NewForm Co-Fonder & CEO Hamza Alsamraee Interview Transcript
Clint Betts
So you've done so many incredible things.
Hamza Alsamraee
I appreciate it.
Clint Betts
I'm blown away. You see, I'm still in college. I'm 40, and I haven't done nearly what you've done.
I know, I look like I'm 70, dude, that's what I look like. So tell me about this calculus book you published when you were like 16. By the way, who at 16 writes a calculus book?
Hamza Alsamraee
I was into it. I mean, I was always into math growing up.
Clint Betts
It's unbelievable, man, it's so cool.
Hamza Alsamraee
I mean, writing it was the easy part compared to, I mean, marketing it. I would say, I mean, I grew up liking math, it was pretty intuitive, so it felt natural, but not a whole lot of people are out there scouting for math books. So I needed a way to sell it.
And I'd say it's like, it's one thing to write the book, it was a whole other thing to try to get it out there. And ultimately, that's how I am where I am today, the exercise of trying to find a community to promote this to. So I ended up starting a... The whole idea behind the page I started was that I started a math page in high school, and it was just a very boring name. I just called it Daily Math, I'd post every day, and it was all to promote the book, honestly, it was like my way of getting organic traction for it.
Clint Betts
That's so smart. So it's like a blog, is that what you're talking about? You're publishing, or what is it exactly?
Hamza Alsamraee
It was an Instagram page. So I mean, this is...
Clint Betts
Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay.
Hamza Alsamraee
... are more reels. So this was actually just images. I would scribble down... My first post, scribbled down something on a piece of paper, it was a problem from the book, and I posted it, got two likes, kind of got the dopamine hit, [inaudible 00:01:53] another one, and the third, and I started kind of type setting it so it looked nice and clean, and I would just post every day. That was the whole thing. And slowly but surely, I grew the page. I think at the peak, a couple hundred thousand followers or something like that. And across its lifespan, maybe 100 million plus impressions.
Clint Betts
That's incredible. And then you publish the book, and it goes viral. It says here, tell me if this is true, you pulled in nearly $1 million in sales?
Hamza Alsamraee
That was across two books. I mean, yeah, it was under that number, but it was a good bit. I don't keep most of that; Amazon takes most of that.
Clint Betts
You're rich, dude.
Hamza Alsamraee
Nah.
Clint Betts
You're rich for all sorts... And then you had this documentary, which is super cool, which kind of goes into how you built that, distributed products, things of that nature. And now you're at Stanford, you're an undergrad, and you're the founder and CEO of NewForm. Let's start there or move to there. Tell me about NewForm and how you became the founder and CEO.
Hamza Alsamraee
Sure. I mean, honestly, the impetus started from that math page experience. So essentially, what I realized is that Instagram has always been peddled as social media, but more and more, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all these platforms have pivoted from that to become interest media. So when I started the page, and this was 2019, this shift was already starting to happen, and it really accelerated in 2020, 2021 with the rise of short-form content.
So essentially, you went from most of the posts you see on your feed are from friends to most of the posts you see are from random people that are just tied to your interests. And I thought the biggest proof of that was the math page. I was like, I mean, it was pretty niche topics I would cover. The page, first thing, was actually daily integrals. I would literally only solve integral equations. And somehow that found its way to the market. It's a niche thing.
There are a bunch of these examples. Some people are into very specific animes, some people are into, I don't know, a specific brand, a specific random... Harleys are a big thing. So we saw this kind of idea of this new form of marketing. New form of marketing is essentially content first, media, and that kind of targeting audiences, second.
Historically, marketing has always been doing a big kind of brand campaign, trying to target the right user. Maybe your ideal customer is a middle-aged mom. So you would have a big brand campaign, and do your best to try to get that audience, get that out in front of that audience. More and more, it's the opposite. It's like, actually, how can I speak the language of my customer and have them find me? Because of these algorithms, the social media algorithms have gotten so good at matching content with the right audience that they're doing the heavy lifting for you.
So that's the insight that I had from my math page. Eventually implemented at a company called Faves. I was part of the founding team. I was kind of the first marketing growth hire, and scaled that. It was a consumer app, a subscription app. We turned down monetization and scaled it to a million-dollar run rate in a few months, and that was through TikTok ads. I was one of the first to start doing TikTok ads. And I would make all the content, I would like... And the only thing I would think of is what is our ideal customer, what would look organic on their for you page, make ads with that in mind, and naturally, it hits the target audience.
So after that experience, I realized not a lot of people knew how to do this new thing, or how to do marketing in this new paradigm. So that's why we started NewForm, and today... So NewForm is a growth marketing partner primarily for software companies. So we see companies at a very unique stage. We work with a lot of VC-backed companies called Series A, B, C, D, a lot of AI apps at that, I would say, inflection point in their growth where they have a great product, they've grown organically, but they need to add fuel to the fire, and that's where we come in. So we're their growth partner. Essentially, we do ads for software companies. And my whole, from the math phase to now, I think that's what led me to this.
Clint Betts
Well, I mean, it sounds like doing ads for software companies is kind of simple, but to me that is so complicated and takes such a, as you mentioned, a new way of looking at that, a creative way of looking at that. Because a lot of times... I mean, I've interviewed hundreds, probably thousands, of software CEOs at this point. Very few of them can actually explain in a sentence or two what their company does. So they really need somebody like you, you know what I mean? You can get the gist of it over a 30-minute conversation, and do some research and stuff. But people like you, who are brilliant at marketing and understand short-form content and things like that, can distill it to its essence. Is that the value you're providing here is like, hey, we're going to...? Because short-form content is so important and because some of these companies are kind of hard to explain, to be honest with you, right?
Hamza Alsamraee
I would say, I mean, it's less about the fact that it's hard to explain as much as the right way to explain it in a 30-second video is not obvious at all at times. So obviously, you can go just make a video ad, just shoot on a camera, tell someone about the product, but that's not engaging enough. So more and more we're doing... When people think of short-form content, they think of someone just talking to a camera. That worked maybe three years ago. These days, you've got to really do something different, stand out visually, and especially in crowded markets.
I mean, if you think about it, I don't know, we work with a lot of fintechs, like investing apps. One thing, one of our clients, we don't work with them anymore, but Acorns, for example, is kind of the same thing. They'll tell you, Oh, invest your money, and it'll grow just like every other investing app will tell you. But what they cracked in their marketing and why they work with us is ultimately this understanding of how to communicate that concept in a visually appealing, engaging way through video. And that's easier said than done; it's just pretty hard to implement. And doing that at scale is really what we do.
So we make thousands of ads a month. We have a full in-house team, and we have a studio in New York that we shoot out of. I think the economies of scale make us do it that much better than the next person because we just do it every day. And we can tell these company stories in a way that would be very difficult for them to get at their own.
Clint Betts
What do most startups and companies get wrong about marketing?
Hamza Alsamraee
A couple of things. I think that, especially in tech, this tech ecosystem, Silicon Valley in general, ads are a dirty word. Relatively like, oh, there's this sentiment that if you do ads, you're not good enough. And a lot of people brag about like, "Oh, we hit X or whatever with $0 in marketing." I kind of find that weird because like, oh, wait, so you could have grown faster, you could have made more money, and didn't? This whole thing of like, "Oh, we didn't spend anything on marketing."
I mean, sure, of course, it's impressive for you to scale without spending money on marketing. And there's this idea that is peddled by a lot of the Silicon Valley folks, like, oh, your product should be so good, it should sell itself. But frankly, we're in what we call the dropshipping era of software.
If you think about it, think about the 2000s and what happened with the whole idea of dropshipping and e-commerce. So if you look at e-commerce and e-commerce companies, they've swallowed the ads pill a long time ago. They know that the way to grow is to have a great marketing ecosystem. You need to do great marketing, and that's how you stand out. And it's because there's already been this evolution in e-commerce where anyone can start a brand. I mean, think about Shopify, Klaviyo, Alibaba, all these rails have made it really easy for someone to start a brand. So I can go sell the same product as anyone else.
And more and more, the IP has been in the marketing and distribution. So the biggest e-commerce companies, sure, they have good products, but they have even better marketing. And tech is starting to realize that with the advent of AI tools, historically, technology has been hard to build. You need a whole lot of funding, a whole lot of engineers, and a whole lot of sophistication.
More and more, there are rails for technology. Even relatively complicated products, fintech products, you basically have B2B SaaS providers that make building a consumer-facing product really easy. So they'll take care of your compliance, they'll take care of... they'll be your brokerage. Maybe you want a brokerage as part of your app; historically, that was really hard to build. Now, there's a SaaS product for it.
So as more rails become available, consumer-facing tech companies will shift their focus from product to distribution because, just frankly, everyone's going after the same use cases. And unless there's some outsized technology play... OpenAI with ChatGPT was such a new technology that it's just going to have product-like growth. But if you're the 10th investing app and you're 10% better, that's probably not enough to get you 100 million users; you need to do marketing. And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. I think startups need to understand that.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Elon is really famous for that, saying Tesla's never spent a dollar on advertising. And I don't even know if that's exactly true, but [inaudible 00:12:19].
Hamza Alsamraee
But they also, I mean, their product has been going down in price for the last however many years, which I don't know, I mean, hey, maybe if they had marketing and marketed as a luxury product, maybe not. Obviously, people think Elon is great. I think obviously proof is in the numbers, but...
Clint Betts
Yeah, sure.
Hamza Alsamraee
... I don't know if I necessarily agree with that.
Clint Betts
Yeah, for sure. What does a typical day look like for you? You're a 22-year-old entrepreneur, you run a multi-million dollar business during the day, and you also go to school full-time. What does a typical day look like?
Hamza Alsamraee
Well, it's summer now, so I get to obsess. I'm meeting a client after this for drinks, so I'm looking forward to that. So that's my summer.
But I mean, in terms of when I'm at school, frankly, I find myself even more productive. This is crazy to say. It's because I have to essentially wrestle with my time. I'm like, okay, there are 24 hours in the day, what do I really need to do? And how do I make sure that whatever I do, it's the best use of my time? And obviously, this is a constant challenge, and sometimes I'll spend my time doing the wrong things. However, I think having constraints breeds creativity, almost always.
I actually think I haven't gotten to this point right now, but there's going to be a point, maybe in a month or so, where I'm so obsessed that I get a little bit of like, okay, I need to pull back a little bit. I love what I do, so I get really into the weeds. And sometimes having that distance actually is better.
Clint Betts
Yeah, [inaudible 00:14:03].
Hamza Alsamraee
I do go to class. I'm probably on Slack in class. Hopefully my professors don't hear this, but I'll still be on Slack, I'll still be looking over things, but I'll engage, I'll try to hear out what the lecturer has to say, and...
Clint Betts
That's awesome. Give me a sense for how leaders and marketers should think about implementing AI in marketing. I'll give you an experience that I'm having; you tell me if you're experiencing this. I go on LinkedIn, and it seems like everybody's robots are just talking to each other. None of that feels super authentic. It just seems like, all of a sudden, one day, everybody got really grammatically correct and saying everything exactly the right way. So everybody kind of sounds the same now because they're so obviously using AI. And so I wonder, and the ones that aren't are standing out, which is another interesting... So, how should leaders and marketers think about using AI in the balance of that?
Hamza Alsamraee
Totally. I mean, we have a very... Listen, in a few years, this may sound really dumb because AI models they're getting better. And whenever I say this, I tell people, the market will stay irrational long enough that eventually AI tools may get there. But we don't believe in AI for the generation of marketing collateral. I mean, at the very least for video. So, all our videos, we make thousands of videos a month, all of which are created by human creators.
So we use AI in our workflows. Actually, I mean, we're one of the few marketing agencies with a CTO. We have a full tech team that's building our products, both external-facing and internally for our team to use. But almost all of those features, the products that we build... Our biggest product launch has been WillBot. WillBot is essentially an agent that lives natively on your Slack. It syncs across all your ad data. So it syncs directly with Facebook ads, with TikTok ads, and can actually watch the ads assets themselves.
So you can ask it questions like, "Hey, did female or male creators perform better?" It can actually monitor the ad account for you, tell you, "Hey, these types of creators or this type of positioning are doing better. You should double down on this." It does our creative testing. So our creative testing is fully automated at this point. It'll use statistics to try to understand, okay, what ads are hitting KPIs? What should we scale, what should we turn off? Of the ones that we turned off, what can we learn? Can we compare and contrast winners and losers from a creative perspective and see which ads are working and why? So that's been a game changer for us and has made our people 10 times more productive.
However, a lot of people are thinking about how to take shortcuts with AI, like letting me generate AI ads. But we work with advertisers, big and small. I'll tell you, none of the big ones do this because they realize even if AI ads are just 5% worse, if you're managing a million dollars' worth of budget a month, that's 50 grand. I'll tell you, human ads cost less. We do UGC, we do the short-form, the TikTok-style ads, it does not cost 50 grand to make even 100 ads. You can probably do that for less.
So that's what I think a lot of people are getting wrong about what they're trying to... The shiny thing is AI ads, AI ads, but the actual real value is in AI-assisted workflows. And the reason I believe this so strongly is because if you look at an industry that's maybe more advanced from a tech perspective than marketing, look at deaf tools, look at Cursor. The biggest player, Cursor, is huge now. But Cursor wasn't set out to replace programmers; it's meant to empower them.
So the best programmers are 10 times better. Obviously, the worst ones are out of a job now, but that's always going to be the case. Yes, if you're not good, you're going to struggle to find a job. But I actually think AI is only going to make the best marketers better, and it's certainly making us better. And that's how I think of implementing it in our day-to-day.
Clint Betts
Where do you see this company in five years? How are you thinking about it?
Hamza Alsamraee
I want to be the leading name in software growth. If you think about software growth, growing software companies, nothing really comes to mind. There's no name. Obviously, we're not going to be a household name, we're B2B, right? But I believe that there are a lot of great e-commerce agencies out there. There are not a whole lot of great software agencies. I think we're one of the better ones. We're new, and there's so much more to be left on the table for us to capitalize on, and we have ambitious plans. So that's really what I want to get NewForm to, is become that state-of-the-art growth partner.
Clint Betts
Tell me more about WillBot and this idea of, like you just mentioned, it's like the world's first AI performance marketer. You kind of explained what it did a little bit ago, but tell us more about that and this idea of, you're right, I can't even think of a marketing firm that has a CTO. That's really interesting. That's a really interesting differentiator.
Hamza Alsamraee
Yeah, I mean, it's because I came from the world of VC-backed companies and software. And my co-founders, I have two co-founders, they do not have marketing backgrounds. Frankly, a lot of our team does not have a marketing background. We're more nontraditional in that way. So we see the industry in a new lens, and I actually think that's a good thing. So people really, really like that. They like that we're outsiders. So that's that.
In terms of WillBot, essentially, if you look at the history of marketing, there's been media, and there's been creative, and they don't talk; they're different teams. So the media team will be in the dashboards all day, looking at data, trying to get to KPIs, and stuff like that. And the creative team is honestly just being creative. And more and more, we're seeing this intersection of actually, no, you have performance content, performance creative. That's a new word that I don't think existed five years ago.
So we're seeing this intersection between media and content. And it's because these new platforms have converged the two. More and more, Meta just tells you, "Just give me content, and I'll do the media for you." So they're really pushing.
And Zuck, at a certain point, may even automate the creative layer. So I can talk about that for a while. But those two teams have not talked, and we want to connect them. We think they're one and the same at the end of the day. Content informs the media, and media informs the content, and that's the gist of what we're building with WillBot is how can we connect the data, the KPIs, what the business objectives are to the content, translate them to content learnings, give that back to our team, have them iterate with a human-first approach, and then plug that back. That way, we're moving fast.
So, creative velocity for us is the number one biggest indicator of success. If we think about whether we are doing one iteration a month or 10? And if we're doing 10, we're just going to hit metrics a lot faster than if we're doing one, and we want to make doing 10 as clean, as straightforward, as operationalized as possible. And that's what we're building tech around.
Clint Betts
What makes a good short-term ad versus a great one? What's the difference between a great short-form ad and a good one?
Hamza Alsamraee
It's a great question. I would say flow. It's kind of very Rick Rubin-y; it has to flow. And what I mean by that is that it needs to feel natural, it needs to feel like you're talking to a friend. And that's really hard to do in an ad because you're selling it, but there's a good way to do it.
I think the biggest thing is that a lot of people think really heavily about the hook, but they don't think about how it transitions into the sale. So, one very easy format that we use is introducing a problem in the hook. And one of our favorite hooks is like, I hate X problem. I hate being broke, and then the transition, so I found X, and it did Y for me. And that's a very simple ad script that flows well. Can you do that in a more visually interesting way? Maybe in a street interview, maybe on a podcast set, maybe it's like a skit outdoors.
So good ads sell the product, and they'll go over the good selling points. Great ads flow well. So at the end of the day, it's about engaging your viewer, and this is where you kind of just have to do it a million times, frankly, to understand, okay, what is that...? It's ultimately authentic. What does that authenticity look like? And that's why I think humans are so important in the loop.
Clint Betts
Do you think we may already be here, we're getting close to any new celebrity coming from social media, not traditional media anymore? Do you think we're getting to that point? The celebrities now are YouTubers and TikTokers, and it's wild.
Hamza Alsamraee
I guess this is interesting. I would say that traditional media will naturally always... It's easier to go from traditional media to social media than vice versa. Although the vice versa is becoming easier. Think about it, Brad Pitt has an Instagram. I don't think Brad Pitt is in a show, but I bet he has a lot of followers just because it's Brad Pitt, you know who Brad Pitt is.
So actually there's this... I think we'll return to a median. The Overton window has shifted so much to the social stuff that I think traditional still has a role, and people like the IRL stuff. I mean, as much as my generation loves the screens, actually, we also crave other things.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah. I am seeing that too, actually. Finally, we end every interview with the same question: At CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Hamza Alsamraee
It's a great question. Honestly, I think my last startup, when I joined, was called Faves. When I joined Faves, it was basically Tyler who was CEO, and Jacob, who's now currently CEO, was the founding engineer. And I think there was a freelance designer, I was kind of it. And I was straight out of high school. I was decent at marketing. I didn't know anything about software companies. But then I started out, it was a kind of contract, part-time role, and eventually got to own the product direction, the growth operation of the company. And obviously, I worked really hard for that, but at the same time, I was young, and I was given a chance.
So, Tyler, if you're hearing this, he knows, he's like a big brother to me. I learned a lot from that experience. And I think I credit that experience to where I am today, so that's the chance that I got.
Clint Betts
That's incredible, man. What are you majoring in, by the way?
Hamza Alsamraee
Math.
Clint Betts
Yeah, of course, of course, man.
Hamza Alsamraee
I mean, it checks out. It's also, in my opinion, I mean, the people are going, "Oh, this guy's not..." It's the easiest major because you don't have to go to class. There's no attendance requirement; there's no portion of that in the grade. And they're relatively... honestly, they don't care. If you could pass the test, you're fine. As long as I get a B, I'll be fine.
Clint Betts
Well, best of luck with everything. Congrats on everything you've built, man. Thanks for coming on.
Hamza Alsamraee
Of course. Thanks for having me.
Clint Betts
Okay, thanks, brother.
Edited for readability.