BIZ/DEV
David Baxter has over fifteen years of experience in designing, building, and advising startups and businesses, drawing crucial insights from interactions with leaders across the greater Raleigh area. His deep passion, knowledge, and uncompromising honesty have been instrumental in launching numerous companies. In the podcast BIZ/DEV, David, along with Gary Voigt, an award-winning Creative Director, explore current tech trends and their influence on startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture, integrating perspectives gained from local business leaders to enrich their discussions.
BIZ/DEV
Digital Revolution w/ Ardis Kadiu | Ep. 157
In this episode of the Biz/Dev podcast David and Gary, we sit down with Ardis Kadiu, CEO and founder of Element451, the groundbreaking platform transforming higher education with generative AI. Ardis didn’t just show up to the table—he built it, leading the way in using AI to reimagine how institutions connect with students.
LINKS:
___________________________________
Submit Your Questions to:
hello@thebigpixel.net
OR comment on our YouTube videos! - Big Pixel, LLC - YouTube
Our Hosts
David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel
Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel
The Podcast
David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.
In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.
Contact Us
hello@thebigpixel.net
919-275-0646
FB | IG | LI | TW | TT : @bigpixelNC
Big Pixel
1772 Heritage Center Dr
Suite 201
Wake Forest, NC 27587
Music by: BLXRR
[00:00:00] Ardis: From a business side, the risk is always, there's a founder risk. It's like, hey, what happens if, um, if I get hit by a bus, right? That's always the, uh, that's always the question
[00:00:09] David: call the proverbial bus.
[00:00:13] David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the biz dev podcast the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host joined per usual by Gary Voigt. What's up, man?
[00:00:22] Gary: Hey, how's it going?
[00:00:24] David: I am good. This is the second one we've recorded this week, so it's weird. I don't like seeing your face this often. Let me just be honest.
[00:00:31] Gary: Yeah, no, I can understand that. I can understand.
[00:00:34] David: It hurts my face. More importantly, we are joined today by Ardith Kadu, who is the founder and CEO of Element 451. Welcome Ardith. How are you?
[00:00:45] Ardis: Hey guys, nice being here. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:47] David: Absolutely. So tell me, let's just start off easy. What is Element 451 and why do I care?
[00:00:55] Gary: And how did you come up with the name?
Because that's interesting to me.
[00:00:59] Ardis: I can tell you what we do first and then I can go into the name and the history for sure. We're a um, a marketing automation and CRM platform for colleges and universities to manage their students. So, we work with about 250 schools, and we handle all the communication, all the application management, all of the marketing activities that that school does to engage with their students.
[00:01:23] David: nice. I got questions there. That's a lot. You've been doing this now almost seven years?
[00:01:30] Ardis: That's right. Yeah. Seven years. Yeah. So the naming I had a marketing agency prior to this and that name of that was spark for 51. So the four 51 kind of continues and then element for 51. So the 451 is the if you guys are familiar with Fahrenheit 451, that's a nod to Bradbury. And 451 is the degree at which paper burns.
So it signifies this transitional period from paper to digital. So digital transformation while we were at the agency and then moving into software platform, it's really that again, that digital transformation from traditional to digital. And now with AI is even more it's even more fitting for us because we're an AI first CRM.
That transition between traditional through Moving to a I 1st,
[00:02:18] David: Man, his name has a lot more meaning than mine.
[00:02:21] Gary: Yeah, you came up with a pretty good,
[00:02:23] David: That's awesome.
[00:02:24] Gary: non impressive name,
[00:02:26] David: my, my
[00:02:27] Gary: fun to say.
[00:02:27] David: And boring and has no meaning whatsoever. I like yours better. Let's just steal that. It's funny I've said this before, but originally I was going to name No, see, that's just stupid
[00:02:37] Gary: No, can't do that Yeah.
[00:02:52] David: with so many elements.
[00:02:53] Ardis: that's right. Yeah, there is. Certainly we did have to do a lot of trade trademark searches in order to make sure that we added that for 51 in there. Al is that's Albania, so that's,
[00:03:03] David: That's right.
[00:03:03] Ardis: how you got that 1.
[00:03:04] David: It was just one of those things I would, back, this was obviously 13 years ago, 12 years ago, plus. And back then everybody was buying, that was before the TLDs had, there were only like five or six. And so people started buying the country ones and getting all fun. And so they they were selling theirs and so bam.
So you've been going for almost seven years. That's a lot of transition in tech world. That's a long time. So what made you think that schools and colleges needed what you were providing? Go back seven years. What was the, you were running marketing, what transitioned into education, how did that happen?
[00:03:41] Ardis: yeah, so so the whole trajectory has been around us supporting schools connect better and. With our students at the agency. We were working with college universities, but we were doing things from a marketing perspective. So we're helping schools market better to those students. And then we started building some systems internally. So that's was that was the impetus for spinning that out into its own company. So it was a spin out rather than, building it from the ground up, but it was essentially from a business perspective, it was a is a build from the ground up. And what we saw a need for was really schools or higher education.
Traditionally has been underserved around great software that purpose built for higher ed to serve their students or their customers better. So we saw a really great opportunity to improve the student experience and how schools are engaging with those students. Take for example, like here in Raleigh, like Wake Tech is a client of ours and they serve there's sort of thousands of students and prior to element, the experience of the applying the application experience wasn't that great. We come in and we make that a lot faster, a lot easier. We make it a lot easier for them. Via multiple channels. So that's the that's the the element focus. It's like that's what we saw. Like I'm traditionally, I've been part of the higher ed world for all my career.
So that's where I saw the problem working on the institution side and then having the agency and now building the software. So it's been evolving, right? It's like, how can we serve more clients and solve that problem at scale?
[00:05:14] David: So practically speaking, you're helping colleges with their application process. You're helping them with my son is about to go into NC State. And so we're knee deep in all of their software. And every time, so all semesters, this is way too much information, but it does have a point. Every time he has to, because he's accepting in the spring, so we're starting like he's a brand new student.
And every time we're checking boxes, a huge checklist, if you haven't gone through this with your kids, huge checklist of all the things you have to do to go to school. And it's vaccine this, and sign this, and watch Title IX videos over here. All of these things. And every time we go there, we get introduced to another portal.
I'm not exaggerating. NC State, and I'm sure, and I'm wondering if you solve this for your clients. I don't know if NC State is one of your clients, but They've got the MyPack portal, which is where students start. There is the Wolfware portal. There is the Wolf Paul, there is the Wolf reporter. Those are the four that I know of so far.
We're almost done. Four different portals that he has to log in and he has three different logins. Like they're not even the same logins. And it is amazing to me. The top, and my son's like, why are there so many portals? I'm like, my guess is, cause I don't know, I have no inside knowledge, but my guess is over time they had a need and they bought another platform.
Is probably what happened. And
[00:06:46] Gary: Or a lot of times like the colleges, if they have a technical side of the school, they'll create their own portals too for students and that'll be like their practice portal. You know what? That's the one that I'll expand upon. My daughter is the same way when the school she was going to, there was two
different portals, one for the actual administrative side, and then one for the student side, the student community.
Even for my daughter's school, a lot of times the students will have their own students in computer sciences or whatever will create or manage the student portal too. There's an administrative portal and then a student portal and the, I'm sure with larger colleges, there's probably you said, a 4, so I'm assuming 1 of those is probably the student paper. And one of them is like student community, the other one is probably admin, the other one after that is probably just keeping track of, other stuff, whether it's the cafeteria dorms or something like that.
[00:07:36] David: So where does element like use an NC State as an example? Are you any of those portals or are you hoping that you're helping them bring all that together? Or where would you fit in there? If they were embracing Element 451 100%, could you get rid of all those portals? Like, how does that work?
[00:07:54] Ardis: Yeah, that's exactly it. So we're trying to do technology consolidation and provide 1 experience for that student to go through their journey from when they land on the website to ask a question that they haven't even applied yet to getting information about the school to get information about the program to logging in and to applying. To when they get admitted and they have to submit all those documents and checklist items to when they're actually show up in class and
now they can look at a calendar and of their classes and they can talk to their advisors element brings all that stuff together into one
experience.
[00:08:29] David: THat's awesome so tell me the process Seven years technology has advanced dramatically Now you are AI first. Tell me that process When When did you decide to embrace AI and how are you guys using it?
[00:08:47] Ardis: So AI has always been part of our DNA and kind of what we do because we're an engagement platform. We have a lot of data that is behavioral data from things like how often have you visited the website to what emails did you open to how many times did you interact with with somebody on the school side.
So all that activity data has always been part of it. Our platform and we've always been able to build a I recall machine learning models around
behavioral data. So we can predict, for example, based on your activity on the students activity. How likely are they to take the next step to apply or to submit their application to be,
To deposit right based on the activity based.
So that's always been part of our DNA. And then
Two years ago. And of course, because we have a DNA in marketing, like the marketing and personalization was really important content creation was at the core of everything that we did, but schools had to create their own content.
When Gen AI came around, we got really early access to OpenAI's models.
This was really early on.
And. We were able to very quickly start building this first chat bot. So they can, the schools can actually or the students and
they can communicate and have conversational
conversational interface to the school so they can now ask questions in a more natural way.
So we started very early on. We started building tools in the platform, things like. Change of tone translations and so on and so forth. This was very early on in 2000. We talk about early on, but this is literally we've been around guys for two years since GPT, Chad, GPT came around and this is 2023.
So last year, middle
of the year, we released a lot of this generative AI chatbot platforms, very smart gen
chatbots. And then since then we've been accelerating and building more and more. Kind of tools and more and more of these, we call them a I assistance now, right? Think about assistance that are helping the students either.
They can be an advisor. They can be a a virtual a I coach or a peer advisor or an academic advisor. So those are different personas and different chat bots that we built. Assistance for the student side, and then we built assistance also form.
The administrative side
so somebody can go in the platform and they can start
asking a question around.
Hey, I need to build a campaign for for this target segment, and
I needed to be this many communications, email, SMS mix or whatever,
and the assistant will actually go ahead and go back and forth in the conversation, write the content and actually built the HTML and built the flows directly as part of our platform. So we have both of. Student facing assistance and staff facing assistance to help to help that. So the AI
part has been, like I said, part of our DNA, but Gen AI over the past couple of years. Now we've been able to accelerate a lot of the content creation and the assistance and the conversation interface with with the student side.
[00:11:49] Gary: Now, you're saying content creation and you were mentioning marketing is the marketing focus on just retaining like, student body, internal marketing. Or is it also outbound marketing for recruiting and,
or
[00:12:02] Ardis: both of them. It's both of those. Yeah. It's both of those mostly for outbound and recruiting and nurturing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like David's son, for example he needs to get a lot of those messages and sequences around the program that he picked or maybe maybe not. They're like, Hey, this is all the next steps that you need to complete.
And here is more information about what's happening on campus that basically those nurture campaigns around applications around yeah,
[00:12:26] Gary: how cool would it be if like, I know my daughter would love it if she's okay, this is where I want to be. And I don't really want to look through all the classes and try to schedule for the spring.
What can I do? What's available? What should I do? What's the pace? What's the path? And then it comes back with like you choose path A, B, or C. And then we'll just go ahead and enroll you in all of them and tell you which one you get. That'd be great.
[00:12:48] David: Oh my gosh. Yeah.
We've been playing with AI for a little while now. And I know for a fact that a year and a half ago, when you were using those AI bots, you They lied to you nine times out of 10, like it just, the technology wasn't there. The rags and all the fun stuff that we can do now to make them behave that didn't exist.
So how are you like, we show, we would show prototypes and stuff to our clients. And they're like, yeah, that's cool. But I ain't showing that to my client, my, my users, because that thing's lying half the time. How did you guys work around that in the early days?
[00:13:23] Ardis: we actually Built some, we built, rag back then. So it existed. So we, the vector databases, so we're using them very early on. So we're using vector databases. We're using our old kind of rag approach. So essentially grounding everything, the, this idea of the school would point the would point the knowledge base or the scraping on their website, and we would load all of the content from the website into our. into our system. And then we would do the whole rag pipeline, right? So the retrieval augmented generation, think about like we would load it all into our vector databases or semantic databases, and then have the whole pipeline around retrieving appropriate content, putting that in the context and then answering questions based on that.
So we were doing that very early on. And like it wasn't a part of the platforms, right? Right now you see. This techniques actually coming down to the individual platforms that your guys are probably using. But back then you had to put a bunch of those pieces together yourself in order to get it.
So it wasn't the whole stack in a lot of the platforms that you're using now. They give you everything put all together.
And that helped us quite a bit because we had to work very close to the.
Do the metal, so to speak, and a lot of these models and techniques. So we built a lot of muscle around, how good are these models and how good are the techniques?
So we've been able to optimize that drastically over the past year and a half. And today it's we have, I would say 95 to 96% accuracy rate in terms of pulling that information and retrieving, and as we do evaluations on this stuff. So it's come a really long way for sure.
[00:15:02] Gary: it's pretty
[00:15:03] David: How did That's amazing. You know, nowadays I can go and I can search and find answers to how do I make it stop lying to me. Two years ago, you couldn't, so where did you guys get that expertise?
[00:15:17] Ardis: We didn't build our own model. So we were very early on. We were reading all the research papers that were coming out. We were literally like if you are familiar with the whole ecosystem that started building with link chain and so on and so forth around developing with his models. Or the open source community and everything else. Like we were literally at that edge and testing and building stuff as the, the community was building them as well. So it helped us, but it helped us in. Understanding and going deeper into a lot of these problems rather than just using kind of prebuilt solutions.
So that's, it existed, but it was very early on David. I think that's probably something that we're we're grateful that we got there early.
[00:16:04] David: When you're talking about, you guys have this expertise and this ability to grab onto some early tech, does it in some weird way bother you now that it's easy because you guys could do it when it was hard. And that gave you probably a pretty good competitive advantage. And now it's a lot, quote unquote, easier.
Don't get me wrong. It's still tricky, but. phone, It's way easier than it used to be. Are you guys like, man, if we were, we could do this earlier now, or are you guys now leaping ahead to the next thing wherever, before the tools catch up?
[00:16:36] Ardis: Yeah we're ready on the next thing. And it's not about, so It's a trajectory, right? So it's not necessarily this step function where you have certain capabilities. We like to say that our competitors are about a year behind in terms of the things that they're able to do, or that they're putting out there.
We're already working on the next kind of iteration, which is. More on the reasoning models, like the reasoning capabilities and the ability for this for capabilities that we have in our platform to have reasoning as part of their as part of the workflows, both reasoning around how can that model or how can our AI. And our AI assistants be proactive, meaning that they're
observing everything that student does. They're observing, they know exactly what's happening and then how can they nudge them along to complete the next goal and the next step.
And that's then they're able to actually write the content.
The reason about what's the best channel, what is the best. The best next action to perform and actually create that. So these autonomous proactive agents that kind of what we're building in now,
and you're probably seeing that on the commercial side, for example, Salesforce with agent force and co pilot with so all of these larger companies are.
Putting platforms out there that
can do some of these things, or at least their customers,
it's not quite there. But we're
building that next phase and we're building the, like we're moving very quickly.
So when can you capabilities like real time voice comes around that open AI just announced a month, a couple of months ago, we already have that as part of our product right now.
So you can, our AI assistants can call out. To somebody, and they can use the real time voice in order to essentially pre qualify them or give them instructions to do something or go back and forth and answer an inbound call as if it was, a real person, and it can route and forward that to different people, depending on the need. So we've already. Moving to the next thing rather. So the rag chatbot, it was 2023, right? Though we're past that. So we're way past that. Early 2024, mid 2024 was all about how do we do this orchestration between different chatbots and handing things off and answering questions and connecting it to the CRM and doing actual works using tools, and now we're moving to the proactive agent world where. Things are just happening and based on goals and based on
This workflows that are part of the system. There's a long winded answer. Sorry.
[00:19:08] David: No, I love it. I love it.
[00:19:16] AD: BigPixel builds world class custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects. Our design infused development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients. From startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business.
[00:19:45] David: You're in a unique position, I think, to have an opinion. You hear the founders of OpenAI and Anthropic and all of them wax poetic about how digital god is right around the corner and how they're gonna invent it and it's gonna be amazing and we're gonna all be sitting around just talking to our robots.
I am less and less convinced that's actually, I think that's a marketing ploy for them to raise a bazillion dollars. But you're in the thick of it way more than I am. What do you think?
[00:20:17] Ardis: Do you mean, so look, there's multiple ways to answer that and it really depends, right? So we're
actually building. Yeah. I do have a podcast called generation AI that that we talk a lot about that kind of this advancements in higher ed, but we also go deep on some of this.
The thing about what we see is that.
There is a
like there's a curve of capabilities that these models are going to be able to do. Right now we're in that phase where if you think about the work that a person can do, the person, like you, you measure it in I can do something in five seconds, I can do something in five minutes, I can do something in five hours or five days or five weeks. And a model can now accomplish things that you can do in five. Five hours very easily. So you put together a marketing campaign or you write a blog post or whatever, like all of those tasks that you can do in five hours can now be done by AI in the split second, what the next capabilities are is around reasoning and putting together tasks that, or not necessarily tasks, but work that can be done, let's say in five days.
In five days, you have to
do a lot of different things as an individual to accomplish. A particular, let's say a full campaign. You have to
work with your art director. You have to work with,
Your writer with your content person, whatever, all these pieces.
so
that's where we're going next. And if you look at around capabilities or what's coming.
In a year or two is going to be around reasoning
On things that we do, for example as part of the company, I'm like, okay,
let's, I need a marketing plan, a growth marketing plan for 2025. And I can hand that job to an assistant or to an AI
and something that it would take my CMO or my team, for example a full month to put together a full marketing plan. Very well thought out with different channel mixes, all these different things. Now, one of these AI models can think about it for five minutes or a couple of hours and give me the work output of that five weeks or even a month plus worth of work that somebody has to do. So it's going to get better and better, but it's not going to be the huge step function. That today we're here and then tomorrow it's going to be, digital gods ruling us. I think it's going to be very slow to get to a place where behavior is going to change for humans, and it's not about it's not going to be about capabilities. It's going to be about adoption and how we incorporated in our day to day work, and that's going to take a little bit longer because there's going to be a lot of forces.
The other side, for example, like people don't like change very often, and they get Freaked out when they get faced
with change. So there's always going to be that push, right? So the adoption part is going to take a lot longer than the technical capabilities
[00:23:16] David: so I hear what you're saying and I like the optimism where I get stuck is when I look at what AI can do today when it's generating, say, for instance, an Apple intelligence, it's generating my summaries, it is summarizing articles, which it does pretty well, or when it writes for me, I don't really like the output that it makes.
And so in order to generate what you're talking about, that five month or that month plan, marketing plan for my company, let's say, if I tasked my marketing person, Christy, to go and do that, and I ask AI to do the same thing and they come back together, the plan, the AI is going to come with is going to be gibberish compared to her, at least as far as I have seen, have you seen it where that plan that comes back with is great, or are you still seeing it?
It's okay.
[00:24:07] Ardis: So it's going to be a kind of a continuous, like it's not going to be one day, it's going to become better. So it's going to get better and better and better every iteration and this model's capabilities are increasing every couple of months and they're getting better faster. So if you tried it, let's say six months ago or last year, it was not very good.
And I actually taught prompt engineering
and what I used to teach, let's say last year, you don't even have to do that now because the models I've gotten so good. They don't, you don't have to. Provide all the prompting a certain way in order to get the output, right?
That you need, they've gotten a lot smarter, a lot better at giving you what you need with very little context and very little prompting. So to your point, is it there yet today? I don't know what kind of marketing plan, but I guarantee you, if I. Can give it the context and the outline and give it more direction and chat back and forth a couple of times, I'm able to get a marketing plan that is very good. That a person would take a lot longer to do. So it's just a matter of Time before it gets to the point where you can just put a few sentences in and then get really great output. Now you have to do a little bit more work and go work back and forth with it. A little bit more.
So
[00:25:25] Gary: Yeah, I can see that. If it doesn't know the company, and
it's not going to generate a plan from scratch, is going to fit the company like someone who's been working with the company for a while, but the back and forth between. Say a Christie and AI to help Christie
eventually you can get that month long marketing strategy done in like a week
or like it'll take a chunk of those tasks.
So don't worry. Christie is not going to take your job. Okay.
[00:26:05] David: now you, most of the time we talk about the slog, which is the time when you start a business to the time anybody cares, right?
That can be months or years or whatever for you though, from what you described. Yours was a little different, at least when it came to element 451 versus your marketing. Cause you took your marketing clients and said, look, I got a product. You already had a built in client base. Is that right?
[00:26:28] Ardis: Yeah. But it was very difficult actually. So we was our marketing clients, they didn't really understand or see us as a software and we had to. We had a slower start because of the market was not seeing us as a software company or solution. They always associated us with the marketing agency.
So we had to educate the market. And the first two years were very difficult in terms of getting and acquiring customers. It was to the point where. If we were really struggling to to get capital because,
We weren't getting customers that we needed.
We're as a slow adoption the business was self funded. So it was four founders, the same founders that had a spark,
we spun it out and it was a self. Basically all the income from, or the revenue from our marketing agency was going into the software. And it was getting to the point where holy shit, we now need a venture money, or we need institutional money to Make sure that we grow this thing.
So it took us two years in order to do that. In 2019, we we partner with co founders capital here in in Raleigh to do that. They're out of carry. But before that it was difficult to explain like, Hey we have
a spark, which is a bigger client that was still using the software.
And then
now we didn't have as many clients on our own. Everybody was looking at us. I was like wait a minute. Like you've been around for a year. You have this, and nobody was valuing that technology. So what ended up happening as soon as we got that institutional investment, then we we started hitting our stride.
So we got a couple of clients and things starting to accelerate. COVID came around that things accelerated even more. We did our B, our a round very fast after that. And then, fast forward another year, we're growing even faster. We did our B round. And then over the past two years, we've been growing almost 90 percent to 100 percent year over years in terms of both revenue and customer base.
But it was a slog, man. The first two years, it was just like, literally, like we're thinking,
it's oh, shit, like,
How do we do this? And during COVID.
Like we, we battered down and it's I went without a salary for a while because I needed to do the right thing and make sure that we had enough cash for us to move things forward.
But it was it was hard. That was the hardest, that was the hardest part. It was like, what do you do? Do you keep going? And
but good thing that we kept going because things turned out great. And right now we're in a very good spot. Just being able to.
Dominate the market. One of the fastest growing CRMs
And
platforms in higher ed.
And, Our customers love us. We have customers that are
huge hundreds of thousands of students. They're serving two very tiny schools.
And it's been it's been really good.
[00:29:11] Gary: check. Let's
[00:29:13] David: So what was that turning point? What is it that, you're struggling, you get your capital, you have money now that, but what did you use that money in such a way that, that you were able to break through that barrier? Was it the fact that you now had. An institution behind you and that gave you legitimacy.
What was it that turned that corner for you?
[00:29:31] Ardis: Think we just hung in there. Like it was literally, I'm serious. It was just literally hanging in there
And gaining those customers one by one.
And as, as you get,
Get a couple, and then
after six months to a year, just by us hanging in there, we now had enough customers that we started the flywheel, customers telling other customers, we had references and things just starting to click.
So that was
[00:29:56] Gary: Yeah, I was going to ask if that networking and the referral basis from client to client probably helped a lot.
[00:30:01] Ardis: Yeah, it's very important in higher ed. It's like the snowball effect and everybody's word of mouth. So it's, it was very important for us. So it wasn't one thing. There's no, we didn't want one day say, Hey, we have this amazing invention now come on
[00:30:16] Gary: and perseverance.
[00:30:18] Ardis: Yeah, exactly.
[00:30:19] David: So where are you guys at now? Are you profitable? You still on your runway? Where are you guys sitting now?
[00:30:26] Ardis: We just we just became profitable for the first time in September. So that was our first
[00:30:31] David: Oh, that's pretty amazing. Congrats. That's a big deal. So that's very cool. Now I've, this is going to be my new question. I'm gonna start asking this of every guest. If I, if everything went the way that you wanted, No, no big hills, smooth sailing, where does element 451 sit in five years? What do you look like?
[00:30:54] Ardis: We have over 2000 plus customers. That's about 10 times of where we are right now. We break that 100 million in ARR and like we become the the system of record and the number 1
Engagement platform in higher ed.
[00:31:11] Ardis: Of course, we'd like to break into other industries, but right now that's the goal.
[00:31:15] David: In that five year period, you're thinking, so one of the things that I've learned with learning business and stuff like that is. They call it the, some people call it, I shouldn't say they, but some people call it the big, hairy, audacious goal, right? The BHAG, which I hate that word, but it's shooting, it's your moonshot, right?
That you put it out there because if you don't dream it, it won't happen, right? And so that's where that question comes from. If there is nothing in your way, where do you go? So now you're dominating. So do you go, is that now you put that out there? You came up with that quickly. So I know you didn't just make that up.
There's your five year goal. Do you guys now say, all right, if I, that's where we are in five years, where do we need to be in three? Where do we need to be in two? Where do we need to be in 12 months? Have you done that exercise where you go backwards?
[00:31:57] Ardis: Yeah. We're very goal oriented. So it's that's my team and I, they know it's very hard.
I drive them really hard around those goals. So we're our goal is to double every every year. And it's becoming easier and easier for us
traditionally. Companies
go really fast at first and then they, it slows down once they get a little bit bigger for us.
It's actually been,
we've been going slower and now things have been accelerating. So,
I see us getting there a lot
faster and easier
and it's just a go to market play for us right now. Our product is great. Our market, we have product market fit and it's really about like, how do we, How do we amplify our go to market engine, both sales, marketing and then, and then just execution, right?
That's been that's been that's super important. So
[00:32:43] David: So
if that is your happy path, what
is the thing that would throw that off? What is it? Do you see something that you guys are fighting against that would just totally derail that, or are you like, nah we got, as long as we execute, we're going to get there.
[00:33:01] Gary: you, and we're good for
[00:33:03] Ardis: I don't see any roadblocks right now, unless there is some crazy thing happening when in higher education,
I don't know. Stranger things can happen, but if half of the schools in the U. S. close down or something like that, I don't see us slowing down in terms of the software need and the adoption there.
From a business side, the risk is always, there's a founder risk. It's hey, what happens if if I get hit by a bus, right? That's always the
that's
[00:33:29] David: Call the proverbial bus.
[00:33:30] Gary: You're quoting David now. Yeah.
[00:33:33] Ardis: So that's a high risk, but I have a good team, so they're all pretty good. And that's the other thing. It's I've learned to I've learned to appreciate having a good team and people around you that can, that you can hand things off. Traditionally I've been very hands on in a lot of different things and that's my nature.
But. I've learned to appreciate it. Like I haven't learned it yet, but I've learned to appreciate it. I don't know if that makes
sense
[00:34:01] David: Yeah. No, I get it.
[00:34:02] Gary: Speaking of what you've learned, what,
what would you say are your top three pieces of advice for any new entrepreneur, business, or startup?
[00:34:11] Ardis: I think success, like it's this notion that you just got to grind it out unless you have something that is going to be very unique or you're catching a wave or whatever it is. Like you just got to grind it out. And then. Things just happen success. So it's I
don't know. What is that quote?
It's like, how did you become a billionaire? I forget who says that. What is it? Or how do you go broke? I forget who? Bankrupt. How do you go bankrupt? He says slow. I forget. Is it Warren Buffett who says that it's like
Very slowly and then once of a sudden or then and then very fast, right? So this idea that you don't go bankrupt You don't go bankrupt right away you go bankrupt very slowly and then you're just bankrupt. And then with the success part, it's you don't become successful. Like it's, it requires a lot of grind. And then once of a sudden things start clicking and things start moving. So you, when you work in the business, it's just sticking in there and putting in the work. I feel like that's the. That's one of the most important parts, at least from my side.
[00:35:15] David: Nice.
[00:35:16] Gary: others?
going to
stick with the 1?
[00:35:18] Ardis: Yeah, two others. One of the things that I don't know, have you guys seen or heard about the Paul Graham founder mode movement or wave? What's happening? This whole idea that you have to bring in institutional managers to kinda hand things off and professional managers to manage your business. What
I've seen from my side is that a flatter organization works out better most of the time. And, not doing things. Not adopting frameworks just for the adoption of frameworks. For example, like if you're going to do a sprinting or if you're going to do anyways, like any of these frameworks, like what we have found out from our side is anytime that we try to force process on our, on ourselves for the sake of process, it never works out.
It's you're going to do OKR's All right. How do you do? OKR's You just got to follow this process. It never works out. Like we've always failed. When we've done really great is when. We can take those things and just adopt it, but it's never worked out when we try to implement frameworks that other companies and try to borrow them.
It's never worked out that way. So that's number 2. And the number 3, I would say
is perhaps that idea of having a strong, good team. You spend so much time with your team, right? It's sometimes you spend more time with them than your wife or your partner and kids. And you just got to have people that get your back.
I think that's really important. You don't have to you can certainly socialize, but you just got to have the trust and understand that they got, they just got your back. Like they're going to do what they're going to do. What, they're going to do and they're not going to let you down.
That's the thing that's, I feel it's really important. And if you don't trust your team or you don't feel like you can hand something off There is a lot of anxiety and there's a lot of, I would say you can go in a very bad direction if you can't have that support system or that, that team that you can trust. You can't move
[00:37:14] Gary: That makes
[00:37:15] Ardis: Let's put it that way.
[00:37:16] Gary: Yeah, David has said it before earlier in the business, he would be a little nervous taking vacations, but now he just takes them all the time.
[00:37:24] David: Now I just take them all the time. I'm just gone. Most of the time,
[00:37:27] Ardis: Oh man, I want to be, I want to be
[00:37:29] David: the world.
[00:37:30] Ardis: want to be you when I
[00:37:30] David: No, that
is not true.
[00:37:32] Gary: Now, Ardis.
[00:37:32] David: No, I will say though, there was a big shift this year. I took a two week vacation for the first time, literally ever before even not even including my business, just ever.
And I could not have done that a year ago. Like just no way would I have felt comfortable leaving my company. For that long. And so having those people who can take over when you're gone, man, that, that's critical. It's critical.
[00:37:57] Ardis: Exactly.
[00:37:58] Gary: Ardis, if anybody wants to learn more about element 451, your products or yourself, how can they reach out?
[00:38:05] Ardis: Yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. artists is so you can just search for artists could do, or just art slash artists on LinkedIn. And then element for 51. com. That's our website. I also, like I said, I also have a podcast on AI called generation AI. So you can grab it on Apple podcast.
Spotify or wherever you guys listen to podcasts. But yeah, I talk about this content there all the time.
[00:38:29] David: Love it.
[00:38:30] Gary: We'll make sure those links are in the show notes as well.
[00:38:32] David: Thank you so much, Ardis, for joining us. This has been a lot of fun. Love geeking out with you.
[00:38:37] Ardis: Same here, guys. Thanks for having me on.
[00:38:39] OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net.
