How 1Mind CEO Amanda Kahlow grew 1Mind to $6M revenue and 60 customers in 2026.

Nathan Latka (00:00) Hey folks, my guest today is Amanda Kalo. She's a three time entrepreneur and the former founder and CEO of Sixth Sense. She's currently the founder and CEO of One Mind, which she launched a transform to go to market strategies using emotionally intelligent AI. Amanda, you ready to take us to the top? All right, okay, what is emotionally intelligent AI mean? Take me past the buzzwords. Amanda Kahlow (00:16) Let's do it. I don't know who came up with that. That's not typically what we call ourselves, but we are building what we call go-to-market superhumans. So we are replacing all roles across go-to-market. So everything from the obvious that everybody else is doing. here we go. There's our superhuman right there. ⁓ Top of funnel inbound. She's on your website. She gives a pitch, gives the demo. She doesn't just pass off to an SDR. She goes all the way for the close. And so then we also join Zoom calls so she could be here on the call with us. and she can act as a ride along sales engineer, solutions engineer to give the demo, answer the tough technical questions. And then we have lot of PLG companies that are using it for onboarding to get people to go from free trial to paid. And lastly, in customer success. So how do we onboard our customers through the lifecycle for more of an enterprise motion? So our goal is not to be just top of funnel. Our goal is to support the full lifecycle and give the buyers one experience that's consistent throughout. Nathan Latka (01:20) Interesting. Yeah, I mean, I'm using here on my screen. had to mute it because she started talking to me. But you guys get the sense of what's happening over here. Amanda, just out of curiosity, what is the, what's the tech stack here? I mean, is this a, like a Hey Jen real time API plus 11 labs voice on top of it or what, what's the tech stack here powering her? Amanda Kahlow (01:36) We use a multiple of different technologies. Some of it's our own and some of it's third party vendors. We actually have our own pipeline for most of it. We use multiple different face vendors. The face, I believe, will be commoditized at some point. we did start out building face and then we kind of said, you know what, we're more about the brain. We want to build the context graph and be the decision logic and the engine behind so that she can give the real live demo, so that she can support and create. ROI calculators on the fly, et cetera. So yeah, it's a combination of different things and a lot of it's our own. Nathan Latka (02:13) Okay, let's do a couple of these examples here. HubSpot VSP, just to be clear, are these real paying customers? Real examples? Amanda Kahlow (02:19) They are real enterprise paying customers with logos that we are allowed to talk about. ⁓ So these are not ⁓ experimental budgets. Most of these customers are paying the cost of a human plus and have multiple like HubSpot, for example, we are working on, I believe it is their fourth superhuman to go live across their journey. Fiona, the one you're seeing here was the first superhuman that we built for them. It's in the top left corner of Fiona. is set to talk to their SMB business. So when somebody asks for a demo, they engage with Fiona. She gives the demo, she qualifies, she takes them through to close, and they were able to increase their revenue by 25 % in their SMB small business segment. Nathan Latka (03:02) Interesting, does Fiona make commissions? Amanda Kahlow (03:05) No, that's the good thing. We did some analysis for HubSpot and we looked at the transcripts and the number of conversations and the quality of conversations, the depth and the content she was talking about. It would have taken 89 SDRs and 19 sales engineers to do the job that Fiona is doing today. Nathan Latka (03:24) Interesting. So quantify, I mean, everyone watching my show totally understands the old sort of SDR BDR to AE ratios and their CSM after that everyone understands that flow. How are you right? mean, you probably ran that playbook at six cents actually as you scaled six cents. How is this radically changing that? Is this like a cost structure change? Is it something else I'm missing? Amanda Kahlow (03:42) No, this is a full replacement of humans across the life cycle. So we are truly replacing multiple different roles. And I don't say that lightly because I know that there are real jobs that are going to be impacted. But if you look at the jobs report, AI has put on more jobs than has taken away. I think there are some legacy ways that we ran go to market that is highly inefficient, as you mentioned. But really, lot of companies today are stuck and they're not growing and they need to cut costs. They need to do two things. They grow and they need to cut cost. And so what bigger problem to solve than those two things through the form of an AI superhuman that basically can do the job and do it exponentially better, more efficiently and serves the buyer. So my ultimate goal, why I'm helping companies grow, I'm helping them cut costs. My number one thing that we are focused on is creating a better buying experience. The handoff from an SDR to an AE to a sales engineer to a CSM is atrocious. If you think about, and there's There's loss of context and memory. We ask the buyers the same thing. We take them through the journey. And it's if you put yourself in the buyer's shoes, the process that we go through with humans today is ungodly. So this is a new way and a new world to have unlimited memory, recall, capacity limits, can talk to any industry or vertical. Like, for example, if you're talking to like a Cisco or a Databricks that sell to every industry and every vertical and anyone who needs data. For them to staff sales engineers and solutions engineers that understand the nuances of every vertical and every industry they sell to is virtually impossible. But with AI, it has no capacity limits. So she can actually solution sell in a way that humans could never in the past. Nathan Latka (05:19) This makes sense. How are you pricing this thing? What's the average customer paying per month today? Amanda Kahlow (05:25) ⁓ It's an annual contract ⁓ or a multi-year contract commitments that we have from most of our customers right now. ⁓ They are basically paying a license fee to turn on the superhuman per role. if you think of it, ideally, I want to sell you one superhuman that goes across the life cycle. But to be honest, the market isn't ready for that. They're saying, all right, let's start with the SDR. Let's put it on our website. Let's have her run the demo. Let's have her qualify. And they're like, that really worked. Now let's have her join sales calls and be a sales engineer. So we charge per roll. And 90 % of our cost is baked into the subscription. So it's nothing surprise. Like, it's a flat subscription. We do have some fair use caps where we say, OK, we know your business is this size. I'm going to 5x what we think you're going to do. So if you go to that level and all of sudden your business explodes, we're not out of business tomorrow. But I'm not in the world of metering. ⁓ I actually think that's, I think, the whole pricing model around AI is very difficult to get right. And my goal is to try to make Nathan Latka (06:21) So you don't, just to be clear, you don't price. So if I pay you, I guess what is it? If I have you build one roll for me on one license, am I gonna pay you 10 grand a year on average or what's the general cost? Amanda Kahlow (06:31) It's the cost of a human, so it's six figures. Nathan Latka (06:34) It's like 100K, like 100K for one, okay. And then if she, if the agent you build for me handles 10 calls versus handles 10,000 calls, you're saying there's no variability pricing there. Amanda Kahlow (06:36) At least, yeah. There is a variability. We price based on the size of your business. And then we have a very good understanding of how much we think you're going to consume. So we're doing that on the back end, but we're not metering it. We were. So there are a lot of customers of ours that are on a metered pricing system, but we're moving and we're shifting over to a world that just makes it easier to know exactly what you're going to pay for and the outcome that she's going to produce and what that looks like. Nathan Latka (07:10) Yeah, I would imagine like my hesitancy to signing up to something like this is okay, if I release her on my website and she has 1000 conversations and I was like, oh my gosh, I thought she was only gonna have five and now I owe Amanda like a million dollars when I thought it was gonna be like 100K. That makes it really hard for me to predict like my budgets for with my CFO. Did you experience that firsthand? Is that what happened? Amanda Kahlow (07:29) No, we actually said you would buy a bucket of conversations. So let's say we would estimate, OK, you're going to have 1,000 or 2,000 conversations a month. So let's call that 12,000 or 24,000 conversations a year. And I would sell you a bucket of those conversations. And now what we're moving towards is we still have that concept. But I'm basically giving you exponential what we think you're going to do. Like if you have 10,000 visitors to your site, I think I get 20 to 40 % will talk to the superhuman. If you got all 100 % I'm not going to charge you more. So we're really looking at this of like, we want to be in partnership. We don't want to prohibit you and slow you down from using the superhuman. We don't want you to put her in a corner. We want to give her as much exposure, he or she or they, whatever pronoun you...