Today we’d like to introduce you to Brett Hollman.
Hi Brett, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My career path started as an architect and later a platform engineering leader. In 2012, I went to AWS as an early Solutions Architect (field engineer). Shortly thereafter as we scaled out AWS, I became the Southwest and Central Solutions Architecture leader. I left in 2016 to take on a new role as a B2B SaaS CTO and CPO for a company that we scaled from zero to >$2M ARR before leaving. Having done some AI work as a CTO on building and scaling out recommendations in our SaaS platform, in 2019 I returned to AWS to be the leader for the Americas AI Solutions Architecture and I grew that organization from just a few people to about 60 Solutions Architects (primarily hiring field Data Scientists and ML Engineers) that helped customers build AI solutions in the cloud on AWS.
In 2022, I left AWS to go to Intuit to lead the AI Platforms organization. As the leader of this organization, I owned and worked with my teams to build out the Machine Learning Platform used by Intuit Data Science teams, the Democratized AI Model Builder that could be used by product managers and engineers to build their own models, and the Generative AI Platform named GenOS (and discussed in many publications). As part of this role, I grew the organization from approximately 35 engineers in the US to around 80 engineers across the US and India.
In the beginning of 2024, I left Intuit to become the CEO of Enji, where I am also one of three Founders. In this role, I am putting to use all my skills in strategy, organization building, product development, engineering, and AI to build our cutting edge product that simplified marketing for small business owners that are not marketing experts.
To sum up my career, I excel at the nexus of product and technology. I have helped multiple companies launch products at scale (startup and enterprise), and received patents for my work. I have over 25 years of experience both as an architect / engineer and as an engineering and product leader building engineering, product development, and AI organizations.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
In addition to my professional life, I am a very active person and love outdoor sports – rock climbing, surfing, skiing, and mountain biking. I think my biggest obstacles have always been in balancing my life between my personal and professional life. Twice in my career I have taken longer breaks from work after pushing really hard professionally.
I took a year off after working at Level 3 Communications in Boulder, CO as an architecture and engineering leader. My career was in an accelerated upward trajectory but I was burned out and I didn’t have the time in my personal life to do the things I wanted to do. I traveled for a year in South Africa, Mexico, and California pursuing a new interest in surfing and eventually moved from Boulder, CO to San Diego, CA where I settled after travel.
Returning from travel for a year and restarting my career in the same spot and on the same path was difficult. It did take a few years to get back to where I was on my career path. That being said, I wouldn’t trade that time traveling for anything, so it slowed my career progression a bit, but was a lifetime experience that I will never regret. I did have another block of time later in my career where I took a larger block of time off, and again, no regrets, but it was a tradeoff with career progression.
In the end, taking this time and gaining these life experiences made me who I am, but did slow my career trajectory down a bit.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Enji?
Enji was an idea between me and my wife Tayler that started during the pandemic. The inception of the idea was hers and it involved taking her marketing consulting practice that was focused on small business owners and making the services she offered available as software and affordable to all small business owners needing marketing help. We quickly got started thinking it through and building a prototype.
To sum up what we do, Enji is an AI based marketing platform built specifically for solopreneurs and very small business owners (with teams typically under 10 people) that need to do their own marketing and don’t have expertise in marketing. Our goal is to simplify marketing for these business owners and teams with a platform that is built for them and assumes they are not expert marketers (very different than most marketing software out there).
We have created an AI, which is our own expert system, that builds a customized marketing strategy for a customer based upon their website and their answers to our questions. From there, our AI breaks that strategy down into an actionable marketing plan and puts tasks on their marketing calendar to help them meet their business and marketing goals. These tasks don’t assume expertise and come with education where applicable. There is a full project and task management capability built into Enji so the company marketing calendar and tasks can include the full team and any contractors.
We also provide the tools to execute much of their marketing plan with AI content creation and copywriting tools, a full social media management set of tools, performance management tools to bring all of their sales and marketing KPIs into one dashboard, and a set of tools to manage their brand. All of these tools are important to the overall marketing plan, but the social media management tools are a standout as a user can create a social media specific plan, generate new ideas for their social media, write their captions using our AI that writes in their brand voice (and in their business context), and can schedule their content for posting across all the major social platforms.
In addition to our core offering above, we provide campaign templates, twice a month group coaching calls where users can get educated on a topic or bring questions, and much more. We aim to make it easy for the small business owner that is doing their own marketing (with help from their small team) to do their own marketing and reach their goals.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Since I am now in the startup space and have been in the past, I am going to include two lessons that are applicable to startup founders / senior leaders as well as technical leaders in a startup.
First, in my career I have bounced back and forth between hands on roles and leadership / exec roles. I have always sought to be a person that can not only lead the work but also do the work. In a startup, you have to wear many hats, and although I am the CEO, I have been doing engineering work since we started. I find that to be successful in an early stage startup, you need to wear many hats and be good at a lot of things (not necessarily great at all of them). As you move forward, some of these hats can be handed off and you need to be good at hiring the right people as those first hires are make or break for the company.
Second, as a startup founder, persistence is the most important thing above all else. You are going to have good days, weeks, and months and you are going to have bad ones. The highs are very high and the lows are very low as a startup founder, but you have to be persistent when things aren’t going great to see things through and get to the next inflection point. You also need to be real about what is happening and realize when you are going down a path that isn’t the bets and there is a good pivot. At multiple startups, we have launched amazing products and features and some that fizzled. Knowing when to stop on something and move on is key.
Pricing:
- Monthly Plan – $29 / month
- Yearly Plan – $289 / year
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.enji.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/enji_co
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/enjimarketing
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bretthollman/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@enjimarketing
- Other: Enji LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/enji/
Image Credits
All the images are from our cameras.
