Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Tyler.

Tyler Strand:
Thanks so much for having me, Fabian, and I’m excited to be here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m really thrilled to have you here because like many others, so I assume I learned about Air because you took out a full page ad featuring, it was featuring a handwritten note by your co-founder Shane in the Sunday New York Times. And that was just a few weeks back. Yes. In that ad, it had Shane’s email under his name and I believe it even had his cell number.

Tyler Strand:
His real cell phone number. Yeah, his phone has been ringing off the hook.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So that’s awesome. So I was super amazed. I’m sitting there for my Sunday brunch and I’m like, oh, well, that’s interesting. So of course I reached out to him to ask him or you to be on the interview. And I was wondering if I’d actually ever hear back. Here we are.

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. I love it. Well, I’m glad you reached out and yeah, we’re excited to have made it happen.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yes, absolutely. I mean, this is very dear to my heart because I’m a creative, ran an agency. Now I’m part of Chameleon Collective, so we’re 120 people there. Most of them are creative. So what you are building is something that you’re building for people like us. So the brand that you built and your messaging and how bold you are, it’s super, super exciting for us. But back to that ad, you spent $73,000 on that ad.

Tyler Strand:
That’s correct. Yeah. Which I thought was surprisingly little. I thought-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You’re stealing my line. That’s exactly what I wanted to say. It’s like actually less than I thought.

Tyler Strand:
I mean, we’ve spent more to get featured in newsletters. It’s sort of sad about the state of traditional media that you can get a full page Sunday ad in the New York Times for that number, but that was the amount and that’s what we paid.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Unbelievable and you got perfect, perfect placement at the back of the business section. I mean, come

Tyler Strand:
On. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. We were really excited about it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So besides them being on my show, of course, which is huge return on investment, but how is the ROI? I mean, how can you even measure it from an old school print ad besides Shane’s phone being off the hook?

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s something that we think about a lot because many of our campaigns take this sort of shape where we’ll do something that’s … It’s physical, it exists in the world and maybe it shows up on social and that stuff can be particularly hard to measure, but we usually use it as an excuse to create a ton of content, to start a conversation, to program around the event. And so this was a perfect example of that. We took out the ad, but the campaign was almost all the content about the ad. So we made videos. We went to the place where they actually printed the paper. We did interviews with the team leading up to it about the sort of thought process and what we were hoping to get out of it. And so all of that became this sort of ancillary content around the ad, which ran as social videos, it ran as ad campaigns.
We threw a massive block party at our office the day that the ad came out in the paper. And so we do our best to round up all the attribution from those different touchpoints and all call that sort of the impact of the campaign. And this was one of the most successful campaigns we’ve ever run. We got tens of thousands of visits to our website, hundreds of meetings with our sales team. It was the most signups that we’ve ever gotten in a single week on the product. And so huge, huge success driven, I think, by the ad and then the storytelling we did around it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s so fantastic to hear. It’s a pricing and yet it’s not. It’s like this weird time where we’re in right now where who says print is that? Well, it’s not that. Every single brand has their own magazine again. It’s so amazing. I just see it in the last couple of months where it really starts to happen again in bigger terms where you see it in every mall. On the way out, you can pick up a magazine. I’m like, wow.

Tyler Strand:
Absolutely. Yeah. I think people are craving it. I mean, we’re in a little bit of a digital, an AI and automation sort of saturation moment where I feel like people are kind of getting beaten over the head with it. And yeah, there’s something sort of nostalgic and satisfying about reversion to the old way of doing things. And so yeah, I think that’s a big part of why we chose this medium, this format to actually launch an AI product. We thought what better way to cut through the noise than by doing it in the most human and un-AI way possible, which was a handwritten note in the physical newspaper.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And your entire brand is about empowering creatives. I mean, it’s the fist in the air for creatives in a time of AI where you too are driven by AI and everyone should to a certain extent. So it’s a really interesting conversation that you can start all the time. Let’s start that conversation. Actually, take us back to the beginnings of AIR, which you founded together with Shane almost, what, almost eight years ago, something like that?

Tyler Strand:
Yeah, about eight years ago. Yeah, that’s right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How did that idea come … What was the idea back then? How did it turn into a product? How did you pivot and how did it become the brand that it is today? Just give us a quick synopsis of eight years.

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ll try to sum it up in two minutes if I can. Well, Shane and I had both been working in what we always describe as the intersection of media and technology. Shane was working at a digital media company out in Los Angeles and I was at a music company based in New York. And we had both gone to college together and studied computer science and engineering. And so we were interested in systems and tools and the way work happens. And we were struck by how underrepresented that felt in creative. There were lots of great software products that we were using to do our jobs and to manage data, to manage code, to manage revenue, but creative work and marketing and brand felt really unsupported. And this was at a time when content creation was going through this massive explosion. All the social media channels were developing and the kind of need for creative work was growing exponentially and outpacing the headcount that was responsible for producing it in most of these businesses.
And so it felt like there was an opportunity for software, for automation. This was a little pre-AI, but it felt like there was a need for a tool to help streamline and support the people who were doing that work. We’ve always said that over the last 10 years or so, every company has kind of become a media company. Even if you’re a local restaurant chain or a hotel or a real estate company, you produce a ton of images and videos to sell your products, to talk to your customers, to build your brands. And we wanted to build a home for that work to happen.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Makes tons of sense. And then I feel like really in the last couple of months or in the last year, things were really developing. I mean, when did you really see the brand taking off?

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. I mean, what’s interesting is that I think when we started the company, we thought so much, I mean, and you can hear it in my origin story, we thought so much about the product. What are we going to build and what are the specific features that we want to string together to make it easier to organize your files, to search, to give feedback, to make edits? And these are all very sort of technical things that we went and spent many years building. But I think what we grew to understand and appreciate was that the brand we were going to build around that was equally as important as the thing that we were actually selling. And I think it came later, probably not until three or four years into starting the company, did we sort of recognize the importance of that, particularly in this industry.
I mean, we’re selling to creatives. I mean, this is their work. All day, they think about how to cut through the noise and build affinity and relationships with the people that they sell to. And it had to be sort of front and center in our work if we were going to connect and earn the admiration and respect of those people. And so yeah, over time, I think the brand has become of equal importance to us as the product itself.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Was the name always Air or did it change over time?

Tyler Strand:
The name was always Air. And initially the inspiration was you have this really kind of clunky, heavy process, all these moving files around, sending them from AtoB. Some people were doing it with physical hard drives. They still are. And so we liked the connotation that all of it lives in the cloud, it’s in the air, it’s all around you, you almost don’t have to think about it. It fades into the background. It’s invisible. And I had actually always been taught in school, I was studying computer science and sort of product design that the best technology should be sort of invisible, that you’re doing the work, but you’re not thinking about using the tool. And so all that kind of went into us thinking that AIR was a really great association for how we wanted people to sort of feel about the product. I will say it has been a challenge from a SEO perspective.
I might’ve chosen something a little bit more unique if I could go back and do it again, but we’ve powered through it and made a real brand out of it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You’re reading my mind because you work a lot with creatives. So I’m like, this is totally awesome and super insane. And in a certain way, this is exactly what your brand is about too, right? That idea of pushing creative boundaries and doing really weird stuff that is completely against the norm because that’s what art directors do. That’s what creatives do when they’re not AI. AI would tell you don’t do air because the dotcom is taken. And if you search air, there is a problem. And it was within a reason why your company caught my attention in the New York Times because I think Shane’s email is like Shane at … It was like at air.hq.
Yeah. Yeah. But it was so apparent, right? All of the issues that are now being celebrated. And I love the stuff that you guys do. I mean, you’re flying to the loneliest, most remote house in Iceland to breathe in the air and weird stuff that’s very agency stuff. So it’s fun to see how air started with like, it’s in the clouds, right? It’s in the cloud. And then it turned into something of like, how can you actually transform a brand that you have? And it’s always going to pivot. It’s always going to change. How do you make it yours over the years? And I think to me, that’s really exciting to see how you guys are doing that.

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, we’ve really kind of leaned into the pun of it over the years too. It’s sort of corny, but I feel like we get a kick out of these sort of air adjacent campaigns that like the best air ever campaign that you’re referring to, which we did in January this year, we sent Shane to Iceland in search of the best air ever, and he bottled it and brought it back to New York. It was all just kind of an excuse to shoot a beautiful film and talk a little bit about some new additions to the product. But yeah, we’ve kind of really leaned into the name more and more over time.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And just when you think this is just a great vacation for Shane, but you actually see him. Do You see Him suffer?

Tyler Strand:
It was part of that too. I think he was the first to raise his hand when we came up with the idea and we thought we’ve got to send somebody to Iceland. He was halfway there by the time we were done with the meeting.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
He had the ticket booked. Yeah. No, I mean, look, anyone who hasn’t been to Iceland, I was lucky enough to have been there a couple of times. It is absolutely stunning. I mean, maybe not exactly where you took shame because that’s in the middle of nowhere and he had to take the boat to the boat to the island, but it is really funny. But it’s like because you’ve built tools for creatives, crazy good campaigns have been a part of your brand for a long time because the whole idea of human crafted quality and may it be as wacko as going out to that place in Iceland, but it is exactly the opposite of AI blendness. This real, this was painful and now we’re making something out of it. Which was your favorite campaign or which was the craziest campaign yet? I mean, that was pretty crazy.

Tyler Strand:
That one was crazy. I mean, there’ve been a bunch over the years and not all of them successes, to be clear. We take these sort of big swings and they’re risky and sometimes they piss people off or we do something that we grow to regret. But I think that’s all part of the game. We’re trying to do things that they cut through the noise. We always say we want to do the type of marketing that marketers wish their bosses would approve.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that

Tyler Strand:
That. But it’s sort of this aspiration like, “Oh, I wish I could do that kind of thing. That’s so fun. I can’t believe that they actually did it. ” Again, because we’re trying to earn the attention and the respect of these folks who ultimately we think could benefit from the tool and not necessarily to get them to sign up or take a demo on day one, but to just to learn about what we do and the kind of ethos of the company. But I think one of my favorites was probably the first campaign that we did that sort of like set this tone that we’ve been following now for several years. We call it the oxygen campaign. And we actually hired a bunch of actors to play creative directors and we put them in a room and we interviewed them about their work as we were physically removing the air from the room.
So the bit was that they were sort of suffocating due to lack of air. And it was bizarre. I mean, it was almost like a little two minute horror film of these people becoming short of breath and then eventually fainting. And the tag at the end was something like, whatever, creatives can’t live without air or something. Again, just sort of leaning into the pun. But it was the first time that we had ever taken a big swing like that. And we spent probably $50,000, $100,000 to produce it. And we partnered with this great agency on the production of it. And a lot of people really didn’t like it. I mean, there were some people who thought, they commented on it online and said, “You’re killing the people that you’re selling to. Why would I ever want to associate with this company?” And we were happy.
We were happy that people had a reaction and wanted to engage with it. And yeah, it sort of set a little bit of a format that we’ve grown to really like and follow on a somewhat regular cadence now.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, how did Dropbox … You know where I’m heading with this. How did Dropbox, your biggest competitor feel about your April Fool’s press release announcing Air just acquired them. That was such an unbelievably bold move. Did you have lawyers call you or you’re like, “Come on, it’s April Fools.”

Tyler Strand:
We did. We got some outreach from their corp dev team or something, but no, they took it in stride and I don’t know. I mean, they’re such a big company and we’ve been sort of poking fun at them a little bit from the sidelines for so many years, but most of the time it feels like they’re barely even noticing. And I think that one was a real throwaway when we came up with that idea like 30 minutes before we posted it. And we were a little shocked at how much traction it got. And a lot of our customers reached out to say, “Congratulations.” Shane Mom called them and Shane Don called them and said, “I can’t believe that this is how I find out heads up.” So we felt that people really kind of took the bait on that

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Who knows? Maybe it’s manifesting on a corporate level for acquisition, but I’m not the one who says that. But this is hilarious because the fun thing is, and I always wonder, should companies keep the April Fools as part of their timeline on social or should they after a week or two erase it? Because interesting. I was going through your social to prepare for this, and I’m not thinking about April Fools anymore. And suddenly I see this and I’m more trained than most probably everyone’s mom who’s like, “Oh my God, I had no idea.” But because it was kind of apparent, but still, I always wonder, should it still be there or not? Who knows? With your brand, of course, whatever.

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. With ours, it sort of fits in with the rest of the timeline.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
All right. Well, let’s slowly move from the fun part to the business part, even though business is fun too, but you choke a lot as a brand on social media about how people don’t understand what the AIR brand is or what AIR actually does. And underneath every choke, there is some truth, right? Yeah. Was that, or is that a problem, which I believe for every SaaS company, every tech company, for everyone who has feature sets and does a lot of the same that others do, but some things are different and overall it’s all different. Did you find a certain narrative or a certain line that seems to stick or is it something that changes all the time?

Tyler Strand:
Yeah, I mean, this is a constant perennial debate that we have internally. And I think you look at our presence online, we have probably a couple hundred thousand followers now across a variety of channels, which is far beyond companies that are 10 and a hundred times our size. I’m sure we have more social followers than Dropbox does, for example. And I think that that’s a trade we’re making. People don’t want to follow a company account that says, today we released a new feature that lets you add a password to your share link.That’s not exciting stuff that kind of keeps people in your orbit, but at some point you got to figure out how to get the medicine down with the sugar or whatever the expression Is.
Yeah, we see it as the primary, the place that we’re sort of building an audience and a brand is on social, and it should be 90% about creativity and about celebrating great work and lifting others up in our community who we think are doing interesting stuff. And we’ll slip a product thing in or two from time to time, but it’s not the way that we expect people to learn about what we do. That happens a few touches further down our funnel where we can be a little bit more direct once you’ve demonstrated some interest in learning more.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So it’s really about getting people to become part of that creative community, and then they go on the website and they slowly go down as they learn the typical funnel.

Tyler Strand:
Correct. Yeah. And there’s even a sort of physical component too. We have this office space in Chinatown in lower Manhattan now, and we program a lot of events for the community out of the space. And it’s so fun. I mean, so just last night, there was a group of 50 or so creative directors in the space and I was chatting with one and he said, “Where do you work?” And I said, “I work at AIR.” And he said, “Oh, what’s air?” And I was like, “Well, you’re at air. You literally in our office right now.” But we’ve kind of come to be comfortable with that and say, “Well, that’s all right. This is his first time in the space. And now his email is in the CRM and he’s going to get a touch in two weeks and thank you for coming.” And he’ll hear a little bit about it in the presentation tonight.
And so yeah, I think if it was more overt, I don’t know that he’s walking into our office on a Wednesday night.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, it’s interesting because you have this fantastic line to air as human. And I think it’s literally what you just said, all of that. And I think that idea of, well, it has the pun of error, of course, but then the human part, this is what it’s all about. I mean, building community, every marketer can’t shut up about the idea that’s so important for a brand, but the way that you do it is this really slow sell of just really, you’re empowering creatives and yeah, you can learn more if you want to, but let’s first talk. Let’s talk about creative, let’s talk about the industry, let’s talk about AI. Super interesting. You and Shane and many others in the company are a big part of your social media and they’re everywhere. How do you feel about being such a big part of the brand? Being such a human brand, you almost have to do that, but are there any regrets?
How do you feel about having your face out there as a company?

Tyler Strand:
I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
The first time you think about it, you’re like, “True, true. I am.” I don’t

Tyler Strand:
Know. I feel like in some ways it feels to me like the only way to do it. I think we want to build something that feels very much a reflection of us. I mean that Shane and I, when we first started the company, obviously it was just the two of us and we had been friends for a long time and we joke around a lot. We like to build, but we like to have fun. And little by little, that sort of became how we thought about making the first hire. And suddenly we were 10 people and it still felt like this group of friends working on a creative project together. And I think now that has become even extended into what the brand is. And so I feel like it’s coming from a place of authenticity. The story is us building this business and trying to help the creatives.
And naturally, I think we, and especially Sherman Shane is on camera much more than I am, but I think it feels very authentic to how we’re building the business. And we actually want to be out there meeting these folks and talking to them and hearing their feedback, hearing their pain points, hearing their stories firsthand. And to not put a face on that, I think would diminish it somehow.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think it’s interesting because I asked that question mainly because a lot of founders that are listening, they’re like, “Should I do this or should I not? ” Do I want to be at that level of exposure or do I not and what are the benefits? And then at the same vein, those founders ask me, “How can I create an authentic brand?” Well, step one, put yourself out there. Step two, create a community that pushes the industry forward. So it’s a lot of these things that for you, you intrinsically do. Talking about intrinsic instinct. I mean, with you, obviously a lot of building what you’re building in the backend, a lot of it is of course about data, which every company is. Every company’s a media company, a tech company, a data company, and an AI company now, I guess. Did you ever early on maybe go against customer data and you did a gutsy move where you just felt, “You know what?
We hear that and we see that in data, but we really want to go over…” If they zig, we sack. If everyone says we should do this, but we want to do something different, just based on you all sitting together and saying, “This is what we think people would need.”

Tyler Strand:
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that actually this recent release, which I could talk about a little bit, the New York Times ad was us announcing our latest and largest AI powered feature. We released this canvas. It’s a tool on web where you can import images and videos and manipulate them, edit them, multiply them using AI. And this was not something that customers were begging for. I mean, they were asking us for extensions of what the product had already been doing, additions to traditional digital asset management functionality, better search, more ways to share or integrations with their creative tools. And we’re building all those things too and constantly shipping additions to the tool. But I think a lot of the creatives that we talked to, they’re actually pretty averse or allergic to the concept of AI in their work. And this was a thing that we debated a ton internally is we believe that this is the way that the world is moving and that there is a really valuable role for AI to play in creativity alongside the humans who are doing the creation.
And so I think this was probably one of the biggest swings we took. It wasn’t market pull. It was us believing in a future of how this work happens and trying to figure out how to present that to our customers in a way that resonated with them and didn’t repel them. We’ve seen a lot of creative AI tools come out in the last year that I think really missed the mark. They antagonized the people that they’re selling to and they talk about, you’ll never need to do a photo shoot again or we just one shot replaced Hollywood and it never made any sense to us thinking, these are the people who you need to buy your software are the ones who you’re telling don’t need to exist anymore. And so yeah, that was sort of the challenge of this release and why we went so heavy into the sort of human element of it with the paper ad and the handwritten note.
And I think also the way that we implemented it too, but it’s not about zero to one creation and type in a prompt and get some generic image that looks like everything else. It’s about, no, you give us the creative to start and then let us help you scale it. But yeah, it was definitely not a customer-driven decision that we made.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s the faster horses idea. They wanted faster horses, you gave them a car and they’re like, “Well, let’s get used to that. It has AI. Not sure how I feel about it. ” But I tried out that new feature last night and was super interesting. I kept playing with it and I told you offline before the interview how it worked really well. And it feels different than the typical drag and drop and let AI do everything. It felt like you’re in control and it felt more like you’re creating a new asset based on your vision rather than, “Hey, let me have you have a vision.” But that’s not how it works. That’s not how it should. Right.

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean, we played around with a lot of the the competitive landscape. And we were a little slow, I would say, even to enter the creative AI race because we weren’t satisfied with a lot of the results that we were getting. I mean, we do a ton of creative work and we produce a lot of content here and our own team continues to do much of that work by hand and then slowly stepping into these tools to help scale it. But yeah, I’m really happy with where it landed and I think strikes the right balance of letting the creatives be in the driver’s seat and then AI do some of the boring stuff around the edges.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and I think the comment about being a little late to that, maybe it wasn’t late, right? Maybe it takes creatives that long to just slowly really warm up to that idea. And if they know there’s a company and a platform that has them in the best interest and their future and their creativity and the human aspect, if you then add a touch of AI where they’re already slowly warming up to it, but in that environment, it’s kind of like the safe space. Yes,

Tyler Strand:
I think that’s right. I think that’s right. Yeah. I mean, the other thing too is that we are spending so much time thinking about this internally. We’re a tech company. I mean, we have 25 engineers whose work has been radically changed by AI over the last 12 months or so, but I think we forget sometimes until we get out of our own four walls here how early a lot of the world still is on the AI adoption curve, especially in creative. I think that this is not the way that engineering is changing is probably a year or two ahead of how creativity is changing. And so yeah, maybe what feels late to us, it still feels kind of new and magical to the vast majority of people that we talk to every day.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think so. Yeah, I think so. And it was completely shocking to me how things are developing right now, month to month for quarter to quarter because last year I was strategically starting to reposition my own creative work to be less output, more input, more strategy, leading more towards the strategy part because, oh, AI’s going to do the logos. AI is going to do all that stuff. But in my heart, I’m a brand identity person. That’s what I do. And so I had my whole business plan changed around. I was ready. And then start January, we were just, I mean, inundated with brand identity work, old school logos, all of that. And we are still, I mean, for four months in a row now and almost five months, we just keep getting that type of work. And so I think it’s so interesting because I was ready, right?
I was ready to pull the plug and pivot and kind of get into survival mode. But yet it is what happens all the time. It happened with Photoshop. It happened with the internet. It’s like, oh my God, it’s going to change and ruin everything. No, it’s not because we’re all going to realize it actually has a purpose. And I think we’re just starting to get to know what the purpose of AI and creative is. And it’s not what everyone feared or what everyone thought. So I think where you all are positioned right now is golden, right? Because you were there from the beginning saying, “No, no, no, don’t fear.” It’s a really good positioning. Talking about positioning, talking about logos, talking about the idea of branding, obviously with air, with having a name that you’re like, “Oh my God, what is it going to do to search engine optimization?” And now having that wind in your sales, no pun intended, which is all air.

Tyler Strand:
That’s Good. That’s A good one.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Thank you. Thank you. And working with that name and making that name yours every day more and more so and having less and less regrets, right? What does branding mean to you? It’s such a misunderstood word.What does it mean to you personally?

Tyler Strand:
I think it’s about the feeling that you convey to your customer or your audience when they think about your product or your company. It’s not maybe something concrete or tangible, but I think it’s the association that comes with the work that you do and how you show up in the world. And yeah, I’m sure it means different things to different people and there are companies who don’t use it, I think, to their advantage as much as they could. But I think the best brands in the world, you just see a smidgen of the logo or a particular color palette and there’s this sensation that comes over the recollection of all the times you’ve interacted with it and where you were and the way it made you feel. And so that’s what it’s about to me. And I think it’s a really hard thing to build and quantify and put your finger on, but you kind of know it when you see it done really well.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and you’re not afraid of that intangible, right? I mean, as you build your own brand, that’s what you guys do all the time.You’re like, “We don’t know the RI, but we sure as heck going to work super hard on creating lots of content around it so that our community understands what we’re all about. ”

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. And by the way, I mean, we haven’t done it without much debate and second guessing. I mean, we’ve had many a tough conversation with our own internal team and our investors and our board about like, “Hey guys, you’re spending a lot of money on some of this stuff and a lot of time, and it seems to be taking up a lot of mental energy and bandwidth from the team. Can you just run some Facebook ads? Is this all really worth it? ” And I don’t know, it’s a bet that every day feels a little bit closer to paying off. But yeah, I certainly don’t think it’s the only way to build a business or necessarily right, but it’s one that we’ve found aligns with what we’re doing. And I think what we’re good at, we’ve increasingly built a team that wants to work here because of that and so sort of feeds on itself.
But there are plenty of other businesses that grow to be really big and get there really quickly without the investment and brand that we’ve made.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Sure. No, absolutely. It’s a path that you chose, right? And it is a very strategic path in the way that you connect to your target audience very intimately and super hard for investors to be like, “Sure, blow 73K on a print ad that we have no idea what’s going to come back.” It’s like, sure, why not?

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think part of how we’ve not made our piece with it or come to believe that it’s the right path for us is, one, it’s about the customer. I think that this is stuff that really means something to the folks who we want to attract, creatives and marketers. And two, I think that the competitive landscape that we sit in is really bad at this. I mean, some of the alternatives to our tool are things like Google Drive and Dropbox, or there’s these legacy digital asset management tools, Binder and Canto. It’s a lot of really dry, boring software. And it feels like there’s opportunity to be the antithesis of that. And three, the third reason that we invest so much is increasingly because we feel like it’s a strength of ours, whether it was in the beginning or it grew to become one.
But all of that adds up to us continuing to feel like this is the right way for us to build this business. But again, it doesn’t mean it’s always the right way for everybody.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Talking about the essence of your business and of your brand, when you think about a brand, you already brought it up before in the question, what is branding all about? And you said it’s like the soul, right? It’s kind of like that. It’s kind of like that essence. It’s like what you feel when you see something. I always like to do this exercise with my clients and I force my poor interviewee victims to this as well. If you would put the entire brand through a funnel and outcomes one word, what would it be? For Liquid Def, it would be mischief, right? It’s not water. For Everlane, it’s not clothing, it’s radical transparency. So what is one word that can describe your brand for you today, right? Yeah.

Tyler Strand:
Well, luckily, unfortunately, you gave me a little bit of a heads up on this. So I added a few minutes at least to think a little bit about how I would distill it. And I think the word that I would go with is space. We talk a lot about this concept of giving creatives space, space to breathe, space to work, space to be creative. And it’s again, it’s a little bit of a pun in here again, obviously because we also have literally safe space and store files and things like that. But the hope with what we do is that we remove a lot of the nuts and bolts of the work and gives you time back to just focus on the creative. And so if I were to sum it up, I think this concept of people having space to breathe, to work, to create, that’s sort of the best case scenario, I think, for us and for how a customer would feel or perceive what we’re trying to do here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Are you sure you’re not a brand strategist or copywriter? Are you sure you have this technical background there? There’s always future for you. There’s a future on the other side.

Tyler Strand:
I’m spending too much time with all of them. So it’s just starting to rub off after

Fabian Geyrhalter:
All these things. And that is a good thing. Yeah, space is wonderful for so many reasons. Yeah, it’s great. That’s great. Well, since you are, at least for today and at least for these 40 minutes, a branding maestro, what kind of brand advice would you give to founders or to creatives as a takeaway? Is there something you learned where you just would say like, “Hey, here’s what I would give you on the road if you want to build a brand in 2026.” Any thoughts?

Tyler Strand:
I feel like the sort of rote or typical advice here is be authentic, which I think is good advice. I mean, I think people can see through it when you’re trying to build a brand that isn’t you or isn’t your company or isn’t your team. So I do think that that’s important, but maybe the other piece that I would add that I’ve come to appreciate is you have to be patient. This is not something that happens overnight and there is a long road to brand building and it’s about consistency and sort of sticking to the message. And it might take you even some iteration or some experimentation like it did for us to find what that brand voice or tone or manifestation is. But I think now being what feels like many, many years into it, it feels like only then does it start to feel like the ROI begins to appear.
So the patience, the consistency, kind of sticking with it long enough for the brand to become a thing, because I don’t think it’s something that happens quickly.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. I love that slow and steady approach. It’s something that I do with my startup too, even though we’re going at 500 miles an hour, but when it comes to the brand building, you can always do better. You can always do more. But that idea that if you know who you are and you know who your customer is and you know what you want to get across and what differentiates you on an emotional level, not a feature set level, but on an emotional level, and you just write that out. And there might be mums where you do less and mums where you do a lot, right? But I see so many D2C startups, especially because with D2C, you can just go to market. You just go to market, it’s out there, it’s on the site, you can buy it, and they pivot marketing every three months because again, I and everything, and you can just, “Oh, I don’t think this sticks.
Let’s go somewhere else.” And then after a year, you have no brand at all because people are completely confused who you are.

Tyler Strand:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, this is another piece of advice I often give, not just our marketing and creative teams, but even our product team too, is that sometimes your taste, what you think the brand should be
Outpaces your ability to execute on it. Just because you know what you want it to look like doesn’t mean it’s easy to bring that into the world. You have to align people and do creative and nail copy and messaging and distribute it at the right place at the right time. And so it can be frustrating too to feel like, “I want it to be this, but we can’t figure out quite how to get it there.” And that still happens here all the time. I mean, we do these campaigns and we think, “Ah, this didn’t quite hit the mark or in our heads it was going to look like this. ” And in reality, it wound up looking like that. So I think that’s another reason why you have to stick with it for a long time because there’s this gap that you’re constantly trying to close to get it closer to the thing that you have in your head.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. So what did we learn? We learned that for all of those asking, what is AIR? What does the AIR brand do? We now know that air is actually creative agency. That’s it. Everything else is just a product in the background. We learned. That’s what we learned. Hey, what’s next for the air brand? I mean, I know you just had a big launch with Canvas, right? So what are you excited about over the next six months?

Tyler Strand:
Well, I mean, we actually have a really fun campaign coming out. I think that by the time this episode airs, it will be live so I can talk about it. But it’s kind of a fun one for me personally, and really the origin story doesn’t have much to do with air at all. But my dad growing up was a video producer. He mostly worked in daytime television, and one of his longtime accounts was with the Maury Povich Show, the guy who used to do these paternity test reveals on TV and say, “Hey, are you the father? Are you not the father?”
And in a recent campaign brainstorm, we were kind of throwing ideas at the wall and I said, “Hey, what if we did something with my dad where we brought Maury out of retirement and we did sort of like a, is it AI or is it not AI kind of modern spoof on the reveal?” And we actually just shot it. We brought Maury’s 87 and we flew him up from Florida and my dad produced a campaign with us and it’s going to be the latest air campaign. And as usual, we use it to talk a lot about how we’re using our own software to shoot and edit and distribute this content. But it’s going to be a really fun one. I think it’ll tug at some nostalgic heartstrings for people who grew up in the ’90s and 2000s and remember this kind of daytime TV format.
And personally, it was a blast to get to work with my dad on it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. How fantastic. What a cool idea and how gratifying for yourself and what a great Thanksgiving conversation this year for the family. Yeah,

Tyler Strand:
It’ll be a lot of good stories.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Remember how this year started?That’s awesome. Hey, listen, there are plenty of founders, plenty of creatives in the audience. I think it’s literally only creatives and founders in this audience. Where can people get to know Air? How can they start playing with it or how can they follow Air or you personally online?

Tyler Strand:
Yeah. The best place to get the product is on our website, air.inc.That’s IMC. And you can sign up for the tool for free. It’s really easy to get started. You can use all the features and functions without needing to go credit card down or anything. And then I think another great place is to follow us on Instagram. We’re at air.hq, and that’s probably the best place to follow along with some of the creative antics, hopefully with 5% thrown in there about the product. So great place to join the ride.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, that comes with a big caveat. If you actually do that and you start looking at the timeline of air on Instagram, it’s going to take you some time. Take time. On a Sunday afternoon, sit down and start it because you’re going to go down a rabbit hole. It’s really-

Tyler Strand:
Yeah, there’s a lot in there.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s really fun. Listen, Tyler, thank you so much for spending almost an hour with us here. We’re super excited to see the latest campaign to dive into everything. And yeah, best of luck to you and the folks over there.

Tyler Strand:
Thank you so much, Fabian. It was really fun getting to chat with you, and hopefully we’ll talk more soon.