Doug Camplejohn
(00:01)
Hello, this is Doug Camplejohn, your host of Revenue Renegades. And this week’s episode, I’m being joined by Michelle Lim, the CEO and co-founder of Flint. Welcome to the show.
Michelle Lim
(00:12)
Thanks, Doug. Happy to be here.
Doug Camplejohn
(00:14)
So we always love to kick things off with founding stories. We’re both builders. What was that aha moment that led to the founding of Flint?
Michelle Lim
(00:24)
Yeah. So I had previously led growth and marketing for a Series B company called Warp, which was building an AI coding terminal. I was in charge of both growth and our website. Every time we needed to add something new to our website or run a new growth initiative, the website was always our bottleneck.
There were multiple agencies and contractors who had to be involved just to build an additional page—SEO, ads, data, marketing ops, design, developer, product marketing, demand gen—everyone working in concert for something as simple as a comparison page or an A/B test. So the aha moment came when I was also running the AI product at Warp and noticing how much more powerful these agents were getting at writing code and building products. That’s when I realized there was an opportunity to create a brand new kind of website—an autonomous site powered by AI that could code, listen to your market, design, and write up comparison and solution pages for you. It could even listen to your Gong calls and adapt by pitching similar languages to new prospects, morphing itself based on who is visiting: highlighting healthcare case studies for healthcare executives, or adapting to be more agent-friendly for AI agents. That was the moment I saw a big problem and a chance to combine agentic technology in coding with my background as both an engineer and marketer.
Doug Camplejohn
(02:36)
So we met at a VC dinner recently, and I think you were pre-launch at that point. By the time this podcast comes out, you’ve already launched, and it’s public about your funding round and some of the folks behind you. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Michelle Lim
(02:53)
Yeah, we raised a $5 million seed led by Accel, with participation from Sheryl Sandberg’s fund, as well as our existing investor, Neil.
Doug Camplejohn
(03:06)
So what was it about Flint that caught Sheryl’s eye? What made the light bulb go on for her and inspired her to invest?
Michelle Lim
(03:16)
I remember I was actually in her house pitching her. I opened my laptop, had 12 slides, and was five minutes in explaining a workflow I faced at Warp where five people had to work in a serial, one by one, to build an A/B test that took months. At that moment, she placed her hand in front of my keyboard and said, “Michelle, you don’t really need to explain this. We had 140 people at Meta doing this.” She ran the business side at Meta and was one of the key people behind Google Ads, so she understands the internet, new dynamics, and monetization. She felt that Flint addresses pain points she had personally experienced, so she got excited about us.
Doug Camplejohn
(04:33)
That must’ve been a fun part of the presentation. It sounds like some of this is a technology problem and some is a people problem. Do you think Flint, or similar companies, can solve this purely with technology, or will there always be a people-and-process element?
Michelle Lim
(04:58)
People are very important, and all the roles I mentioned should still be part of building a company’s web presence. Technology can provide a way for them to focus on strategy and guardrails rather than the minutiae of implementation.
These people are essential for setting the guardrails for an autonomous website, ensuring brand compliance, using the right design system, language, photography, and typography. The brand designer lays down these guardrails so they don’t spend time on repetitive creative briefs or applying the design system to hundreds of SEO pages. Product marketers set messaging frameworks so the website stays true to the brand voice and doesn’t need constant Google Doc reviews. These roles will become higher leverage in the era of autonomous websites.
Doug Camplejohn
(07:03)
Got it. There have been companies tackling pieces of this before. We lived through the ABM wave, where you’d land on a website and see personalized greetings. Is there overlap with that and what you’re describing?
Michelle Lim
(07:28)
There is definitely overlap—the big difference is today’s technology lets you change not just the text, but the entire layout of a page and its components. With smaller models, we can do real-time component reuse and create new pages on the fly. You can imagine a user spending time on a pricing page, which then spawns an ROI calculator module, or at the end of a session, generates a personalized sales demo, maybe even a video or avatar conversation. In the past, you could change text, but now technology lets us change everything about a page, including when things appear. We’re in a brave new internet—much more is possible than before.
Doug Camplejohn
(09:05)
The other thing this brings up for me is SEO, which has been around since Google launched. I forget if it’s called AEO or something else now.
Michelle Lim
(09:21)
It’s GEO—Generative Engine Optimization.
Doug Camplejohn
(09:25)
GEO, okay. If I’m in charge of go-to-market or a CEO, I’m thinking about how my website shows up not just in Google, but also in Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Claude searches. How do you fit into that world, and how do you think about generating those pages?
Michelle Lim
(09:53)
In today’s world, as a CEO, you’re getting more questions from users online than ever before. Previously, customers would break down a research question, write keywords, and piece together information. Now, they just put the whole research question into the search bar, sometimes with extremely specific details. Before, it took my team three months to build one page to answer a question—now I need to produce thousands a day. Traditional CMS tools can’t keep up; every new module still requires a developer or designer. Flint lets you create these pages quickly and on-brand. Our breakthrough in brand understanding means we can generate pages much faster. For example, working with Cognition, we built comparison pages in one or two days versus the three months it took at Warp.
Michelle Lim
(12:17)
That’s a stark difference between spending days with Cognition versus months at Warp. We flattened the website development process into one AI.
Doug Camplejohn
(12:34)
Are you replacing CMS tools or working alongside them? If someone uses Webflow, are you integrating, or do you take over everything?
Michelle Lim
(12:49)
We’re starting with landing pages—we work alongside tools like Webflow, Sanity, and Contentful. We can take over a folder on your domain (for example, cognition.ai/compare), so Flint powers your comparison pages while you keep your main site’s CMS. Ultimately, our vision is to fully replace your CMS. We hope to earn that trust over time.
Doug Camplejohn
(13:28)
Are you reporting GEO results for those comparison pages, or is that another tool?
Michelle Lim
(13:37)
We have a partnership with a GEO analytics provider integrated into our tool. We’re building a closed feedback loop: analytics inform what pages you should write, those get published, and the results come right back. Flint’s key piece is a closed feedback loop between analytics and page-building; only by having everything in one system can you remove human waiting between steps.
Doug Camplejohn
(14:32)
So you’re describing a future where much of the content is not necessarily for direct website visitors—it might be for people getting answers in their chatbot of choice, never visiting the site. How do you see the balance shifting? Will there just be these big content engines that people rarely visit, and most content gets consumed through Perplexity or another tool, or will people still spend significant time on brand
Websites?
Michelle Lim
(15:22)
We’ll always have a dual internet—one for bots, one for humans. Humans are social; they want to connect with other humans. We use the internet or answer engines to find a human on the other side of the question.
Michelle Lim
(15:52)
If I’m a Fortune 500 CEO researching CRM tools, I’m considering a multimillion-dollar purchase. I want to speak to Doug directly; I don’t want to just check out in ChatGPT. It’s critical for large transactions to build relationships. Marketers have many channels—social, billboards, paid social, field marketing—and when someone hears about your brand, they’ll type in your website. We need both: internet for bots and internet for humans.
Brands are also building more interactive experiences into their websites—browser-based products you can use instantly, voice API (VAPI) sites you can talk to, and companies like Ramp producing tools like ROI calculators or company name generators. There will be only more of these interactive experiences now that AI coding is democratized beyond the developer community.
Doug Camplejohn
(17:47)
Do you think that’s the overall trend? We’ve gone from text-based websites to rich checkout experiences, with lots of animation. It seems like there are ebbs and flows in the richness of content, but it sounds like you’re saying the future is less static, more about dynamically helping people experience the product, perhaps through chatbots or avatars. Or do you see both?
Michelle Lim
(18:30)
Both, it truly depends on the product. Some products can’t be experienced through video alone; for example, you might want to interview lawyers before you hire them. But many products don’t require a sales call for every tier. For lower-ACV SaaS products, you may not need to talk to a BDR before buying. If AI gets good enough to run that BDR call while someone’s on the site, they don’t need to wait for a scheduled sales call, and companies won’t need as many BDRs. BDRs can focus on bigger, high-touch deals.
Doug Camplejohn
(20:00)
We had Amanda Kalo from One Mind on the show. I don’t spend a lot of time chatting with text bots, and at Dreamforce Salesforce was showing mostly customer support bot use cases. When I’ve used One Mind’s chatbot (on Yakov’s Winning by Design site), it’s interesting—I can ask what I want without committing to a sales meeting. Most people want to handle as much of the transaction as possible before actually meeting someone, unless it’s a high-consideration purchase. Let’s talk about leadership and culture. You were a former engineer, now CEO. What have you learned about the transition from builder to CEO and co-founder?
Michelle Lim
(21:22)
It’s so different. I’m sure you understand, too—the biggest difference is that as CEO, decisions end with you. As an engineer, I had thoughts about the business, but they were just proposals.
Now, as CEO, when I believe I’m right, it becomes action. That’s both exciting and sometimes scary—making decisions every day.
Doug Camplejohn
(22:10)
One of my favorite phrases from a colleague at LinkedIn was, “I may be wrong, but I’m not confused.” It’s an interesting way of saying you’re open to ideas, but if there’s indecision, you’ll just take action and go that way. Often, your gut reaction leads the way. In startups, speed matters. You’ve mentioned velocity culture. Can you talk about Flint’s culture and how you reinforce that?
Michelle Lim
(22:50)
We stress a sense of urgency. If something should be done, we ask, “Why can’t it be done now? Why not today?” I try to instill fast feedback loops. Dogfooding is very important—everyone uses our product every day, just as when I was at Slack, using Slack daily made it quicker and more enjoyable to build.
It’s crucial to have practices where everyone in the company uses the product, allowing them to spot and fix issues quickly. I record product calls, then share snippets in our channel to highlight customer struggles (“This button doesn’t work here, let’s fix it”). The bottom line is to motivate around customer problems and hire people who care about customers. When customers speak loudly, everyone cares about them. Other great companies do this at scale. At Notion, I demonstrated my own workflow and got their team excited about resolving pain points. Tomorrow I’ll do something similar at one of our AI infrastructure company partners. These teams are energized by customer problems.
Doug Camplejohn
(25:29)
I don’t think I could ever run a company where I felt no connection to the problem. I’d be terrible at something like chip design; I need to personally feel the problem. Onboarding customers and spending time with them at Coffee is crucial—I often learn from seeing someone do something different than expected, and then bring that snippet back to the product. At Coffee, on Slack, we have the customer priorities channel; if an issue comes up that’s clearly causing confusion or frustration, it takes priority.
So, you’re not saying marketing teams will get replaced by bots; you’re not advocating for fewer people, just that their roles will become more strategic, right?
Michelle Lim
(26:31)
Exactly, 100%.
Doug Camplejohn
(26:50)
So how do you think the role of marketing is changing? If I’m in go-to-market or marketing, thinking about my website, brand, and presence, what should I be focusing on?
Michelle Lim
(27:16)
Focus on positioning, messaging, branding, ICP, and segmentation.
Exploit channels and test quickly—the fun parts of marketing, and why we go into it. Spend less time worrying about CSS to center a box, or technical requirements like Lighthouse scores. Don’t focus on minutiae; make sure you’re solid on storytelling, positioning, and trending. Those will always require a human touch.
Doug Camplejohn
(28:42)
So the basics remain the same, but marketers should shift how they think about their website: making it more dynamic, expansive, and able to cover diverse customer journeys—using tools like Flint.
Michelle Lim
(29:03)
Yes. Think of it like placing tracks and guardrails on a living organism instead of writing a static document.
Doug Camplejohn
(29:15)
All right, let’s shift gears to our speed round of questions. Tell our audience something surprising about yourself.
Michelle Lim
(29:33)
I sang in a Russian acapella group in college without knowing any Russian.
Doug Camplejohn
(29:41)
That might be the most obscure thing we’ve heard. That’s awesome. What do you like to do for fun outside of work?
Michelle Lim
(29:46)
I love watching films, going to film festivals, and writing reviews on Letterboxd. I often schedule times for 20 or so people to watch a film together and have booked out entire theaters for premieres like Barbie, Dune, and Dune 2.
Doug Camplejohn
(30:20)
That’s awesome. When my last company got acquired by LinkedIn, it was right when Disney rebooted Star Wars—episode seven was coming out. We did the same thing: rented out a theater for employees, investors, friends, and family. So much fun.
Michelle Lim
(30:38)
Movies should be special occasions again, not just something you do at home.
Doug Camplejohn
(30:53)
Agreed. Do you go to festivals like Sundance?
Michelle Lim
(30:57)
Yes, I went to Sundance this year. It was amazing. Did you?
Doug Camplejohn
(30:58)
Yes—my oldest daughter and I have gone for the last eight or nine years as an annual tradition. We typically go on the second weekend; the first is too crazy.
Michelle Lim
(31:13)
I’m already looking at tickets for January.
Doug Camplejohn
(31:17)
Nice. Last year was in Salt Lake, right? Switching to Boulder after that. One more question: what’s a product you love and why?
Michelle Lim
(31:32)
I love Superhuman. It makes me feel accomplished after managing email, has fantastic sorting so I never miss important emails, and it’s beautifully designed. I bring that love for design into Flint.
Doug Camplejohn
(32:06)
Nice. I love the early stories of how hands-on Superhuman was trying to create magic moments for users. We’re focused these days on delivering delight as quickly and clearly as possible in our product. Finally, how can our listeners stay in touch and help Flint?
Michelle Lim
(32:32)
They can follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn: michlimlim. We’re always hiring—engineers or designers interested in building the future of websites, please reach out. Recruiting is my top priority.
Doug Camplejohn
(33:00)
Always be recruiting, always be hiring. Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. Really enjoyed it.
Michelle Lim
(33:08)
Of course. Those were great questions.
Doug Camplejohn
(33:11)
Thank you.
