Reza Khadjavi on Building Motion, Bridging the Creative-Data Gap, and Why B2B Brands Need Consumer DNA

Reza Khadjavi, co-founder and CEO of Motion, joins Mark MacLeod on the Startup CEO Show to share the full story behind one of the most unconventional paths in SaaS. What started as a Shopify app called Shoelace evolved into an accidental agency, and eventually became Motion, a creative analytics platform that’s redefining how growth teams and creatives work together.

In this episode, Reza breaks down why creative is now the most important lever in advertising, how Motion popularized the creative strategist role, what it took to rebuild the entire company as AI-native after raising a Series B, and why B2B brands need to start marketing like the best consumer companies.

This conversation is packed with practical insights for SaaS founders, marketers, and leaders navigating scale, creativity, and rapid technological change. Let’s get into it!

Mark MacLeod:
In this episode, I sit down with Reza Khadjavi, co-founder and CEO of Motion.

It’s harder and harder to stand out in this world. There’s just so much noise, so many brands, everyone’s competing for our attention. And there’s a trend happening where, you know, only kind of really truly creative ads actually get us to stop scrolling and pay attention.

And so Reza’s company helps advertisers do that and actually connect science with art and figure out which creative advertising actually works. We walked through his whole journey. Motion actually came out of a previous agency, and then they went and disrupted themselves, and Reza and his company have been through a whole journey with AI.

And so he walks us through all of that. Tons of actionable insights. And one of the biggest ones is that B2B brands really need to step up their consumer DNA and almost market as if they were marketing to consumers. So lots of really great stuff here. I hope you check it out.

Reza, welcome to the Startup CEO Show. It’s a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

Reza Khadjavi:
I’m doing well. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, yeah. I’ve been looking forward to having you on for some time. For folks who don’t know, maybe just tell everyone what Motion does.

Reza Khadjavi:
Sure, Motion is a creative analytics platform for growth marketing teams to be able to ship more winning ads. So a lot has changed in the world of advertising, where it used to be, for the first maybe decade or so of advertising, it was a lot about audience targeting.

So if you were a growth marketer and you were able to figure out how to get in front of the right person, that was probably the biggest lever that you could pull when it came to paid advertising. And then over the last few years, especially, all of that’s kind of flipped now, where the most important, most critical, increasingly only lever that there is to pull in advertising is the actual creative.

So these days it’s not like you’re doing much audience targeting anymore. It’s just that the creative that you produce determines the audience that sees your creative.

And that creates a lot of challenges for teams to figure out how to produce more creatives that work. And the challenge there is that you have creative teams who are typically not very revenue-driven. They’re not necessarily comfortable in a spreadsheet. They just like to make cool stuff.

Mark MacLeod:
They’re artists.

Reza Khadjavi:
They’re artists, yeah. And then you have the growth marketers who are just like living and breathing in spreadsheets all day. And you actually need the best of both worlds to make winning ads in this environment.

And so Motion was a platform that basically tried to balance the left brain and the right brain. So it’s a very visual product where you can see and consume and play videos, but it’s also a very data-oriented product where you actually can understand what’s working and what’s not.

And so, yeah, we tried to build a product that would take the best of someone who is very analytical and people who are very creative and merge that into one platform, and that was Motion.

Mark MacLeod:
Wow, I love it. There’s so much to explore there. I understand that Motion came out of Shoelace, and you were sort of forced to innovate in some way because Shoelace was being disrupted. Is that right? And if so, maybe tell folks about that because it sounds pretty interesting.

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, it’s a fun story. Very long and brutal as we went through it, but looking back now, it’s kind of a fun story to tell. But we started Shoelace maybe 11 years ago, and we were one of the first apps in the Shopify app store at the time. I think Shopify had like 50,000 merchants on the platform, something like that, very, very early days.

Their app store was just getting off the ground. It was also the time that Facebook was going more directly to advertisers. So, like a few years prior to Shoelace, you would still often go through a third party to buy ads on Facebook. And so they had this whole partner program that they sunset, and they were going all in direct to advertiser. It’s when they started to roll out their Facebook pixel.

And it’s a really interesting timing. Like, for other founders, obviously, timing is such a factor that you can’t control, but it turns out much better. Like such a big part of everyone’s story. At this moment in time, it was basically like Shopify is emerging as this commerce platform, letting anyone sell anything, but actually Shopify would not, I don’t think, grown as fast as they did if it wasn’t for the emergence of this perfect distribution channel in Meta ads for every single advertiser to be like, okay, I started a Shopify store. How do I get in front of my customers?

And Facebook was like the perfect answer to that because for all these niche stores that you might create, like a yoga brand, and they’re like, okay, how am I gonna get in front of yoga enthusiasts? They’re not necessarily searching for this stuff, but I know that they’re enthusiasts. So if I can get my brand in front of them, they will buy.

And so Facebook was like the perfect distribution channel that was emerging at that time. And every single merchant on Shopify needed to figure out how they’re gonna advertise on Facebook.

And at the time, the problem that Shoelace solved was a very simple technical one, which was like, if I’m a Shopify store, I need to take a bunch of code from Facebook and pop it onto my Shopify store so that when someone buys from a Facebook ad, I know that it came from there.

And I also need to sync my product catalog to Facebook so that when Facebook is running product catalog ads, it can show my latest product catalog. And it was very technical to do for these like merchants that weren’t necessarily technical. And so our app was like a perfect example of the type of niche apps that were really interesting in Shopify at the time.

So that’s how the business started. We obviously got a bit more ambitious over time, where a lot of what we tried to do in the early days was automate the role of an advertiser. And this was like, obviously pre-LLMs, and it was very hard to do.

So we actually had a bunch of our team with tooling that we built, trying to semi-automate the role of a marketer. And this typically happens with a lot of companies that were trying to solve problems around advertising, is that they’ll accidentally build an agency, which is kind of what happened to Shoelace. As we went through several pivots in terms of what the product could be, ultimately, we weren’t quite able to automate the human job, which was our aspiration.

And it just kind of meant that we needed to have humans at the wheel helping do this thing, but we were also charging software prices. And so, like a business model…

Mark MacLeod:
Human cost of goods with software pricing. That doesn’t match.

Reza Khadjavi:
No, so the business was not a good business in that sense. But as soon as we were like, okay, let’s call this company what it is. It’s a marketing agency. I hated that idea because I loved software, and I didn’t want to give up on building stuff, but we’re running out of money, and the business is going to die otherwise.

And it was taboo at the company for a long time. It was like, everyone kind of knew it already was an agency. It’s just that I didn’t want to call it that. But otherwise, when we decided to call it an agency, it was like everyone on the team was like, yeah, of course, that’s what it is. What took you so long to admit it, basically?

And then the thing that happened, though, was like, okay, for an agency that we can charge real prices. And then we did that. And then the business started to make lots of money. And then, like maybe a month after that, we went from burning lots of money to now making lots of money, which was nice.

And then at that point, we still had an engineering team. And the question was that, like, we could have let go of the engineering team, and then this company would have been even more profitable because they didn’t need it anymore.

But I looked at that, and I was like, well, this sounds like the best thing in the world because we can pay for all these salaries through the company’s profit. And that means we can spend the next forever coming up with new ideas, and we don’t need funding from any investors. So we kept the engineering.

Mark MacLeod:
Had you raised funding previously?

Reza Khadjavi:
We raised a little bit, I think in total, Shoelace may have raised like three or $4 million max. So like not a lot.

Mark MacLeod:
How did your investors feel about investing in a thing that was now an agency?

Reza Khadjavi:
Oh, by that point, everyone had already written it off. They were like, they didn’t care about the company. They were like, good luck to you. This thing is over as far as we’re concerned. So I don’t know if any of our investors at that time, I think they just all wrote it off. It was not a company that they were thinking about…

Mark MacLeod:
I don’t know if you did that, but maybe just for everyone listening who’s maybe facing a similar situation, that’s a great time to buy those investors back for like a dollar. The least amount of money, right? Because they’ve written it off anyway, and then you just repatriate a whole bunch of equity.

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, totally. It would’ve been a good idea. As we started, we kept the engineers, started working on exploring new ideas, and one of those new ideas eventually became Motion, and then we spun out Motion into a separate entity, and it kind of just took off from there.

But the premise of exploring what became Motion was that when we started solving problems for Shoelace, one of the challenges that we were solving was niche problems at the edges, right? It was not a core fundamental, high-priority burning issue for the company to figure out how they’re gonna synchronize their Facebook code with their Shopify store, right?

And so, when we went back to talk to our customers and people, we knew we wanted to still build for the same industry because we knew it well. The exploration that we did was like, how do we try to find and identify the most important, highest priority, urgent problem that these companies are facing, because that was the insight that we felt, if we were not solving a high-priority issue, it always felt like you’re pushing a boulder up a hill.

It’s gonna be harder to get people on demos; people are gonna churn. But this one simple difference is that if you just solve a really high-priority problem, now you have people’s attention; they really care about it because it’s an urgent problem.

So that insight led us to a lot of conversations with our customers where we were just very pointed questions, trying to get to the heart of what really mattered to them right now, which I think is another maybe first-time founder issue, where like the difficult problems feel scary.

They’re like, why don’t I just like stay over here? It’s like, solve a few simple problems, don’t get in anybody’s way. But the problem with that becomes that it’s just not high-priority enough, but go right into the heart of the most difficult issue for customers. And then ironically, everything gets easier because momentum is on your side if you’re solving an urgent problem.

Mark MacLeod:
Was there some kind of extinction event in Shoelace that forced you to make Motion a thing, or was it more like you developed it, and you were getting positive feedback, and you’re like, oh, this thing’s just way better?

Reza Khadjavi:
So once we decided that Shoelace was going to be an agency, I kind of knew that moment that I was not the right person to run an agency. I was not fired up about it. And so we had a general manager basically take over running the business immediately.

And then I was just off from day one with one of our designers at the time, just exploring a bunch of ideas. One of them became Motion. So I kind of just knew that it was not the right thing for me to work in an agency business. I was not fired up about it.

So as soon as we made the call, I found the clarity that, okay, this chapter is kind of closed. This business has become what it has meant to become, and I’m free to explore what I’m excited about.

Mark MacLeod:
Amazing. You know, when I think about being inside Shoelace and now the CEO is off doing this shiny new thing, by definition, I’d be like, why wouldn’t I be where he is? Like, how did you get people to stay at Shoelace versus follow you?

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, that was definitely challenging. I think in the early days of Motion, though, it was not clear that there was anything going on there. So for the first little while, it was just exploration, and there was a lot of excitement at Shoelace at that time because the thing was making money, and it kind of found itself.

And I think this was right when COVID happened as well. So e-commerce was growing really fast at that time. And so in the absolute early days, there was a lot of momentum and energy on the Shoelace side as well.

I think once Motion started to take off, that’s when the whole thing was a little bit weird, where you have this project that’s really taking off within a company. And yeah, some people did start to move over from Shoelace. Actually, a lot of the early employees of Motion were all kinds of Shoelace stuff.

So I think it was a few people, one after the other, started to hop over, and even to this day, a bunch of the earliest employees are people that we were working with from Shoelace. And so it’s kind of been cool to go through this experience with a lot of people who were on the Shoelace era as well. So yeah, one by one, people started to hop on over once it started to become real.

Mark MacLeod:
That’s cool. You said something else that I wanna double click on, which is like you were charging software prices, you realized you needed to become an agency, you started charging agency prices, and then you were instantly profitable. Did that mean the exact same customers now just paid you more, or did you have to get new customers because the old ones were used to getting you for not enough money?

Reza Khadjavi:
So, it was the same customers paying us more. And in order to try to automate advertising, we were like, we can’t possibly automate all of it. So we’re only gonna try to automate a subset of it. And so it was basically the retargeting side. So when somebody visits your website, and they would leave, we tried to build this whole experience around the ads that people would experience when they would leave your site.

The thing that people really wanted from us, though, is like, could you also just do my acquisition? Could you also just run the part of my ads that would attract new customers? And we resisted that for a very long time because we’re like, if we do that, then the surface area is too broad, and there’s no way we can automate it.

And so when we decided to turn it into an agency, we’re like, okay, let’s just do the thing that all these customers have been asking for all this time as well, which is like, can you do my acquisition? Because it was very weird. I remember it where we were so adamant that we wouldn’t do the top of the funnel.

And so customers really liked our approach to the kind of elaborate bottom-of-funnel retargeting where they would bring in another agency, and then the other agency would be like, what the hell is this? Like, why do you have some other company doing just this part of your advertising? It doesn’t make sense. We should do the whole thing.

And so a lot of our churn at the time would come from customers who were like, guys, this doesn’t make sense that like you guys are doing this part, these guys are doing that part. And so when we flipped, we’re like, okay, we could actually just do the whole thing. And then that allowed us to really increase what we were charging at that point.

And it wasn’t necessarily that the work was all that much more. We were just like managing a few more campaigns within the ad account. So that was the jump. But yeah, a lot of it was just the exact same customers, just kind of upselling them into a bigger offering.

Mark MacLeod:
Cool. And Shoelace still exists today, right?

Reza Khadjavi:
It does. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.

Mark MacLeod:
That’s wild. So, I think about showing an advertiser, showing a brand, which creative works, that just feels like something that should have existed all along. Why didn’t this exist before?

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, because answering the question of what works is not a simple question. Like, part of it is that the volume of creatives that people run today, particularly paid social advertising, is a lot. Like, if you want to deploy any kind of meaningful budget, you have to produce a ton of creative and feed that into the algorithm and see what sticks and see what works.

The best teams had this taxonomy around the elements that were part of their hypothesis. So like, if I’m creating a set of ads and I’m putting them into Meta to run them, the teams themselves usually have some hypotheses around what we’re testing? Like, what do we care about? It’s kind of like how product teams will apply event labels when people are using their product so that they can go back and see what’s working.

So you have to go and set the event variables, like what it is you want to track, based on the hypotheses that you have. And so the problem is that a lot of people weren’t really good at that, at writing good naming conventions, and then when you pull out that data and you want to analyze it in a spreadsheet, it’s a very strange place to do creative analysis.

So prior to Motion, people would have these data platforms, whether it’s Tableau, at the time it was called Google Data Studio, now it’s Looker, or honestly just like pivot tables and spreadsheets, and they would export that data and try to figure out, okay, this ad underscore this, that, and the other variable versus this other one, and you don’t have the frame of reference of the actual creative. And you can’t bring the creative team into that discussion and say, hey, we’re evaluating our creatives right now, let’s talk about it.

So when you’re looking at just a boring sheet of data, that’s not the right environment for a creative brainstorming discussion. So I think the reason was that, and this is something I think as we get into the era of AI, I think it starts to get even more interesting, but since the beginning of the internet, anybody who ever built a data product or an analytics product built it for data people, obviously, right? Who else are you gonna build a data product for?

But then the thing that needed to happen was that creative people needed to start wrapping their heads around performance data. And so our design principle that went into the product was that what if you built an analytics product, but it was built for creative people, not built for data people. Data people do have like the tooling already, they don’t need another one.

But creative people are completely blind to performance data, and it’s creating a really big friction between teams that need to build the bridge between their growth people and their creative people, or really coming from different worlds.

And so what we started to realize over time with Motion is that we’re almost a translation product where some people speak two different languages, and we’re like, hey, you two actually need to like talk to each other. So we need to find a common language that you understand, and you understand.

And what started to become really interesting is that there have always been people, everyone knows a handful of people like this that are like, this person is really creative, but they’re also really analytical. It’s kind of a rare combo, but they exist. And we found that the best companies had these types of people.

And it could be that somebody was from a more traditional data background, and once they started to get exposed to the creative side, I’m like, this is actually pretty interesting. Like, I’m having a good time, and they were curious, and then they developed their creative side a little bit more, and they became these balanced individuals that were part analytical, part creative, and vice versa.

We had a ton of stories from people who are designers. They got introduced to Motion, they started to see data, and they started to connect the dots, and then they became really good at the data side. And in the early days of Motion, we’re like, hey, there’s something happening here. We need to call this out as a new type of job.

And we weren’t the ones to like name this job, but we definitely popularized it. There was a term of the creative strategist that a bunch of people were starting to use, but no one really knew what that role was. We just noticed that some of the best teams were calling this out as a dedicated job role.

And so Motion basically went all in on this individual job role. Like this is the future as far as we can tell, this creative strategist role seems really important. Who knows if this name sticks or not, but we need a new way to express this type of person who is equally data-driven and creative.

So we push that role pretty hard. We do a virtual event every year called the Creative Strategy Summit. The first year we did it, it was like crickets; no one really showed up, and no one knew what it was. The one that we did this year in October had 17,000 people register for the event.

So now we look at our CRM, we search by job role, creative strategist, like pages and pages of people with that job role. And so this idea of skill sets collapsing, I think, is a common theme that we’re seeing right now with AI, where, if you’re a person who’s like really good at design, you might be able to like build stuff now and not be limited by an engineer. And kind of like, where does the line end and another line begin with regard to talent?

And so in the marketing world, this feels like the most important skill set ingredient for the marketing teams of the future is that you have to combine extreme creativity with extreme rigor on the data side, and the people and the teams who figure that out are the ones whose companies are gonna grow the fastest. We have no doubt about that at this point.

Mark MacLeod:
Love it. I’ve often said, you know, when I look back on my time as a VC and just a general observer of VC-backed companies, you know, the biggest outcomes are based on some crisp, simple insight, not simple to make happen, but simple to articulate. But unfortunately, that insight is only kind of obvious after the fact.

So what you just described is that the foundational insight of this business is that marketing has changed, and there’s this new creative strategist that blends right brain and left brain, and they’re the future of marketing?

Reza Khadjavi:
Totally. You know, unclear what the job roles of the future end up being called. I think that part is really in flux. But the principle of creativity and data rigor or, you know, like those two left brain, right brain meeting as one, that is definitely the core insight of the business because, you know, we were just talking with a brand earlier and we were talking about direct response marketers who are so in touch with their customers and understand, direct response marketers use this term called hooks, and hooks is this really interesting direct response principle, which is like, you have to say something that will really attract the attention of the person that you’re trying to talk to.

And sometimes people who don’t understand direct response really well might use that and just like, I’ve seen silly things, like they’ll pop a balloon or something in the first few seconds of an ad. It’s like, okay, you got my attention, but like, I’m still going to scroll past that.

Whereas there’s a company called Fixer, which we really love; they’re an AI product that automates a lot of your email. They have a really cool ad that is centered around the idea of the guilt of missing family dinner. And that’s like a hook that they use in their ad.

And so, they could say something boring, like our AI will sit there and like sort through and automate your emails. Like, okay, everyone is saying that. But if you say something like tapping into the guilt of missing family dinner because you’re sitting around doing something that AI could do for you, okay, that really gets me. Like, I don’t want to be that person.

And so, it’s the direct response marketers who are figuring that out, and they’re figuring it out in their creative because organic creators do this naturally, right? Like if you’re creating a YouTube video or like posting stuff on social, these days, like you’re kind of just thinking about things in hooks and you want to say things that are relevant to the audience.

So now that that’s really important, you have companies that have the direct response team and the creative strategists who are like the frontline talking to customers through their advertising, understanding what sticks. And then someone shows up and says, okay, we have a brand campaign about this theme and message that we want to take to market.

And like the direct response, people roll their eyes, and they’re like, no, this is not gonna work. Like, there’s no way this is gonna work. And so I think there’s something really special happening there where the things that are working in creative, those are actually the things that the whole company strategy should be built around.

This is kind of one of the viewpoints that we have, is the companies that can’t build a tight feedback loop between what is happening in their go-to-market and their company strategy. Like, that feedback loop needs to be really rapid and really tight.

And the only types of people who can do that very well are the types of people who have rigor and business acumen, and they are comfortable with data, but then they can put that to the side for a second and just be really creative. And I think that’s the skill that is going to be the most in demand as products get easier to build, software gets easier to build, and the bottleneck becomes how do you get people to care? How do you break through the noise?

And I think that’s always been the case where attention is a difficult thing, but the competition for attention is just increasing. At least it was hard for someone to build a product like yours, so you have to compete with fewer people. But as it becomes easier to build stuff, then you have more competition, and you have to find the parts of the market that really resonate with you and talk to them, but then also build for them, right?

So, it’s this really interesting idea that the direct response team is the biggest, most interesting signal for founders to think about what the market thinks about my product, and where do we go from here?

Mark MacLeod:
That’s interesting. I’ll bet you there are not a lot of CEOs who’ve connected the dots. They just think of this as a means to an end versus this source of signal that we really need to kind of focus on first.

Reza Khadjavi:
Totally. And there’s this thing where consumer companies are always a few years ahead of B2B companies, and we see now, actually, a lot of B2B companies doing a good job in their advertising. This was one of our predictions a few years ago that consumer companies tend to have elite direct response teams, whereas B2B companies were like, download my whitepaper and it’s like, it’s the most boring thing of all time.

But now B2B companies are actually starting to do a good job there where I think the best consumer CEOs, I would argue that the best consumer company CEOs are the chief creative strategist, whether they understand it or not. And I think it’s probably lagging on the B2B side quite a bit, but one of our favorite brands is Jones Road Beauty, the CEO, Cody, is in the weeds, in the trenches with his team, thinking about their organic social strategy, which creators they wanna work with.

And we were on a podcast together, and I basically told him, I think you’re a creative strategist. You’re the CEO of the company, sure, but you were acting very much like a creative strategist, and you understand these principles.

And I think this is catching on quite a bit on the consumer side, where you just really have to understand your customers. Like, there are probably two channels that really help you understand your customers. One is support, and one is ads, right? Like those two are the sharpest signals. And I think people have always recognized that support is a really good avenue for understanding customers, but support is a lagging indicator, right?

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, lagging indicator and then perhaps some bias in the signal. Like, I have an issue, right? It’s not a representation of all of the viewpoints, right? By definition, you don’t hear from most of your customers unless you have a crappy product, which means support’s giving you some of the signal, not all of the signal.

Reza Khadjavi:
Totally. Yeah, we talked to one brand that was like, they’ve done all these tests. They know the hooks that work for the largest audiences, and they spend so much money on paid social advertising. But then, when it came time, the company wanted to do a billboard campaign, they ended up putting the most boring stuff on the billboard because somehow that counted as a brand campaign. It was a different thing.

Whereas this team was like, if they just put our hooks on there, like those billboard ads sort of crushed, but they didn’t, you know? And so I think…

Mark MacLeod:
Do you think B2B marketers should hire some B2C talent?

Reza Khadjavi:
Totally, 100%. Yeah, on the go-to-market side, I think the lines between good go-to-market on the B2B side are starting to feel very much like consumer. I think people talked about the consumerization of software as a thing people were saying even many years ago. And I think with that comes the consumerization of go-to-market, even if you’re a B2B company.

I think what becomes a little bit different is probably for B2B, there’s quite a bit of education to do around, like, what is this? Why should I care? Help me do my job. And so even Motion’s own go-to-market is really advanced in my view.

And the thing that we do really well is we don’t lead a lot with, hey, here’s our product, here’s why you should buy it. It’s more around. Here’s some content that you would be interested in, or here’s an event that we’re running. And doing that in a way that people really care about, that sort of thing.

I think B2B, a lot of people wanna get better at their jobs, and they wanna learn a lot around the problem, and so I think that’s one area that I’ve generally felt like B2B companies don’t do a great job at, which is just being elite at education and helping teach the buyer around the problem space. And doing that in a fun, engaging way, because no one wants to show up to a boring webinar.

So if you see, for example, one of our webinars, Evan, who runs them, it’s really fun and exciting and full of life. And I think B2B companies just skew too boring sometimes, and it’s just not great.

Mark MacLeod:
I love it. When I think of HubSpot, and they kind of created, not themselves, but certainly played a large part in creating this movement around inbound marketing, and there were new job categories that popped up as a result of this inbound movement.

Are you trying to do the same thing here? And if so, do you have any playbook that you can share for how you’re kind of trying to create a movement here?

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, we’ve thought about HubSpot quite a bit. I think the creative strategist is basically a similar thing to the inbound marketer. But I think even when you look at HubSpot’s story and the inbound marketer, I was thinking about this recently, no one’s quite thinking about inbound marketing. We don’t really use that term anymore, right? But the principles around the idea have really stuck. And I think that’s the part that we care the most about.

As much as we evangelize the role of the creative strategist, we’re like, even if you don’t call yourself this formally as your full-time job, even if you’re the head of growth or the head of creative or a designer, or the CEO, someone should just wear this hat of the creative strategist and thinking about the world this way is really useful.

What it ends up becoming called is very unclear, especially in the age of AI, and how job roles collapse into one becomes quite unclear. But yeah, this idea that the disconnect between creative and data or brand and demand gen, as B2B companies would call it, needs to be solved, and you need excellence in both. And that’s a very important part of marketing at this point.

My bet is that it will stick because I think the way to create a movement is probably the wrong framing, because I think it’s impossible to do that. It’s more like you see a thing that’s inevitable, and it’s happening with or without you.

If Motion didn’t exist and if we weren’t saying these things, all of this stuff would still be happening, I’m convinced. It’s not happening because of us. It’s happening because this is just what’s going on. This is the reality.

There’s a book around this, Play Bigger, I think it’s called, around this idea of defining categories and being category leaders. It’s basically around whoever can articulate best what’s going on; they basically help shape the category. But it’s gotta be real, it’s gotta be happening. You gotta be able to point to it and say, hey, this is happening, it’s real, here’s all these examples of it and help give the industry vocabulary around doing the thing that everyone feels needs to be done, and just helping them get there faster.

So I think the thing about creating a category is dangerous because it can be code for like, okay, there’s no market here, but there will be one day, but it also could be that you’re just talking to yourself.

Mark MacLeod:
Obviously, the biggest force in technology at the moment right now is AI. And I’d love to actually just maybe even spend the rest of our conversation there and just explore, first of all, your personal journey with AI and what you think CEOs should be doing and what you’re doing as a CEO around AI and how it’s transforming your role and your impact. Maybe let’s start there before I add questions on top of that.

Reza Khadjavi:
Sure, yeah, I’ve been having a lot of fun. So, prior to Shoelace, I was a software engineer by way of hacking, and I had a lot of fun in those days. And I think over the last maybe eight, nine years, I didn’t touch a line of code, right? But I always loved it.

And AI was kind of my way to parachute back into, like, oh, I missed all this stuff, but it doesn’t matter because I can just jump in and do interesting things again. And so that’s been a lot of fun for me personally.

I’ve been using it in a few different interesting ways. So I think probably the two use cases that I find are really interesting. One is if you have an idea for a feature or something that you think would be interesting, I’ve tried not to do things where I go to the team, and I say, hey, we’re building this thing. So if people are not bought in, they’re just not gonna do a great job.

But if I’m fired up about something and I wanna get other people excited about it, it can work to take a very compelling narrative and say, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we did this thing, and I heard it from this customer and so on, and you try to get people excited.

But what I found really interesting is that you can just build a prototype to do the thing that you’re thinking about. And I think for CEOs or literally anybody at the company, that’s probably the number one most interesting use case for any tech company is that ideas are now just prototypes. There’s been a couple of things that we ended up building because I just put together a prototype, and people were like, oh, this is really cool. And then they kind of ran with it. So that’s one.

The other is that I’ve been finding myself using it quite a bit for taking large chunks of data and processing it in a way that’s interesting. So, as an example, we recently exported 2,000 rows of conversations that people had with our agent in our system. And I just built a simple thing with Cloud Code locally to run through every single one of those messages and find different patterns, and I asked the different questions.

The challenge is when you arrive at something that’s a large chunk of data, and you try to upload it into either ChatGPT or Cloud or something. Some of them have large context windows, but it’ll still get choppy on the answers, or the thing is literally too long. So I found that if you have a big chunk of data that you wanna have AI process and do something interesting with, I think you can vibe code some really cool, just like local scripts.

So, for example, I categorized each one of those conversations to see what the most common things that people are asking the agent. And obviously, there are tools and things that we can build to give us better visibility of that, and we have a bunch of those, but if I have a very specific type of way that I wanna look at this data, I can just write something that will help me do that. So I think that’s been a really interesting one.

Mark MacLeod:
I would say generally, like if you had an analyst or data function in the house, you’d give them that question, and they give you the answer, versus you doing it. Why are you doing it?

Reza Khadjavi:
Well, it was, first of all, a lot of fun. And then second of all, I think even the data team would go about it the same way, right? And with some of these things, I can get there in like 10 minutes and 15 minutes, like they just, they don’t take that long.

It probably took the conversations that I wanted to analyze; it probably took an hour for AI to process it, but it didn’t take me very long to tell AI what I wanted done, right? And so the idea of asking someone to do something and then going back and forth with, “Did you mean it this way or did you mean it the other way?” I can’t kind of tell what the difference is anymore for some tasks. Am I telling another person to do it, or am I telling AI to do it?

Obviously, for big, high agency-type tasks, AI is obviously nowhere close to that. But if you have like a specific thing that you want done, oh, I kind of feel like it’s just as fast getting AI to do it as it might be asking someone.

Mark MacLeod:
Fascinating. When I think about the CEO role, especially as a company scales, the role becomes unmanageable. It’s just like there’s just more and more information to process, meetings to attend, decisions that need to be made. And I’m wondering, have you used AI to make that role more manageable, to make you more scalable?

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, actually, the first thing I built was at some point, I was like, it would be really nice if I just knew what everyone was up to all the time. Because the company gets big and we’re remote, I think we’re about like 70-something people at this point. And in particular, on our product design and engineering side of the business, it’s really hard to keep up.

I can join the standups, I can read linear issues, and so on. But like, it’s really hard for me to have a pulse on what everyone’s working on. We do off-sites once a quarter, and those are always great because when you’re in person, you collect a lot of information, you kind of stay connected. But remote, I find that’s challenging.

And so I built an app that each person on the PDE team had a link. And each morning they would go to that link, and I put a character limit just so people don’t feel the need to like go on and on about what they’re up to. But it just asked a simple question: What’s the most important thing you wanna get done today? And I think they had to keep it up to like 150 characters or something.

And so they would write it, but then everybody would write it. And then I would get these one-sentence summaries of what everyone’s planning to do today, and I can process that with AI and see what’s going on.

Mark MacLeod:
Is everyone generally heading in the right direction? Is there enough velocity?

Reza Khadjavi:
Exactly, or like if I can see something at some point where it’s like, well, why are we working on this? And it helps me kind of probe into different parts of the business. The day after, when they go to write tomorrow’s message, it also asks, like, how did this thing go that you were working on yesterday? So it kind of has some built-in accountability that everyone appreciated, too. So that was another example.

I think there are a lot of these types of things that can be done to help kind of scale the CEO job. But I think part of it too is just kind of as a CEO in a tech company building AI products, I think if you’re not in there in the weeds playing around with this stuff, I think it’s just very difficult to make any product decisions because this stuff is so unlike other things that we’ve had from a technology standpoint that if you don’t really get a sense for how they work, I think it’s hard to make decisions.

And so I think even if you waste a little bit of time vibe coding things that could have been done in a different way, like could have probably done what I’ve had set up here if we just kind of set people up on like Asana or something, it would probably have been just fine doing that. But I learned a lot, and it kind of kept me close to working with AI, which I think is really important for making good product decisions.

Mark MacLeod:
So would you say you’re also the lead product manager? And if so, is that a thing you intend to continue?

Reza Khadjavi:
Well, I definitely love it. I definitely enjoy spending time there. And I think probably, you know what I said about consumer CEOs needing to be chief creative strategist, I kind of feel the same thing about tech companies’ CEOs. And like, I think it’s really challenging if you’re not a very product-oriented tech founder.

Mark MacLeod:
That’s the reason why I never started a startup. I can’t code, which is no longer a barrier, but I just don’t have the product instincts.

Reza Khadjavi:
I think it’s really important. And I think the problem, though, that I have found with product, is that there is today and there’s tomorrow. And there’s like, what are we shipping right now, like literally this week, and is the train moving on time? And do we have good product execution around the things that we’ve decided that we’re gonna ship in the next three to four weeks? That’s a type of product job.

And then there’s like, where are we headed? And how are we thinking about products in a multi-year sense? I think the challenge with CEOs getting excited about product, which we have to like check ourselves, is that sometimes we’re looking at something and it’s like, oh yeah, that’s like a three-year out thing. That’s not a right now, tomorrow thing. That doesn’t belong in the reorient the entire company and get everyone working on this thing right now.

So I think balancing the now, later, much later becomes…

Mark MacLeod:
That’s such an important point. Anything you say as CEO, it’s like you’re shouting into a megaphone. You could just have this little aside about something that you’re curious about that’s way in the future, and suddenly that’s like everyone’s top priority. And then they drop the ball today.

Reza Khadjavi:
I think the times when I’ve had a good grasp of that, I’ve been very productive and helpful to the company on the product side. The times when I’ve not kept those boundaries well, I think the CEO could actually cause a lot of inefficiency, trying to meddle in the product. But if you disconnect also, that’s a problem. So you have to be very connected, but also try to distinguish what matters right now and what is something I need to process for later.

Mark MacLeod:
Yep. Maybe the last big topic, Reza, staying on AI, but now with the company. So there was a Motion 1.0, you start getting more and more kind of AI-enabled, and at a certain point, you’re kind of going down the agentic path and maybe thinking of disrupting yourself. I was wondering if you could just bring folks along that path and maybe share any actionable insights for folks who are running SaaS businesses that either disrupt or are disrupted.

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, so we raised our Series B last year, in September. And I remember right after that thinking, usually you’d raise a Series B, and you’re like, okay, things are working, we just scale this thing now.

Mark MacLeod:
Absolutely, everything’s figured out at the Series B. It’s just like, I can make 10 sausages today, give me your money, and I can make 100, and they all taste the same. That’s the Series B pitch, typically.

Reza Khadjavi:
Totally, and like we had taken out a bunch of technical debt in order to get there. But I remember realizing that like, wait, no, actually everything has to change entirely, but that’s not just us, that’s like everyone.

So it wasn’t a thing of like, we were in no position to raise a Series B or whatever, but it was more like any company at any point, whether they’re a startup or whether they’re like a giant enterprise, whether they raise a Series A or B, it didn’t matter. November 2024, looking into 2025, everybody needed to be like, this business needs to be an AI-native business by the end of next year. Like that was the thing to say, no question about it.

So that was kind of scary for us, but also very exciting for me because I love new things. So it kind of gave me an opportunity to go back a little bit to the things I love, which is kind of building things from zero to one. So selfishly, I enjoy that. But for the business, it was brutal because we had all these things that were working, and we had to go all the way to the core and reimagine it from an AI-native lens.

And probably the biggest difference for us was that up until that point, Motion, you could think about as a data visualization product that was meant to help visualize data for creative people. But our system didn’t actually understand anything about the data. Like we were basically blind to it, but we would help you visualize your own data in a way that was very productive and collaborative between your growth team and your creative team.

And if we wanted to be helpful from an AI standpoint, that was basically a really critical problem to solve, is that all of this data needs to be processed in a way that we can be helpful to our customers about their own data, but in a way that they can kind of leverage AI for. And so it’s just the type of thing that you don’t solve on the edges. Like it really does need to like all the way to the core and reimagine.

So, it was kind of painful, but when you have clarity that a thing must be done, it really helps. I think the thing that’s really challenging for CEOs is when you’re not sure, when you have hesitation, like, should I do this? Should I do that? That becomes really tricky, but it’s almost like even the most difficult thing, if you have certainty that this is the right thing to do, it actually makes sense, like, yeah, the CEO job is hard. Like, you get punched in the face every day. It’s like all of that is like, you know, part of it. But if you know where you’re going, then it’s doable.

And so, like on this one issue, I felt like, you know, this is crazy. It’s really difficult, but there’s no question in my mind that this is the right thing. And took us, you know, now probably December last year, we made the decision that we’re completely rebuilding this company from an AI-native standpoint.

Then we just had another offsite a few weeks ago. And we’re like, damn, like we got together in January of this year and basically reinvented the entire company to be AI-native, and the year is not even over yet. And so it was very productive in that sense, but it kind of has to be an all-in decision.

Mark MacLeod:
True. Let me final double click on that. Having been a VC before, I’m just picturing writing the series B check into this proven sausage machine, I think, only to find out, actually, no, we’re not making sausages anymore. We’re making them a totally different way. Can you tell us how you brought your investors along with this?

Reza Khadjavi:
You know, the thing that’s really fascinating is that when I look at our Series B pitch, the vision for the problem that we’re solving for our customers is like completely unchanged. And in some ways, like the problem that we’ve been trying to solve since day one of Motion, it’s completely the same. So I think from that standpoint, we’re very fortunate that we didn’t need to change our market and who we’re selling to and the problem that we’re solving.

So from that standpoint, we feel pretty grounded that we’re still selling to this customer, and this is the problem that they have. It’s just that with this tectonic shift of AI, we are now able to solve these problems in this fascinating new way, so we can accelerate. But oh, by the way, if we don’t do that, we’re gonna die is the kind of trade-off to that.

But, you know, I think it’s like, we had a lot of really good conversations with our investors about it. The interesting thing is that this situation was like an equalizer for everyone. Didn’t matter what stage you were at. And the conversations I had with our investors were that they were worried about the companies that didn’t recognize as fast as we did, that this is existential, and we have to move on it with urgency.

And like, that is actually the signal that investors wanted to see, which was that we had the agility to say this is the most important thing and we’re going to do it. And the companies that were too stuck in the sausage machine were like, wait, you don’t understand, this whole thing is going to change. And so it’s like a false sense of safety that you have. And so that’s the thing to be concerned about.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, a VC never wants you to hedge, right? That’s a bold direction. Whether it’s right or wrong, they want you to be bold.

Reza Khadjavi:
Yeah, I agree with that. Hedging is so tough. Hedging is the most stressful way to run a company, in my opinion, because you’re always hesitating and you’re always unsure, and then things just don’t work out that way.

Mark MacLeod:
Yeah, interesting. Well, Reza, this has been fascinating. I think lots of actionable insights here for folks, particularly anyone who’s feeling a need to pivot these insights around, kind of how we need to bring more consumer tactics into how we market, and just all of your journey with AI. So, I think folks are going to really enjoy this episode. Really appreciate you making the time. Yeah, thanks so much. Take care.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you’d like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacLeod.me, or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod, or X account @markmacleod_, and if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time!