Use AI to Find Exact Channels That Reach Your Audience | Sandeep Kondury | Founder/CEO | Feat | 4k

I think there's this weird mass psychosis that people seem to believe that AI is just gonna make content better or it's gonna make so much more content so we don't need people anymore. I think in the space of content and marketing the complete opposite is true your customers want to be associated with you and not some sort of ai bot i don't think anyone wants that if you're able to organize your marketing strategy seo strategy to something where you're able to solve both these problems of like increasing human trust and increasing ai trust then you have more likelihood of being recommended by any algorithm marketing teams are going to have to realize you're not just serving for an algorithm anymore you have to do it for two layers. One is humans and the primary layer is AI. focused on identifying early market signals by analyzing data spread across the internet and how language predicts startup outcomes. I use my product and search who are the people with the panel. on YouTube and on podcasts, on newsletters, and you're the one of the first people that it recommended. I thought everyone that came on has been like either someone who is highly respected in this space or they're building something that's going to change the world. I was able to discover the one common feature of every successful company in the world, which I termed as. All right, everybody, welcome to the AI Space podcast. AI isn't just the future. It's a force rewriting the rules of business, wealth creation, society. If you're a founder, innovator or technologist, this is the AI show for you. The question you have to ask yourself is, will I blaze a path? Follow the crowd or be left in the dust. This is season two, the 14th episode, and we're thrilled to have Sandeep Kwanduri, founder and CEO of Feature. I'm Sanjay Kluvlel, your creator and host, founder and CEO of Stonehouse Advisors, your trusted advisor for AI founders and businesses focused on golden market strategy and execution. Sandeep, on the AI Space podcast, we jump right in to highlight game-changing insights that help founders drive innovation and scale business initiatives. First of all, welcome. What do you see as the key trends in AI going to 2026? Thank you very much for having me on, Sanjay. The big trend that I notice is happening right now is in the space of marketing, right? Everyone is optimizing for getting featured, getting their product or service be the first thing that shows up when someone searches for a problem to be sought. And this is sort of the market that I'm putting my efforts into as well. The big trend is that everyone's optimizing for AI search. or AI visibility, which I think is kind of counter-intuitive and counter-productive. And I'll talk about this later during the pod. And that's really the problem that I'm going after to solve through my company feature. Besides those, besides the one that I'm directly involved in, I would say the other two trends is going to be around content creation and product development, right? I've been an avid user of Cursor now. I've been... cranking out the code every day. So I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of big trend happening in the space of like coding and marketing and content creation right now. Well, that's great. And then we'll dive deeper in those insights. If you look back upon 2025, what's one insight, positive or negative, that's kind of impacted you like, hmm, you go, uh-huh. Maybe I need to rethink how I approach in 2026. Yeah, absolutely. Actually, I had a whole presentation around the insight I had. I gave a TED Talk, which later got selected as the TED Editor's Pick. Through my experience in venture capital, I was able to discover the one common feature of every successful company in the world, which I termed as Lingo Leverage, which is being able to associate a company to a certain behavior or an action that's an evolutionarily... an evolutionarily advantageous position than their incumbents. And that's what I call call lingo leverage. And I'll tag it somewhere in the description or leave a QR code somewhere. But that has impacted the way in which I approach venture, not just my startup, but all the companies that I worked with in my day job as a venture associate. And it's completely changed the way in which I look at early stage investing. and early stage product development. Oh, that's great. And then what do you see the top AI strategies to grow and scale a business? Yeah, the first one is what I definitely would want to push more and really become the voice for is what I call featured marketing, right? Everyone's optimizing for AI visibility. I think the whole marketing world is sort of stuck up on SEO optimization and saying, hey, like they're still thinking about SEO or like being visible on AI sort of the same way people did 10 years ago by keyword optimization. What I really want to push for is what I call featured marketing, which is identifying similar rooms or spaces. as that of what your business does and going and getting yourself featured on it like I'm doing right now, getting featured on a podcast, going to newsletters, going into different other spaces where there are similar voices and audience as that of what you're trying to do and providing value there instead of writing blog posts or something like that because creating blogs or creating content is fundamentally shifted and it's easier right the other day i was able to just create uh crank out 100 blog posts for my website in like 30 minutes so think about the power of that right everyone can create content now so se optimization is not going to be as effective anymore if you really want to be seen as an authority and you want ai to take what you're doing and build uh your ai trust credit if that's what you want to call it you want to be seen Talking about the same topic or talking about the same problem across multiple different channels and provide value or provide solutions across different channels. Think podcasts, newsletters, events, conferences, everywhere. And having a strategy of saying, hey, this is what I'm solving for. This is my niche. So let me make sure I don't just optimize getting featured, but also what the metadata or the what the description of those featured posts are going to be. So AI has this comprehensive understanding of what you do overall. Oh, that's great. So, you know, yeah, now let's take a step back. I'll tell the audience a little bit more about Feature and yourself. Feature is an AI-powered distribution platform that helps founders and creators instantly find the right channels to reach their ideal audience. Built for featured marketing, it identifies the trusted newsletters, podcasts, communities, and creators that actually drive influence and demand. By analyzing content and audience signals across the internet, Feature removes the guesswork from distribution and shows exactly where stories should get featured to compound growth. Sandeep Kunduri is a venture capital associate and founder building tools at the intersection of media, distribution, and AI. focused on identifying early market signals by analyzing ideas spread across the internet and how language predicts startup outcomes. He's a founder of Feature, a platform that uses AI to instantly identify high intent distribution channels for founders and creators. Sandeep, you know, let's take a, we can take a breath, you know, relax a little bit. First of all, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and your path into AI? Absolutely. I started my career early as an analyst at a venture capital firm in Seattle while I was in college. And that experience really, really started pushing me into the rabbit hole of understanding how early investing works, early venture production, venture creation works. And I just followed that curiosity. I got my first job here in Austin, Texas after graduation as an analyst, worked at an accelerator, worked with hundreds of startups over the next four years or so, maybe over 1,400 startups at this point. helped in the deployment of over $10 million. So that was really the birth of my career into venture. And recently, last year, as I mentioned earlier, I gave this TED talk on my thesis on venture investing. It was very well received, got selected to be staged on the global TED platform and selected as a TED editor's pick. While all of this was happening, AI sort of took the world by storm, right? I don't think there's a single person on the planet that hasn't been affected or will be affected by the AI revolution. So just like that, my career has been affected. When I say affected, I don't mean like affected, but it's been influenced by AI, right? My workflows have changed my... future plans of like how do I think about products how I think about venture investing everything has been influenced by AI and somewhere along the way after my after my speaking gig or like little TED talk I decided hey let me be a founder I think this is a great time to build something because the world is going through a transition phase right now and this is the perfect time if you have a bold counter-intuitive vision this is like a great time to start something because everybody's sort of receptive to change people are more open to what I call sort of like anti-position ideas right like you don't just say hey I'm doing the same thing a million other people are doing I'm doing something that's radically different and distinct from from anything that exists on on the market And I think people are a lot more receptive to that right now than they would be like five years ago. So I would say these are all the ways in which like AI has like primarily affected me in the last like couple of years. No, I appreciate that. So what made you realize, hey, you need to build feature and the world's ready for it? Yeah. So there's a couple of different things that pushed me to starting features, right? First was I was trying to scratch my own itch. After my talk got published. Like most wonderful TED talks, it got like some 10,000 views or something like that. But it didn't go much beyond that. And I was like, oh my God, that's such a valuable talk. Why isn't it going viral, right? So I tried hacking a few methods. I said, okay, let me try to get this featured on a couple of different Instagram pages or a few niche channels. I reached out to people manually. I tried to collaborate with them and the word spread and in less than a week, I got another 40,000 views or something like that. Uh, and that was like mind opening. I was like, Oh my God, like you can, you can collaborate with people similar to what you're doing or like in a, in a similar space and their audience suddenly become yours, right? Like you can rent people's audience almost. So that's where this whole idea of like getting featured started later. once I did start building the product, I noticed it's sort of directly in conflict. My thesis is directly in conflict with the marketing world, the way in which it operates right now. Like I said earlier, everyone in the marketing world seems to be operating under the same rules of the last 10 years of saying, hey, let's optimize SEO. Let's do AI visibility. We'll get you featured on LLMs. We'll increase your AI visibility by like putting a few keywords in your blog post and stuff like that. But coming from my venture background, I realized if everyone's doing it, it's not going to be as valuable anymore, right? Like it's sort of diminishes the return, the utility of it. So that's when another insight struck me. I'm like, if everyone's trying to optimize for it, that's probably going to not be as effective. How do we mix getting featured with AI optimization so that Companies can really leverage their content, their valuable information, the information they provide through multiple channels to increase their AI visibility, if you will. And I've started building the product, got a few early customers. On the first week of launch, I made some $3,000. That was definitely very reinforcing, right? And then after that, I just started building the product, getting more customers, seeing traction. And it kept sort of like the positive reinforcement kept adding on top of the previous events. Yeah. And so what's your role and mandate? Currently, I'm the solo founder. I'm the CEO tech customer support. I'm the everything guy. I do everything for the company. I do have like a small team of contractors that I lean on once in a while. founder, typical founder journey, right? Of like building the product, talking to people, making sure I'm aligning them with the vision, being able to provide value, say, through the product and continuing to iterate the process. Yeah. So who are you? You said founder. So who are your target segments and what are your use cases? I'm currently working with mostly early stage growth stage, early and growth stage startups. I'm working with companies that are seed and beyond, companies that are post-product, post-revenue, that do have a stake in marketing. They've built something valuable, now they want to get it featured or they want to get it in the market. So I would say my ideal customers are companies that are going to market and trying to increase the word of mouth of what they're doing. Yeah, that's great. So, you know, in terms of AI, ML, architecture, tech stack, what tools or frameworks, how are you building out like methodologies, frameworks, architecture, tools, platforms, how are you kind of building this out? This is a very interesting question personally, because I'm not a developer by trade. I can't code, but I've been building the whole product by myself, right? I've been using a lot of AI. My primary stack is... for someone, anyone that's interested in this stuff. Next.js, MongoDB for the backend. And I'm using cursor and codex for like prompt coding, if that's a word. And what else? Yeah, some regular like Vercel for deployment. But this really talks more than what I'm using. The reason I'm talking about this is this really talks about the shift. that happened recently, right, in the last one year. Someone like me who's not a developer can leverage AI tools to build something that's enterprise-grade, that companies with millions of dollars are using. I don't think this could have been possible a couple of years ago. So that's really another big impact AI has had in the last few months. So when you started out in AI, kind of building out, when you were prompting, Were there specific LLMs you were looking at or have you tried most of them? I've tried most of them. My current favorites are cutting edge, right? Opus 4.6, Codex 3.5. Oh, sorry, 5.3. And I also am a big fan of Cursor. There's, I think, a very tight competition happening right now between Cursor, Composer 1.5 and Codex. But they're... They're both equally good. Besides these, I would say there's like a lot of code is Opus 4.6 again. It's nice. It's great. I've personally been a cursor fan and yeah, I'm really excited about the next generation. I think they can, especially if you're in the space of like software or SAS, you have no reason to not be building right now anymore. When I started, I was using, you know, just regular chat GPT. I've tried, I had my own custom GPTs in like my CMOs. custom GPT. I actually have a language learning tool that's a custom GPT. I also have kind of like a prompting for my AI art in there. But then recently I was trying, you know, Gemini 3.0. Initially I thought it was good. I came to a point recently where I've been putting, as I'm trying to tweak my podcast and I put in the transcripts and I also put in metrics for my results, I'll ask the GPTs. i'll put screenshots and i'll ask you to assess give me only actual lines from the transcript they'll produce something i don't recognize that line and i say is this an actual line it's like no no it's not i've asked you multiple times only give me actual lines so i say your line is like yeah we're sorry you know and then that's across happened across all the gpds and then i'll post in some metrics and it'll give me these this okay i'll say rank the metrics whatever and it'll give me this rankings like did you even read because i'll say first of all read my screenshot it says i've read it Then it's giving metrics for another screenshot. So it got a little frustrating. I'm getting to, I think I've seen a degradation in this. And the point I'm getting to is like, you know, I know that there's tools out there like Bolt and Kirsch and all, and I know a lot of these things are actually on top of Cloud code, right? So I actually went into Cloud and asked it, hey, help me build out a tool to analyze the metrics from my YouTube channel and then also Google ads and all this stuff to pull it in. So I started building that out and it's building it for me. I got to a point where then I had to get the API from Google. And that took like a week or two, right? To get the actual API, which is kind of unfortunate. So I got to get back to that. And then last year I used cursor. There's good things about it, but there's times there's no magic button. You have to be kind of sophisticated in terms of the prompt engineering and the context windows to make sure something doesn't break. But you say, go fix this. Then it breaks three other items. So I remember using cursor last year, right? And there's no easy button on any of these tools. So I think, you know, there has to be some people that go, I'm just going to start byte coding. Everything will come out right. You have to actually still approach it with a structured approach because there's a front end, there's a back end, like you said, you use, you know, a database, et cetera. Right. And you have to make sure everything works, et cetera. And there's times when you ask some of these tools, go do this and it goes, does that thing that it breaks everything else. Right. So from your experience, have you, have you managed that process? Have you experienced that? Then have you managed it? Right. Yeah. I did experience it a couple of times. Uh, what I, what I figured works best for me. is breaking down the development process into very small chunks. And I never give my code editors more than like a few blocks to work on, whether it's front end or back end. It helps on multiple levels. It helps me understand what exactly needs to be done. Like what's the logic behind this feature that needs to be developed and sort of like take it incrementally instead of like saying, hey, like do this big. big fat thing and it usually ends up getting confused. Uh, so yes, I think the big, uh, and another thing is like, if you are, if you do decide to do something that requires larger context, uh, plan mode, I think plan mode is definitely very helpful because firstly, it helps you think through what you want to develop and then it creates this very robust plan and then you can use that to, to sort of implement, I wouldn't say large. feature but like something mid-sized yeah no that's great and then i think that's very important inside is managing how much you promise a lot of people go into an ai and get this long prompt and paste it in and say why it didn't whip out whatever i expected right because it doesn't know you know it's trying to prioritize what needs to get done and sometimes it misses some things and so manage that context window it also manages your costs too because if you don't manage it right you can burn through your free plan and your basic plan like that right Exactly. Totally. I think, and that reminds me, actually, I want to, you want to make sure you're, you're managing your credits and how much, uh, how much you're spending on these, uh, platforms. Uh, that is absolutely very important. Uh, but I thought of something else while we were discussing this, think about products that were like cutting edge a few years, like 10, 20 years ago, like Instagram and Facebook, those weren't. successful because of their like initial complexity, right? Like Instagram was like a video uploading or like photograph uploading, same thing with Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. They weren't like super sophisticated products. So if you're an early builder, if you're a, if you're a founder, you can first, I think you need to spend a lot more time with your customers, trying to figure out what your unique thesis is, what you see as changing in the world. And then you build an MVP, right? Like that's, that's the, that's the main idea is can you build something that's the most minimal viable product for whatever you're trying to do. And, and then once you have customers, you start building around their usage, around how they're leveraging your product or tool or service. And then the complexity builds on top of it. So instead of trying to over-engineer your product to make it serve everyone, you want to figure out what your unique value or edges and just build for that very specific thing. And if you do it like that, it gets much easier to build something like this with AI. Like Instagram can be built so easily now with a prompt. I'm not talking more like the sophistication. That's a very important point because even with my podcast, I could do so much more. But what I've done is... just get it out there on my website get you know get it out there then iterate you know okay next episode i get some amazing insights from you or somebody else just take it to the next level but it doesn't have to be a heavy lift and then it's a preto principle too right you got to find the things that are going to what's really going to drive the most impact and where you spend your time there's only a limited amount of time but you can hopefully use aai agents etc so now you've done the coding all that stuff Done anything, gone anything further into automation or AI agents or is that down, is that on the roadmap? For my product, I'm building a few different AI agents right now. There are certain components of every, every product needs to, to get a job done, right? Like you open Instagram or you open Netflix, you have a job you want to be done. In the software era, pre-AI, that was primarily done through code. In the AI era, what changed is now you can have any product do more jobs or like do a job better because it's not just built on code. You're now being able to create agents that your customers can use when they open your product or service or mostly products. They can go and say, Hey, like this is the job to be done. Click. And then if you're able to generate an agent or a set of agents that get that, that gets that job done, you're in a better, better position. Yeah, that's great. And we'll dive into some. some more aspects of other things as we get further. But let's just shift gears a little bit. What about the AI Space podcast resonate with you? Say, hey, I'd like to be a guest on the show. Yeah, it's really been the guests that I've attended so far. I thought everyone that came on has been like either someone who is highly respected in this space or they're building something that's going to change the world. So these are things that really resonated with me. And the second thing I would say is you have niched down. and very well niched, right? You're specified on AI, which is all the boom and the craze right now. So you're really been able to like put yourself in this position of like bringing anyone that's associated with AI or want to be associated with AI onto your platform. So that's what I thought was very interesting about your platform. No, I appreciate that. And, you know, I say this a couple of times. I started my AI business about three years ago. I saw AI coming down the pike. I got some certifications, you know, AI go to market strategy execution. Last year I saw this podcast. I said, why don't I give back? Other people are trying to figure out this AI space. And, you know, my ICP is really not just AI. It's really the founders, the builders, the innovators. So it's even more niche than that, but actually building out of the space. And so it's not, you know, I'm trying to make it too technical and too business, too fluffy and too hype driven. So finding that balance where people. at this time are looking for authentic, real stories and how do I build a business and make money, right? And even when I started this, going back to you saying, you know, finding that sweet spot, people saying, why are you starting a podcast? You can just do AI and create a podcast. And at first I was like, oh, okay, maybe I should do that at some point. But now I'm so glad because there's so much AI slop. There's so much, I don't think people really, it doesn't resonate with people, right? I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? 100%. That is exactly why I started Feature. I think there's this weird mass psychosis that people seem to believe that AI is just going to make content better or it's going to make so much more content so we don't need people anymore. I think in the space of content and marketing, the complete opposite is true. Because if everyone can create AI podcasts, it's not going to have the same value. Number one, and more importantly, business still happens through people. Right? Like I know my product is built for AI readability and the best products in the world are being built for AIs, right? Like there's a parallel web systems as the Google for AI. And then there's all these other different products. But at the end of the day, we are really trying to serve humans, right? That's, that's who our end customer is always going to be. So if you, if you take people out of the loop, you're really taking out like prospects or potential revenue out of your business. Right. So there are aspects where like AI can make your job easier, but this I think should become an opportunity for people to realize, Hey, I should go on more podcasts. I should go on more newsletters. I should go get myself appeared on more channels. So that builds trust because at the end of the day, your customers want to be associated with you and not some sort of AI bot. I don't think anyone wants that. Right. No, you're definitely right. Those are things we have to navigate. So where's the best place for everyone to connect with you and learn more about your company? Yeah. Again, I'll link it in the description or one of the QR codes. But you can find me on LinkedIn, Sandeep Konduri on LinkedIn. You'll find me if you want to watch my TED talk. It's how to be in the top 10% of startups that succeed by Sandeep Konduri on YouTube. I'm always available and open to chat. And what's a website they need to go to? Feat.press. F-E-A-T.press. All right. Well, I want to make sure everybody likes, comments, subscribes to the AI Space podcast. Definitely follow and connect with Sandeep. When you do that, if you like, subscribe to us. It helps us grow the show and have more animated guests like Sandeep. And then if also you're stuck in your business trying to grow and trying to figure this out, feel free to book a meeting with me. There's a link in the description. One other thing actually I want to add too. I guess you had reached out to me a couple of months ago, right? And we connected. How'd you, how'd you find me? I'm curious. I actually used my product. So I used my product and searched who are the people with the panel on YouTube and on podcasts, on newsletters. And you're the one of the first people that it recommended. It said, Hey, like you live in the Texas area. You should connect with Sanjay. and that's how i got first recommended and also i think we were part of the same whatsapp group the founder group so that's where i got your contact information yes yeah no that's amazing and you know um and then now i'm i think i'm one of the first creators on your platform right yes yeah you are one of the first and i'll have you set up so you can start getting more of these and you can organize your entire like content strategy from your customers perspective or like your your guests perspective too right because they want to be pushing for a certain message, how do they track not just getting featured, but also the context part of it so that AI also reads your podcast better for them and for you. Yeah, that's great. You know, in terms of vision, mindset, strategy, what are your insights on how do you turn? a vision or dream into a strategy and finally into action right if you don't have all those in place then you're just a daydreamer right so what are your insights around that i think action is the biggest uh way in which you can take any vision any sort of goal you have and bring it down to more tangible uh practical steps whether it's a strategy or a plan for the quarter or a plan for this month you want to start with a grand vision, an anti-position, like I said earlier, something that's unique. That's very encouraged in the VC world. And then start from the vision, go to what actions can I take to make it real? Like a 12-month plan and say, what has to be true? Like what needs to happen for this vision to become reality and like work backwards from there? No, that's great. And then, you know, I'm in a different phase now. I've been bootstrapping this, et cetera. You know, Cashflow is important. And so one of the things I've been focused on the last few weeks is instead of pushing off to the end of the day, it's like, what are my top most revenue generating activities that I need to get done and pushed out the door today or this morning versus the busy work, right? And, you know, I think that's one of the shifts that I've had in terms of actions. And, you know, there's times where it's frustrating as an entrepreneur, right? But I find it's a snowball effect. It's like, it's the little actions that add up. It's not always the big actions. It's the cumulative effect of the actions. that show up, you know, being consistent, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the revenue generating part is very important because that's what makes it real, right? Like you're never going to pay someone who you think is like not going to provide you the value. So you want to make sure you're doing something that other people would be willing to pay. If you're able to bridge the gap between what you're doing and what other people are willing to pay for and do that over a long enough period of time, it becomes smoother and smoother. to the point where you build something that a bunch of people want to use and you can immediately provide the value. That's great. So from a sales and marketing perspective, what insights can you share on getting your first clients and expanding your clientele? You alluded to earlier, but can you expand a little bit more on that? Absolutely. I am a big believer of early stage direct go-to-market being sales. You want to talk to people. Marketing isn't really effective when you're early. Marketing comes into play once you're maybe raised money or you have some sort of capital to spend and that's a different game altogether. But when you're early stage and you want to figure out, hey, like, who is my ideal customer? You want to talk to as many people as you can. Tell them what you're building, what value you can provide them and say, hey, are you willing to sign up? Let's see if we can work together. So early on, your target should be understanding what you're building, understanding who you could sell it to, and trying to talk to as many of such people as possible. No, you're absolutely right. Because they're going to tell you, yeah, this makes sense. You understand my pain point, and I'm willing to hand over your money. If they're not willing to hand over your money, then something's wrong, right? And even like what you said, even there's different phases too. So I used to focus a lot on outreach. I mean, you know, when you also are demonstrating value, like even on my podcast now. I'm not even doing any more outreach for guests. I have like a three to six month wait list per se. Now I can start prioritizing stuff. I've had people from South Africa, Canada, Thailand, you know, different places now finding me. Right. And one of the things I've been doing too, also you talk about SEO, GEO, which is generative engine and AEO. Now they call it for AI portion. You have to do things differently. So I recently, I've been optimizing my descriptions, you know, leveraging AI to ask and a similar theme comes out. he calls it eeat and google kind of gemini brings that one up is more about is it demonstrating the expertise the experience the trust factor and are they authority and on your and is that communicating so versus just you know hashtag ai expert or ai genius or whatever it's going to be right is the content is the material that's being generated does it resonate with that? Because sometimes I'll do this stuff and even LLM will tell me, do this thumbnail. I said, that sounds like so clickbait-ish, which is not, I want to be authentic. So don't give me any clickbait stuff. And that's what it's trained on to give you clickbait, but I'm kind of that anti-position. I'm like, no, I want people to know what they're, if they're going to go watch my video, they should know what's going to be in the video. They should hook them, but they should be like, oh, I was expecting this, but I got this instead, right? Nobody wants that. Absolutely. And that's really, again, my thesis is going back to that is, How do you increase your expertise? your experience or like how do you present your expertise, experience, authenticity and trust, right? Like these are things you want to optimize for. I think marketing teams are going to have to realize you're not just serving for an algorithm anymore. You have to do it for two layers. One is humans and the primary layer is AI. If you're able to organize your marketing strategy, SEO strategy to something that you're able to solve both these problems of like increasing human trust and increasing AI. trust, then you have more likelihood of being recommended by any algorithm. If you just try to say, Hey, like, I'm just going to do SEO optimization and I'm going to do, put a bunch of keywords in blog posts and publish hundreds of blog posts. Everyone can do that, right? You're not going to stand out in any way or like AI is not going to trust you. Or if you say, I'm just going to get on a bunch of podcasts and. people are going to know about me. It depends on what you've talked about in each of those podcasts. So you want to have this uniform activity across getting featured on the right channels, keywords that you've used, topics you've talked about. So you can present yourself from multiple sources talking about the same thing, which increases all these plus factors that you just mentioned. Yeah. And just because you go on a podcast doesn't mean anything. Even my podcast has been out there for a year. I just broke 3.5 million views, et cetera. I'm doing all the stuff I can. But if I type in AI podcast, You're going to see five diverse CEO videos and then A16 and then a couple of other famous, because they've dominated the space, right? So how does a small creator like myself break through that pack? So I have to be more innovative in how I approach my stuff and what I do and my descriptions and my thumbnails. And still that doesn't guarantee anything, right? But you've got to keep moving forward and innovating, right? Yes, yes, yes. And the way you would differentiate yourself is by niching down, right? Like you want to become an expert in very specific niche. Diary of a CEO, great example, but he's not like AI focused. If you're able to like carve out this very specific AI niche, that's how, because AI doesn't have any emotions, right? It just has like memory and it reads. So if you're able to say, oh, this guy just talks about this one thing. it keeps feeding uh feeding the algorithm yeah i'm gonna say no my a niche is the ai founder playbook you know go to market playbook that's what it is it's it's it's you know it's a holistic approach it's not tech it's not just business it's not hype you know it's like what's practical and real to to grow my business right that leads us into you know what insights do you have on as you go forward how do you plan to streamline your operations and scale the business right like i said right now solo founders so streamlining is just streamlining my time during the day. As the company grows and I'm starting to productize more of what I'm building, we'll be able to bring in more resources, more talent that can really make sure this, the operations is happening much more like an AI first business than a software first business. I think right now we can easily find a bunch of tools and resources online to make any business, a software-first business. But to make a company an AI-first business, you need to do a lot of work, either finding those resources or building them in-house yourself. So that's what I'm going to be focusing on in the next couple of years. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Because as a founder, you can be a jack-of-all-trades, but you got to decide what is the value of your time? Is your time worth $100 an hour, $250 an hour, or $500 an hour, right? And as an entrepreneur, like you said, you're the CMO, CFO, CEO. admin, IT, janitor, you know, HR to sometimes to yourself. But you got to determine, is this a $10 activity that I'm spending my time on? Going back to the revenue generating versus something that's a $10 activity. And, you know, I try to be, I'm behind on my LinkedIn messaging. I try to be, I try to respond to everybody. So I'll have like a notepad and I'll put in for the, no, I don't require these services. And then I'll say, hey, by the way, check in my podcast because they're just happy that somebody responded, right? But now I've just made a commitment now that. I am not going to type out any more emails or anything like that. I'm actually going to put it into an automation because by the time I do all that stuff, I've worn myself out. Just pop it into, you know, get the, what's the LinkedIn connection or an email. Now, if they're standard, pop into an automation and get that done. And I think that's for any solopreneur. That's one of the first things you should be doing is optimizing your time when it comes to email and messaging. you know yeah yeah absolutely communication and that does take up a lot of time uh and there's these really nice tools now i forget the name of one i think it's superhuman uh that optimizes for uh your email and there's a bunch of other tools too that a couple of my friends use where they see all their inboxes like email linkedin instagram everything and just one tab and they can like click click across i forget the name of that product uh but i know a couple of my friends using it that's just much more organized for them. So communication early stage is going to be very important for sure. Cool. You know, in terms of AI democratization, AI is definitely a great equalizer, but what do you see as the key challenges and opportunities in making AI accessible to founders and businesses from a variety of industries, experiences, backgrounds? How can we bridge this gap? That's a great question. I think AI could be the least challenging. field to make accessible, but I think the opposite is happening. There's more concentration, uh, which makes sense and why it's happening because the powerful tool, it's a very powerful tool. So it wants to aggregate more of what it already has, but accessibility is when you go work for the edge cases, right? Some like African language or someone who speaks with someone who has a disability or something and creating those like custom. AI solutions is easier and harder because there's a lot more of those and AI can do it easily. I think it's just about like leaders taking more, giving it more priority, just saying, Hey, this is something we want to put in the value. We want to democratize this for a much more larger audience than just like this very specific Silicon Valley or Austin niche audience. Yeah. I think especially if somebody has a passion, some domain expertise and combine that with AI. I mean, they can really do some really cool things. The challenge will be when it comes to, I think, the funding and then all the compute cost side of it, especially if you don't understand how to manage that from, you know, context windows and, you know, the whole tokenization issue and are really these foundational models designed in a good way to move forward, right? You know, I always talk about ethical and responsible AI. So going back to the anti-position or whatever, right? A lot of people don't talk about this stuff. It's not a focus, but in every episode we talk about ethical and responsible AI. So how do you balance AI innovation with responsible development? I think, yeah, right now, this is a good time to be talking about it, right? I think a couple of days ago, I heard news about Anthropics AI being attacked by some malicious users. They've used very sophisticated technology to attack Anthropics. model reasoning and to implement what they're doing. Basically sort of like stealing their data. I think for most startups, you have to be more careful, extra vigilant about their security right now than ever. Bad actors are always going to be around. You'll have to be cautious. And larger companies, I think, are just now starting to prioritize security as like something that they want to... democratize. I think they're putting more value or like more importance into democratizing security than accessibility, which is a debate to have. But companies can be more responsible just by saying, hey, like, are we doing something malicious? Are we like sticking to some code ethics and the values that we stand for? Or are we just like trying to make a quick buck? Because AI is powerful, right? Like you could do a lot of stuff with it. You want to be sure you're not crossing the line yourself and being careful that. someone else is not taking advantage of you. Yeah. If you go back to the design, right. When you design with intent and build, you know, future thinking, right. You don't want to get to the point where we've, we got to a point where it's too late to put the genie back in the bottle. Right. And that's, that's in a situation we have to be really careful about, you know, going forward. Anything else you want to add on the, um, you know, making somebody about feature, right. In terms of how it works or how you help other people to stand out. Yeah, so let me give you an example. I just spoke to, I'll give you two examples. One is a tech company. They're a legal tech company that's trying to get, they're trying to do marketing. They already have a product. They have some 20K ARR. So they're really going to market with marketing right now, right? So what feature helped them with is identifying the right channels to get featured on. So think podcasts, newsletters, sub-stack groups, blogs, so on and so forth. Help them identify the contact information of these creators, reach out to them, get a featured post or a featured article or getting on their podcast and giving them code snippets that they can include into those featured posts so that AI recognizes them for the topic that they want to be recognized for. And sort of having like this command center for the company to be able to do all their marketing efforts, outbound marketing efforts. And for the other business that I'm working with right now is a service that provides consulting for executives, tech executives. This is a small team. They do a lot of speaking events. They go to events. They want to optimize anything that they, like right now what I'm doing is sort of similar, right? Like I'm getting on a podcast. I could talk about anything, but the real work begins after the podcast too. is you want to optimize for the description, you want to optimize for the metadata, you want to optimize for everything else that you're building around that specific piece of artifact. And that's what Feature really helps with. Very cool. Awesome. You know, we're coming up on time, you know, we always want to end with some encouragement. Any concluding thoughts, insights or encouragement to those that are seeking to gain this space or struggling to build their business? Yeah, if you're a founder, if you're trying to get started, focus on revenue. Definitely make sure you go get at least 100 paying customers. And by the time you're there, you're already like you figured out what the problem market niche is. And post that, it's all beautiful. It's much easier to raise money. It's much easier to attract talent. It just becomes a lot easier once you have something going rather than trying to find like a co-founder or trying to find some investor that's going to solve all your problems. That never happens. People always want to join a train that's already moving. Nobody wants to join a train that's like static. Yeah, I think, you know, one thing I realized when I started this is sales and marketing revenue, that's a long pole of intent. If you identify your customer pain points, can create something around product market fit that addresses that, that they're willing to pay for on a repeated basis, cash flow solves a lot of problems, right? And then you're no longer begging. you know and you're in a position of power and that's a thing that i think businesses need to focus on versus chasing the next stage of funding or whatever it's like and let the you know and if you can sort that out then you can be able to control your own destiny right okay okay yeah so you know i definitely know we can talk all day about the future of the ai space and other things i'm sure we're going to be doing you know some upcoming collaboration once again You know, where's the best place for our listeners to learn more about your connect with you and your company? Best place to connect with me is LinkedIn, Sandeep Konduri. And you'll see my profile picture there. And my company's website is feetfeat.press. If anyone's interested, feel free to DM me. I'm always happy to talk about marketing, what I call featured marketing. How do you get yourself featured across different platforms and build authority, not just for humans, but for AI as well. Awesome. Awesome. Well, everyone make sure to check out and connect with Sandeep. Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn, subscribe to our YouTube channel, find us on your favorite podcast platforms like Spotify or Apple and Apple's coming out with a video version in, um, in April. So I guess, you know, this will be good for this podcast too. So, you know, I've learned quite a bit from this episode. I can't thank you enough, Sandeep, for sharing your insights with us today, sharing with, you know, what you're building with feature. I'm Sanjay Kalugulo, the creator and host of the, of your show. the founder and CEO of Stonehouse Advisors. I hope you gained a wealth of game-changing real-world insights to grow, transform, and scale to new levels and dimensions leveraging AI. See you all next time. Thanks so much.

In this episode, the Host, Sanjay Kalluvilayil, sits down with Sandeep Khondury, Founder and CEO of feat., to explore why the marketing world is broken, how AI is rewriting the rules of distribution, and why "featured marketing" is replacing SEO as the new growth playbook for founders and creators. They unpack why getting featured on the right channels compounds authority faster than blog content ever could, why marketing now serves two audiences (humans and AI), and how Sandeep is using his own product to help startups instantly find the trusted newsletters, podcasts, and communities that actually reach their ideal audience.

💠 Key Insights
1. Why Featured Marketing Is Replacing SEO in the AI Era
Anyone can crank out 100 blog posts in 30 minutes. SEO optimization is dead as a moat. The new edge is getting featured across podcasts, newsletters, and communities where your ICP already lives, so AI builds your authority across multiple trusted sources.

2. Why You Now Market to Two Layers: Humans First, AI Always
The primary algorithm reading your content is AI. Marketing teams must optimize for expertise, experience, authenticity, and trust across every channel, or risk being invisible to both LLM recommendations and human buyers.

3. Why Lingo Leverage Is the One Common Feature of Successful Companies
After analyzing 1,400+ startups and $10M+ in deployed capital, Sandeep's TED Editor's Pick thesis reveals the linguistic pattern every winning company shares, and why founders can engineer it from day one.

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⚡ The Show Log - The AI Space Podcast - Season 2 | Episode 16
🎙️ Guest: Sandeep Khondury | Founder & CEO | feat.
📍 Austin, TX
🎙️ Host: Sanjay Kalluvilayil | Founder & CEO | Stonehaas Advisors | Creator | The AI Space Podcast
📍 Dallas, TX
🔔 Subscribe - Real world insights for AI Founders & Start-ups!

Guest Links:
🌐 feat.: https://feat.press/

Key Links:
🌐 Website: https://theaispacepodcast.ai
📅 Calendar: https://calendly.com/sanjay-stonehaasadvisors/ai-advantage-15-min
🔗 Platforms: https://theaispacepodcast.ai/platforms
📬 Newsletter: https://newsletter.theaispacepodcast.ai/
📝 Transcript: https://theaispacepodcast.ai/s2-e16-featured-marketing-sandeep-kondury

👤 Guest Bio
Sandeep Khondury is a venture capital associate and founder building tools at the intersection of media, distribution, and AI. A TED Editor's Pick speaker, he has worked with 1,400+ startups and helped deploy over $10M in early-stage capital, developing his thesis on "lingo leverage" and how language predicts startup outcomes.

💠 Company Bio:
feat. is an AI-powered distribution platform that helps founders and creators instantly find the trusted newsletters, podcasts, communities, and creators that drive real influence with their ideal audience, removing the guesswork from distribution and compounding growth across both human and AI discovery layers.

📈 Host Bio: Sanjay Kalluvilayil is a visionary leader on a mission to help AI businesses win clients, convert sales, and scale operations to maximize cash flow and valuation. As a trusted advisor and fractional CXO, I bring 30+ years of strategic and execution expertise from Big 4 consulting to Fortune 500 transformation to startup acceleration.

🎯 Company Bio: At Stonehaas Advisors, we work with AI founders and businesses to overcome growth and cash flow challenges by designing and executing GTM strategies that drive organic growth, successful capital raises, and strategic exits.

Chapters
0:00 Trailer: Use AI to Find the Exact Channels That Reach Your Audience
1:53 Host Intro
2:43 Key AI Trends - Marketing, Coding & Content Creation
3:06 Top AI Strategies - The Featured Marketing Playbook
5:25 Guest Intro - Sandeep Khondury | feat.
6:21 AI Journey - Seattle VC to Austin Founder
8:00 TED Talk & Lingo Leverage Thesis
9:48 Why AI Slop Is Killing Marketing Trust
11:42 Founding feat. - From $3K Launch Week to Traction
12:20 ICP & Target Verticals
13:04 AI-ML Architecture & Tech Stack
14:18 Favorite LLMs - Opus, Codex & Cursor
16:58 Marketing to Two Layers - Humans & AI
18:32 Breaking Through a Crowded Niche
19:04 Niching Down - The AI Founder Playbook
22:11 Why The AI Space Podcast?
26:30 How feat. Found Sanjay - Product in Action
27:04 Featured Marketing - Real Customer Examples
30:21 Sales, Marketing & The First 100 Customers
41:32 Reskilling & Workforce Disruption
44:22 Ethical & Responsible AI
46:54 Final Thoughts - Focus on Revenue, Not Funding
50:18 Show Outro

AI, Artificial Intelligence, AI Podcast, AI News, Tech News, Featured Marketing, AI Distribution, AI Marketing, SEO vs AI, GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, AI Visibility, Founder Marketing, Startup Marketing, AI Discovery

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