How AI Is Changing Entrepreneurship: Noemi Kis on AI for Entrepreneurs, Personal Branding & Media

0:00 Hi, I'm your host, Henry Clavo, CEO and founder of Orlando Insight Group. Each episode, we dive into real conversations with technology leaders, innovators, experts, influencers who are shaping the future of data, cybersecurity, and net. Our goal is simple, to give you practical insights, real-world strategies, and expert perspective that you can use to drive smarter decisions and stronger results for your business. So today I'm joined by Noemi Kiss, entrepreneur, Forbes contributor, TEDx speaker, and founder of Kiss and Co Media.

0:35 Today she brings that experience to a new question. How is artificial intelligence changed the way we build businesses, hire people, and compete? Through Kiss and Co Media, she explores the intersection of AI, entrepreneurship, and emerging trends, helping business owners understand these changes mean for their future. We'll explore her entrepreneurial journey, the decisions behind building and reinventing a business, and how leaders can prepare for opportunities while navigating uncertainty. Naomi, welcome to the podcast.

1:03 It's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you, Henry. I'm excited to be here. So just to get started, what is the single biggest way AI will change entrepreneurship over the next three years, Naomi? me wow that's a good question how will ai change entrepreneurship in the next you know um so ai has already started changing entrepreneurship in such a big way um as you know a lot of um what used to what it used to take to become an entrepreneur you have to get developers and you have to set up your marketing team and you have to do all this capital, right?

1:49 You have to raise a lot of money to get a startup going. That eventually went away for the most part. And now founders can, even with solo teams, we've had a record number of million dollar companies with no official W-2s on their record. So solo million dollar companies are now, you know, more regular than ever. So I feel like it's changed a lot for founders to build, but also on how you build up your team, your work structure looks different. So it's interesting because I used to have people doing things like doing tasks, produce this work, you know, update this spreadsheet, give me the KPIs on this and doing, right?

2:44 And now we built a lot of systems with AI that do the work. It will write up the drafts. It will update the Trello CRM. It will do the things that a person used to do. So now I need people who can make the judgment calls on whether that output is good or not. And it's more outcome-based than task-oriented. Very interesting. So now that they have these tools, most likely they will offshore their capabilities. Isn't there a fear that they'll lose that capability or you will have more noise than signals in your business?

3:34 How, as an entrepreneur, can you tackle this new challenge and be able to grow a business now with this uh ai uh initiative everyone has access to oh i see are you um you're basically saying that because now every it's democratized so everyone has the same access to ai right so correct now you you're not differentiated if you have capital to build because now that founder who didn't have it is now going to have access to all the research the tools right as a big company um exactly so it's interesting um i it's what i have seen is it's i've seen still a lot of disparity between founders building something that's going to be long lasting right because now what happens is you can find a tool and quickly build it, right?

4:37 You can build a SaaS, you can build a business, you can be a professional, an agency, and you can do a lot of the things that you used to have to hire professionals to do, to do it with. So it's a much more lean agency. I think the same strategies still apply for entrepreneurship with AI. So the fact that you have to go into a market where there's demand for your product and you have to then be able to create return customers and deliver that product and be profitable, those three things were always true for business.

5:18 And they will always be true even with AI. So the first principles we have to go back to, are they still true? Yes, they will always be true. So if founder can build in one day a SaaS that built by a big company, but is he going to be able to get customers? Can he deliver a good product and can he be profitable? That's what's going to separate them from winners. Yeah, they have to be a conductor and be able to identify the market as well as have marketing process that gets attention to them. So it's a very long process, but it does take dedication and hours.

6:02 Moving on, you immigrated from Hungary at 17 without an established network. How did the experience shape the way you build businesses and relationships?

6:17 Immigrating was a really good thing for me. I lived in three countries before the age of 17. I was born in Hungary, raised. Then we moved to South Africa, Cape Town. I lived in for four years. And then we moved to the U.S. when I was a senior in high school. So I got to see a lot of the world early on. And it taught me that there are different viewpoints and different cultures. Because, you know, growing up in Eastern Europe, in Hungary, at the time that I did, it's very closed country, Eastern Europe, right?

6:56 You don't have like, you can't leave and come. Like there's not many tourists. There's not many people outside perspective. You're just with other Hungarians. And so it was good for me to get a perspective. Also, one thing I think that's like an immigrant mindset where, and you don't have to be an immigrant to have this mindset, but I think it does come with immigration is you were kind of given a chance at a new life, at a new opportunity in the U.S. where basically anything is still possible, right?

7:31 And you don't want to waste it. So I've never taken it for granted. And I always worked hard to make it worthwhile for my parents to give up their entire life and move us all here

7:47 When you came to the States, what was the culture shock that you experienced for you for the first time? Oh, my gosh, so many. So I didn't get the jokes. Like when somebody would make a joke, I just wouldn't get it. I don't know why. It was, I was like, I'm sorry. I, it was like, things just went over my head because there was, there's a lot of jargon. There's a lot of, not jargon, but cultural nuances that I just didn't get. And so, and also I think in Hungary, the mannerisms are very different.

8:29 So So we're more, my face is not maybe expressing as much emotion. I may not be, you know, in America, like, oh my gosh, I missed you so much. Have you been? We don't do that in Hungary. So it could come out as cold, you know, to a U.S. person, but it's not. And so is the U.S. person being so emotional, could come out as fake, but it's not. It's part of the culture, right? So I have to learn those things. Yeah, that's one thing I noticed when we met for the first time. I won't say monotone, but it was very static in the way you communicate.

9:13 I found that interesting, and that's why I wanted to reach out to you when you first appeared on LinkedIn. Thank you. Yes, it's true. Which habit from that period still shows up in how you work today, Naomi? well I consider myself self-made because in my 20s I didn't have any positive I didn't have like positive habits I didn't I wasn't born with being driven I wasn't born with you know some people are always like oh I from the time I was you know 12 or 20 I already knew what I wanted and I worked hard.

9:55 Like that wasn't me. I was hanging out with the wrong crowd. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And I just didn't have like much motivation because I didn't have goals. Like, yes, I went to college, but I started working in accounting, but I would just show up and not really know like, where is my life going to be in 10 years. So I only started cultivating these habits of entrepreneurship and having drive and having goals where I want to show up for my life every single day with a specific goal.

10:30 And that only came to me in my 30s and now I'm in my 40s. So not that long. So talking from experience, and I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs can share this idea when it comes to this come sacrifices was there anything in any point in your life where you had to forego something in order to pursue your water business your your media company was there any regrets in that regard ah you know it's so interesting i just i just pre-ordered the new book from seth godin called the knot yeah and it's so interesting he talks about this kind of where people get stuck.

11:15 And that's where I was a lot of the time is I want to own a business, but I don't want to fail. Or I want to start a company, but I don't want to work too hard. Or, you know, like all these, I want something, it's going to come with a price or a cost. And I'm not, while I want this, I'm not willing to do this, right? And so we get stuck. And I think I was there a lot of the times with fear. I don't know if I want to go after my entrepreneurship goals because I may fail. I won't have a steady paycheck.

11:49 And so one day I just got to a point where the pain of staying was greater than the fear of making the change. And I said, I just like want a new life. Like I cannot live like this. I'm just not happy. and that's that was the motivation for me to take the step and start a business and it like the rest is history like my life changed at that moment completely it was for the better like I found like wow you can actually be happy like show up to work and be happy and you can be passionate about what you do like what a concept yeah if you are able to measure where you are now um and then level up and meet new people, that usually is the formula to expand your horizon.

12:39 So good, good, good. What did building a seven-figure industrial water treatment business teach you that online entrepreneurs often learn too late?

12:52 So what I think is important, so there's a few things that are important when starting a business that will decide whether you're going to be successful or not. And the water filtration business I started had all those things. And those things are having a recurring business model, right? So you're not constantly having to go after customers. You're not in the sales business, right? You get a customer and they're going to need water filters every month, right? So you got a customer for life, so to speak, right?

13:25 That's number one. Um, number two is, um, do you have enough, um, sim, like simplicity of operations, right? I didn't want to be a big operator, like having a big warehouse and having, you know, 200 employees and like complexity, like a restaurant, you know, need so much complexity to run a restaurant. Right. But like you have a laundromat, it's very easy to run. I mean, it's not easy, but it's a very simple operation. That's how my company is. It's very easy operationally because we don't stock the product.

14:00 It's almost like we have relationship, key strategic relationships. And then I would say the third important one is margin. Do you have enough margin where you can make a sale and have enough to support your business? and what lessons came from serving customers like nasa spacex mphd like how is those relationships different when working with your water treatment plant you know they're not and that was the big aha moment for me is i always thought oh i can't like those companies would never work with my little company.

14:43 And then we had a big company reach out to us. And it was the first time and we served that client, I think it was SpaceX. And that was my realization, like, wow, we did the exact same job as we did for another company. And we did it just as well. And now I was able to use that company name to pitch other big companies to say, hey, I served this. Once you get a Fortune 500 company in your client base you can go to other Fortune 500 companies and say hey these are my other clients and they happy right so that what he taught me yeah you can go wrong with a big name it makes things this year so true you mentioned that you didn't have like a supply or things to stock but what did those physical products and operation constraints force you to get right?

15:49 Like when you had the business, what needed to be right so it doesn't affect your margins? I had to make sure that we have good relationships with suppliers. We can, And then one thing that I did to stand out is I looked at the competitors and I said, what is important to our customers and what is something the competitors are not good at? And what is that gap? And I found it because it was customers like this needed ASAP. Like sometimes something is broken. You're in a plant and the plant operator is like, oh, my gosh, do you have this?

16:33 Can you ship it overnight? And they would call and nobody would answer. They would leave a message. They would call two to three suppliers. So when I trained my team, I said, the number one rule, we only have one rule, that when we get an email, we reply to it immediately during business hours. Like drop everything. You got a new email, reply to it and give that person a quote. And that helped us to stand out as a no-name company because we did that one thing right.

17:07 Yeah, that's the golden rule, as my teammate would say. If you do something excellent, you'll be dependent on to do other projects. So the same thing with your business recognition. You have to show that you're a professional. Exactly. What problems did you create, monitor to solve? And when did you first realize the market was not responding as you expect? So we'll take a look at other aspects of your business and what didn't work well. Yeah, so Monitor was a software startup that I started in the same space as the water industry.

17:44 I noticed that people I was selling water filtration things to, they also had equipment. And so I wanted to offer another service to my existing customer base to help with maintenance of their equipment and getting parts for them. And I started testing it. And I started, I made it for small companies. I said, you know, I don't want the complexity of big company. I can't handle that. I had a very small team, limited funds. so but what happened is when I went to trade shows or I advertised it only big companies were interested because the problem for small companies was a small problem and they solved it with an excel worksheet right we'll just keep track here but for a big company was a complex huge problem it was very painful so I would get on these calls with like they would bring everybody on a call, like 10 people.

18:43 Hey, I brought my engineer and my warehouse guy. And like, they were so excited. And the problem was, is that they had a ERP system that was, you know, from the 1990s that everyone was on. And it required such complexity to execute this project over with with a big company that I just wasn't I started um creating features for them and it I just got to a point where I said you know this is not the type of company I want to build it's very resource heavy and it it just it was it got too complex for me so I I decided to um wind things down if you were to go back what we test earlier to avoid all these to learn the lessons early before committing

19:42 what would you test earlier if you're starting it again so if you were to go through this process again, but avoid the mistakes, the high level mistakes. What things you were testing earlier? Ah.

20:04 I think if I was building that company now, I wouldn't even hire a developer. I would just vibe code it and talk to a bunch of companies. and before building them features, decide the first use case that I'm going to serve really well. I'm not going to have a big platform. I'm going to do one thing for you guys. Do you want it to monitor your equipment? Do you want it to help your salespeople? And I'm just going to focus on the biggest pain point first, build it for that. And once I get some prepayments from customers, then I'll hire a developer and go all in on building that MVP for them.

20:45 Yeah, that makes sense. You have to develop something specialized or a small POC to be able to test the viability of a product in the market. But I can attest you didn't have AI at the time. Yeah, exactly. Incredible. How can a founder tell whether to persist with an idea, pivot the business or shut it down? I think it's pretty easy to tell if there's demand. So when a business has demand, you're going to get customers reaching out. You're going to close a certain percentage of your customers because there's real demand there.

21:32 If it feels like you're pulling teeth and it's just not happening, you either need to pivot to something that will work or you just shut it down. because why waste time and money when there is no demand? So I would just look at the demand and if there's product market fit and then you either need to pivot your product or you find a new market and you just keep testing little things until it works. But I really also like just going with as simple as checking keywords, right? So you search how many people are looking for laundry mats near me or cleaning services near me or accountants, you know, anyway, wills or trusts near me.

22:22 And then you go, oh, there's a lot of monthly searches, like let's say over a thousand monthly searches. But the difficulty or the competition of the keyword is pretty low. like under 20, right? So you have that sweet spot where enough people are searching, but the competition is not there yet. So I think it's very good to test keywords for what you want to start.

22:52 And going back to the business failing what evidence deserves more weight than optimism or sunk cost Which evidence deserves more weight than optimism or sunk cost Like do you give credence to feelings of a business and customers and what your investors are telling you? Or do you go with the cost of the business and your capital? I like to do a mix of two. So I look at the data, of course, you have to look at the evidence because there's data that's going to tell you if it's working. But there's also something else that I think founders need to rely on, which is your instinct.

23:41 You know, sometimes we have some kind of an instinct. It comes from experience in the industry, comes from like knowing people, knowing your customer. But I think listen to both. Take both of that account, because sometimes my gut will tell me to do something and I'll somehow make it work. And so that's important to listen to. That's like our higher wisdom, right? It's very important.

24:08 And now we move on to social media. When did you realize your LinkedIn content was gaining real traction and what changed just before that inflection point. So yeah, I met you at a point where you appeared out of thin air and I was, who is this person? I want to learn more. So, and then you start to grow a following. So I'm curious, how did that all come about? Yeah, it was very methodical actually and intentional. So I was, I wanted to be a well-known LinkedIn creator. And I hired a coach and said, listen, I don't want to go through three to six months of trial and error and get frustrated.

24:55 Why don't you just teach me everything? You know, because you have 200,000 followers. So I want to know how you did it. And I took lessons from her and she basically taught me, this is how you write a hook. This is what kind of images you should use. This is, you know, what good content looks like. And so I took that and I started creating. And at first I would get, you know, 10 comments or 10 people. I had maybe like 5,000 followers, but I never posted anything. So there was no engagement. And most of the followers were in the water industry.

25:31 And I wasn't posting about water industry stuff. I was posting about entrepreneurship and leadership stuff. And it was a progression. Then I would 50 likes per post and then 100 likes per post. And then all of a sudden it compounded. And then it seemed like it happened overnight. But then I would get like 500 likes per post, 1,000. It would just, it seemed like overnight that it just blew up. But I think it was building to that for about a year, maybe six months or eight months before that.

26:08 And, yeah, that grew for another couple of years until you started online content where you would have potential entrepreneurs build a business. And then it evolved into Instagram and social media videos about people using AI. And then you created a generation idea, a website so people can go and take your ideas and start a business. What was the I guess the motivation to do that? You have a very successful business and you have a good following and you have good posts. But what made you want to share with other entrepreneurs?

26:55 Yeah, I think it's about, so there's this kind of stigma on, you know, your content creator or your, you know, influencer. And it's considered like almost cheesy, right? To be like, what are you doing posting online? That's cringe. And I don't look at it like that. I look at it as a business owner. I look at my business and I say, where am I the bottleneck and how can I scale? And this is the same thing for your personal brand. If I do a group and I share my expertise with a group, how many, I have to be there physically and share it with a group of people that show up, right?

27:38 Or I can do it in a group or a coaching session. But if you want to scale yourself personally and be talking to people even if when you're sleeping you have 20 videos online that are spreading your message you have literally just multiplied yourself and that's very powerful and I think there's a lot of power behind being a b2b creator specifically because I think a lot of lifestyle creators and all of them are are a different format of creators but the b2b creator is sorry about that that's okay yeah b2b creators are more oriented towards business founders and people want to follow right so business content you would usually get from like articles or company blogs but when you have a person who is talking to you it's more relatable to get that information.

28:44 So people want to follow people, not companies.

28:49 Yeah, that is true. Now that LinkedIn has changed algorithms, you have to build a presence. You have to present yourself, know how to speak, know your subject to be able to build at least a baseline following. We're reaching to the end of the podcast, Noemi, But where can they find you for more content and KISS and Co.? Yeah, absolutely. So I have a website called fastestgrowingtrends.com where you can find the fastest growing trends. You can sign up for a free account. I also have a website called noemikish.com where I post free resources like from the school community.

29:36 I used to have all my resources around there. And so that's also, or find me on LinkedIn or Instagram by my name. Awesome. And any upcoming events coming up for you, Naomi, that people would ask?

29:53 I just got a column on Forbes.com. So I'm an entrepreneurship Forbes contributor now. So definitely find me there. And I'll post, I don't know events yet, But I'm sure I'll be attending some events this year, this next year. Awesome. Well, Naomi, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. We hope you come back and have a long conversation more on your background and what you're currently doing with AI. So thank you so much. Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Henry. Thanks for having me on. This wraps up today's episode of To Catch More.

30:34 speakers like Noemi, please visit our website, OrlandoInsightsPodcast.com, and sign, subscribe, and like. Have a good one. Take care.