Running a One-Person, AI-First Marketing Team as a Startup ScalesRunning a One-Person, AI-First Marketing Team as a Startup Scales

Running a One-Person, AI-First Marketing Team as a Startup Scales Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing, sir?

Carman Pirie: I’m doing great. I’m looking forward to today’s conversation.

Jeff White: I think it’s an interesting thing that I think a lot of manufacturing marketers may be dealing with, but maybe without some of the same pressures.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Look, I’m a sucker for a really cool company that’s doing some really cool stuff. And, uh, I don’t know, this company just seems like it’s almost like a tiger by the tail from a

Jeff White: Or a robot…

Carman Pirie: Exactly. I was reading an article about them recently in The New York Times, and it’s just impressive.

So I’m really excited to have them on the show and, looking forward to today’s chat

Jeff White: Yeah, me as well. So joining us today is Carl Standertskjold. Carl is the head of marketing at Inbolt. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Carl.

Carl Standertskjold: Hi, guys. Hi, Jeff and Carman. Thanks a lot for having me.

Jeff White: Great to have you on the show.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, thanks for joining us. Carl, as we get underway, naturally we’re gonna wanna know a lot about you, but I’d love to hear a little bit about the firm first, if you would. Can you introduce us to Inbolt and what you all are up to, in case, the listeners haven’t, been as up to date as we are on it?

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah, for sure. So, basically, industrial robots are blind. They can’t see, they can’t think. And what this means is that they need to be really pre-taught, pre-pre-programmed and, set up with mechanical fixtures and jigs and all that just so that they work really perfectly, on the line and on the station.

This means there’s a lot of extra costs, a lot of deployment, integration, programming time that is spent. So what we do is we wanna make that faster and much more flexible. So we add vision to these industrial robots and some intelligence. So we add a 3D vision camera, and then we have a, AI model that is trained just on the CAD part – a CAD model of the part that it needs to focus on.

So then in five minutes, the robot is able to see the part, and even as it moves, it can adapt to it. So we kind of program the robot so that we take control of it as well, so that it’s able to follow parts in real time and work on them. And what this means is that, if there is ever downtime in an existing sort of robot station, but with InBolt’s, it’ll just keep working and performing.

So it’s increasing uptime and, increasing cycle times and things like that. So it’s really beneficial on all sorts of lines really, but even new ones like moving lines, for example, that are very hard to automate. So if you have like a, an engine hanging on chains and there’s operators tightening and so on, historically that’s been very hard to have a robot do because the part is constantly moving in a different place.

But we’re able to do that. And so also retrofit new stations, we cover both. So that’s basically what we do. We mainly do it for automotive, but we do it for home goods, like white goods, electronics, a bit of aerospace.

Carman Pirie: That’s amazing. Like, the idea of just giving industrial robots vision and then helping them think better, basically. Improving their brain and giving them eyesight.

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah, exactly

Jeff White: And, it’s basically the entire world of manufacturing that needs this.

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah, basically. We started off in the big automotive part, kind of area, but we’re going down into the more precise electronic segment as well. But, there’s really all robots should have vision in a way. So if they don’t, it’s just they’re limited. So we’re trying to, improve the automation side of that.

Jeff White: That article that Carman mentioned earlier as well suggested that it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars every time a robot goes down in a more traditional sense if the part isn’t where it expects it to be or the jigs move or anything like that happens.

So the ROI must be just massive for your customers.

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah, definitely. Especially in some of these big OEMs and these plants that are really high volume business, and every second counts really. So if you’re stopping lines, it really impacts everything that’s going out. I’ve been to these factories to film case studies, and some of them have these huge digital dashboard screens on the wall that’s showing every bit of data, what’s coming in, what’s out, what stock is, this is coming in and it’s…

It has to just be really efficient and running smoothly

Carman Pirie: Hmm. That’s fascinating, Carl. I wonder if you could, tell us about how you ended up there. How did you, make your way to Inbolt? Tell us a bit about yourself.

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah. So, I joined Inbolt last year. It’s, August 2026 right now, and I joined in April twenty twenty-five. I’ve always been working for tech companies and in marketing roles. I started my career in Sony Electronics, but in the professional B2B division. So I was working on segments like cinema, home cinema, video security, technology for universities and offices and things like that.

And then I created a – co-created a startup within that on like kind of smart workplace technology. Then I moved to a late-stage startup called Algolia, which is a French company, that was a double unicorn that was doing AI search for e-commerce. So taking all the data from Walgreens, Lacoste, Gymshark, companies like this, and then making sure that the search experience was as good as it could be and intelligent and optimized.

So I’ve done a bit of hardware, a bit of software, and then I thought, “I wanna get back to mixing the two,” and so joined Inbolt, which is a software company. We might have a 3D vision camera, but at the essence, all our engineers here are really software engineers. I really liked what Inbolt was doing and building.

I saw great potential in it and, so I reached out, decided to join, and that’s a year and a half ago.

Carman Pirie: I don’t think we disclosed this, Carl, as we met earlier, but, this agency is an incredible fan of Algolia as well. We’ve deployed Algolia a ton.

Jeff White: At least a dozen times.

Carl Standertskjold: Oh, really?

Carman Pirie: For anybody out there that is not familiar, and you have an on-site search, experience that you’d like to deliver, I suggest you get familiar pretty

Jeff White: Yeah, e-comm or otherwise.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah, it’s really cool. Carl, I guess it’s just a – I have so many questions. And, your startup background is, obviously, very relevant to Inbolt and as they move towards – I believe they’ve had Series A, now you’re maybe moving towards, a Series B. And of course, at that time in a startup’s kind of evolution, it’s that’s where things are scaling up a little bit more.

Sometimes it seems like they’re moving from a small company to a big company, to put it really quite simply. And I’m really excited today to chat with you about how you’ve thought about that, that path. As we crack open that conversation, Carl, I wonder what would you say is the number one challenge in your mind that you faced in thinking about that growth path?

What do you think is the biggest question mark that you’ve had in your mind about it or potential barrier that you’ve seen to success that you just know you have to navigate around somehow?

Carl Standertskjold: Very good question. Very big question. I’ve never actually thought about the one main sort of like challenge. But if I look back on how I started, the role, and I came in trying to think about, doing an audit of what we had, setting sort of a base layer and structure for building on top for each division of marketing.

Even though I was managing them all, I wanted to make sure that I had the kind of basics in place. What that means is a good tech stack. The website is o-operating well. We can capture leads if we send them there. I’ve got a clear idea of positioning and messaging house and things like that.

But the challenge in terms of scale and growth is mainly a mix of it all. So I would say like coordinating the commercial and business strategy standpoint and understanding how are we gonna grow from a business standpoint. Because at the top of like the kind of pyramid that I create usually in my strategy is what is the business outcome that we want to achieve?

And then I build down under that in terms of the objectives that I want, I think marketing need to deliver on that, and then tactical activities, with goals to hit those objectives. So the challenge is in a scaling up company like this is it’s always changing. So that business objective is like very fluid.

We know we wanna get more sales and so on, but it’s how are we doing that? And that changes how you do marketing. So for example, when I first joined, we were just trying to get into as many like OEMs and plants as possible, but then we realized expansion is super important for us. So instead of just getting that like first logo, now it’s all about, getting that second deployment within that plant and getting to, to twenty plants, within that one manufacturer.

And so for me, the biggest challenge I think was as we shift our business focus, how do we then also ensure the marketing is supporting that?

Carman Pirie: I mean, people probably, some people listening to that may think, “Oh, well, you’re pivoting from a new logo acquisition to land and expand, no big deal.” But I’m sitting here thinking some of the skill sets required on one side of that versus the other are just so incredibly different.

And if you’re in your seat, you have limited resources. You need – you can only hire so many people. You can only do so, so many things. So I can see what you mean about it being a, a challenge to try to map the marketing function to the growth trajectory of the organization and make sure that it’s where, what it needs, what the organization needs at any given point.

It’s real.

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah. Yeah. exactly. And I think, it’s like this new world of how we need to think about the marketing role. It’s really changing. I’m still a one-man marketing organization. I have been for a year, and when I s- just started working, I’ve been working for, over I don’t know, what, 15, 20 years, and it was never like that.

We would have a full team, everyone would be specialized, and the world is changing. And so now you have to be a generalist, and you have to use and be like, AI- first mindset and use all the tools that we have that are now adding a lot of value. For me, it’s now really always thinking in a different way.

So it’s thinking about the structure of what I’m doing and like more systems type thinking as I, I, as I call it, and thinking about all the inputs that I have and then the inputs, the outputs that I wanna deliver. I can explain more on that if you want, but that’s how I’ve had to now start thinking about this.

Jeff White: What’s interesting about that, and we’ve certainly encountered quite a few scaling companies with one person, maybe one and a half person marketing departments, and I think that… I’m wondering as you look at that and as you step back from probably being a bit more of a specialist perhaps in previous roles and you become more of that generalist, is there anything that becomes completely off the table for you?

Like something that you simply cannot do as a single marketer or that you avoid doing that maybe you would want to if you had a larger team?

Carl Standertskjold: That’s a good point because I think I – you should use all these tools as much as you can, and you can connect it. I can connect my Claude and set all the inputs from CRM data to understand all the pain points and all the sales calls and look at the target accounts and create content automatically.

But there’s – I, I still… I’m like old school in the fact that I still believe that there is human judgment that’s needed on specific, sort of topics and human creativity. Even in areas where people think you don’t need that, I think you sometimes do. So for example, at the moment, I spend…

I could try to do it all myself, but I also don’t have time. But I’m hiring two roles which are interesting in what they symbolize in this, because I’m hiring a performance marketing manager because, it’s kind of specialist and I could I can do the basic strategy and I can implement basic campaigns, but to take it to that next level of really, really being targeted and optimizing and really ensuring that we’re changing, how we talk to different, people in our buying circle and having the right content and so on.

And really, I – it takes a lot of time just to manage the Google Ads and Meta Ads, LinkedIn ads and so on. So I’m, I’m – I want that role, and I believe you can automate parts of that, but I also want someone who has the judgment to look at the results and just see what needs to be optimized that maybe, AI might suggest a generic way to do it, but have a little bit of an idea of what’s different in the manufacturing industry that we need to think about.

And then on top of that, the brand, I’m hiring a brand and design kind of role with me here in Paris, and that’s because I spend a lot of time actually doing the design work, and that takes the most amount of time doing all the creative, all the videos. And yes, I could make a whole load of AI slop, but I just don’t believe that is really hitting the essence of your brand and looking creating an identity that is unique and that has, an extra level of value and touch and understanding of what the customer wants.

And even just they go together, these roles, ’cause the performance marketing manager is gonna be creating so many new ads. He’s gonna have to have a hundred bits of creative every quarter. So we need someone to support that. I wanna free up my time. So yeah, so it’s a kind of judgment and creativity aspect I think is still important.

Jeff White: Great response.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Look, I, I couldn’t agree more, Carl. I, I guess I, I’ll just add to your comment around the performance marketer and to any of our listeners who haven’t had the benefit of trying to do a deep performance analysis on a paid search campaign, for example, and have it agentically supported, i.e., do you have your agent connected to something like Semrush?

Do you have your agent connected to your Google Analytics and your Google Ads platform? And so you would think, “Oh, I’m one prompt away from the best advice.” No, no, you’re one prompt away from advice.

Carl Standertskjold: Hmm.

Carman Pirie: And whether or not it’s good or not. It won’t be immediately clear and, but one thing it will – you can be sure of is it will sound authoritative, and it will sound certain.

And until you’ve lived that as every marketer out there talking about, “Oh, AI is just gonna automate everything,” yeah, that’s the marketer that hasn’t tried it yet. I hold more promise for AI than most, I think, and I’m as bullish as anyone on the technology and we get a huge benefit out of it here at the firm.

But y-your, your point about the expert in the loops that are required along the way really, I think, is, is something I hope people hear loud and clear.

Jeff White: There was a term I learned last night, “meat proxy”. The person who just takes what the AI gives them and sends it on to the next person.

Carman Pirie: A meat proxy. But, and your systems thinking comment, Carl, on the creative, I think really stands out to me as well because we have found that the creatives that really tend to flourish in this world are the ones that can take a bit of a systems thinking to the creative that they’re, like the development of creative systems that then can be, adjusted by AI or worked with by AI, but they’re not conceived from AI.

They’re conceived from the human. And it sounds like that’s where you’re heading.

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, I think in the hiring … not everyone is a systems thinker, but I think you need to try to be, and you need to work that muscle and grow it. I wouldn’t maybe expect a pure creative designer to think like that naturally, but there are ones that do try that, and when they start doing that, they – even their creative job is so much better because there’s all these different ways that you can then understand where creative has value, where you maybe didn’t think it did if you think more in terms of that systems approach.

But definitely the performance marketing manager, anyone doing digital campaigns, the manager needs to think in terms of, that full kind of input/output flow and how you’re measuring and how you’re converting and that has to definitely be that. But if a creative person can too, even better

Jeff White: Man, that is such good advice. I spend a fair amount of time, I’m a traditionally a designer by training, but although now more leading the creative and dev side of the firm. But so many of the designers out there today feel that they’re underutilized or misunderstood, or their managers are just giving them AI to replicate or things like that.

And it’s like, folks, it’s because you’re not thinking about things in a more strategic way. You’re not contributing that system. You’re not contributing the thinking of how you’re going to scale yourself and, scale your output while maintaining quality. It’s such a huge point, and I think it’s missed by a lot of folks who are in the creative industry and feeling like they’re underused.

Carman Pirie: Yeah, and it’s interesting, Jeff, too, I think that they’re the ones that are maybe the – find it the easiest to, to discover peers that are anti-AI, right? And therefore, it’s easy to have that attitude about it. But yeah, it we beat this to death a little bit, but I think it, it’s an interesting one, and I think part of the secret sauce for us has been having creatives working alongside devs.

To Carl’s point, the creatives aren’t always the first one to think systems thinking necessarily maybe, but, they can learn a little bit of that from their dev counterparts who just tend to think that way a little bit more. I think they’ve just been trained over time to think a little bit more that.

Carl Standertskjold: Just one point on that, ’cause I’m in an office full of devs and, and I know how it works, and sometimes they have trouble communicating a concept in a way that a creative person might think of it.

They’re more like process and less thinking about the sort of visual cues and messaging and stuff like that. And you could even just, using AI, you can take like release notes and talking about inputs and outputs, take these things and input them, take those in, analyze all of them, and find new ways to present visually topics or like launches or features that are quite complex or dry or like, you know, like difficult to com- communicate on.

And it’s like you could just get inspiration as well by taking all these things, asking for input on new visual ideas, and you still do all the creative, but it’s helping you then think of ways to present complex workflows and so on in a visual way and a more simple way.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Great advice. Great advice. Carl, I’ve had a question kind of hanging in my head here about… ’cause when we think about startups, o-often we praise, small, nimble, agile teams. And as they scale up, it’s often thought that the desire is to ensure that you retain some of that agility and speed because the startup needs it. So I’m wondering, what kind of small company habits do you think you need to get rid of as you scale

Carl Standertskjold: This is another good question and a tricky one. So small company habits that maybe impede your growth or… okay, so this is a, a habit, a thing that I’ve had that I guess a lot of leaders have this. Basically, I’m not the best when it comes to delegating and getting help, you know? So basically, when you do scale up, you can’t do everything yourself.

I’ve been trying to do everything for a year, and I do a pretty good job, but there’s limits. So obviously, one main thing that you have to change from that small sort of startup mindset is you can’t just end up doing everything yourself. You need to delegate and get help. And so that, again, comes down to thinking and planning a little bit better on, how do you optimize these activities when you have less resource and less time, and you have to then hire a team and think about how they do that better.

When you’re in a startup and you’re starting out, not everything needs to be like really perfect or really connected, and you say “Oh, maybe, we don’t need that much of a complex attribution model for our campaigns, and we don’t need this and that.”

And so I think what you do need to change when you do scale up is at some point decide when is it now that we really step up the professional way or the more like elevated or complex way that we are doing things. I don’t know when that is, but there’s definitely a point where you need to then move from this like, more sort of junior type of ac- way that you behave and do things to that next more established, really smooth professional way.

And I think maybe you should just do that sooner. Maybe I’m just putting it off a little bit. Maybe you should just get in there and do that straight away. But there’s, definitely a few things like that, you don’t do immediately, which you should do at some point.

Jeff White: I feel like there’s probably some unique challenges within a startup environment as compared to more traditional manufacturing when investment comes on board, like when you land a Series A, when you will eventually land the Series B and things like that.

Have you found there to be any specific things that have changed in the expectations of your role or any types of deliverables that were unique at the point of that investment triggering?

Carl Standertskjold: Yes, it has changed a lot, and it does change with funding rounds. It changes with investor and board member input and like guidance to the founders and the team. This is how it is for every company. You know, often, with tech startups, the founders maybe haven’t been working in marketing and these more roles.

They’re more very product-focused and tech-focused. So they might hire for one thing, which I was more hired for like a communications role, but then I’ve moved into more of a lead generation type engine role, which I’ve done both in my past. I’m fine with it. But as you scale up and you get more funding, you also need to be really showing results much faster and in a more sustainable way.

So I think things definitely change, in that sense. It becomes much more of a commercial urgency, but not in a bad way. I think it’s a healthy way to be having that, bottom line as your sort of North Star plan. But that really becomes the focus

Carman Pirie: Yeah, I can see, there’s a greater demand for sustained results and being able to call the shots a little bit, which kind of links to your earlier point a little bit about there comes a time when you need to get a little bit more professional about what you’re doing and not cut as many corners.

I was beginning to imagine this idea that, when you’re smaller, you can cut some of those corners and take some of those shortcuts because the complexity that results from you doing that is still manageable. You can still kinda navigate it. You remember the shortcut that was taken, so you can work around it later.

But then, like you say, at some point you need to get a lot more disciplined about it because if you still take that small company habit you’re injecting almost like a little bit of chaos into a system that’s a lot more complex than the small one, and therefore the fallout’s a lot, more difficult to predict and harder to handle.

Carl Standertskjold: It’s exactly that. It’s like usually it’s linked to you’re investing more in marketing activities, so you’re getting more leads, and then your sales team has increased in size. And they’re in, and in sort of different focus, like target accounts and industries and so on. And so it’s much more complex in terms of the sales workforce team that you have to…

And it’s bigger, the team you have to support, and you’re also doing more activity, getting more leads. So it has to be a bit more intelligent how you set things up and how you execute.

Carman Pirie: Carl, I wanna shift gears just a little bit because you’re hiring for two roles, and you’ve had an impressive career thus far having worked with, like some very interesting organizations and have obviously carved a very interesting path. So I wonder what your advice is to those marketers who are more junior than you.

What do you desperately wish to find in your, in your recruitment? What is it that you… If you had to say, “People, these are the kind of people I want to fill these roles. This is what I would hope that you do as a new marketer. This is my advice to you,” what is it?

Carl Standertskjold: I would say, me personally, I look for people who straightaway show that they’re interested, excited, they’re, I don’t know if maybe I don’t wanna be like one of these guys who sounds like an old guy who’s, talking badly about, kids these days. But basically, I feel like when I joined, it was a bit messy and informal how these things are done, and I really expect people to be on time to the interview and really communicate clearly and, in a professional way.

And, don’t make mistakes. I’ve had people sending, some case studies work, and it’s like you clearly haven’t even looked at it one time after you did it. ’Cause, I can just see things aren’t even pulled out in the frame correctly. So I think attention to detail, I don’t know why, but that seems to be lacking a little bit.

So just really focus on detail. Try to go a little bit above and beyond. Even if I ask for something, maybe bring your input in a different way. Think, “Actually, here’s another idea as well,” you know? Don’t be scared to go a little bit above and beyond. I think that’s kind of it.

Just really work hard.

Carman Pirie: I always think that the answers to a question like that gives some insight into how somebody thinks they’ve succeeded themselves. You’re probably sitting there thinking, “Look, I’ve paid attention to some of the details. I’ve crossed the T’s and I’ve dotted the I’s along the way, and I’ve tried to add value in ways that were unexpected.”

And that’s part of the success here.

Carl Standertskjold: For sure. I think, yeah, and exactly that. Maybe I’m projecting a little bit of what I expect or what I think about, but I think for me, that’s important. One thing that in my career I’ve always tried to also – like I talk about out-of-the-box thinking, but always just, step out and look at the bigger picture and, don’t just do what you think you should do or what AI says you should do, basically.

And for example, we work in manufacturing, and we talk about all these digital touch points, but the truth is like some of our customers are engineers in a factory, and if you think about like a sort of like customer journey, where should we find them? What forums are they on? You even have to look at that and see like these are just people who spend most of the time in the factory, then they go home, maybe they read something, but what are they actually doing?

And so they go to a bar or a restaurant outside the plant. Maybe we need to go and do some ad marketing there. Like not even, online campaigns. Maybe we should go into the bar where all these plant workers are and have a little like free bar tab for them and sponsor the bar once in a while.

So I think this out-of-the-box thinking is important, especially in an industry like we’re in, which is not B2B, SaaS, eCom. It is different, and we need to think a bit differently.

Carman Pirie: Hear, hear.

Well, and not only that, but I think like actually dealing with people that are real humans, like actually like…

Jeff White: On a human level.

Carman Pirie: Like people, where do we talk to them? Well, they go to a bar. They go to the bar next to the factory. How do they talk when they’re there? Like I’m reminded of the Hugh MacLeod cartoon, if you talk to people the way advertising talk to people, they’d punch you in the face.

I think sometimes that’s the case. Like marketers, they get we get too much in the abstract and we’re thinking about ICPs and buyer personas, and we don’t think enough in the terms of it’s Al at the bar that’s five pints in and it’s 7:00 PM. Carl, this has been a great chat.

I’ve really enjoyed hearing how you’re thinking about scaling up the organization and it’s been refreshing to hear your perspective. Thank you for bringing it to the show

Carl Standertskjold: Thank you both. It was a really great podcast and, I’m gonna be listening to all the podcasts coming up now. I really liked it, so thanks

Jeff White: Ah, fantastic. And all the best for the future with InBolt. It sounds like a super exciting company to be part of.

Carl Standertskjold: Yeah. Thank you.