In this episode of Beyond SaaS, Jason Niedle speaks with Anton Morrison, co-founder of Mogul AI, about the intersection of design innovation and business growth. They discuss the importance of measuring the success of AI implementations, understanding digital potential, and identifying the ‘frustrated innovator’ as a key customer. Anton shares insights on streamlining the design process, the role of user testing, and strategies for business growth, especially in challenging economic times. The conversation also touches on customer satisfaction, the use of AI tools for efficiency, and future trends in technology and design.
Takeaways
- AI agents should solve real problems, not just be shiny tools.
- Measure success using the GEM framework: Grow, Engage, Monetize.
- Mogul AI aims to help teams realize their digital potential.
- Frustrated innovators are key customers for design solutions.
- Streamline design processes to avoid bloated projects.
- User testing is crucial for validating designs early.
- Focus on customer satisfaction to drive growth.
- Partnerships with other agencies can lead to organic growth.
- Automation tools like make.com can enhance efficiency.
- Future trends may simplify the tech landscape.
Sound Bites
“How is it growing your business?”
“Make.com is a great automation tool.”
“Innovate, innovate, innovate.”
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
we’re talking with Anton Morrison, co-founder of Mogul AI, about design innovation and how that leads to growth.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency and we partner with companies to deliver growth solutions and sales.
I am excited to talk with Anton today. He’s the co-founder of Mogul AI, and they drive solutions by blending UX and UI design to bridge that gap between strategy and execution to create web and mobile apps and portals and SaaS platforms and AI enabled tools and all sorts of cool digital products. And Anton looks like this problem solver who is always exploring the future and uncovering and validating ideas.
Anton Morrison (00:41)
Thank ⁓
Jason Niedle (00:44)
and then creating, design and testing, digital products until they delight. And then from there, helping grow through dynamic design systems and training teams. And I love for me to think about the systems of design, because it’s creativity meets logic. So I’m excited to have you here, Anton, welcome.
Anton Morrison (00:57)
Thanks you Jason.
Jason Niedle (00:58)
Hey, any golden nugget for us today? A quick tip for our listeners.
Anton Morrison (01:01)
So I do think it’s a surprise that everybody’s talking about AI agents at the moment. And I think everybody should be diving into them. But I think my nugget is to make sure that you’re evaluating them with actual what people are doing out there. I think there’s a bit of a shiny tool object for AI agents at the moment. And people are like, hey, look, we can do this much faster. But it’s actually something that they only did once a year or something.
We really try and focus a lot on measuring the success of our AI agents that we do for clients. So we say, how much does this usually take you? How long does this, know, how much does it cost you? So what we’re saving it. So they’re not just building things for the sake of building things, because that’s what AI is really good at. So my one nugget is don’t get caught up too much on shiny objects and make sure that you’re solving real problems with AI.
Jason Niedle (01:50)
So if you’re going to do it, find a way to measure it and make sure you’re actually solving a problem.
Anton Morrison (01:53)
Yep. The way that we always measure things is we think about it in the terms of a framework called GEM. So is this going to Grow your business? And is this going to make your customers more Engaged? Or is this going to Monetize things? And it’s a really good foundation to actually just ask the question rather than diving ahead and just building something that does something faster or does something that you don’t normally do. How is it growing your business? How is it engaging with your customers? Or how is it putting money in your bank? Which is very important.
Hahaha
Jason Niedle (02:23)
I
love that. That’s a great way to look at everything. So tell me a little bit about Mogul.
Anton Morrison (02:27)
Yeah, so we actually set up Mogul around two and half years ago and our motto is a little bit cheesy Jason, but our motto is to help people, teams and organizations realize their digital potential. The reason that I did that, I set up Mogul is I used to work for a larger agency and we used to have big budgets, we used to big clients like Pfizer, Disney, Air Canada and we had great projects but we
got into this trap of just building stuff for the sake of building stuff and it was very bloated as well. So you just have feature after feature, you’d have more team members, more team members. And I saw around three years ago, I thought there’s better ways of doing this, there’s faster ways of doing this. And then I come along at the same time and it was just like, okay, this is the accelerator that I need to actually jump into this on my own. And as I say, we really want to help people realize their digital potential by
breaking things down into smaller chunks and delivering at a far lower cost and far faster pace.
Jason Niedle (03:23)
What does that mean to you when you say digital potential?
Anton Morrison (03:25)
So I have a customer in my mind that I call a frustrated innovator. So it’s someone that maybe works for a large company or a medium sized company and they work in the marketing department or the working operations or and they’re sitting with their team and each year they do a big marketing campaign or they buy a big piece of software or a platform. And there’s one person in the room going
there must be a different way of doing this. Why do we always just copy our competitors? Why are we just following this? So I feel as though they’ve got a potential they need to realize and I feel as though I’m person that can come in and make them realize that. So this frustrated innovator is my key customer that I try to go for. I don’t want to just replace something that someone’s done beforehand. I don’t want to copy competitors. I really want those people that kind of come to the table and go, okay, blanks.
blank sheet, here’s the problem I’ve got to solve, let’s think about solving it in a different way from anyone else.
Jason Niedle (04:23)
So I think this is a refreshing way — we always talk about our ICPs and someone says, it’s a CFO at a $10 million plus, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? — and it’s a refreshing way to say, what is their problem and what is their itch, right? The frustrated innovator, you have his problem and you have his itch, his desire in the same phrase. And those are the things that matter when we’re talking about our ideal customer profile, right? So that’s like a really refreshing way to look at it.
Anton Morrison (04:35)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm. Yep.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And you need people that are ambitious as well. you know, like that have got ambitions for their own career as well. Sometimes when we go into an agency and you see people that we’re looking to further their own career, they want to do that on the back of a project and they bring in people that are going to think differently.
Jason Niedle (05:04)
If, yeah, and your terminology is perfect, right? If it’s just the frustrated executive, they might not want anything, they might not be going anywhere, they’re just a crusty old man, Or woman or whatever, right? And if it’s just the innovator, maybe they don’t need, feel like they need you at this moment, right? So that’s like really, it’s a great way to look at people. And I think I want to go back and rename some of my client ICPs in a way like that, because it’s fun.
Anton Morrison (05:09)
Yeah, well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
⁓
Yeah, exactly. I mean the old phrase is you don’t get sacked for hiring IBM is the opposite of what we are because we are not IBM obviously but we will come in and we kind of have results to show for what was done in the past.
Jason Niedle (05:37)
Hmm
But IBM might not handle that frustrated innovator, right? He might be slowly resolving his frustration in five years.
Anton Morrison (05:48)
And it’s
funny as well from if you’re at an organization and you’re looking at your competitors, I always look, so I’m based up in Canada, even though you can hear my accents from Scotland. I always look at banks in Canada and if you look at, you customer experience metrics, there’s always one bank that jumps the next one, then the next one goes there. And it’s just because they’re all copying each other. They’re all literally just going.
Jason Niedle (06:09)
Mmm.
Anton Morrison (06:11)
they added this feature this year, we’ll add that feature this year. And you can see it from the history. And that’s what that tells me about it. Whereas no bank is thinking, especially in Canada, with highly regulated, no bank is thinking the same way as some other banks outside of Canada that are really bringing digital customer focus to another level.
Jason Niedle (06:31)
Interesting. So there’s a Venn diagram we were talking about in the last episode where, what’s needed out there in the world and what you’re good at and what you’re passionate about. So what would you say you’re passionate about and what are you good at?
Anton Morrison (06:40)
Mmm.
So I think the passion that I love creating things, I love building things, I love getting in there with my team and really seeing something come from, like a scrap of paper that we’re drawing ideas on to something on a screen and then getting it into customers’ hands or people’s hands. So I love the work. Like I used to work at bigger agencies and I always have a ceiling sometimes because I always would go back to the projects and I talk to the customers and talk to the users.
So my passion is about the thing we’re doing, the actual work that’s taken us to the final place.
Jason Niedle (07:18)
Yeah, and at the big agency, they’re like, why are you going back? You’re out of budget. Or it’s good enough.
Anton Morrison (07:20)
Yeah. Yeah.
Or, know, why are you talking, why are you jumping around, kick off calls? Why are you asking questions to customers? Like you should be just looking after your team. And I always always just dragged back into the actual work.
Jason Niedle (07:36)
What’s your team like now there at Mogul?
Anton Morrison (07:37)
We have a small but mighty team. have a few. have based out of Montreal. We have a small office here. We have some offshore no code developers in India and then we have a few spotted people across Canada and the US that I’ve worked with over the years. I think it was a testament when I left my last place that I brought some of the people with me because they enjoyed the work. And then we have a lot of what I call partner agencies.
big partner agency in London and a couple in the US and they really are one in Canada and they bring us in when they get a customer that’s looking for something a little bit different or a bit more specific or a bit more, hey they’ve got a blank canvas and we need to run some workshops, need to create a prototype, they need to do something that’s not within their wheelhouse.
Jason Niedle (08:24)
I always like to look at the system for creativity. So here in my agency, I always say it’s five steps is the discovery, figuring out what they want and why and what their customers think of them and what they think of themselves and all these kind of unstated assumptions and beliefs. And then the planning, well, okay, you want to do something. How do we get from A to B, And then the design will kind of, what does that look and feel like? And then the execution, like the actual building and then
Anton Morrison (08:49)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Niedle (08:50)
and then the follow through, does it actually work, can we improve it, et cetera. So I always see it kind of as a five step arc. How do you see your process and what you’re doing?
Anton Morrison (09:00)
I would take all of those five steps and just squash them into one. We have a motto here where we’re continuous discovery. And we also have a motto where we get things on a screen or in people’s hands as fast as possible. I won’t say that the agile word, think that’s, another different type of kind of workflow in that. But we really like we want to.
I come up with hypotheses as early as possible and then get designs to be able to prove or improve that hypothesis as quickly as possible. And we also want to bring everybody in. So we also have a rule where we don’t do big fancy presentations for readouts. We just show things within the tools. So we show your designs. We show you our designs as we go.
You can go in at any moment in time and see where we are in the process. So we’re not an agency that kind of goes away for two weeks and comes back and goes, dada, here’s the answer. We really want to, I think a good way of thinking about it is we embed ourselves within our clients’ teams to become part of their teams so that we don’t have bloated communication and presentations and that, and just get to the design and execution as quickly as possible so that we can validate stuff and learn stuff better than what we can do in the past.
Jason Niedle (10:14)
I like this idea of trying and breaking and trying and breaking until it works. So I’ve lectured at the local university as a professor for eight years. And one of the exercises that we would do is I give everybody these spaghetti sticks that break really easily and give them some tape and a little glue and say, whoever builds the tallest structure, you guys have 20, 30 minutes, whatever, whoever builds the tallest structure wins, I don’t know, 100 bucks.
Anton Morrison (10:17)
Yeah.
Okay?
Jason Niedle (10:38)
And they would always fail in comparison to like a kindergarten class, right? Because the kindergartners go make something that falls, they make something that falls, they make something that falls. And they made six of them by the time they get to their six footer at the end, right? And then my students here, they’re in college and they’re waiting to put that last piece on there and they go to put the last piece and the entire thing collapses and they waited 29 minutes to do that, right? And they can’t play again. And so it’s a super valuable lesson for everything we do. And it sounds like it’s how you’re running your agency.
Anton Morrison (11:04)
Yeah, exactly. And I think that’s where AI has really empowered us because we can get things that we can test so quickly now and they can be throw away without a lot of budget going into them. And the olden days, I’m a big advocate for user testing. So user testing is actually getting something in front of a user and watching them use it or asking them to use it in a certain way. in the past, it’s always been
a really contentious moment in a project because there’s stakeholders that are like, say they don’t like it, we’ve got a deadline, we need to make that deadline. But if they don’t like it and we make the deadline, we’re making the deadline with something that’s not going to work long term. And it’s this kind of a weird scenario that comes about. Now with AI, we can turn user testing from two weeks to two days.
It’s literally from months to weeks to days now. And we have a way that it’s not a big investment. It’s not a risk to the project because you can do it multiple times. And getting that insight as early as possible just means that you’re actually more confident that you’re building something that’s going to last a long time.
Jason Niedle (12:13)
In our prior episode, we were talking about this idea. Some people are ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, fire the gun, right? And some people are like, fire, see where it went, aim, fire, like, you know, the feedback loop. And that feedback loop is pretty critical, is critical.
Anton Morrison (12:20)
Mm. ⁓
Yeah, yeah,
we have a graph where we talk about the sweet spot of research. So I’ve been part of teams where we’ve had way too much research. We’re kind of trying to prove a false scenario or a false certainty and we’re just investing more money or the research teams out of sync with the product, with the development team.
And then there’s no research where you’re just proving your own false misconceptions. And we believe that there’s a sweet spot there where you’re doing enough research to validate and make truthful hypothesis you have without over-investing in it, without going down a route where you’re just doing research to prove the last research. So thinking about that sweet spot of research is really important for us.
Jason Niedle (13:11)
So can we talk about growth? There’s a common saying, right, that the cobbler’s kid has no shoes, you know, where we tend to be, I’ve been in a marketing agency and haven’t marketed myself until recently for 22 of our 23 years or whatever. What about you? How are you focusing on your own growth?
Anton Morrison (13:13)
Yeah.
It’s probably a little bit differently, but we, for the first year, we went out and tried to get lots of clients and we, we’ve been in a few big RFPs. We work a lot in the travel industry and it’s, it’s unfortunately full of bad FPs cause it’s a lot of public money, etc. And we changed course and we really look for such partnerships with other agencies that we compliment. So
we have some agencies that are really good on technology but they don’t have the design and AI capabilities. And then we have some other agencies that are really good in marketing and PR but they don’t even touch digital. So we made probably around six months, we made a lot of presentations, a lot of outreach to agencies to find five or six of those sweet spot agencies. And once we deliver a project and it’s successful.
It just has a snowball effect because it goes around their company and usually it’s something different from what they do. So everybody gets interested. So all of their solutions teams are like, Hey, can we get the Mogul guys involved in this? Hey, could we get them involved? So it’s been really successful in terms of organic growth through those agencies and just working that. Hands up, we have not done enough of our own marketing and that’s one of those problems where it’s good because we’ve been busy, but
there is probably great opportunities out there where I can help people realise their digital potential that we’re not. So that’s what we’re on course to do now, trying to market ourselves a little bit better.
Jason Niedle (14:50)
But I love the idea of looking at the partner agencies and making that work, right? Because you have the frustrated innovator who is ultimately the end user way down there, or not the end user, but the user in the company. But then you have the, what would they be? The frustrated agency rep. Somebody in there, right? There’s a better name for that. But you have somebody in the agency who’s like, I can’t get this done. I have this big project and I can’t do X component of it, right? How do I find the right fit?
Anton Morrison (15:04)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah,
it’s such a good fit with some of the agencies they work with. They work with great huge education universities, the Harvard, Princeton, they work with them all on big complex technology problems.
And now and again, they get an opportunity to say, hey, we’ve got an event and we need something that’s going to be really cool that people can use at the event. Or hey, we’ve got a new enrollment and we want to do something different with a certain potential student. And they bring us in and it’s just this, we kind of come in there with the fresh ideas and it excites the clients as well because they’re like, this is different. This is not, you know, like the, I don’t want to say boring, but the boring stuff.
Jason Niedle (15:51)
Mm-hmm.
Anton Morrison (15:54)
So it’s a win-win for us as well because we come in there and we get to be a little bit different from their normal day-to-day.
Jason Niedle (16:00)
Sure. So do you have enough growth or are you still looking to grow?
Anton Morrison (16:03)
Still looking to grow, obviously. I mean, we’ve had a few, in fact, three projects so far that have been put on hold because of the economic uncertainty. So I feel as though as a co-founder at the moment, I am thinking a lot about what the future looks like in terms of growth and sustainability in certain places. So it’s top of my mind at the moment.
Jason Niedle (16:24)
So what should you be doing that you’re not doing?
Anton Morrison (16:25)
I need to get my story out there. I need to get what we’re doing. Because, we’ve built stuff for some of our clients that for airlines where they it’s an onboarding platform and whether you’re a pilot, a cabin crew, front of house, your thumbs are on our work. And we have great stories to tell where millions of people are using our products every day.
No one knows about it yet. So that really needs to be my focus for the next six months. I think it’s, do remember what I said I was most passionate about? The work. So I always go back into that and I think it’s one of those things where you kind of need to get out of the weeds a little bit so you can see where the future is.
Jason Niedle (16:50)
So what’s the constraint, what’s holding you back?
I guess the consultant in me would challenge you to say, then why are you trying to do that? Why aren’t you handing it off to a team member or a partner?
Anton Morrison (17:13)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it’s a growing business as well so you always have those, when you’re an agency under 20 people, the people are so important as well so it makes a big difference and you know talent is difficult to find, the right type of talent that has the right ambitions with the right work ethic as well.
Jason Niedle (17:26)
Yeah.
That’s something I struggle with. think a of times I’m looking for what I call the unicorn, like the really super rare creative. And I feel like we’re fortunate we have a couple, but it feels almost impossible to find. And it seems like it’s such a bottleneck to growth in many ways.
Anton Morrison (17:38)
Yeah.
Yeah.
I actually started off my career as a software engineer. I’ve studied computing science nearly 30 years ago now, unfortunately. And then I got into UX and design through that idea where it was technology meeting users and it was a kind of overlap of science and art at the same time. But I feel as though our industry, we look at UX and UI, it’s kind of tore itself up a little bit in the last five, 10 years because it’s
you compartmentalise every position within a team and you have like a specialist that just does one little thing and you have another specialist that does not one little thing. And in my mindset, you have to have a little bit of overlap in a lot of these areas to understand people’s businesses and to understand how you’re going to, produce something that’s going to be successful.
So I think that there’s a lot of people out there that have got into a career path that is so specialized and so singularity that unless the Googles or Facebook are looking for people, they’re going to struggle to kind of adapt within the ever-changing way in which the world works.
Jason Niedle (18:50)
For sure. So what should other business leaders know about growing their own companies?
Anton Morrison (18:54)
Errrm… I think, you know
customer referrals and actually customer satisfaction I think is one of the most important things. I also think that we’re at a point where, and if we think about SaaS companies, you know, AI is coming along and I feel as though there’s a bit of a time where we’re going to look at things where when will you go to AI compared to when will you use your current tool? And I think
the challenge that I’m seeing a lot of people fall into is they’re just adding a little bit of AI to their product. And it’s kind of like, what? I don’t understand. This is not helping me at all. So I think there’s going to be a lot of customer dissatisfaction with AI, more than customer satisfaction. And I think to grow a company, grow a user base, you have to have that core users.
Jason Niedle (19:27)
I see that everywhere.
Mm.
Anton Morrison (19:46)
You have to get feedback off them and they become your advocates. I think don’t just focus on getting new customers. Make sure that you build a moat around your current customers and make sure that you’re not trying to solve problems for them that they don’t need you to solve. And really kind of focus a lot on keeping your current customers to grow slowly on top of them.
Jason Niedle (20:06)
I love that. Are there any specific AI tools that you think are great right now, particularly to help a company grow?
Anton Morrison (20:12)
Yeah, I mean, it’s not so much an AI tool, we do a lot of, AI agents and there’s a lot of different tools out there and we use a plethora of them. But there’s one simple tool called make.com, which we always go to and we’re like make.com. And it’s an automation tool. They’ve got some AI integration now, but it’s just a really nice interface where you can automate things.
Jason Niedle (20:26)
What is it?
Anton Morrison (20:36)
From customer support, for lead generation, from blog writing, we’ve got things where if you like the looks of a YouTube video, you can press a button and it gives you a transcribe and the kit. So we’re kind of, in the last two months, we’ve got obsessed by automating things and bringing data into some of our other tools that we use like Airtable and that. So I think make.com does a really good job of being.
intuitive to use so you can do advanced things quite quickly without code and it connects to all your AI tools like Chat GPT, whatever you need to do and it’s just it’s it doesn’t it’s not a lot of time that you have to put into it and you get a lot of results out of
Jason Niedle (21:16)
the markets took how far of a dive in the last few weeks. Tariffs have just started everywhere, but then got pulled back, but then might get put back in. And the friendship between the governments of Canada and the US is tested, although not between the peoples, I hope. What do you see ahead?
Anton Morrison (21:18)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I think in the short term, the six months, unfortunately, I see a lot of layoffs in the tech industry and even without that, because I think the CEOs and the boardrooms are just going to be thinking we need to stop spending money where we can because we don’t know what’s on the other side of this. So I think that means that people should be thinking about the skill set and
potentially qualifications outside of that. And the flip side of that, I do from a philosophical user standpoint or usability standpoint, I feel as though there is going to be a moment where we look back at the way we have so many websites for things and so many apps for things as that must have been crazy to use. There’s a great theory called, I can’t remember who wrote it unfortunately.
But was round about the early 80s, he wrote about how civilizations collapse within themselves. And it’s this complexity of civilizations collapsing. And a lot of people use that when they’ve talked about broadcast TV going to YouTube and everything and how big companies or broadcast companies can’t not think about doing it the way they do it. And I think we’re at a moment where maybe even SaaS companies
definitely the way that we market ourselves around millions of channels is going to change due to the fact that we are going to use, we’re going to gather information, we’re going to do things much more through AI tools of some sort and we’re not going to have such a disparate tool set that we go to to do every every thing there. I don’t think it will come in near future. I think it’ll be by the end of the year where we’ll start to see a real path to
this new interaction and I think it’ll be as big as the iPhone coming out or you know moving to online.
Jason Niedle (23:19)
Wow, amazing. Is there any final words here, anything I forgot to chat it about with you?
Anton Morrison (23:20)
Hahaha.
I would love to know how high the highest spaghetti tower is. What is the record for it?
Jason Niedle (23:28)
Hahaha
They started them on a desk and I think they got them almost to the point where their hand was, but honestly, 90% of the teams, well, 50% of the teams collapsed their own spaghetti towers, right? Because they literally put it at the very end and it’s, you know, it fall over. And then the others just did not get very high. I did it with my eight year old and he beat most of the college kids.
Anton Morrison (23:35)
it
Yeah.
DOOP
Nice, nice. I see we should start hiring.
Jason Niedle (23:52)
Innovate, innovate, innovate, right? Just keep doing it, break it, keep
doing it, break it, keep doing it, break it. I love that. Well, this has been really fun. Where can our audience find you?
Anton Morrison (24:02)
Mogul.global is our website and then I’m on, like, down under Anton Morrison and anybody needs to reach out and love to be able to talk further about any anybody that wants to fulfill their digital potential they can reach out to me.
Jason Niedle (24:17)
Perfect. That’s Anton Morrison on LinkedIn and Mogul.global, just like it sounds, on the internet, on the web. Thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For the tech leadership out there, we are committed to growth. We’re dropping episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com, where you can get that brilliant hyperscale playbook at tethos.com/podcast. And if you got some value today, please share, like, all that fun stuff that really helps us out. Until next time.
Anton Morrison (24:26)
Thank you.
Jason Niedle (24:45)
This is Beyond Saas.
