This interview is with Aron Solberg, Co-founder & CEO at Risotto.

Aron Solberg, Co-founder & CEO, Risotto

Welcome, Aron! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an expert in the world of SEO, B2B SaaS, AI, and digital marketing?

My journey started at the end of 2023 when my co-founder and I got accepted into the prestigious accelerator Y-Combinator. We were selected for our idea to build Risotto – a product built to help IT managers automatically solve IT support tickets and give them time back in their day!

Fortunately, my background as a product manager in tech at companies like Grammarly and Dropbox has helped prepare me. But even so, the journey has truly been a whirlwind, and I’ve had to learn many new skills on the job. For an early-stage company, brand awareness has been a huge challenge. To solve this, I’ve been diving headfirst into the world of content marketing and SEO to help us build out our brand and reputation within IT!

Your career path sounds fascinating! Could you share a pivotal moment or decision that solidified your focus on these specific areas?

The pivotal moment to decide to focus on content and SEO was a series of experiments we ran to see how we could get the most traction with our target buyer, which is IT support managers.

We quickly realized that we could pay for traffic using Google AdWords and LinkedIn-boosted posts, but the benefits didn’t seem to outweigh the costs. As a result, I refocused our efforts on writing and sharing content to build our reputation as thought leaders in the AI automation space for IT. This method seems to work particularly well if we also have ways to harness our most engaged audience members with recurring content and material that provide value to our customers, such as newsletters and free tools.

Balancing AI and human effort is key. In your experience meeting with clients, like the time you helped implement your product firsthand, what role does human connection play in closing deals, especially in the age of digital communication?

The human connection is one of the most important factors when trying to close a deal. People want to buy software from other people that they know and trust. They also want to ensure that the vision of the founders and early employees resonates with the experience they are trying to provide at their own company.

I always recommend going the extra mile and looking for opportunities to build rapport by giving gifts, making in-person office visits, and getting to know the person on the other side of the deal table. This human connection is especially critical in the age of AI because it’s one thing that AI will never be able to replicate.

It seems personal touchpoints are still crucial. How can sales teams, even when using AI tools, ensure those interactions feel genuine and not automated?

My personal mental framework for using AI in any area almost always includes a “human-in-the-loop,” and that’s especially true for something as nuanced as sales.

I would suggest three main tips here to maintain quality and authenticity:

First, try not to rely on full-message generation; instead, opt for smaller pieces such as suggested talking points.

This will allow you to leverage AI for the hardest part (selecting the best topics) but still allow your own voice to shine through.

Second, have some kind of a QA process where you spot-check things periodically and find ways to minimize mistakes and hallucinations.

And third, have a sliding scale of manual intervention for more important customers and customers further along in the conversation.

For them, be willing to devote more personal time and use fewer automations because those prospects are the most important to try and convert to paid customers.

Authenticity is so important.  You mentioned that organizational skills, like using AI transcription tools, contribute to empathy in customer interactions. What other tools or strategies have you found helpful in providing exceptional customer experiences?

Great topic! There are three main principles I try to weave into every customer who explores Risotto:

First, remember you’re building a relationship, so take the time to learn about the person on the other side of the virtual table. If they’re willing to share personal details like hobbies or stories about family life, these things can help make your meetings more fun, and it’s more likely you’ll find a common interest you relate to!

Second, find out what goals they are trying to achieve and learn how you can make them successful in their job. For example, if they’re pitching your product to their boss, help create a deck that communicates the value prop so they don’t have to do it themselves.

Finally, share as much as you can with them about your own learnings from similar customers. It’s ideal if you can prepare case studies to help other customers learn and grow. It’s all a part of being proactive and going the extra mile. If you do all these three things, you will definitely stand out!

Thinking about aspiring entrepreneurs, what advice would you give to those looking to leverage AI in their B2B SaaS ventures, particularly in the marketing and sales domains?

AI is moving so quickly; the first piece of advice that comes to mind is, do not be shy about trying new tools out. In some cases, the promise of a new tool doesn’t live up to the hype, but in other cases, it absolutely does. Magical moments are increasing at a rapid pace, and when you find an AI product that actually works as promised, it can give you a serious boost in productivity; thus, a leg up on the competition.

The most common sales and marketing tools to use AI for automation are undoubtedly content marketing and automated outbound (AI SDRs), but there are many other places AI can help. For example, there are AI products to help convert customer interviews into case studies, produce personalized sales collateral, monitor customer sentiment, and much more. Focus on your number one need at any given moment and don’t be afraid to try a new product if it seems to use AI to solve exactly the problem you’re looking for!

Thank you for these insightful responses, Aron! One last question – what emerging trends in AI, SEO, or digital marketing excite you the most for the future of B2B SaaS?

The emerging trend that’s the most exciting to me is related to seeing foundational LLMs advance at such a rapid pace. These models power many B2B AI SaaS apps, and as the models improve, so will the apps they power. Scaling up model size (measured in the number of parameters) continues to be the most common way to improve a model’s performance.

However, there is an entirely separate research path now related to enhancing a model’s reasoning capabilities. For example, OpenAI’s latest model release, called “o1,” can reason through intricate problems and outperforms previous models like GPT-4o in many key benchmarks. This research path, combined with advancements in data production methods, will support multiple orders of magnitude of improvement beyond where we are today.