Founder's Story - Why Most Businesses Will Fail Without AI Marketing | Ep. 204 with Raza Sheikh Founder & CEO of Identable

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

In this episode of Founder's Story, Raza Sheikh, Founder & CEO of Identable, explains how he distilled his own frustration with fragmented SEO, content, and social tools into Identable—“one platform, zero fragmentation.” Designed for businesses of every size, Identable combines AI-powered SEO, content creation, social scheduling, and lead capture into a single dashboard. Raza describes how his technologist roots and Antler VC experience revealed a universal pain point: marketing teams wasted hours wrestling with disconnected systems instead of crafting strategy.Key Discussion Points:Inspiration & Problem: Juggling multiple free AI utilities, legacy SEO tools, and agencies left teams burned out.Founder’s Path: Solving his own go-to-market struggles led to a platform that any entrepreneur can use.Core Features: Unified website optimization, AI-driven content generation, social posting, and real-time lead tracking.SEO Meets GSO: Integrating traditional backlink SEO with generative search optimization for structured, AI-aware content.AI’s Role: Speed and scale—using AI to handle repetitive tasks so humans can focus on strategy and creativity.Takeaways:Fragmented marketing stacks cost time and talent; consolidation boosts both productivity and results.Generative Search Optimization (GSO) is the next evolution of SEO—structure and semantics matter.AI tools amplify human insight but must be steered by clear strategy and intent.Closing Thoughts: Whether you run brick-and-mortar shops or digital agencies, Identable offers a streamlined, AI-powered path from content idea to customer capture—freeing teams to innovate rather than integrate.Our Sponsors:* Check out Avocado Green Mattress: https://www.avocadogreenmattress.com* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Notion: https://notion.com/founders* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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Today we have Raza and Raza, you are doing something very interesting that I believe is going to impact the entire world and any entrepreneur, any business owner, they need to understand this. It doesn't matter if you have a brick and mortar doesn't matter if you have an online business e-commerce you're a coach you're an author whatever it is everyone needs to understand the impacts of AI marketing and that's why today we're gonna we're gonna get deep into some of these topics today that at the

end of this people are gonna understand just how important this is. But you are the founder of Identable. I love this tagline, one platform, zero fragmentation for organic marketing. But Identable is dedicated to unifying and simplifying organic marketing for organizations of all sizes. So let's just kick it off, Raza,

with what was the spark that made you say, I need to create this company and I need to do it right now? Well, you see, Daniel, the inspiration of Identable came from something that I witnessed on a day-to-day life before, wherein the chaos of organic marketing team facing or juggling around with patches of AI tools, free utilities and legacy platforms

that really work together, right? I saw the talented teams spending more time wrestling with the technologies than actually marketing itself. The frustration drove me to create Identable, a single reliable platform that cuts through the noises and fragmentations. Basically, our mission here is to give our organization back the time so that they can

focus on the strategy rather than creating the content, scheduling the content, hiring technical SEO team to optimize their website, and so on and so forth. So the tool basically a unified platform that packages all together for our organic marketing part of it. So Raza, if you were to think back just through your own success, other people that you know, would you say that a founder who can solve a problem for themselves first and then bring that to market is a great route for somebody versus coming up with something that maybe they don't even have any experience in. So that's a very good point actually, because even the idea of Identable, the frustration itself is a-hand experience of my own, where in my previous venture, because I'm coming from a data background,

a technologist and so on and so forth, I know how to build the code. But one thing that I was really missing out was shifting the code into the market and making it present to the target audience. I happened to join at one particular point of time, you know, alumnae as VC of Antler VC in back in Singapore. And that's where I actually learned these, the other side of the coin, which is the business side of the coin, the marketing and sales

and so on and so forth. Having interacted with 52 founders, I realized that it does, it is not that the me alone who's struggling with this problem, but most of the tech entrepreneurs basically have these issues of making their product visible to the audience. So I used to hire this content writer separately, who used to do this content, writing the content. And then basically we had this SEO expert who used to optimize our website so that the building block of the website is solid and the on-page and technical issues have been fixed, which used to take ages for him to do that.

And then Google starts ranking the page and the content comes in, keyword optimization, LSI keywords, identification, and so on and so forth. A lot of things that actually used to happen, which used to take a time, right? And more importantly, what I realized is the social media aspect wherein I used to hire, I remember one of the Australian based agency that we hired for,

they used to create a lot of content for us on the social media, which was great. But one aspect that was missing throughout this whole process was the prospect who used to interact with the content, they were not being captured. And I did not know, for whatsoever reason, that who interacted with my content and who got to resonate with the pain points that

we are talking about, and so on and so forth, so that my sales team can go and approach them as a hot lead and so forth. These are the problems wherein we have bought in and centralized into Identable. So Identable basically is, as I said, zero fragmentation. That means the building block, what I call it as flywheel effect completely, the building block is basically optimizing your website, making it ready for Google to rank. And then basically is the content creation, where we basically entirely for six months or one year we schedule your content, whether it's social media or a blog post or whatever it is, with the right keywords.

And we have seen the witness that our customer basically get rank within three days of the content getting posted for the blog post within from the identifiable and capturing those all leads who have been interacting with the content, centralizing into our CR. So complete flywheel effect that we're trying to bring into the whole aspect. Hope that makes sense. Yeah, I know there's a lot of talk about SEO changes.

And when it comes to not just Google rank, but how AI is now ranking because Google has their AI search and people are searching. I don't know what the number is, but I think it's like 20, 25% of people are searching now in chat, GBT and places. So it's, you know, how the Google rank is changing and digital marketing is changing.

How do you see AI playing into this if, you know, people are not staying up to speed with AI versus those who are? If you're not catching up with AI, then you're missing something for sure. But there is always an aspect where you have to really realize that AI is not everything. You have to have AI to feed into something that AI can personalize the content to you specifically, to your pain problems, to your target person's pain problems so that they can resonate to what problem you're talking about, right? Along with your solution. So in our platform, we personalize this entire content. And one other thing that you really bought out

is in my humble opinion, the SEO is not dead. SEO is still there, but generative search optimization, GSO, what we call it as, is coming up. But it is a semantic layer on top of the SEO itself. And what is the difference between that? SEO is more backed up, backlink powered, but generative search optimization is more structural process. How you are structuring your content,

how basically, what keywords and what basically the information you post, you know, structuring the entire content basically. And that is the combination that we bring in to make sure that we are not even catering the SEO, but also the generative search engine optimization aspect. Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up and you clarify. I like that. SEO is really traditional SEO is backlink driven. And I agree, it's not dead. I feel like every year, being in the

digital marketing space for many years myself, every year they say SEO is dead or this is dead or meta ads are dead or this, but it just changed and transformed. But I like this generative search and its heavy importance on the content. So it's even more important to have a platform like Identable and be able to create this consistent good quality content. So what are you seeing in terms of, so if I'm a business owner and I start using this software, how does this transform the team that I have? Do you think that people might downsize their team? Because now team members can do more? Will people increase their team

because now they're getting more output? How do you see this playing out? Good point. So I've been, last two weeks before I was reading through that Meta actually has automated the entire level one engineers completely. So I'm not saying that the team size has to be reduced, but what I'm basically

saying is AI is to give you the space to do that valuable thing. When you have AI to do your labor work, so you can play smart, You can basically do things much better with AI and much faster, because the whole idea of this current era that we are living in, or AI era, what you can call it as, it's all about speed. It's all about speed. If you can't match up your competitors' speed, then you're losing the game.

As simple as that. And in my humble opinion, AI helps you in making coming to the piece of your competitors or you know going beyond it. So we were interviewing Son recently who I guess you would call him a futurist and he was saying how IQ is gonna be the least important thing in the future just because we have so many tools that are gonna be probably smarter than most of us.

And that there's other EQ and other things that are gonna be important for, this is just humans in general, like regardless of the digital marketing aspect. But how do you feel about that in terms of, just our species, just humans in general, in the future, do you think IQ is going to be less important, more important? How do you think AI is going to be transforming how we think?

I tend to agree with that, unfortunately, or whatever it is, because we cannot match the IQ of AI whatsoever. So it's better that we agree it up right at the moment, rather than later. But one thing that we can make the difference is, like other day itself, I was reading one article where it was saying that there's nothing as smart work because if you're not working hard, you're not getting smarter, right? So that is something that AI does not do it, right?

It could, AI cannot work harder to get smarter. You have to work harder, right, as a human to make AI smarter. So how you are using AI is gonna make the change in the shift of the game. What exactly are you doing with AI? I like that. That is good, I really like that.

How do you see, and this is just AI in general here, what excites you the most about AI in the future and then what scares you the most? Okay, Metaverse scares me the most to be honest. Okay, to be honest, okay, because being a father of three, I see most of my kids' time being spent on the screens, right? And that's preparing them to be ready for the metals, something like that. I'm not. But see, ethical use, this is very important, right? Ethical use of anything, right? Definitely would, would make things adaptable and easy, easy, easy going as well. But too much is too bad for anything, whether in your day to day life, or whether it's with AI, whether it's the data, anything too much is always too bad. Too much ice cream is never good. We were talking about you know sweet tooth right I you know I gotta stop I

gotta stop eating ice cream basically because it's not good for my health but so this has been very informative and I appreciate that I could understand how important it is you important it's gonna be because like you said in the beginning, we have so many AI tools now, there's so many things to do, it's very confusing and really we just want it into one single place and I think it's a lot easier for our teams.

So one last thing on what are you seeing in terms of the clients that are using this, what are they telling you about how this is transforming their business? So one of the customers that yesterday I was having a chat with and being a small, tiny team, right, they basically see the value of Identable being added, wherein they were basically able to do the posting just for the text long form and short form post. And through Identable, they are basically able to generate their explanatory videos with a prompt

and with a blog post that they have earlier been written from. And that made things very easy for them to convey the message to their target audience seamlessly. One other thing that they pointed out to me, because in Identable, when we say that we capture the leads from the content interaction, we also allow email discovery as well. But in a roadmap, we do have this capability

of email cadence and so on and so forth, which is what they basically have to use a third party tool to do the email cadence and all those things. So that's a very good point that he have raised that when is this roadmap or when is this particular components coming into, which is a delightful ask for me, because that shows and that proves

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We talk so much about technology on this show, and you know that AI is incredible for all business owners. And something that has been an absolute game changer for me has been leveraging Notion Mail, which I have recently switched to. Notion Mail is the inbox that thinks like you, automated, personalized, and flexible to finally work the way you work. With AI that learns what matters to you, it can organize your inbox, label messages, draft replies, and even schedule meetings.

No manual sorting required. We get so many emails on an everyday basis and I miss so many things. So I love how it filters what's important with the AI organized inbox. It lets me create custom views to stay focused and it helps me fly through emails using snippets, one click templates for followups and intros. If you're already using Notion,

it integrates seamlessly with your docs. So everything just works together. Get Notion mail for free right now at Notion.com slash founders and try the inbox that thinks like you. That's all lowercase letters Notion.com slash founders to get Notion Mail for free right now. When you use our link, you're supporting our show. Notion.com slash founders. Well, Raza, this is super exciting.

I can't wait. You know, it seems like possibilities are endless. And now that you have, you now that you have the foundation built, you have an amazing software that I just started using and it's really transformed our business in terms of being able to... One person now that we, at least from my experience, one person could do multiple things. Before they had to master SEO content creation, they had to master social media, you know, they had to master these things. Writing an article took four hours. Now though, one person can master like three different things. And if you are a marketing agency and you're

helping clients, you know, you can have more clients per person and making it, you know, doing as good or a better job than before, which is good for anyone's business. But I could totally understand that in the future, this will only get better and better. But if you wanna get in touch with you, they wanna find out more information, how can they do so? So you can basically reach out to our support team.

And I'm gonna leave the link for my personal calendar as well if there is any need for anyone to connect or you want to reach out to me. I'll be happy to connect. I'll be happy to listen to what is to be said. And yeah, we are here to do whatever is needed to be done to make SMEs successful in the marketing aspect. Well, Raaz, this has been great. Thank you for joining us today on Founder's Story, and I hope everybody checks out Identable. Thanks.

And thanks for the conversation. I had a lot of fun as well. I appreciate that. It's the sportsbook born in Vegas. Enjoy top odds on your favorite home run bets, fast and convenient ways to play same game parlays, special boosts and tokens, and so much more. From the first pitch to the game-winning fireworks, there are more ways than ever to supercharge your excitement. Download the BetMGM app and get your piece of MLB action. BetMGM is an official partner of Major League Baseball.

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