up, man, but like, I'm actually curious where you think, because this is what you study this is what you think about a lot more than most people. I'm of the opinion that we need to really invest in like continuing education stipends. We need to invest in some type of AI dividend, whether you want to call it UBI or something. I think that people need to get paid for the work that they've done in the past, training these things unknowingly.

00:22:13 Mark Smith
Yeah, I think that will all get sorted out. I think for the individual though, like Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founder of LinkedIn, he said by 2035 that over 50% of the US workforce will be contractors. They won't be on, they won't work. So if you think, if that's your future by 2035, you've got to sort out the healthcare scenario, right? That's A fundamental, that has to be solved. But let's say you're contracting. That means straight away you have the ability to work anywhere in the globe. if you've changed that mindset. Most people have always gone for an employee-employer model. And that whole solopreneur type thing is a new thinking for the general populace, right? Not the you and the edge case, but the general populace is that's a new thing to think about themselves as the product and how, or the thoroughbred racehorse, how do they optimize themselves to win and to be successful. And so I think that need for continuing skilling, using AI to make you powerful, I think is going to be super important. But the day of going, relying on my employer for my retirement, for anything, I think is the capitalist is going to win this game.

00:23:29 Colin McIntosh
And I guess that's what worries me is like, maybe it's because I live in the US, but I don't see us going to public healthcare anytime soon.

00:23:37 Mark Smith
Oh, no. But in my country, it's going to go private, right? Like I just consulted to my brother. I've just been in Europe, just flew back. He's got sick with something. He's quite a bit older than me. And our healthcare in our country cannot get him to the right specialist in time. And I said, mate, for $5,000, Go to Turkey, where they have the best of breed surgeons. You can go in, have 50 different blood works done. It's only money, like pay the money, go to the country that can give you the best healthcare possible, get it done. And I think that we're going to see this medical kind of tourism they talk about become much more prevalent and get best-class specialists, but then it's not going to happen in your own country.

00:24:17 Colin McIntosh
No, we're in a bit of a pickle here. Like, I would like to have some type of basic guarantee for folks. Like, if you're asking me to wave a magic wand and get on my political soapbox and, like, actually, like, run for office. I might. But what I think I would like to do is I think that education needs to be guaranteed for all Americans and you need to have continuing education in a bunch of different sectors. And I would really say whatever the person wants to study should be free. I think more education has proven out to be long-term aggregate supply moves to the right. It's the best investment a society can make in itself. We don't invest nearly enough in education here in the US. I think that you've got to have some basic level of healthcare covered because I think a full 60% of our bankruptcies are medical bankruptcies now in the US. Wow. I know, I know. It's horrendous. And of people who get cancer, I think about one in four of them go bankrupt and half of them deplete their entire life savings. And, you know, like, When you're talking about people getting laid off from AI, you're talking about just don't even worry about the AI piece. Just look at a mass layoff example we have right now that I think is very like a microcosm of this whole thing is we had 300,000 people laid off by the federal government in the last 100 days. And whether you want to talk about that's good or bad or this or that,

00:25:39 Colin McIntosh
I look at the 300,000 human beings who have families, who most of them have dependents, whose access to a doctor relied upon that job. And so we've got 300,000 children, or maybe 600,000, depending on the amount of kids at home, who now have either lost access or are at risk of losing access to healthcare because the federal government, their employer, decided to let them go without warning. And Again, talking big picture, strategic government spending, that's a great conversation. I'll have that over 4 beers. But when you're just looking at like the fallout from the, and when I say mass layoff, I mean, 300,000 people, we got 160 million workers in this country. So that's a drop in the bucket in terms of like the overall labor market. But just that problem by itself is a huge problem because these people don't have skills to go into the private sector. What is a national parks worker supposed to do? Go work at a zoo or like an aquarium? Like are there that many jobs available for these people? So I feel like that's like a microcosm of the AI problem is when these folks *** **** off because AI comes in and replaces their job, what are they to do? their skill has now become obsolete effectively in the economy. And they have no healthcare, they've got no income, they've got, like no continuing education stipends or grants. And... They're just supposed to just go find it.

00:27:14 Colin McIntosh
The amount of demand for jobs is about to, and is already in the process of hockey sticking and the supply of jobs in the exact opposite direction. And that's going to create some really gnarly labor market outcomes.

00:27:27 Mark Smith
It is crazy. It is crazy. Tell me about building a brand from scratch, a consumer brand. I feel B2B is more manageable because you can know the target so much better, which is a space almond. But B2C, that's got to be, it seems like you have to spend a lot of capital on getting marketing out there to get recognized, to get scale.

00:27:48 Colin McIntosh
I think you have to like people. If you're like a B2C marketer, like if you're a consumer brand, I think that you have to, as a founder, you have to enjoy other human beings. Maybe not an extrovert necessarily, but you have to have an affinity for others. You have to think highly of humanity. Because you're dealing with like, Man, millions and millions of people come across my desk, and they're such interesting characters. These people are such crazy creatures. They're nice. Everybody wants to talk about something.

00:28:20 Colin McIntosh
Everybody wants to feel heard. But in terms of brand building, I would recommend a few things. Number one is day one, do a brand identity map. And that's a very simple thing to do. It takes you four hours. Don't bother hiring an agency. You have to do the brand identity map yourself. The brand's voice should be the founder's voice. So when you're doing your archetype for the brand, there's like 12 major brand archetypes, you know, hero, jester, outlaw, everyman. People know that you can Google it. And you've got to figure out actually which one you are as the founder. Because frankly, if you're going to be invested in this, if you're going to be the face of this company, which most founders are, you cannot fake a different brand voice. And I'm a jester for sure. Like I'm a jester, I'm an outlaw. And so I know what type of branding I'm going to do always. And I can be a bit of a sage, a bit of a hero, but I know what I am first and foremost. And so And then from there, like you start to have the guardrails around like, okay, maybe the brand is sweet, but not saccharine. It's funny, but not corny. It's smart, but not try hard. And then you start to build these guardrails. And then eventually you have this really beautiful picture of like how we talk to people, who are we talking to, what our features are, what our benefits are, tangible benefits, intangible benefits, reptilian hot buttons. And then you have like a really strong written down picture of a brand and you can pass that out to your employees and everybody can understand and get it. Yeah.

00:29:46 Mark Smith
I like it. I like it. But how did you, how did that then translate into your market reach that you've achieved to doing million dollar bonds?

00:29:56 Colin McIntosh
Yeah, so with Sheets and Giggles specifically, like, I like the zig where other people are zagging. So with SMG, I mean, everybody in this space bored me in tears. Like white sheets, white walls. There's always a French press coffee on the edge of the bed. It's like I never understood who would put coffee on their bed. And... It's always like acro yoga in the bedroom and exposed brick in New York City. And it felt so aspirational to me, but in a condescending way of like... And they're all marketing to young women. Don't you want to have the New York City apartment with the boyfriend who does yoga in bed with you? And it's just really weird. I always hated those brands. And so I wanted to build a brand for people who love Seinfeld, who love SpongeBob, who grew up... you know, with maybe like SportsCenter or, you know, Stuart Scott and like just people who like had a 90s Navy sense of humor. And I really love building the brand brick by brick. It's kind of like a brand about nothing. Like one day we can talk about, you know, $40,000 donated to COVID relief. And the next day we can talk about, you know, our favorite SpongeBob episode or something like that on the same Instagram. And so, in terms of how we went about building our reach, you're correct in that spending a lot of money. But we sold $300,000 of pre-orders before we shipped a single unit. We did that on crowdfunding. We scaled in our first three months on Amazon, we scaled from $3,000 to $34,000 to $93,000 in our first three months on amazon.com. I guess I could go into all the different pieces of how I did these different strategies, but I like to think of it as, when I was interviewing for McKinsey in college, which I did not get the job, I'm not a McKinsey man, but they had this really good way of thinking about problems, which I really like, of drilling down into the individual components. Very popular way to do things nowadays. And when you drill down to a consumer brand, you've got your price point, your unit sold is your revenue. And then your price point's immutable. You can change that a little bit, but you're in a competitive landscape. There's price elasticity. So you can't really go too high on that. So then it's about units sold. Units sold is about conversion multiplied by website visitors. Okay, well, you can change conversion for sure. You can optimize conversion, but at some point, it's going to cap out. So make a really beautiful website, make sure it converts, but then focus on visitors. And then visitors are a function of impressions times click-through. And then click-through, yeah, you can improve click-through a little bit, but it does cap out a little bit at some point. So then it becomes about impressions.

00:32:42 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:32:43 Colin McIntosh
And you can really get these blinders on of like, okay, I need millions upon millions of impressions, and I can't pay for all of them, so how do I get organic impressions? So there's SEO components, there's different forms of advertising, different channels. There's word of mouth competitions. We do referral programs with our existing customers. We've got affiliate marketing, all the usual suspects. I mean, I'm not going to tell anybody anything they've never heard before on here in terms of which channels to go to and which ones perform the best. The key insight I had, which goes along with building a brand that I loved to tell people about so people can replicate it, is I realized that I'm building a company for people like me. I realized that I'm like the core customer, which is funny because like 80% of our customers are women. But they're like me. They don't take life too seriously. They like to laugh at themselves, and they love their families, and they work hard. And those people are all watching and listening to the same things I am. And that was my key insight is like, Oh, I need to sponsor the stuff that I love. And once I started sponsoring the stuff that I loved, that's when the company really started to take off because I could craft the advertisements in the voice of the media genre that I was sponsoring, make inside jokes that only people would get if they'd been listening to the show for years. And then I created landing pages that specifically talk to that audience in the voice of the medium. And that was like a huge unlock for me. One of the podcasts we sponsored, that is a podcast I've been listening to for 20 years. When we started sponsoring in month four, I think, we had a day where we did six figures in sales from just the podcast. And that like, and it's because I integrated myself into the podcast as like the sheets guy, like the sheets CEO. Like it was a whole bit of like, it had to do with like Trump and the MyPillow guy. It was like, it was a whole thing. It was very funny. And we ended up shaving this guy's head live on air. We sponsored the shave. And it's hard to describe in hindsight, but it was very fun. Yeah, and we did $100,000 in sales in a day. It was crazy.

00:35:13 Mark Smith
That's amazing. That's amazing.

00:35:15 Colin McIntosh
Yeah.

00:35:15 Mark Smith
Amazing. Very cool. Very cool. Well, this is a time's well past and It's been super interesting talking to you. I think, as I say, last week I was in Europe and I talked about you coming on the podcast to recruiters that I ran into there and just said how much success you'd had with your resume tools, which led you to build this new tool, even though you'd been out of the industry for some time. And they were blown away by the scale that we discussed, you know, on the pre-call that you'd been achieving.

00:35:49 Colin McIntosh
Oh man, it's so fun.

00:35:50 Mark Smith
Yeah, it's an interesting space.

00:35:53 Colin McIntosh
Yeah, it's been fun helping people. It's been a gift because when I was a recruiter, it was very hard emotionally to not be able to help people who would come to you at their wit's end. They can't make their rent, their family doesn't have healthcare, they're putting food on the table. And it was really exhausting because I had to focus on candidates that I could get placed so I could make money and the company can make money. And so All these years later now, 10 years later, to be able to help so many people and to do it freely for the folks that can't afford it. Yeah, I'd probably give it away to 10 or 20 people every day.

00:36:26 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:36:28 Colin McIntosh
And it is just so cathartic to be able to help folks in this really personal way. And I've gotten so many amazing testimonials and reviews and the ripple effects are huge. Like if you can help somebody have a successful job search and change their career, It's just been so, rewarding for me. And I appreciate you sharing it with people because it's a gift to be able to help people on this journey.

00:36:56 Mark Smith
You've been listening to AI Unfiltered with me, Mark Smith. If you enjoyed this episode and want to share a little kindness, please leave a review. To learn more or connect with today's guest, check out the show notes. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next time, where we'll continue to uncover AI's true potential, one conversation at a time.