Blue Seedling

Heading to Black Hat this year? Save August 5 for sushi, cocktails, and the best conversations of the week. 🍣 We're co-hosting a private event at Mandalay Bay with Novee Security and YL Ventures for some of the sharpest Israeli women in cyber: founders, marketers, product leaders, sales leaders, investors, and operators. No agenda, no booth pitches. Just good food, fun drinks, and real conversations. This is a chance to hang out with some of the Israeli cyber community’s best, without the conference floor noise. Space is limited and registration needs approval. 🍹 Register here: https://luma.com/y9ki36c7

Black Hat week means back-to-back meetings and packed sessions. Somewhere between sessions, you'll realize a decent cup of coffee in Las Vegas is harder to find than it should be, for a city that sells you every other luxury on earth. Netta Kivilis mapped out the best specialty coffee on the Strip and in the Arts District, from an espresso bar tucked inside a used bookstore to a chocolate maker that pulls a great (in Netta’s opinion the best) shot on the side. Full list is in the comments if you need to stay caffeinated between sessions at Mandalay Bay. ☕

For this week's Blue Seedling Real AI, we're highlighting Cielo Gil's customized sales deck generator that, frankly, blew us away. The idea: create a tailored sales deck for each sales prospect in minutes instead of hours. Fill out a Google Form with the prospect's details, and a script produces a tailored, ready-to-refine deck. The script, built with Claude and executed on Google Apps Script, copies Blue Seedling’s master deck and tailors it automatically: swapping in the company name and dates, picking case studies and testimonials by vertical, and removing the slides that don't apply. Our favorite part: it even drops comments in the deck flagging what still needs a human like pricing and timeline dates. We'll be back with more #BlueSeedlingRealAI posts soon. 💙

Most booths are built backwards. The team starts with "what do we want to show?" and ends up with a product demo, a logo wall, and a pile of branded pens. 🖊️ Before you spend another dollar on your booth, answer one question first: What do you want people to say about your company after they walk away? In their own words. Write it down. Then ask five other people on your team to write their answers down separately. If the answers don't match, you have a problem. Not a booth problem. A story problem. And no amount of budget will fix a story problem. Once you have alignment, four things need to exist on paper before any vendor gets a brief: 1️⃣ A one-sentence company description your parents could understand. 2️⃣ A written perception statement. After someone walks away from my booth, I want them to think: _____. 3️⃣ A messaging hierarchy. One key message, two supporting lines. 4️⃣ A 10-word booth headline that works even without context. Be specific. Be clear. The booth is the easy part. The story is the work. Deck and recording from Kill It at Black Hat in the comments. 🎩

Before you spend a dollar on Black Hat, five decisions will define your entire conference. Get these right and everything else follows. Get them wrong, and no amount of swag will save you. 1️⃣ Booth size and type. Do you have a booth at all? How big? Custom build or DIY? This isn’t just a budget question. It’s a goals question. 2️⃣ Sponsorship level. A keynote slot, digital advertising, or nothing at the show level. Each carries a very different price tag and a very different signal to the market. 3️⃣ Media coverage. Paid interviews, content syndication, press outreach. Do you want to walk away with evergreen content and third-party credibility, or are you putting that budget elsewhere? 4️⃣ Where you meet people. A private suite at Mandalay Bay, a shared meeting space, or Starbucks next to the venue. The setting shapes the conversation. 5️⃣ Your team. Who goes, how many, and what are they there to do. This is the decision most teams underinvest in. Every other choice flows from these five. And all five flow from your goals. Deck and recording from Kill It at Black Hat in the comments. 🎩

Another Blue Seedling Real AI, this one for anyone who's ever spent too long making AI-written content sound less... AI-written. 👀 David Pozo built a Claude Skill that scrubs the most common LLM telltales from longer content like blog posts and project plans. Overused words, em dash abuse, too much excitement, that kind of thing. The verdict so far? Kind of just okay. Better than starting from scratch every time, definitely. Perfect, not even close. But that's the point. The best AI workflows aren't always magic, they're small practical improvements that remove a little friction from work you're already doing, and then you test, tweak, and improve from there.

Three companies. Three very different Black Hat strategies. All of them worked. That's the point. There's no single right answer for how to show up at Black Hat. The right answer depends entirely on where you are as a company and what you're trying to accomplish. Here's what that looks like in practice: 🥇 Seed stage. Small DIY booth, core team only, shared premium meeting space, two co-sponsored parties. Lean, focused, and scrappy in the best way. You're there to make connections, not to look like CrowdStrike. 🥈 Series A. Small custom booth, ten-person team including the full sales org, shared meeting space, two co-sponsored parties. You're making a splash without overextending. 🥉 Late stage. Medium to large booth, 18-person team, private suite at a five-star hotel, self-hosted and partner events. You're not just generating pipeline. You're owning the room. Same conference. Very different playbooks. The question isn't what the best Black Hat strategy looks like. It's what the best Black Hat strategy looks like for you, right now, with your goals and your resources. Deck and full recording from Kill It at Black Hat in the comments.

Another Blue Seedling Real AI, and honestly, it might be the most underrated one yet. 👀 Laura Montagna has 150 lines of expenses to categorize every month. She'd been trying to automate this exact task for a while, but the results were never good enough. Mistakes, overcomplicated outputs, tools that weren't quite ready. This time, she dropped the list into Gemini while drafting an email and asked it to categorize everything. Two minutes later, done. Same task, same instinct to automate. The tools just finally caught up. That's one of the biggest underrated stories in AI right now. It's not always about finding a new workflow. Sometimes it's about trying the same one again to see if the tools have caught up. 💙

At Blue Seedling, we push our team to find and share AI tools and workflows they can actually use day-to-day. No overhyped "AI-powered solutions." No tricks that only work in theory. Just the real stuff that makes our work better and faster. 🤖 Some of the best use cases have been almost embarrassingly simple. Over 10 years, we've documented what works in our blog posts, webinars, case studies, and LinkedIn posts - and now our AI Agent pulls it all together. It lives right on our website, so you can ask it anything, anytime: "How should I be using AI for content creation?" "What AI tools does Blue Seedling use for B2B marketing?" It knows what we know. And keep an eye out here for more of what our team is actually using. 👀

The fastest way to fix a struggling pipeline? Stop trying to sell to everyone. 🎯 It sounds obvious. But most early-stage cybersecurity teams are still targeting "CISOs" and wondering why nothing's converting. Netta breaks down why ICP specificity is still the most underleveraged decision in early-stage cyber - and how to actually get there. Link in comments. 👇