Horizon Development - Making Sense of Automation and AI in Today's World

We have talked a lot about the implementation of automation and ai and how it has integrated with people's business and/or their sales approach in today's world.  This week we are actually talking to someone who makes that happen.  Horizon Development are Automation Experts.  They save businesses time and money with the Website/Application for your business needs. They build systems designed to help your business run better and more efficiently.

Austin Reed and his partner Mateo Neves founded Horizon Development nearly 5 years ago.  Wait till you hear what got them started - talk about one of your all-time best origin stories.  Necessity is the mother of all invention.  

#softwaredevelopment #cybersecurity #ai #automation

Transcript

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Jesse Stakes: Hey, everybody! Welcome to this week's episode of making sense of it all with Jesse Stakes today I have Austin Reed. Austin is the founder and CEO of horizon development. Austin, thank you so much for joining me.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Man.

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Jesse Stakes: So

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Jesse Stakes: I always ask people this, but kind of before we get into everything high level, tell my audience what horizon development does.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, so basically, we do automation solutions for small to medium sized businesses. Our preface is if we can save, you know, a team. Everybody on the team, one to 2 HA day. That's a huge win for us. That's a huge win for the business. So our big deal is like, let's save people time. Let's make things more efficient, and let's make everybody's day to day a little bit easier.

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Jesse Stakes: I I you know it's funny, because I think that the You know AI has become a huge buzzword in the Ca, you know in the business community. And it's like, I feel like everyone's sticking a on on everything. And I but what I feel like is, there's a lot of things that really are not artificial intelligence. They really are just automating processes, automating things. It's not necessarily artificial intelligence. Would I be correct in saying that.

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Austin Reed: I believe. So. Yeah, I mean, connecting all these different systems. I mean, you could think of like Hubspot salesforce with quickbooks and all those things just connecting all that together is all just automation stuff. I mean, even a lot of this generating some certain types of text and things like that and cleaning text or even editing videos, a lot of these AI generated video editors aren't really using as much AI as they're using just

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Austin Reed: algorithmic programming chains right? Not so much any intelligence at all. To be honest.

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Jesse Stakes: So nothing to be afraid of. The Terminator isn't coming to get you. We're just making things easier, more efficient for you and your business.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, basically, just that man. And some of that does include AI, I mean on the customer service end, on the analytical end. You know, analyzing big amounts of data and stuff. But in terms of it, a lot of it's just a really good, well-made system that improves people's lives.

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Jesse Stakes: Awesome, Austin. When do you start? When did you start your business?

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Austin Reed: A little bit over 4 years ago. I think we're getting close to 5 now. Yeah.

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Jesse Stakes: So what what was it at that time 4 years ago? What was it that inspired you to start horizon development.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, so it's this is not gonna be a typical business story at all.

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Austin Reed: we started the company by accident.

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Jesse Stakes: I like those stories.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have a friend. Mateo's our CTO. And my business partner. He's from Brazil, and I got to know him when I lived in Brazil, like I think it was like 7 years ago now, 6 years ago, something like that, and we were really good friends. And then this was in the middle of Covid, fast forward a couple years. He's still in Brazil. I'm in Indonesia, and he got robbed.

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Austin Reed: So he got robbed at gunpoint. They took all of his. They took his laptop. They took all his money for rent and stuff, and in Brazil that's a lot, I mean, even rent is like, I mean, that's a pretty good wage, and he had a good job and stuff. But he had a laptop that he saved up for like 9 months to buy and things. And he was texting me. He was just like really complaining. He's like, yeah, this fucking sucks blah blah blah.

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Austin Reed: And I had this idea because he has a master's in cybersecurity. And I knew he did. Programming and stuff. I was like a text. I'm like, Bro. I have an idea. How about this? Let me send you a couple 100 bucks. Just go get the shittiest laptop you can find on Facebook and let me just sell a website and you'll code it.

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Austin Reed: We'll do that 2 or 3 times, and then we'll get you out of this bad situation. And so I did. It took me like, I don't know, like 5 or 7 days or something to sell the 1st website. And we don't even do that work anymore. We've evolved a lot since then.

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Austin Reed: But yeah, fast forward, we did a couple more jobs. He's like dude. This is like paying way more than the job that I'm currently doing in Brazil, Japan.

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Austin Reed: Then he just like, quit his job. And it was like, Oh, okay, well, I mean, this is the thing. Now, like, we're actually doing this. And then, you know, there was some iterations, you know, we used to work with like only doing websites and like wordpress stuff

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Austin Reed: which we didn't really like. And the clients weren't like what we were looking for and things like that. Then we started working with Django and react. We did a little bit of crypto for a minute. That also we didn't really like. But then we started doing like some. We helped a warehouse, automating their processes importing, you know, their.

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Austin Reed: It was a wholesaler company importing all their products because they get these manifestos in P-d-f's and in excels from all these different suppliers, and we built a whole inventory management system that integrated directly into their site, and it saved them like an ungodly amount of hours of keyboard warriors just manually entering in data. Right?

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Austin Reed: And I was like, Wow, this is, this is cool. And this actually makes like a huge difference. It's not.

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Jesse Stakes: No doubt.

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Austin Reed: Like a website where you're just like, Oh, let's just sell this product, or whatever this actually helps people

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Austin Reed: leverage more time and get more done and freeze them up to do more higher leverage things right? And so that's kind of how we started going into the automation route. And since then I mean, it's history. So yeah.

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Jesse Stakes: Very cool. Well, and you mentioned I mean you just mentioned it kind of in passing there, but I think it bears kind of bringing out to the, to to the listeners attention! You've mentioned that you're in Indonesia and your partners in Brazil.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, yeah, well, not anymore. Like, so now, we're both in Argentina and Buenos Aires. So I'm a digital nomad. I travel a lot. But at that time, yeah, I was in Indonesia, and he was in Brazil. Yes.

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Jesse Stakes: But it. But my point is is that this world has become a much smaller place. You know anybody who's been like myself, where you've been in business in the business world for over 20 years, I mean the you know, things have gone from a local ecosystem to a you know, a geographical ecosystem that really has no boundaries anymore. You can do business with people, no matter where you're at in the world, especially with your with what you guys do. It has a global application, and in your customer set is

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Jesse Stakes: doesn't matter whether whether they're here in the United States where I'm sitting. If they're in Buenos Aires. If they're in Argentina wherever they're at, they're a potential customer for you guys.

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Austin Reed: No, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we try to target Europe and the Us. Most of our clients are from the Us. That's because that's where we incorporate and stuff. But I mean, our employees are all across the world. We've got some guys in Turkey. We have some guys here. We have some guys in Brazil. We have some guys in Africa. You know, we have some guys in the States side to help us out. You know what I mean. So I mean, it's kind of all over the place. Yeah, it's true. It's true.

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Jesse Stakes: So that kind. It's really cool, and it's but and for you know, forgive me if it's an ignorant question. But how did you connect with all of those people like to bring them kind of under your banner, and to say, Hey, want you to work with us? What did that look like.

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Austin Reed: Yeah. So everybody's a little bit different. A lot of the guys that we work with we found on Linkedin. So we have a couple of profiles that we use our project manager and mateos' profile. We use specifically only for finding good talent. And basically, we'll just look up different. We'll post jobs.

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Austin Reed: which is good. But we found a slightly better method, which is, we'll just look up keywords for certain technologies and target them within certain areas, because we found that, like a lot of the guys on our team went to the same university. We found that for whatever reason that university has very, very high quality programmers, which is amazing. So we target that university specifically

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Austin Reed: instead of putting out an ad, because if we put out an ad, we get tons of range of talent, and sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not, sometimes they ace the interview, and then 2 months later, it just doesn't work out. Other times

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Austin Reed: the interview didn't go that. Well, but 2 months later they're amazing, right? It's like really hard to sell. So it's really interesting to find these little culture pockets of people that are really talented because, like minds tend to stick together. And so, if you can find a good pocket of talent which we found a few. We tend to stick to those pockets of talent.

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Jesse Stakes: Very cool, and I gotta imagine it really does. It broadens your scope of customers as well. The more that the more people in the more different and varied locations that you can have.

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Jesse Stakes: the the better it is, as far as being able to access customers. Yes.

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Austin Reed: I believe. Yes and no. A lot of people in the Us. Are of the mindset of everything needs to be done in the us, not everybody. But there is a percentage of people out there, and they are a little bit more close to the idea of hey? Do they speak English like, yes, they do. But is their English good? Yeah. But it doesn't matter, because I'm fluent in Portuguese, and it's my job to make sure that they know what they're doing right. But that scares some people because things get lost in translation.

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Austin Reed: And like, I've experienced that, too, because I mean, I've worked with some

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Austin Reed: teams in like India and Pakistan, and stuff where things did get lost in translation, and and the projects didn't go very well, and that's why we only work with people where we can fully, fluently speak the language with them.

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Austin Reed: and so that, I think, is a key factor. So if we were to take on clients from other cultures, it would either be they'd have to speak Spanish, Portuguese, or English, because those are the languages that we work with fair.

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Jesse Stakes: Well, and I and I think I've I've experienced that just on, you know, not to name names or to, you know, to impugn people's character. But I have had seen. I've seen that firsthand where you've had people in India where they they take money to build a database, build a website.

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Jesse Stakes: You know, they they give somebody something that you know. They take somebody's money. They give them something that looks like looks like a database from the outside. But when you start diving into it, it's almost like they put up a a fake set like, you know, like it's almost like a movie set to where you can't. Really, there's nothing behind it. Once you open the door.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, and I mean, like, not stream India, there's a lot of really talented guys in India.

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Austin Reed: really, really, great guys, some of the best guys in tech are in India right now. That being said, I mean the language barrier does. I mean, even if you have a really good guy, if you can't communicate very well with them, you're not going to get a good result.

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Jesse Stakes: Sure.

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Austin Reed: So communication is is definitely key, and I found that more often than not working with India and Pakistani teams it tends to go towards like a eventually it'll get done, but not necessarily in the best way or the right way. And and projects tend to like.

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Austin Reed: We tend to do patchwork later on on things that we didn't.

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Austin Reed: You know that we weren't aware of? Because, you know, we're not. We're not sitting there behind them, watching them code, right?

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Jesse Stakes: Sure! Oh.

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Austin Reed: So I mean that being said, though, like because of that, we've only limited all of our employees and all of our clients to only Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

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Austin Reed: and we find that that eliminates the lack of communication, because those are languages that I'm fluent in all 3 mateos is fluent in all 3. Our Pm. Is fluent in all of them, as well.

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Jesse Stakes: Very fair. So let's talk a little bit about what you guys offer. I know you're talk. We're talking about automating processes for a business.

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Austin Reed: Yeah.

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Jesse Stakes: Give me an example of some of the things that somebody in a customer of yours. What are they automating? What are they looking? What are you offloading for them? Off of their plate? That would typically be done by somebody at the business which is inefficient. And it's and it's like you said. It's costing people hours of their time.

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Austin Reed: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, so that looks different for every different type of business generally. What we'll do is we'll jump in and we'll automate. We'll

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Austin Reed: well audit and see if there's even a need for us to come in, because some businesses they they

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Austin Reed: what they actually need is just like a couple more hands on deck. Right? They actually don't really need a system.

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Austin Reed: And so every business looks a little bit different. That being said, a lot of the common problems that we find are based around 3 general areas. One is fulfillment. One is sales and one is customer service. When it comes to customer service. Generally speaking, they have a lot of overhead. And it's really just because customers aren't being educated properly on the service or the system.

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Austin Reed: And then training A-i's to be able to handle the input. And I don't mean just like an AI that you text. And you just get pissed like with your bank. Right? You're like, no, I want to talk to a person. This is not solving my problem right, but like one that's actually intelligent enough

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Austin Reed: to give proper feedback and response and understand the problem and give a proper solution to the problem. So really well trained. And there's a big difference between the 2 and a lot of companies get that wrong, they think, oh, well, I already have an AI Chatbot, I'm like, yeah. But how many problems has that AI Chatbot actually saved? Are they still

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Austin Reed: talking to the customer service agent, or are your customers getting mad? Are they churning? You know what I mean? So that's that's 1 thing you wanna make sure, that doesn't happen on the sales side of things.

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Austin Reed: like, if you look in the software sales world, you know the Sdrs, the Bdrs. The ha's right, and a lot of them are limited to how many.

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Austin Reed: So let's let's.

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Jesse Stakes: Real quick before we go any further. You just said 3 acrony acronyms right there. My audience is not going to know what they are, except for a few people. What are what was that you just said.

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Austin Reed: So essentially, all 3 of them. They're sales agents. The Sdrs are generally responsible for setting up the meeting, the initial meeting, the initial call and qualifying the clients. So they'll do messaging or cold calls, or something like that outreach to see if there's a need. And to get someone on the phone. The Bdrs will generally take that phone call and turn that into a close, and then the Aes will actually plan the territory they'll be like, hey? These are the clients that we're going to go after

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Austin Reed: in this term, and they'll do all of the process in between, and train the Sdrs and the Bdrs to be better at their job. Things like that. So think of like a general sales team right?

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Austin Reed: What you're finding, though, is that these guys are limited right now to the amount of outreaches that they can do per day. So if you're thinking like, Oh, I'm going to send out an email to a company, or I'm going to call a company. You have to physically write that email. And how many emails can do right a day. Sure, you're really limited to that. Whereas when you start adding automation and AI and systems into that, all of a sudden, they don't have to enter data into their CRM.

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Austin Reed: Well, that's cool. That's like a good 5 to 15 min per outreach that they're saving. So that's huge.

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Jesse Stakes: Enormous.

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Austin Reed: But you can compound that you can be like, okay, well, how can we increase the volume without decreasing quality? You know what I mean. So we can go in and we can grab all the website text off of all the businesses. We can grab all the Linkedin posts that you've posted in the last 2 months. We can throw that in AI and have it generate a completely personalized email

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Austin Reed: to the person right at scale, that is, 100 relevant to the person, but not only relevant to the person, but it's also meeting them at the right time. So we can take data like, oh, they just got a funding round, or they just made a partnership with XYZ company, or this guy just got promoted. So not only are we hitting them with relevant information. But we're also hitting them at the right time, which a lot of people have trouble hitting them at the right time. Okay.

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Austin Reed: so you couple that together, and then you add volume to that all of a sudden one agent, whereas before maybe he would reach out to 50 or 100 people a day. All of a sudden he can reach out to like a thousand people a day.

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Austin Reed: Right? And not only can he reach out to that 1,000 people a day. But he's organized now. Everything's on point he doesn't have to like. Oh, I missed this meeting, or I flubbed up this data because I forgot to enter this in, or I entered it in wrong. That doesn't exist anymore.

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Jesse Stakes: Yeah. And I'm sure that there's a lot of people listening to this. And and if they haven't, haven't looked at incorporating artificial intelligence or automation into their processes. Some of this makes your head spin the 1st time you hear it. You're like.

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Austin Reed: Sure.

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Jesse Stakes: I mean, it's such an exponential increase in the productivity or the potential productivity that you have at least the outreach part of it. I mean, you can't get. You can't get somebody to say yes, but you can absolutely give them the opportunity to say yes or no through automating your processes.

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Austin Reed: Oh, absolutely. And you know, I mean, that's probably a more complicated example. A more simple example, I mean is just simply how you guys manage your files day to day. Right? So are all your files being saved in the same drive. And that's a very simple thing. You can think about it. But let's say Sally gets sick on Tuesday, and she emailed it. And it's buried in your email. But you never.

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Austin Reed: It's like, never got notified, or something else is. Communication is really big. Making sure you have a closed loop. So like you ask somebody to do something. They haven't responded. Well, they're already working on it. But you don't know, because they didn't tell you right, or maybe it's already done, and they uploaded it to the drive, and they expected you to check, but you didn't, and you didn't get a notification from it right? And so, having systems and processes in place for those mechanisms within a company can help

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Austin Reed: eliminate a lot of confusion, a lot of double work and push push things forward. And I mean, those are really simple examples. But those are things that happen day to day, and even some of the larger companies.

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Jesse Stakes: No doubt. Well, I got you're you're not the only company that's doing this, or a lot of people that are trying to dive into this space right now, who? Who is your biggest competition?

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Austin Reed: I mean tines. Bro. Tons. I think out the gate, I mean clay is pretty big competition for us, just because they make it easy for businesses to be able to do it for themselves.

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Austin Reed: And and that kind of eliminates the need for an automation agent to come in and do things for them.

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Austin Reed: But then you got bigger companies like oracle and sap, and things like that. Any company that does an Erp system or a CRM system is pretty much in direct competition with us, because a lot of those systems are some of the stuff we build to save time because they're old and clunky, and there's better ways of doing things.

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Jesse Stakes: No doubt. Do you feel like I like in in the past, when I've when I've

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Jesse Stakes: been involved with sales that go into automating a process, or or, you know, outsourcing a process sometimes that the biggest competition that we had was people just keep continuing to do it themselves. But I feel like I feel like at this point in time, though you're talking about

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Jesse Stakes: th, the an expotent, exponential return on productivity, that if they decide to do it themselves. I mean, it's it's really, it's. It's such a great difference in the amount of that you can get done in a day when you incorporate this technology.

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Jesse Stakes: Do do you feel? Do you still see people pushing back, saying, I'm just gonna continue to write my own emails, or I'm just gonna continue to do my own customer outreach? Or or is that something that it's really a an objection that's kind of been handled just by just putting, you know, putting forth your results for your previous clients.

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Austin Reed: Oh, I mean, we see it all the time. One big thing we see 2 big situations that happen a lot is one is like you've got an old mom and Pop Company, and they bring on the son, and the son is now taking charge, and the son wants to make a bunch of changes. But the older guys in the business are very resistant to that. They're like, we've been doing it this way for this long. We don't want to do it, or whatever, and so they kind of like hold the boat back right.

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Austin Reed: The other situation we find is like when we get into like slightly bigger companies. When we get to like 20 plus employees, 30 plus employees up to medium and large size businesses.

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Austin Reed: they already have systems they've been using for years. They've been paying this thing for years. So for me to get jump in and be like, Yo, yeah, we're going to change the system and the way your employees operate day to day. That's something they have to roll out to 30, 50 people or more right? And that's a big change, and that can be very jarring for a company. Right? So it really, I mean, yes, there is a lot of resistance there, but it's also like. Well, the more you cling to these old

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Austin Reed: systems and these old ideas that I mean, the more you'll slowly fall behind with the new technology and the way things are going.

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Austin Reed: because now a lot of companies, they can't succeed without having a small dev team on their on their side every day.

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Austin Reed: and they need a system that grows with the company. And that's what a lot of companies they think they can just buy a thing, and it works forever. But it doesn't work like that in 5, 7, 10 years. It's obsolete. Your competition's already doing something way better. You're still clinging to this old system. You're going to get left behind.

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Jesse Stakes: Yeah. And that's I mean, it's it's a like, I said. I think sometimes, even when I think about it, it almost makes your head spin, and it almost makes you feel like

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Jesse Stakes: you know, it's it's

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Jesse Stakes: in the past. People have always said it's kind of like, well, if you're trying to buy something new all the time. It's like keeping up with the Joneses. But it really isn't that anymore. We've gotten to this. We've gotten to this point in our like, as far as techn like technological efficiencies to where it truly is.

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Jesse Stakes: Th, there's something better that has come out year over year over year over year. And we and we're and and it's true development. It's truly something better. It's a better mouse trap. It is not just. It's not just the new, you know, it's not just the the next iteration of a video game, or the next iteration of a pair of shoes or anything else. It is, it is truly better technology that helps you drive efficiencies in your workday. And to make you more profitable.

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Jesse Stakes: more, you know, more efficient. With your staffing. I mean, there's so many benefits to incorporating this technology into your day, into day, into your daily workflow. It's it really is. You're making a mistake. If you're not looking into it right now.

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Austin Reed: Oh, absolutely a lot of a lot of people like

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Austin Reed: when you're a small business, and you start out with a system. The system that you use as a small business is not the same system that you need when you become medium sized right? And so a lot of people get stuck in that. Another thing is is like when they have a lot of data

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Austin Reed: in the system they're like, Oh, but I don't want to move all this data out of my CRM blah, blah, blah! There's ways of doing that. But if you're not gleaming information from that data, too, here's the other side of things, I mean, not only will it automate, but you can actually.

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Austin Reed: for example, with customer service, if you have data upon when people are messaging and what their most common problems are. You can schedule your employees differently and actually get some

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Austin Reed: people to have more time off. And things like that, based on the demand needs, like you can say, Hey, Tuesday, at 6 o'clock to 9 o'clock is my most busiest hour. How do you know that? Well, because the data is there? Right? But if you don't have a system in place to be able to look at that, then it's not going to help you. And that's something that AI can predict, too, because it's not only on a weekly basis or a monthly basis, it's on a cyclical basis.

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Austin Reed: A lot of businesses are very cyclical year over year. And so we find that, like a lot of the companies we work with, not only are we going in and we're automating stuff. But we're also going in. And we're taking large data sets. And we're predicting making prediction models of like, Oh, hey, this is what aircraft valuations might look like next March.

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Austin Reed: based on the previous 20 years of data that we have. You know what I mean. And having that type of data, I mean there's all kinds of things you can do with that, you know. No doubt.

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Jesse Stakes: It's inval, it's invaluable. It's crazy. Probably this. This answer for this question probably speaks for itself. But when you're looking at future demand for your services, and like how fast this, how fast your industry is growing! What are you seeing.

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Austin Reed: I see demand is very, very high, but I see that people are very resistant. A lot of people are scarred by previous

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Austin Reed: previous experiences. A lot of people like I said, are resistant, clinging to their older systems. And it's really hard. So I see big companies actually getting smashed by smaller companies. I mean, just sales team like

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Austin Reed: you could have a small 3 person sales team smash a 20 person sales team right now. Why is that possible. Well, because the 20 person sales team is just so clingy to these old systems that it's not happening. But that's good because it's going to change the landscape of now. All of a sudden, the underdogs can compete with with the bigger guys, just because technology has advanced so much so quickly

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Austin Reed: that that you know, it's absolutely astonishing. And we find that everybody needs it. Across from the little guy to the big guy. I mean, even the solarpreneurs like automation for them is a huge deal. I mean, if you're working yourself for yourself.

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Austin Reed: You know, saving 1 HA day of your time to do something else is a big deal that's.

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Jesse Stakes: No question.

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Austin Reed: And you multiply that across like a big company. Well, if I can save 20 min of everybody's time on a 200 person team. That's also a really big deal. If you really add it up.

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Jesse Stakes: No doubt. I think people are going to hear this. They're going to be intrigued. They're going to be interested if they want to learn more, and if they'd like to have a conversation with you or your team about doing business with you guys, what's the best way they can find you.

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Austin Reed: Yeah, absolutely. So just go horizon dot dev.

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Austin Reed: just type that in your browser. And that's how you'll find us. I have been posting a lot of Youtube videos lately on how to do a lot of this stuff yourself for some smaller companies and some medium sized teams. If you guys want to integrate some stuff like, I've got some cool stuff on Youtube.

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Austin Reed: But yeah, just reach out there on Linkedin. It's fine.

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Jesse Stakes: Awesome, Austin. I learned a lot, you know. It's just like anything else. You dip your toe into something you know enough to be dangerous. So I look forward to continuing to talk. And and thank you so much for joining the show and and educating my audience on what you guys are offering.

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Austin Reed: I appreciate the opportunity. Man.