Founder's Story
Why Most Businesses Will Fail Without AI Marketing | Ep. 204 with Raza Sheikh Founder & CEO of Identable
Wed, 23 Apr 2025
In this episode of Founder's Story, Raza Sheikh, Founder & CEO of Identable, explains how he distilled his own frustration with fragmented SEO, content, and social tools into Identable—“one platform, zero fragmentation.” Designed for businesses of every size, Identable combines AI-powered SEO, content creation, social scheduling, and lead capture into a single dashboard. Raza describes how his technologist roots and Antler VC experience revealed a universal pain point: marketing teams wasted hours wrestling with disconnected systems instead of crafting strategy.Key Discussion Points:Inspiration & Problem: Juggling multiple free AI utilities, legacy SEO tools, and agencies left teams burned out.Founder’s Path: Solving his own go-to-market struggles led to a platform that any entrepreneur can use.Core Features: Unified website optimization, AI-driven content generation, social posting, and real-time lead tracking.SEO Meets GSO: Integrating traditional backlink SEO with generative search optimization for structured, AI-aware content.AI’s Role: Speed and scale—using AI to handle repetitive tasks so humans can focus on strategy and creativity.Takeaways:Fragmented marketing stacks cost time and talent; consolidation boosts both productivity and results.Generative Search Optimization (GSO) is the next evolution of SEO—structure and semantics matter.AI tools amplify human insight but must be steered by clear strategy and intent.Closing Thoughts: Whether you run brick-and-mortar shops or digital agencies, Identable offers a streamlined, AI-powered path from content idea to customer capture—freeing teams to innovate rather than integrate.Our Sponsors:* Check out Avocado Green Mattress: https://www.avocadogreenmattress.com* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Notion: https://notion.com/founders* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Chapter 1: Who is Raza Sheikh and what inspired him to create Identable?
The frustration drove me to create Identible, a single, reliable platform that cuts through the noises and fragmentations. Basically, our mission here is to give organizations back the time so that they can focus on the strategy rather than creating the content, scheduling the content, hiring technical SEO team to optimize their website, and so on and so forth.
Chapter 2: What problems does Identable solve in organic marketing?
So the tool is basically a unified platform that provides packages all together for organic marketing part of it.
So Raza, if you were to think back just through your own success, other people that you know, would you say that a founder who can solve a problem for themselves first and then bring that to market is a great route for somebody versus coming up with something that maybe they don't even have any experience in?
Absolutely. That's a very good point, actually, because even the idea of identable, the frustration itself is a firsthand experience of my own with my previous venture. Because I'm coming from a data background, a technologist, and so on and so forth, I know how to build the code.
But one thing that I was really missing out was shifting the code into the market and making it present to the target audience. And I happened to join at one particular point of time, you know, alumni as a VC of Antler VC in back in Singapore.
Chapter 3: How does a founder's personal experience shape their business success?
And that's where I actually learned these, the other side of the coin, which is the business side of the coin, the marketing and sales and so on and so forth. Having interacted with 52 founders, I realized that it is not that difficult. the me alone who's struggling with this problem, but most of the tech entrepreneurs basically have these issues of making their product visible to the audience.
So I used to hire this content writer separately who used to do this content, writing the content. And then basically we had this SEO expert who used to optimize our website so that the building block of the website is solid. And the on-page and technical issues has been fixed, which used to take ages for him to do that. And then Google start ranking the page.
And the content comes in keyword optimization, LSI keywords, identification, and so on and so forth. A lot of things that actually used to happen, which used to take a time. Right. And more importantly, what I realized is the social media aspect wherein I used to hire. I remember one of the Australian based agency that we hired for. They used to create a lot of content for us on the social media.
which was great, but one aspect that was missing throughout this whole process was the prospects who used to interact with the content, they were not being captured and I did not know for whatsoever reason that who interacted with my content and who got to resonate with the pain points that we are talking about and so on and so forth so that my sales team can go and approach them as a hot lead and so on and so forth.
These are the problems wherein we have bought in and centralized into Identible. So Identible basically is, as I said to you, zero fragmentation. That means the building block, what I call it as flywheel effect completely. The building block is basically optimizing your website, making it ready for Google to rank.
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Chapter 4: What are the core features of Identable's platform?
And then basically is the content creation where we basically entirely for six months or one year, we schedule your content, whether it's social media or a blog post or whatever it is with the right keywords. And we have seen the witness to that our customer basically get rank within three days of the content getting post.
for the blog posts from the identifiable and capturing those all leads who have been interacting with the content, centralizing into our CRM. So complete flywheel effect that we are trying to bring into the whole aspect. Hope that makes sense.
Yeah, I know there's a lot of talk about SEO changes. And when it comes to not just Google rank, but how AI is now ranking because, you know, Google has their AI search and people are searching. I don't know what the number is, but I think it's like 20, 25% of people are searching now in chat GPT in places. So it's, you know, how the Google rank is changing and digital marketing is changing.
How do you see AI playing into this if, you know, people are not staying up to speed with AI? versus those who are.
If you're not catching up with AI, then you're missing something for sure. But there is always an aspect where you have to really realize that AI is not everything. You have to have AI to feed into something that AI can personalize the content to you specifically, to your pain problems, to your target person's pain problems, so that they can resonate to what problem you're talking about.
along with your solution. So in a platform, we personalize this entire content. And one other thing that you really bought out is the, you know, in my humble opinion, the SEO is not dead. SEO is still there, but generative search optimization, GSO, what we call it as, right? It's coming up. It's coming up. But it is a semantic layer on top of the SEO itself.
And what is the difference between that? SEO is more backlink backed up, backlink powered. But generative search optimization is more structural process. how you are structuring your content, how basically, what keywords and what basically the information you post, you know, structuring the entire content basically.
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Chapter 5: How is AI changing SEO and digital marketing?
And that is the combination that we bring in to make sure that we are not even catering the SEO, but also the generative search engine optimization aspects.
Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up and you clarify. I like that. SEO is really traditional. SEO is backlink driven. And I agree, it's not dead. I feel like every year, being in the digital marketing space for many years myself, every year they say SEO is dead or this is dead or meta ads are dead or this. But it just changed and transformed.
But I like this generative search and its heavy importance on the content. So it's even more important to have a platform like Identible and be able to create this consistent, good quality content. So what are you seeing in terms of so if I'm a business owner and I start using this software, how does this transform the team that I have?
Do you think that people might downsize their team because now team members can do more? Will people increase their team because now they're getting more output? How do you see this playing out?
Chapter 6: What is Generative Search Optimization (GSO) and how does it differ from traditional SEO?
Good point. Yeah. Yeah. So I've been, last two weeks before I was reading through that Meta actually has automated the entire level one engineers completely. So I'm not saying that the team size have to be reduced, but what I'm basically saying is AI is to, you know, give you the space to do that valuable thing. Right.
When when you have AI to do your labor work so you can play smart, you can basically do things much better with AI and much faster because the whole idea of this current era that we are living in or AI era, what we call it as, it's all about speed. It's all about speed. If you can't match up your competitor's speed, then you're losing the game. As simple as that.
And in my humble opinion, AI helps you in coming to the pace of your computers or going beyond it.
So we were interviewing Son recently, who I guess you would call him a futurist. And he was saying how IQ is going to be the least important thing in the future just because we have so many tools that are going to be probably smarter than most of us.
Chapter 7: How can AI tools transform marketing teams and workflows?
And that there's other EQ and other things that are going to be important for, this is just humans in general, like regardless of the digital marketing aspect. But how do you feel about that in terms of just our species, just humans in general in the future? Do you think IQ is going to be less important, more important? How do you think AI is going to be transforming how we think?
I tend to agree with that, unfortunately, or whatever it is, because we cannot match the IQ of AI whatsoever. So it's better that we agree right at the moment rather than later.
But one thing that we can make the difference is, you know, like other day itself, I was reading one article where it was saying that there's nothing as smart work, because if you're not working hard, you're not getting smarter. So that is something that AI does not do it. AI cannot work harder to get smarter. You have to work harder as a human to make AI smarter.
So how you are using AI is going to make the change in the shift of the game. What exactly are you doing with AI?
I like that. That is good. I really like that. How do you see, and this is just AI in general here, what excites you the most about AI in the future? And then what scares you the most?
Okay. Metaverse scares me the most, to be honest. Because being a father of three, I see most of my kids' time being spent on the screens. And that's preparing them to be ready for the Metaverse. Something like that. But see, ethical use, this is very important, right? Ethical use of anything definitely would make things adaptable and easygoing as well. But too much is too bad for anything.
whether in your day-to-day life or whether it's with AI, whether it's with data, anything, too much is always too bad.
Too much ice cream is never good. We were talking about, you know, sweet tooth, right? I, you know, I got to stop, I got to stop eating ice cream, basically, because it's not good for my health. But I, So this has been very informative and I appreciate that. I can understand how important it is. You know, it's going to be because like you said in the beginning, we have so many AI tools now.
There's so many so many things to do. It's very confusing. And really, we just want it into one single place. And I think it's a lot easier for our teams now. So one last thing on what are you seeing in terms of the clients that are using this? What are they telling you about how this is transforming their business?
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