[00:05:14]
And yeah, Now I've just been carrying that throughout. So yes, now it is carried, but accidental at first.
[00:05:21] Josh Sharkey:
Ok. Let’s talk about Star Toilet Paper because it's a smart idea just for the audience. It's basically like advertising on toilet paper. I mean, I don't know, maybe that's. not novel and it's happened before, but I was, you know, I, I just literally, you know, we Googled Jordan Silverman and then actually it didn't pop up.
[00:05:39]
It was, I think my assistant's a little bit of digging on your, some other places to find it, but why isn't this a thing, right? Every public place you go to should have advertising on the toilet paper because you're guaranteed to see it. I think, I think people look at their toilet paper. I don't know.
[00:05:52] Jordan Silverman:
Listen, like I'll give you the whole backstory. So I went to, I went to University of Michigan and like, I was literally just in the bathroom at the library. It's like sitting there. And like I'm sure most of us just reading my phone and sometimes there's posters for us guys a lot of times like when you go to stadiums or something there's things about the urinal that like a bar or something so the idea to send me like it's a captive audience and like nobody's really trying to do something here so the idea was really simple like People read and want something to do in the bathroom and can we give it to them?
[00:06:24]
So yes, is the answer. Star Toilet Paper started off, it evolved, but it started off super simple of ads on toilet paper. That's it. Why is it not a thing? We had two things that kind of stopped us and we can dive deeper into it, but like number one was not everyone wants printed toilet paper, which totally makes sense.
[00:06:43]
Like we had a lot of people worry about like, is this safe? And I use this. Oh yeah, that's true. Yeah. Okay. And then the second thing is like. It's hard to manufacture, but the toilet paper industry as a whole is like very geared towards maximum quantity versus high quality product that is customized.
[00:07:03] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, it's so funny how, you know, by the way, We don't need to spend a ton of time on your toilet paper company for when you're in college.
[00:07:10]
I just thought it was fun to talk about.
[00:07:13] Jordan Silverman:
It taught me a lot and it like led me to where I am. So I like the background.
[00:07:16] Josh Sharkey:
That's why these things are important as you know, just to sort of wind up a little bit. I first met you when you were the VP of customer success, or maybe you weren't even that yet, you were, but you were running customer success at a company called MarketMan.
[00:07:28] J
And, you know, we were just starting meez, and I don't even know how we got connected. Because we were talking to customers and they were using You were an initial customer of MarketMan. That's right.
[00:07:39] Jordan Silverman:
That's right. You guys were MarketMan customers. I was, this was really early in the MarketMan days where I was director of CS, which basically meant I spent half my time being a director and half my time being a CSM.
[00:07:51]
And I was your account manager.
[00:07:53] Josh Sharkey:
Oh yeah, I think I was testing it at MarketMan and one of the brands in the last company was running Aurify. Yep. I forgot about that. Wow. Okay. Pre meez. That's not actually how we started. We talked then, but you were selling me. Correct. A hundred percent. Or at some point. I think I probably didn't even remember.
[00:08:08]
Probably. The interactions. Yeah. But then, But, you know, as I was launching meez, I don't remember how, but we started talking maybe about integrations or something like that. And you were just, and still to this day, have been the most proactively helpful person I've ever met. Like, just going out of your way to help and going out of your way to ask questions and to just sort of dig into what we were doing.
[00:08:34]
Even though, you know, theoretically, some of the things that we were doing were kind of competitive. And I think that's when I knew right away, okay, one, this guy's awesome, two, very clearly an entrepreneur. I had no idea that you had started other companies. And, but I knew like, oh, this guy's probably going to start something at some point just because you had that, you know, you had that approach and that autonomy.
[00:08:57]
Yep. Which I love about like entrepreneurship is like, it's somewhat innate, you know, but you started this company, this toilet paper company, and it's so funny, right? Like the, the, the nuance that you don't think about when you start a company, like everybody says, Oh, it's such a good idea. But then you find all the shit, all the things that make it really hard.
[00:09:17]
And I'm sure you're finding that now with. The company we're here to talk about mostly, which is your new AI based property marketing company. But, but anyways, like what were the biggest takeaways from that company you started in college that have stuck with you to this day?
[00:09:32] Jordan Silverman:
So I think like the first thing is listen to customers.
[00:09:36]
So I have a very distinct memory of We were doing Star Toilet Paper and we went to a movie theater chain and we had this movie theater chain, like pretty big chain that was like, love the idea. And they said, okay, we want to do this, but instead of printed toilet paper, we want printed paper towels. Can you guys do it?
[00:09:55]
Technically? Yes. Could do it. But in my head, I was just like, no, we are a printed toilet paper company. That's what we did. I said, no. So I think the first thing that it taught me was like, Focus on the problem you're trying to solve, not the solution, right? So the problem I was trying to solve at start toilet paper was in digital age, it's getting harder and harder to reach people.
[00:10:19]
And this was 2011, 2012 at this point, right? So it was as digital as it is today, but like, it was getting harder and harder to reach people. And I knew that there was a captive audience there and I should have just been focusing on the problem, not the solution. I think that's carried with me today. The second thing that it really taught me was.
[00:10:37]
Hard work. Like I remember when we were doing it, I said, all right, here are the eight companies I want to work with. And I literally went door to door to those eight companies in Ann Arbor. I all going to sign up. I think I spoke to two people out of the eight and they both said no to me. And like, it was just like, Whoa, this is going to be a lot harder than I expected it to be.
[00:10:58]
So I think the two main things I learned and I still carry with me today are listen to customers and. It's never as easy as you think it's gonna be. It's almost always harder.
[00:11:08] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, yeah, I almost feel like that's, first of all, I totally agree. I almost feel like the, I mean the hard work is, Everybody, of course, no matter what you do, if you don't work hard, and that doesn't mean you need to work hard 24/7 every day, but you need to work hard when you're working, I feel like what you're talking about is more the grit and perseverance, you know, when you start anything you start, and that's why I always tell people whenever I hear someone say, there are other people doing this, or, you know, I have this idea, but everybody has this idea, I'm like, none of that matters, because I'm The reason why most companies don't get started is because you have to get over the first hump, and that is so friggin hard.
[00:11:46]
I remember when we started meez, you know, and I have this like vision of like, why the heck are we doing, you know, all this work on Google sheets? Why is everybody doing their own formulas? Why, you know, why are we putting videos here and all this? Like, this is insane. And I was like, this is obvious, right?
[00:12:02]
Everybody just kind of like love that we've created this new thing. No, everyone's like, no, I do it this way. I've been doing it this way forever. And I'm very particular. And, and all they had for a year or two years, three years before we, you know, actually went live was every reason why we shouldn't do this.
[00:12:20]
And You know, there was every reason to just not start or not continue. And that's, that's the beauty of when you like start a business, right. Is like getting past that. I mean, it only gets harder, right. But, but that part is one of the hardest parts.
[00:12:34] Jordan Silverman:
I'm a big baseball fan. So I like the movie field of dreams and the whole premise of field of dreams.
[00:12:37]
Like if you build it, they will come. And like, I think that's, I think a lot of people in software think about that, right? Like, Oh, it's a freemium product. I'm just going to offer freemium and everyone will sign up. And like, No, like just because you have a great product doesn't mean that's how you fill top of funnel.
[00:12:52]
And I think that's like the hardest thing is just how do you get people to know about it? How do you get people to change how they do things today? So much of what we do, and this is what you're talking about, Josh, is change management. And especially in the restaurant industry. Nobody wants to change.
[00:13:08]
It's such an old school industry, and that's part of why I love it. But it's so hard. It's hard to break through.
[00:13:14] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. Yeah, it really is. You have to have the delta between the value they're getting before they use your product and then the after. Needs to be far greater than the value plus all the energy it takes to change.
[00:13:29]
And I think that's, that usually gets, that gets missed. I promise we're going to talk about Starfish cause I, cause I actually have a bunch of questions as well. I'm super interested to learn selflessly about a few things, but before we do, so you ran customer success at MarketMan. And I think a lot of people, including me when I first started, was like, what the fuck is customer success?
[00:13:48]
What does it even mean? Like, I know customer support. I know sales and account management. It's kind of a new thing. You know, the company Gainsight, you know, brought it to, More of a sort of ubiquitous thing, but what is customer success and why should we talk with the restaurants? Like what, why should they care about it?
[00:14:04]
And what should we expect from customer success in a tech company that's selling to the restaurants?
[00:14:10] Jordan Silverman:
So it's funny. So it was building Star toilet paper, rented the issues I had talked about before, shut down the company. And I was CEO, like, I didn't really know what I wanted to do next, but I was like, I like talking to people.
[00:14:23]
I like building relationships, like, let me get into sales. So after, after StarTP, I went to a company that was a social monitoring and listening company, and I basically ran the sales team there. So I ran inbound sales, outbound sales as the VP of sales, and like, it was great. But I realized I got into sales to build relationships with people.
[00:14:44]
And I've always been SMB in mid market SaaS, SMB mid market tech and small business, medium sized companies. And when you do sales, you don't build relationships, you sell them and then you move on to the next one and you sell them and you move on to the next one. So that's really what drove me to customer success because customer success, your responsibility is to take your client from a blank account, either their credit card, they have a blank account to achieving their goal.
[00:15:15]
So every single customer is either paying you with time or money for a specific reason. It's your job as customer success to Get them to that very specific outcome in the fastest, painful way possible.
[00:15:31] Josh Sharkey:
So, and I'm going to be careful here to like, make sure this is broad enough. It's, you know, a creative conversation for everybody, but you said paying with time or money.
[00:15:38]
So does that mean that customer success also services folks that are taking a free trial?
[00:15:44] Jordan Silverman:
MarketMan, what we did a lot of was, and I think this is true in a lot of the restaurant industry and just general industry is. When you're a software company, if you're working with a larger brand, chances are they're going to want to do some sort of pilot or trial to make sure that the product works.
[00:16:00]
They're not just going to sign up all 50 or 100 locations at once. So what we did a lot of for customer success was pilots with larger companies where imagine you're running a 50 location pizza chain. They come on, they sign one or two locations or one or a franchise group, they might be paying a very small amount compared to the overall thing, but they're mostly investing their time.
[00:16:22]
That's the main thing you're looking for, because there's so much technology out there that really investing time is sometimes on these pilots even more valuable than the money.
[00:16:32] Josh Sharkey:
You're referring to like when they're doing like a, like a pilot run. Correct. Yeah, you know, and again, this is, it's part of this conversation and I apologize to everybody, it's a little selfish for me and to like, we are, you know what it means, we're, we're far more of like a kitchen company or culinary than we are tech, so a lot of this stuff is, is new to us.
[00:16:48]
I will say that, you know, freemium, like free trials is not something you just decide to just Hey, you can use our product for free. It takes an insane amount of development, like product development and building to get it to a place where like, there's actually any sort of value if you just start using a tool for free, like.
[00:17:04]
You know, for better, for worse, you can't just like not talk to anybody at MarketMan or one of these companies and just go use the product, right? You'll never be able to do anything. That's not the case with meez, but it also then created this whole like, well, then who talks to them? Is it? And so we have a support team that just talks to them on the CS side.
[00:17:21]
And I'm like, yeah, there's thousands of them. And it's an interesting dynamic that we try to figure out in the company of who's best to support them. I am curious, like when you have customer success at a, at, you know, let's just say that, you know, you're at MarketMan, you're going to have it, you know, built in, I'm sure it's Starfish.
[00:17:37]
Does it encompass everything from support, like implementation of the tool to training, to like what all falls into the umbrella of it?
[00:17:46] Jordan Silverman:
The answer to that depends on the stage of the company. So when you're early on, like I'll tell you at Starfish, when we hire our first CSM, first customer success manager, they are going to be responsible for Onboarding, training, customer service, account management, everything.
[00:18:03]
What we did at MarketMan was we basically, when I joined, we hired two CSMs. We had those two CSMs doing everything. So that literally means from the second you sign up from the software throughout your lifetime, you're with one person. And what we did was we identified where were they spending the most amount of time.
[00:18:22]
And at MarketMan, it's an inventory tool. That's onboarding. I'm sure you see that means also like onboarding is everything. If a client gets successfully onboarded, they successfully value, they're going to stay with you for a long time. So we did at MarketMan was we first went, Just from CSMs, onboarding, and CSMs.
[00:18:42]
And then we just kept repeating that process where eventually we added trainers, and customer service agents, and sales people. So, as you grow, everything gets more specialized. Versus like, when you're early on, everyone has to be a generalist.
[00:18:55] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. So, before jumping into Starfish, you've Now I've been sort of servicing the restaurant industry for quite a while through a few companies, meaning you've been selling software to restaurants for a long time to small businesses, you know, as well as like these, you know, multi unit groups, like what's changed?
[00:19:13]
Now you have your own company, right? So you're doing it all. What do you think is the biggest change that you've seen in terms of like the adoption of software in terms of how you talk with restaurants? Just anything you could think of. That's different from what it was when you started this like almost a decade ago.
[00:19:30] Jordan Silverman:
When I was in college, and I think this is like a lot of people, like I was not a chef or anything like you, but like I, every single summer I worked at a country club in the kitchen and I did everything there. And is that for like three or four summers? And I remember very clearly, like we would literally take paper and we would write down what we need and then they would go the next day and we would run out of stuff.
[00:19:57]
On almost a daily basis. We would have to 86 items For the members almost all the time because we just ran out of stuff we're terrible at ordering I think from then to now the last 10-12 years I do think even though Restaurants are not the fastest to pick up technology. The majority of them are using something to help. I mean we were using a freaking cash register There was no toast.
[00:20:25]
There was no square. Like we're using a cash register. I think the biggest thing that's changed is number one, most restaurants are using something to help them from a digital standpoint. And number two, restaurants are much more open to the idea. Like I remember when we first started doing MarketMan and eight years ago, I was like employee seven or eight.
[00:20:45]
Most of the customers that came to us were no, I think like clipboard is okay for me still. I think most restaurants today would realize that they need some sort of Digital presence, whether that be for sales or delivery or back of house, it's been a big shift that the point of sale companies, I think it really led.
[00:21:05]
And then the back of house is followed suit, which is really good to see.
[00:21:08] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, there's definitely been a paradigm shift I've seen of just the, just the openness, the willingness to use new things. Okay. So let's talk about Starfish and I also want to talk about AI in general. And by the way, as we've been talking, I've been doing a little bit of some chat GPT to do some fun at the end.
[00:21:27]
I love it. That sounds great. It's a little surprise. I look forward to it. It's going to be fun. I promise. We've talked about Starfish. You showed me a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know a ton about it other than what I understand is that you can help to sort of discover opportunities for profitability through leveraging AI.
[00:21:43]
So just talk me through the company. I think it's kind of obvious why you started it because this is really helpful for restaurants, but share any, you know, fill in the gaps as well there.
[00:21:53] Jordan Silverman:
I spent seven years at MarketMan. And I mean, throughout that time, I think I joined, we probably had like 25, 30 customers and we scaled to a few thousand customers, right?
[00:22:01]
In my seven years there, it was an amazing journey, but restaurants kept asking us the same two questions. And just to take us back, MarketMan, we worked with one location, basically up to like 250 locations. So not the huge chains, but pretty, pretty good size. And the two questions we kept getting asked were, how am I doing compared to others?
[00:22:23]
And Am I making money? Like, how am I actually performing? And I remember for me running customer success, I always want to say, just look at the data, the data will tell you if you're making money, look at your cost of goods.
[00:22:38] Josh Sharkey:
So when you say making money, I mean, like they didn't, they didn't see the EBITDA of their P&L or they just didn't know if they were making enough money.
[00:22:45] Jordan Silverman:
It's a great question. Most of them knew their top line revenue from the point of sale. And then how much cash they had in the bank, but they had very little understanding of what was happening in between. So they knew if they were making profit, but they didn't really know why they were making profit or how much or how things were coming.
[00:23:02]
And I'm not just talking about like single locations. I mean, I'm talking about chains that like we're struggling to understand. Why aren't they making more money? How can they make more money?
[00:23:11] Josh Sharkey:
Sorry, this might be a dumb question. Is it just that they weren't running a P&L with prime cost and OPEX or to understand the bottom line or was it?
[00:23:19] Jordan Silverman:
I'll tell you a quick story. So one of our first customers that signed up for Starfish, Xlocation, fast food chicken chain connected their QuickBooks online to Starfish, pulled in the data, and it said they lost 50,000 last month as a chain. So I went to the CEO. I said, Hey, I don't know if Starfish is correct.
[00:23:36]
We might have a little bug. Did you guys lose 50,000 last month? And he goes, I don't know. I'd have to ask the bookkeeper. So I think so many of these businesses either rely on their external bookkeepers too heavily or are afraid to actually dig into the numbers because they're not sure what they're looking at or afraid to see what it says.
[00:23:56] Josh Sharkey:
By the way, that's really dangerous if you're relying on your bookkeeper to tell you if you made profit because that's the easiest way for them to just skim off the top. Is the problem more of understanding, you know, four wall EBITDA versus overhead of, you know, you know, your corporate expenses in the entire company or was it, was it not matter?
[00:24:17]
Is this sort of agnostic of whether they're small business or multi location that this problem was, was so.
[00:24:24] Jordan Silverman:
We saw it across the board where a lot of our customers, we get their cost of goods, we get their actual versus theoretical, but then didn't necessarily know how to improve on it and what actions to take to improve.
[00:24:39] Josh Sharkey:
So you saw people really have their actual versus theoretical because I've almost never seen restaurants that have it if they don't have their,
[00:24:45] Jordan Silverman:
I mean, listen, we had, we had thousands of customers, right? So like the adversity is really hard. The thing I'll say is number one, you're selling one to one items.
[00:24:53]
It's a lot easier. Right. So we had a lot of customers that were selling one to one. That's a lot easier. And then number two. Yeah, we had some QSRs that, I mean, they were running consistently below 2 percent variance. I really had a dial in, but no, you're right. The majority have, it's so hard.
[00:25:08] Josh Sharkey:
So does Starfish actually generate a P&L?
[00:25:11] Jordan Silverman:
Good question. So what Starfish does is we integrate into your accounting system. QuickBooks, Zero, Restaurant 365, Net Speed, whatever accounting system you use, we pull out your P&L, and then we're trying to do two things. Number one, and this is what our customers have been liking the most, is on a weekly basis, we email tasks out to our customers, showing them how to lower their costs.
[00:25:38]
And an example of that was when I was visiting a customer last week, their two locations, their uniform costs had gone up significantly. And it turns out when they opened their second location, the uniform company charged them incorrectly. This went on for a year and they had no idea of it until they signed up for Starfish.
[00:25:59]
Starfish gave them a task saying your uniform costs at this location are higher than this location. They shouldn't be. Go reach out to the uniform company. They call the uniform company, talk to them, show them the numbers and Starfish. They got $2,000 check in the mail and 30 day payment terms and lower costs all because of this Starfish task.
[00:26:19]
So it's not just about prime costs. We're really looking at the whole business. The first thing we're doing is bringing in your P&L and then giving you actionable tasks and insights to lower your costs. And second, we're doing, and I think you've probably seen this even back in your restaurant days is.
[00:26:38]
As you get to multiple locations, comparing location versus location gets really hard. What most multi units do is do something like QuickBooks, export the data from QuickBooks into Excel, and then manually analyze the data in Excel or Google Sheets. And where it gets hard is a lot of times, and it sounds silly, but you know it's true, there's different chart of accounts at each location.
[00:27:02]
Which makes actually looking at food costs or you or utilities or wages almost impossible. So what we've built at Starfish using AI is basically we can do the chart of accounts for your business. So it's the same across all of your locations. Then all of a sudden, you can look at each location for any time period you want, how much money you've spent, percent of sales, percent of budget, and actually compare each location.
[00:27:30]
For a specific chart of accounts or overall, which is really hard to do today, unless you're using some sort of BI tool.
[00:27:36] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, it's hard to do. I mean, even with the, with the BI tool, if you don't have a way to normalize the, the GL codes and things like that, yeah, it's a pain, it's a pain, but we deal with that on the menu sides where we can show like, you know, the menu cost per location and it's, yeah, when you don't have that, it's a big blind spot.
[00:27:52]
And there's more, I feel like there's more than just. And I want to, I don't want to talk my own book here too much, but you know, you have different sales volumes at every location, right? So like you might have things that are a higher cost that at one location, you actually use a lot more of than another location.
[00:28:08]
It's really helpful to know that the easy example would just be like, if you have a ribeye that location, a. You sell a ton of, and you don't have a great cost on it, the cost is going up in another location, you just don't sell a bunch of it because that area, maybe they're more health conscious and you sell more seafood.
[00:28:23]
It's helpful to know that, right? Because then you can, at the very least, you know you can have a higher food cost at that location than another, and I'm sure that plays into everything on the P&L.
[00:28:32] Jordan Silverman:
We're seeing it a lot where some locations do a lot more delivery than others. And knowing paper costs or takeout costs at one location compared to others is really helpful, especially as you grow, because chances are, when you're adding new locations or new franchises, you're modeling it off of an existing location.
[00:28:50]
And it's really good to know what location to model it off of, not just this generic brand.
[00:28:56] Josh Sharkey:
This show is brought to you by, you guessed it, meez. meez helps thousands of restaurants and food service businesses all over the world Build profitable menus and scale their business successfully. If you're looking to organize your recipe IP and train your team to put out consistent product every day in less time than ever before, then meez is just for you.
[00:29:16]
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[00:29:42]
Visit www.getmeez.com. That's G E T M E E Z. Dot com to learn more and check out the show notes moving forward, because we're gonna be adding promotions and discount codes so that all of you, lovely and brilliant me podcast listeners, get a sweet deal on me.
[00:30:04]
Yeah. Yeah. So just digging under the hood, like how does the AI do this? And then by the way, I'm just going to, we're going to talk about AI for a little bit. I love it. We haven't talked about it much on the, on the show. So we'll chat about that a little bit, but how does it actually work? Are you using an existing language model?
[00:30:21]
Did you guys build your own model? Are you augmenting a model? How are you actually, you know, taking action on this data?
[00:30:26] Jordan Silverman:
So I'm going to, I'm going to tell the initial story of what I thought we were going to do, and then I'll tell you how we do it today. So I thought it was gonna be pretty easy. This is just a disclaimer.
[00:30:33]
Don't put your data in chat GPT. If you want your data not in chat GPT for the whole internet to eventually see and get trained on if you use their API. So if you use the open AI or cloud or any other API, it doesn't train on your data. That's just like a disclaimer. So what I initially did was I initially basically built like a fake data set for a restaurant.
[00:30:56]
I uploaded it into chat GPT and I said like, Analyze it for me. ChatGPT is not great at just analyzing raw Excel data. Like you give it an Excel or a table. It's not great at that. So what we're doing is ingesting the P and L we code in Python. So we're running a bunch of Python scripts on top of the data.
[00:31:17]
We're then feeding the Python API, and then we're getting asks out of it. So what we found was we originally thought we'd just feed the data into open AI. That would be good enough, but we found we had to add a layer on top to help the AI and we're using OpenAI right now to basically figure out what to say and what to do.
[00:31:41] Josh Sharkey:
Got it. And that data is secure as long as you're not going direct to the UI and chat to the team. Correct.
[00:31:47] Jordan Silverman:
Yep. So through the API, it is secure. They don't train on it. They don't use it. It's still owned by the customer.
[00:31:55] Josh Sharkey:
That's really important to I know as well. So today, that's what you're doing, right?
[00:31:59]
You're sort of taking this P&L data, you're training, you're throwing some, some scripts, you know, at the API that goes to chat GPT. And then you're spitting out kind of, you know,
[00:32:09] Jordan Silverman:
Tasks, action items. Yeah.
[00:32:11] Josh Sharkey:
What are you planning for down the road? What's, what's in your road?
[00:32:13] Jordan Silverman:
So. A couple of things. So number one is most restaurants just operate on a hunch. This is what my food cost should be. This is how my labor should be. We will have enough data soon where we can actually benchmark you against local competitors, peers to see what is your food cost. Should be based on your region, your type of restaurant. What should your utilities be based on those things?
[00:32:37]
So the first thing that we want to start doing is real benchmarking. We have benchmarking today in the product, but it's not, it's more directional than perfect. But I think with more data and more customers, we'll be able to do really good benchmarking. I don't know if you saw that toast just rolled out benchmarking recently where they can say like, this is how much lattes costs in the region.
[00:32:54]
And I think we can do that in the cost side really nicely. Second thing that we want to start doing is much more in depth analytics on more than just your P&L. So your P&L is really good because it is the system of record. But when it comes to things like labor and inventory, it's mostly just line item data.
[00:33:16]
So our vision of what we want to do is just get as much data from all your different systems as possible, run AI on top of that, so you don't have to do manual data analysis anymore. So again, I come from MarketMan, imagine using inventory software like MarketMan, chances are that there's some sort of price change report or there's a purchase report where you can see how prices are going up and down.
[00:33:41]
Historically, you've had to manually look at that. If you run AI on top of that, it can really easily show you when the price went up, why the price went up, and what to do about it, and how it affects you.
[00:33:53] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, totally. We're doing a lot of the same. It's such a cool opportunity that's coming our way. Yeah.
[00:33:57]
Absent of having the actual real recipe data, it's very, it's, it's really impossible to get anybody's real food cost. I think that's the, the real blocker for most people, because, you know, you can't just count your ingredients, you gotta, you know, you gotta, you know, Count all the stuff in your walk-in, but there's, there's so much opportunity there.
[00:34:13]
Are there, you know, independent of what you're doing with Starfish AI, are there other things that you're really excited about as it relates to what's happening with AI? In like, not even just like restaurant, you know, yes, there's restaurant operations and we could talk about that, but just generally speaking in your life or whatever, that's, that's really exciting that you're digging into in terms of like using AI.
[00:34:36] Jordan Silverman:
I'll give some personal examples and I'll tell on the business side. So on the personal side, like I have a daughter, she's a year and a half now. And, like, AI has changed the game for me entirely. And, like, the silliest example I could give is, like, I don't know, a year ago, she started getting teeth. It happens, right?
[00:34:53]
So, I wanted to know, what toothbrush should I buy? Instead of reading through, like, ten Google links and tabbing them all out, I can just ask something like chat GPT or perplexity and I can get into perplexity and what it is, but I can just ask an AI. It saves me a tremendous amount of time and I can just go play it.
[00:35:13]
So I think the first thing is on the personal side, like I very rarely Google search anymore. And I recognize I'm probably in the minority when I say that, but like I almost never Google search for something anymore. I always start with an AI engine that can spit out an answer for me.
[00:35:28] Josh Sharkey:
What is perplexity?
[00:35:29] Jordan Silverman:
So perplexity is Google search with AI. So imagine that you type in a question. And again, this example was my daughter just got her first tooth. What kind of toothbrush should I use? And it will actually, instead of giving you links, give you an answer to that with links you can click on for the answer.
[00:35:48]
So it basically said, here's the type of toothbrush you should use. This is why you should use it. And here are a couple of links you can click if you want to go buy it. So helpful.
[00:35:57] Josh Sharkey:
It's cool. I mean, I use it a lot as well. And I actually, like I said, I did something while we were talking that I'm going to show you, but that is fun.
[00:36:04]
I use it, like, with my kids, I use it a lot, like, for a lot of more, just, nonchalant fun. Right? So we'll use, I have the action button on my phone, and we'll just pretend and see how crazy imaginative we can be. And I'm like, Stone, my, my, my kids, I'm like, what kind of picture do you want to see? And my daughter will say, Unicorns.
[00:36:23]
I'm like, Stone, what are they eating? Acorns. Cool. Where are they? They're on a spaceship and then we just got to go through this whole thing and I'm like show me a picture of a unicorn and, you know, and a rhinoceros on a spaceship eating acorns with Daniel Tiger and, and then they see this picture and they're like so excited about it and they get to use their imagination, you know, it's just Dolly and Jackie P.
[00:36:46]
So that's, there's a lot of fun, you know, with, with the kids and of course, we're just asking questions whenever they have a question about like, what's a bobcat? Show me a picture of a bobcat. I do use it a lot for code because I never learned like fully how to code, but I'm learning a lot through GPT.
[00:37:01]
It's also, by the way, like if you ever get stuck on the long, for anybody's doing like Google sheet formulas for PNLs or whatever, hopefully you don't have to do that much longer, but or randoms, like, you don't have to do a lot of modeling for things. I just throw the formula in Google Sheets and say, Hey, I, something is broken and it will tell me and give me, you know, fixes.
And so fast.
[00:37:21] Jordan Silverman:
I want to start writing like a little newsletter that we send to our customers on a weekly basis and I want it to look good, but like, I don't really want to pay for a newsletter service right now. So I just said, like, I just went to chat to you, but you said, this is what I'm looking for.
[00:37:33]
Can you write me custom HTML for it? And it literally spit out perfect HTML, but I can just like throw it into a template and fire off emails from like, I don't know how to write HTML, but I can say like, make the font smaller. It just does it like that. Or like. I can't do that stuff,
[00:37:50]
Jordan. It's it's you know, what's nuts is like when I first started doing this, first of all, I didn't even know like what to do with code.
[00:37:59]
Like where do I put it? So like the first thing I built was I fast a lot. I stopped doing intermittent fasting, but I do like long fasts like five day water fasts. And while I'm fasting, I'm always tracking my my glucose levels and my ketone levels. And then there's a calculation that basically tells you whether you're in ketosis or not.
[00:38:16]
And it's a, it's a, it's basically a formula. I won't get into the details of it, but like I wanted to make this calculate. I didn't want to keep doing this calculation each time on my phone. And so I built a, like a front end calculator, uh, web app of how to calculate my GKI. Like, and so I would like ask ChatGPT to like build this whole thing for me.
[00:38:34]
I kept working on it and I was like, Oh, where do I put this? Yeah. Where do I put it? And then like, explain for me, like, said, I'm using a Mac. It's like, go to your terminal and then do this and then run it here. And I, and I like walk through the thing and I had a couple of questions along the way and it basically like taught me how to build a front end app.
[00:38:51]
And I was like, Hey, I want to, I want to put this button here. I have the, you know, the, the paid version of it, like that was like a year ago on three. Like,
[00:39:01] Jordan Silverman:
I don't even know what it would do now. It's pretty insane.
[00:39:03]
I think that's what's super exciting is like truly democratizing software for everyone.
[00:39:08]
Yeah. Only like big companies would have access to these kinds of tools that would let you do that. And like, now me and you as consumers and small businesses can do these kinds of things that they've never had access to, which is so cool.
[00:39:23] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, and there's also, I don't know how much you can trust it, but like I'm working on some real estate stuff right now.
[00:39:28]
And I threw a, a lease document in there and I just asked it a bunch of questions. And I said, can you tell me five things that seem aggressive on this thing? And I want to make sure I protect this. And it, it's, it's insane. I mean, I'll still run it by an attorney, but like I'm now I'm saving a bunch of time.
[00:39:45] Jordan Silverman:
And the thing that like, I try to always remind myself and other people is like, we're in the second inning of AI, if not the first inning, like it is not perfect today. It hallucinates it does, but we are still so early on. That just think about how good it's going to get and like that's the exciting part Tell us about what can it do for you today?
[00:40:06]
It's more about like can you find cool things for today? And then just think about what this is going to get to
[00:40:12] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah
[00:40:14]
All right. So while we were talking I went to ChatGPT And I asked it a couple questions related to Starfish So I asked it to make me a funny tagline for Starfish and then You And some other taglines, which I'm going to go through and then some limericks as well.
[00:40:31]
That's awesome. I love it. So I'm going to share with you what just happened. All right. So I said, here's a company called Starfish. Here's what it does. Like, give me a tagline. Actually, I asked for five examples. I picked the best one. Five examples of like funny taglines that are witty. I'm going to read this to you.
[00:40:47]
Are you ready? Alright, turn your dough management into Doughmanation with the power of AI and Starfish.
[00:40:54] Jordan Silverman:
Pretty good. It's actually not bad, Burpee. It's pretty good. It's actually not bad. I might steal that. Like, I'm imagining like, I can target some pizza companies with that kind of slogan on social. I like that. Or go to pizza expo with it.
[00:41:06] Josh Sharkey:
Oh yeah. That's good. Then I asked it. I would like a tagline in the style of Taylor Swift. Okay. For Starfish. This is all for Starfish. Now, I don't know Taylor Swift's songs, I'm sorry, I'm starting to try to learn them, but I, so I don't know if this is actually a song, I think it is.
[00:41:24]
The line is, we are never ever getting back to low profits. With Starfish, we're only going up. Clever! I don't know if Yeah!
[00:41:34] Jordan Silverman:
I'm not gonna
[00:41:35]
pretty sure that's I'm not gonna sing it, but yes, we're never ever getting back together. Oh, there's a Taylor Swift song called We Are Never Getting Back Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:41:42] Josh Sharkey:
Okay, got it. Alright, and then I asked it to Jay Z, I want to say, I want a tagline in the style of Jay Z. I'm expecting a lot of Z's. Nine to nine problems, but A. I. ain't one. Starfish comes in, profit's begun. It's Not bad. I mean, I think the first one was probably the best. We're gonna, okay, we got two limericks and then we're done here.
[00:42:01]
I said, okay, now I want a limerick that talks about Starfish, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Okay. Are you ready? Starfish arrived on the scene where data and dining convene with insight so deep, competitors weep as profits grow lean and keen. You can have these by the way.
[00:42:21] Jordan Silverman:
These are impressive, like, it's just funny because like, I, I use AI in a very similar way, like when I'm writing a blog post, I like say like, can you redo this sentence and make it funnier?
[00:42:33] Jordan Silverman:
Or like, this is great.
[00:42:35] Josh Sharkey:
I'm telling you, like, first of all, this, turn your DOE management into DOMINATION with the power of AI and Starfish. It's good, I agree.
[00:42:44]
It's just insane that, like, I mean, whatever, those are, those are, those are pretty good. But what's crazy is, like, how long did that take you? Oh, I was talking to you while I did it.
[00:42:52] Jordan Silverman:
Isn’t that crazy? Like, so quickly.
[00:42:54] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah. Years ago, that would be a room full of marketing and branding people and they'd have 12 ideas and ruminate on it for 12 weeks.
[00:43:03] Jordan Silverman:
This is what you're paying Jon Hamm a lot
of money for.
[00:43:05] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, as opposed to zero personality and issues with, you just like, give me an example.
[00:43:12]
Cool, I'll take that one. I mean, I'm probably, that's very reductionist, I'm sure there's a lot more that goes into that stuff, but anyways. I appreciate it. Thank you. Send those to me. I'm gonna use some.
[00:43:22] Josh Sharkey:
I will. I will. What makes you really angry? Like what makes you like blood boiling angry?
[00:43:27] Jordan Silverman:
I think like on the micro level. One of the things that I struggle with in the restaurant industry is going to a meeting and having someone no show me. That's the micro level. And like, I think anyone in the restaurant industry or any sales job has like been there where it's over zoom or virtual. It's one thing, but like when you go somewhere in person and spend the time, like deep breaths are necessary.
[00:43:50]
You know what I mean? I think on the macro level. I think in today at 2024, like you need to be willing to try new things. I think people that are just like so stuck in their ways that they're refusing to listen and try new things really makes me upset. And it's not even for my benefit. It's for their own.
[00:44:13]
And like, I'm not saying that on the Starfish side, I'm saying in general, like You need to be willing to try new technology. You need to be willing to try new marketing to acquire customers. You need to be willing to try different loyalty things. Like just try different things. Like want to run a better business than you run today.
[00:44:29] Jordan Silverman:
Like don't just be so stuck in the ways and don't think that okay is great.
[00:44:33] Josh Sharkey:
So essentially being close minded and a lack of respect.
[00:44:38] Jordan Silverman:
Yes.
[00:44:39] Josh Sharkey:
Got you. How do you feel like you can sort of manifest that as values in your company today with your team?
[00:44:45] Jordan Silverman:
First thing is like just always show up, like just always show up, always try new things, like if you have a meeting, show up to the meeting, be prepared.
[00:44:54]
If you're not, that's okay. Just say like, Hey, can we push it to tomorrow? Like, that's not a big deal. And then I think the second thing is failing on the micro level is totally okay. Like falling down and getting back up when you're running a restaurant or a startup or anything is good. Like try a new special, try a new feature, try a new email tagline, try different things.
[00:45:16]
And if you fail, just Get the data and try something different. That's what we're trying to manifest here is how can we show up for work every day, really energized, knowing it's going to be an uphill battle as a startup. And then number two, how can we try different things, recognizing that not everything's going to work?
[00:45:36] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, you know, something I have a lot of these things on my wall, and one of them is how are you complicit in the environment that you've, that you're so complaining about, which, you know, I think about all the time, and I think as it relates to us as leaders or anyone that has a, as a team, I totally agree You know, it's so frustrating when people don't try, or people, you know, ruminate for too long, or, you know, are just, aren't taking that leap, or aren't, you know, speaking up, and I think that the majority of the time, that, I mean, there is some personality things there, but regardless, Like, have you created an environment where people feel comfortable failing and people comfortable, you know, speaking up?
[00:46:19]
And that's hard and it takes work, but it's for me It's like rewarding and knowing that like even if that stuff's happening It's something that's my like on me that I have to figure out how to you know Get better at to like create that environment because yes so often it's funny how the things that bother us are at least in some way in our control, you know,
[00:46:41] Jordan Silverman:
Yeah, I just read a book called Relentless by the guy who trained like Michael Jordan and Kobe and Dwayne Wade and all these guys.
[00:46:49]
And he was talking about how like the one thing they all had in common was just like, I messed up. It was my fault. Here's what I'm gonna do to move forward. It was never like reflecting on to someone else, it was never trying to say like, well here's what happened, here's why I messed up, it was just like, take it, you messed up, here's how you move forward.
[00:47:07]
And like, I think that's, can resonate in every industry.
[00:47:11] Josh Sharkey:
To be honest with you, once you get past it, it feels really good to be able to identify and just call out that you fucked up. Because then it's off you, right? It's like, okay, I said it, I screwed up, it's on me. But now I can go and fix that. Whereas, otherwise, it's just something that you have to stew on.
[00:47:31]
Speaking of books, are there other books that you, that you like or that you recommend to people?
[00:47:35] Jordan Silverman:
When I was running my first company, I just read like business book after business book after business book. And I just like Got burnt out of business books. So now this is super nerdy to me, but I basically have a rotation.
[00:47:44]
I do fiction, business, biography, fiction, business, biography. I just try to rotate to keep myself fresh. So on the fiction side, I'm on an Ayn Rand kick right now.
[00:47:56] Josh Sharkey:
Oh, interesting. Wow.
[00:47:58] Jordan Silverman:
I never read it before. I'm on Fountainhead now, so I read Atlas Shrugged, which is a middle book as well, Anthem, and then I'm on Fountainhead now.
[00:48:06]
On the biography side, Living with a Seal. It's Jesse Etzner and David Goggins, like, my favorite book. It is, and like, I listen to the audiobook, and he, Jesse, narrates the audiobook. It's awesome. What a funny story that is a wild story. Like, yeah, the whole idea is crazy. So I'd say those have been, like, what I've been reading recently.
[00:48:30] Josh Sharkey:
Yeah, for so many years I would just never read fiction other than historical fiction Like I'm a big fan of James Mishner and and things that things like that But recently I've tried to throw some into the mix like I and to be honest I'm I grew up my parents really loved science fiction and I was just not into it, but I started reading Isaac Asimov I'm like man, this is pretty interesting right now.
[00:48:53]
I'm rereading Benjamin Franklin's biography by Good and holy shit, man Benjamin Franklin is, I don't know why we don't talk about this person more often. It's insane, the amount of things. That we have today that he started. Yeah, it's, I mean, the list is insane. You know, he started like the first fire department, the first library, basically the idea of this sort of like non parochial, like, like bringing all of the.
[00:49:22]
Colonies together was like something he was trying to push for years. Idea of uniting the states among many, I mean, the amount of things it's, it's pretty insane what he contributed. And he was such an entrepreneur, but not necessarily like. Capitalistic, but like was certainly wealthy. Just so many like learning lessons from him.
[00:49:44]
I get envious because he started much earlier in his life. Just documenting heuristics and ways to live in his like 20s. I mean, maybe things are different back there, but yeah, I love Bradford as well, because there's so much you can learn about not just to apply to business or life, but everything.
[00:50:00] Jordan Silverman:
I have to read that one. I haven't, I haven't read that one. I read the Elon Musk one recently, but I haven't read the Ben Franklin one.
[00:50:05] Josh Sharkey:
The LMS one is great too. Like, both aspirational
[00:50:08] Jordan Silverman:
and like, this is exactly what I don't want to be at the same time.
[00:50:12] Josh Sharkey:
It is, I mean, it's such a great example of, you know, things are not binary and there's so much nuance.
[00:50:20]
There's so much incredible things that he has done, but he also has been pretty terrible to some people. And like, you know, like there, there's not like a, it's not black and white, you know? And that's why that's important, right? Just because it's very easy to, to just completely polarize and just look at someone as evil or not evil.
[00:50:37]
And there's, there's a big spectrum. Yes. I agree. Anyways, that's enough for us. This was fun. I'm glad we got to catch up. Yeah.
[00:50:45] Jordan Silverman:
Thank you. This is great.
[00:50:47] Josh Sharkey:
Are you, by the way, are you Florida based?
[00:50:48] Jordan Silverman:
Yeah, yeah. I was in, I was in New York, grew up in New York, went to Michigan, back to New York. And then, uh, my wife's been wanting to move down here forever.
[00:50:57]
And I was, uh, very stubborn for a long time, but finally said yes. And, uh, I can't imagine ever leaving. So nice.
[00:51:05] Josh Sharkey:
Right. Well, next time you are up north, let me know and I will let you know down south. So
[00:51:12] Jordan Silverman:
Thanks Josh.
[00:51:13] Josh Sharkey:
All right, man. Appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into the meez Podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, Fresh Daily.
[00:51:23] Josh Sharkey:
For show notes and more, visit getmeez.com/podcast. That's G E T M E E Z dot com forward slash podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you could share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros, and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts. Keep innovating, don't settle, make today a little bit better than yesterday, and remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next time.
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