Drew sits down with Kelvin, founder of ZeroRank, the AI search visibility platform that had a very successful run on AppSumo. ZeroRank tracks how brands show up in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and the rest, shows the sentiment behind each mention, and traces every recommendation back to the exact page the model learned it from.

Kelvin pitched this idea three years ago and got told it was nonsense, that nobody was leaving Google. Then Google itself went AI-first. In this episode he walks through the product live and makes the case that the game got reset, which means competing with a HubSpot is possible again if you can actually see where you stand.

What we get into:

- Why AI search volume looks low and converts anyway. "Best attorney in New York" versus "best attorney in New York who handles divorces" is the whole shift.

- The agency setup: a workspace per client, unlimited seats on every plan, white-label dashboards, client reports sent from your own domain, and 100 workspaces on the top tier.

- Pitch workspaces. Drop in a prospect domain, ZeroRank finds the marketing contact, drafts the message, and you send in two clicks.

- Copilot and Agent Brain, plus the version coming next that stops asking permission and just does the work every day.

- REST API and MCP, and the people already building their own tools on ZeroRank as a backend.

- Real numbers. 300K impressions and 3.2K clicks in three months using their own tool, 44K of those from AI search alone, and one AppSumo buyer who saw movement in two days.

- What is shipping next: local AI search for plumbers and lawyers, a mobile app, and an ad spy tool for ChatGPT ads.

- Why Kelvin and his co-founder took no venture money, kept the team at 10, and why he personally handled 1,300 support tickets during the AppSumo months.

Drew also asks the question every Sumo-ling wants answered: are they coming back to AppSumo? You get an honest answer instead of a promise.

ZeroRank: https://zerorank.ai

AFA is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric — white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence — so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Sohaib Ahmad is the founder of DM Champs, a multi-channel AI sales agent built for agencies. Before DM Champs, Sohaib ran (and still runs) a six-year-old Meta-ads agency focused on paid acquisition for international hair clinics, scaling from one clinic to roughly twenty worldwide. DM Champs spun out of the internal tool built to solve the lead-follow-up bottleneck his own agency hit at scale, and is now a Netherlands-based SaaS company with seed-stage funding. He is active on the AppSumo questions board and reachable through dmchamp.com.

Key quotes:

"We've built the whole AI engine of DM Champ to be as human as possible, simply because it's built as a sales agent. And if someone knows you're talking to an AI… their guards will already be up. So we focused a lot on making it as human as possible so you could actually get good results."

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro and what DM Champs does

00:49 — Why DM Champs has the human edge over other AppSumo chat bots

02:22 — Building the AI to bypass "AI guards up" in chat

03:24 — Why the knowledge base + human voice is the unparalleled combination

04:33 — Setup wizard walkthrough — 15 minutes per client

06:45 — Why follow-ups were pulled and rebuilt with stricter guardrails

07:55 — Sales coverage: $27 low-ticket to €50K high-ticket

09:18 — Native Google Calendar booking inside chat — no external links

10:21 — Full white-label and sub-account architecture for agencies

21:00 — The hair clinic case: $5M to $10M in one year

24:17 — Why WhatsApp beats chat widgets for follow-up

25:36 — iMessage rollout timing

27:07 — Tier 6 unlimited sub-accounts, added by community request

Resources:

FREE DM Champs Playbook

Get DM Champs Lifetime Deal

Affiliate disclosure:

AFA may earn a commission if you buy DM Champs through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships.

Automation for Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric — white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence — so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Kevin Kariuki is the founder of Nexuscale, a sales outreach platform that runs email and LinkedIn campaigns from a single platform built on its own LinkedIn and SMTP infrastructure. After a strong AppSumo lifetime-deal run, Kevin's team rebuilt the platform's sending engine inhouse, owned mailboxes, sending IPs, domain purchase, and an internal warming network, and added AI agents that personalize and qualify outreach end-to-end.

Key quotes:

"It essentially allows you to do 70 or 80 percent of what you'd want to do in terms of outreach inside one platform. And that remaining 20, 30 percent, we're closing that gap in the next six months."

Timestamps:

00:05 — Intro

00:37 — What Nexuscale is and the tool-sprawl problem

01:47 — What makes it different: all channels in one platform

03:21 — Building its own SMTP infrastructure

04:16 — White-label: two paths (as-is and API build)

06:36 — Screen tour: domains, mailboxes, warming network

08:57 — LinkedIn outreach without Premium

10:42 — The first-login onboarding flow

13:53 — AI agents that personalize and qualify replies

16:29 — Roadmap: post-engagement leads, voice, cold-dial

18:36 — Team management and unlimited brands per login

19:01 — Best fit: agencies running both channels

Resources:

FREE NexusScale Playbook

Get NexusScale

Affiliate disclosure:

Automation for Agencies may earn a commission if you buy Nexuscale through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships.

Automation For Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric: white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

SheetXAI

David Souza is the founder of SheetXAI, a Google Sheets and Excel AI add-on that automates spreadsheet workflows for non-technical users. Before SheetXAI, David ran three agencies — most recently a customer success consultancy for SaaS companies, plus organic GTM at StartupHelpr and a Facebook ads shop for local businesses going back to 2018. He built the first version of SheetXAI overnight in December 2024 after one too many midnight VLOOKUP sessions on a client SEO project. Connect with David at sheetxai.com.

Key quotes:

"I would say, and in all honesty, I don't think it's probably the best app for white labeling. It's more an internal tool. Like it helps your company focus on the stuff that actually matters for your company rather than necessarily it being something you sell to people." — David Souza

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro

00:55 — What SheetXAI is and who it's for

03:21 — The agency entry point: cold email at scale

04:46 — Why David won't market this as white-label

05:14 — Live demo: 30 personalized cold emails in seconds

08:46 — Where the AI pulls its data from

10:18 — Multimodal: images, video, TTS, alt text

12:24 — The 100x integration partnership announcement

13:46 — "Clay for spreadsheets" — the design north star

14:07 — Roadmap: scheduled runs and automations

17:14 — The 80/20 pitch for agency owners

18:17 — Why "sexy UI" isn't the goal

Resources:

Agency Playbook: FREE Playbook

Get SheetXAI

Affiliate disclosure:

Automation For Agencies may earn a commission if you buy SheetXAI through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships.

Automation For Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric: whitelabel depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Dimitar Savov is the founder of Skillplate, an all-in-one business operating system combining a section-based website builder with native digital products, member areas, bookings, and marketing automation. Before Skillplate, Dimitar and his ten-person team ran Startup Masters, a full-service marketing agency that contributed to building two 9-figure businesses, more than ten 8-figure businesses, and over sixty 7-figure businesses across a decade of operating.

Key quotes:

"I don't think that the agency owner should purchase Skillplate. They should build Skillplate accounts for their clients."

-Dimitar Savov

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro and what Skillplate is

01:34 — Origin: from marketing agency to platform

03:26 — Building the academy that became Skillplate

06:40 — When Skillplate fits, when Shopify wins

07:04 — Marketing-first builder vs. developer-first canvas

10:21 — Branding propagation and the 2-minute styles panel

17:53 — Multi-client setup and the per-client subscription model

22:50 — Webhooks, API, n8n: the integration story

24:43 — Facebook Lead Ads → Skillplate → Telegram in seconds

27:25 — Why team permissions don't ship yet

30:53 — Funnels vs. customer journeys (the product taste)

36:48 — "Agencies shouldn't buy Skillplate — set clients up on it"

40:42 — The agentic AI roadmap, shipping in 2–3 weeks

Resources:

FREE Skillplate Playbook

Get Skillplate

Affiliate disclosure:

Sumofied may earn a commission if you buy Skillplate through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships.

Automation For Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric — white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence — so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Ayush Bansal is the founder of Blip AI, a voice-to-text productivity tool that converts spoken thoughts into ready-to-send text inside any application. Previously an engineer at Amazon and Microsoft, Ayush has built Blip with a focus on sub-second latency and high reliability — and held the top-three deal position on AppSumo for three consecutive weeks at launch. He is active on LinkedIn and contactable through the Blip AI website at blip.ai (or via the AppSumo listing).

Key quotes:

"Our eventual goal is to move into memory layer and do something more with voice. It would be like a voice operating system where you could do most of the stuff with your voice."

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro and what Blip AI does

01:06 — Why voice-to-text is the AI-era input layer

02:00 — Drew on switching from a competitor over mobile pricing

03:14 — Agency use cases: white-label, sub-accounts, API, team management

05:24 — Live demo of action mode and the shortcut library

09:24 — Tier 3 vs Tier 4 seat structure and word-pool allocation

13:46 — The white-label question and the agency invite-email gap

15:05 — Speed and reliability as Blip's primary differentiator

17:05 — Mobile beta walkthrough on iOS and Android

19:46 — The Gmail MCP integration on the roadmap

21:30 — Why this is reportedly the last AppSumo run

Resources:

FREE Blip.AI Playbook

Get Blip.AI

Affiliate disclosure:

Automation For Agencies may earn a commission if you buy Blip AI through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships.

Automation For Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric: whitelabel depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Vesko Kolev is the founder of Icanpreneur, an AI co-founder platform that walks founders from "I have an idea" through customer validation, positioning, and the first version of a landing page and sales deck.

Key quotes:

"We don't help founders build faster. We help them pick the right direction and then accelerate." — Vesko Kolev

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro and what Icanpreneur actually does

01:30 — Why validation beats build-faster

03:40 — How the AI gets it right vs. generic LLMs

05:45 — White-label and the agency tier in development

06:50 — 1-click client transfer plus 15% revenue share

08:30 — The agency revenue model Vesko built using his own product

09:00 — API access and the LinkedIn integration

~12:00 — Multi-tenant question: workspaces, data isolation, tier limits

13:00 — Live demo: zero to landing page in five minutes

17:30 — Synthetic interviews running on five AI personas at once

24:00 — Generating positioning, sales deck, and Google Slides export

28:00 — Which LLMs power Icanpreneur (Gemini + Anthropic)

33:30 — The multilingual ship and the long-term coding-tool roadmap

38:00 — Why Vesko followed his own methodology to build the agency program

Resources:

FREE Icanpreneur Playbook

Get Icanpreneur Lifetime Deal

Affiliate disclosure:

Automation For Agencies may earn a commission if you buy Icanpreneur through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships.

Automation For Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric: white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Luncal

Pranshu Kacholia is the Founder/CEO of Lunacal, an AI-aware scheduling and booking platform for service businesses, consultants, and appointment-driven professionals. Lunacal launched on AppSumo and has shipped multiple major release waves since — Beautiful Booker themes, full workflow automation, and outbound voice-agent meeting reminders. Pranshu is hands-on across product, support, and beta testing (he was running 3am QA the week of the voice-agent launch).

He walks through the architecture of what is arguably the best-looking booking page on AppSumo — and the reasons Sumofied verdicts it a Solo Pick instead of a Buy. The booking page is a 4.3/5 product. The reseller math is a 3.1/5.

This episode covers the agency-specific dimensions in order: White-Label Depth (booker side fully branded, admin side still Lunacal), Multi-Client Management (30 workspaces on Tier 4, but no full-workspace templates), Reseller Viability (no formal program, public LTD pricing, no white-label billing layer), Integration Flexibility (strong webhooks and native CRM coverage, no public API), and Roadmap Confidence (outbound voice agents shipped two weeks ago, inbound voice agents in early build). Pranshu also walks through Beautiful Booker — the embeddable, themable booking widget with industry-specific animations — and the workflow engine that automates pre- and post-meeting touchpoints.

According to Sumofied's Agency Viability Score, Lunacal scores 3.1/5 for agency viability and 4.3/5 for product quality, earning a Solo Pick verdict. Which means: buy it if you run a 1-to-5 person agency with 5–15 service-business clients in non-regulated verticals; pass entirely if you're scaling toward 30+ deployments or need to mark up tool resale margin.

Built for solo operators and small agencies in service-business verticals — coaches, consultants, design studios, fractional executives, B2B advisors.

Resources:

FREE Lunacal Playbook

Get Lunacal

Timestamps

00:00 — Intro: first guest on the new YouTube launch

01:49 — How Lunacal started: scheduling page as marketing landing page

03:45 — White-label setup: workspace per client, 30 seats on Tier 4

04:54 — How a client logs into their own isolated workspace

05:10 — Service-then-provider routing for hospitals and law firms

06:30 — Round-robin event types and balanced lead distribution

08:04 — Webhooks, Zapier, and the booking-event triggers that matter

09:11 — Built-in Stripe and PayPal payments at 0% platform commission

10:13 — Where the white-label stops: backend stays on app.lunacal.ai

13:03 — The Beautiful Booker reveal and Drew's reaction

16:23 — Live walkthrough: themes, animations, industry-specific embeds

19:04 — Email embed: pre-selected time slots inside an email

19:48 — Pranshu, candid: "We have done a bad job at product analytics"

20:22 — Voice agents: outbound reminder calls live, inbound in early build

23:04 — Tech stack under the voice agent (LiveKit + LLMs, not VAPI)

26:19 — Workflows: realtor, tattoo studio, and post-service follow-up

30:14 — AI credits, paid extras, and keeping the business sustainable

Key quotes

"Let's say I am an agency. I have 30 seats. I can bring five individual clients. Each of those clients can have, let's say six seats of their own. Every service business that you can think of can be parallely managed within LunaCal." — Pranshu Kacholia

"We actually launched voice agents very recently. I think it's been a few days. Last Saturday is when I was doing beta testing. It was probably 3 a.m. in the night for me when I made that video." — Pranshu Kacholia

Affiliate disclosure

Automation For Agencies may earn a commission if you buy Lunacal through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships. Read the full methodology at sumofied.com/avs.

Automation for Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric, white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Nizamudheen Valliyattu is the founder of Dale (getdale.com), a demo automation platform that delivers personalized, self-serve product demos with per-contact intent tracking. Before Dale, he sold a single product into banking, healthcare, and insurance buyers, ncluding Citibank and GE Healthcare across 20+ countries. He built Dale to solve the personalization problem that created

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro

00:17 — What Dale does: personalized demos at scale

01:21 — Branched demos for multiple personas and industries

04:15 — The agency scenario: branding and client rosters

06:27 — Workspaces: per-client branding, users, and data isolation

07:36 — API, webhooks, and the HubSpot launch announced on-air

09:12 — Segments and campaigns: automated follow-up as an SDR

10:12 — The GE Healthcare story: 7 months to a first reply

10:50 — Team management, Partner Center, and lead scoring

12:29 — The AI agent that answers live inside demos

13:47 — Four use cases: outbound, inbound, onboarding, training

17:54 — What buyers should know + the free trial

20:08 — The agency selling angle: analytics instead of guessing

Resources:

Free Dale Playbook: https://automationforagencies.com/playbooks/dale

Purcahse Dale here: https://goto.automationforagencies.com/dale

Affiliate disclosure:

AFA (Automation for Agencies) is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric — white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence — so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Pawan Julani is the founder of Swft Connect, a digital business card and lead-capture platform launched in 2021 and now used by 10,000-plus businesses, including Deloitte, TUI, and Buro Happold. He ships weekly and builds the white-label roadmap directly from a Skool community of 300-plus reseller partners. Key quotes:

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro

00:41 — What Swft Connect is and the white-label opening

02:26 — Why digital cards are trending up

04:57 — The email-signature lead-capture play

06:17 — Embedding Calendly inside the profile

07:44 — White-label setup walkthrough (10 to 30 minutes)

09:38 — Native CRM integrations: HubSpot, Salesforce, GoHighLevel

10:51 — Full front-end redesign and Liquid Glass theme

14:01 — The AI engine: profile builder, paper-card scanning

16:23 — Why it hands off after lead capture instead of being a CRM

20:31 — Why white-label sits at Tier 4

24:28 — The roadmap: an email-signature generator and a low-friction tool suite

Resources:

Free Swft Connect Agency Playbook

Get Swft Connect Lifetime Deal

Affiliate disclosure:

AFA may earn a commission if you buy Swft Connect through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships.

Automation for Agencies (AFA) is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric, white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn, launch, scale.

Guest bio:

Federico Terzi is the founder of Borumi, a desktop video creation studio built by Spandino AB in Sweden. A software engineer by trade and a lifelong freelancer, he is also the creator of the open-source text expander Espanso, and he grew a programming YouTube channel to about 10,000 subscribers before building the tool he wished he had for making educational video. Bootstrapped, he has been full-time on Borumi for almost a year.

Key quotes:

"Many times the lifetime deal is kind of like a gold rush. You pay for it and then the founder disappears after 2 months. But [Borumi]'s been around for 2 years and I have plans for the next 5 years." -Federico

Timestamps:

00:00: Intro and episode framing

01:01: What Borumi is and who it is for

03:49: Why guided scenes beat a full video editor

06:03: Why Borumi is not a white-label tool

07:19: Live demo of the script, record and edit workflow

09:00: Claude runs silence removal and captions through the MCP

12:04: Can Claude edit the whole video? Not yet

14:31: Three agency features coming in the next 6 months

17:12: How Borumi came to be

19:20: Why a one-time license works for a desktop app

22:33: Lifetime updates and why the MCP costs him nothing

23:53: Staying bootstrapped and a possible agency lifetime plan

Resources:

Get Borumi for $79 Lifetime

Affiliate disclosure:

Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships. Read the full methodology at automationforagencies.com/avs.

Automation for Agencies is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric — white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn · Launch · Scale.

Guest bio:

Kushal Poddar is the founder of Poko Motion (poko.video), a desktop app that turns a website URL, PDF, deck, or asset folder into a finished motion-graphics video for $5–8, rendered locally. It's his second venture — his first, an AI companion platform he scaled last year, burned through demo videos faster than any editor could deliver, so he built the editor out of the loop. Poko launched June 2, 2026 and sits around 4.5 on Trustpilot.

Key quotes:

"It's a total desktop app, everything stays locally, you don't need to upload anything on cloud, no data risk, nothing, everything stays local."

Timestamps:

00:00 — Intro

00:48 — Why Kushal built Poko: editors charging thousands per video

02:35 — Fully local desktop app: no cloud, no tracking

04:02 — Live demo: website URL to video in one prompt

05:27 — Pricing: ~$5 a video, zero markup on AI usage

07:22 — BYOK and connecting a Claude subscription

08:19 — Local models: near-zero marginal cost on your own GPU

09:45 — MCP servers: publish to YouTube, Meta, and Google Ads

11:23 — Five parallel agents and the Agent Canvas

13:41 — The $8 two-minute demo, cloned voice included

15:19 — Client workspaces and brand kits: five to six days out

17:54 — Roadmap: animation maker, per-brand memory, UGC + motion

19:48 — Traction: 4.5 Trustpilot, 85% agency owners, 24-hour support

Resources:

Poko Motion Playbook

Poko Motion Lifetime Deal

Affiliate disclosure:

Automation for Agencies (AFA) is the podcast where AppSumo founders meet agency owners. Host Drew Rattray scores every tool against the Agency Viability Score (AVS) rubric, white-label depth, multi-client management, reseller viability, integration flexibility, and roadmap confidence, so agency listeners know what's actually worth buying. Learn, launch, scale.

Guest bio:

Akash is the founder of Remalt, an AI content workspace built around a visual whiteboard instead of a linear chat thread. A former agency owner himself, he built Remalt after growing frustrated with the cost and output quality of a competing AppSumo AI content tool, and designed the product around per-group custom instructions, a shared prompt library, and fully transparent coin-based usage tracking.

Key quotes:

"Our brains do not work in this manner where we are just typing in things and we are expecting results. We connect dots, we connect different, different things." -Akash

Timestamps:

00:00: Intro and episode framing

00:43: What Remalt actually does

01:53: Remalt's ideal customer profile

02:48: Live demo begins, AI workflow walkthrough

06:46: Custom instructions and the prompt library

13:56: Voice matching and content repurposing in action

23:35: LinkedIn infographic generation from finished copy

24:12: Multi-client boards and folder organization

25:05: API access and MCP tooling status

25:57: White-label roadmap and reseller structure

28:00: Comparing Remalt to Poppy

31:27: Closing thoughts and roadmap outlook

Resources:

FREE Remalt Playbook PDF

Affiliate disclosure:

AFA may earn a commission if you buy Remalt through our AppSumo link. Reviews are scored independently against the AVS rubric and are never adjusted based on commercial relationships. Read the full methodology at automationforagencies.com/avs.