Meeting Title: Uttam <> Jie Date: 2024-05-06 Meeting participants: Jie, Uttam Kumaran
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1 00:00:28.220 ⇒ 00:00:29.639 Jie: Hey, Tom, how’s it going.
2 00:00:29.830 ⇒ 00:00:31.340 Uttam Kumaran: Hey! How are you?
3 00:00:31.530 ⇒ 00:00:35.379 Jie: Good! Good! Thanks for catching up with me.
4 00:00:35.620 ⇒ 00:00:36.080 Uttam Kumaran: And that was good.
5 00:00:36.080 ⇒ 00:00:36.959 Jie: And while.
6 00:00:36.960 ⇒ 00:00:39.239 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, it’s been a while. How’s life?
7 00:00:40.224 ⇒ 00:00:48.389 Jie: Life is good I am in a different continent at this point. I don’t know. Last time I chatted with you, where was I?
8 00:00:48.390 ⇒ 00:00:49.880 Uttam Kumaran: Are you in South America.
9 00:00:50.170 ⇒ 00:01:00.115 Jie: Yeah, I think I was in Lima, or something like that, right? And then I went to Brazil for like a month, and then I now in Spain, in Valencia. So
10 00:01:00.400 ⇒ 00:01:07.660 Uttam Kumaran: Nice. I love Spain, man favorite. That’s like my number one favorite country, I think, outside us, but.
11 00:01:07.820 ⇒ 00:01:09.739 Jie: Have you? Where have you been in Spain?
12 00:01:09.740 ⇒ 00:01:14.742 Uttam Kumaran: I’ve been to Barcelona, Madrid, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Bill Bow and San Sebastian.
13 00:01:15.390 ⇒ 00:01:16.330 Jie: Oh, wow! Nice!
14 00:01:16.330 ⇒ 00:01:17.930 Uttam Kumaran: There is so nice.
15 00:01:18.170 ⇒ 00:01:20.436 Jie: Yeah, that basket region. I.
16 00:01:20.890 ⇒ 00:01:22.799 Uttam Kumaran: It is so nice for food.
17 00:01:22.800 ⇒ 00:01:25.470 Jie: Heard all the Michelin crazy.
18 00:01:25.470 ⇒ 00:01:25.880 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
19 00:01:25.880 ⇒ 00:01:27.860 Jie: They’re crazy. Yeah, yeah.
20 00:01:27.860 ⇒ 00:01:28.240 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
21 00:01:28.505 ⇒ 00:01:39.390 Jie: But next time you you come to Spain, please come, check out Valencia. It’s a little off the beaten path. I thought that people wouldn’t know about it. But I come here, and I walked down the street, and
22 00:01:39.883 ⇒ 00:01:52.610 Jie: it’s all English and other random languages like the Brits are here, the Americans here. There is a store down the road called Taste of America, where you can buy Cherryos and her
23 00:01:52.980 ⇒ 00:01:56.190 Jie: cars in case you miss the toxic American stuff.
24 00:01:56.190 ⇒ 00:01:56.510 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
25 00:01:56.827 ⇒ 00:02:02.220 Jie: Everybody’s here. Yeah, the place is beautiful. And yeah, it’s really got the whole package. So.
26 00:02:02.220 ⇒ 00:02:02.710 Uttam Kumaran: Nice.
27 00:02:02.710 ⇒ 00:02:03.390 Jie: Yeah.
28 00:02:04.050 ⇒ 00:02:15.943 Uttam Kumaran: Well, yeah. Otherwise, business has been good on my end. Yeah, I’m emailed these just mentioning, we’ve been trying out a bunch of new based tools. And you know, I’ve had a couple of other people inquire about like customer facing
29 00:02:16.310 ⇒ 00:02:28.779 Uttam Kumaran: dashboards, and have spent some time like thinking more about that. I know we we helped a little bit. I know you guys were hiring a bi person, too, so interested to hear like, kind of like how that’s going? But
30 00:02:28.990 ⇒ 00:02:29.590 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, yeah.
31 00:02:30.100 ⇒ 00:02:37.470 Jie: The the bi situation, to be honest with you has been a little bit challenging requires a lot of hand holding.
32 00:02:37.550 ⇒ 00:02:44.909 Jie: So you know, that probably needs to be rethought a little bit on the full spot side of things.
33 00:02:45.050 ⇒ 00:02:52.940 Jie: Honestly not super happy with them. The support has been pretty awful. The
34 00:02:53.551 ⇒ 00:02:59.400 Jie: embedding, you know. There is a lot of flexibility there. But
35 00:02:59.980 ⇒ 00:03:09.299 Jie: it is not very performant. And the the embedding situation is very slow. For anything to load
36 00:03:09.953 ⇒ 00:03:14.460 Jie: there is flexibility in some sense, but
37 00:03:14.670 ⇒ 00:03:28.060 Jie: with all tools this flexibility there is limitations to the flexibility. And so you you always run up against that right? So it, you know it. It’s kind of like.
38 00:03:28.300 ⇒ 00:03:39.569 Jie: Yes, but the it’s it’s just not fully fully there, and I don’t think it’s going to be good enough to allow our customers
39 00:03:39.950 ⇒ 00:03:44.509 Jie: to have a high level of customization on their end, or.
40 00:03:44.510 ⇒ 00:03:44.860 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
41 00:03:44.860 ⇒ 00:04:03.329 Jie: Them to really determine the exact dashboard they want to use. I I think it’s like, even for us. It’s very difficult to wrangle properly between our data back end and their front end. So you know, I I think
42 00:04:03.610 ⇒ 00:04:08.250 Jie: all in all very, very challenging experience. Yeah.
43 00:04:08.250 ⇒ 00:04:08.465 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
44 00:04:08.958 ⇒ 00:04:10.350 Jie: The eyes are difficult. Yeah.
45 00:04:10.350 ⇒ 00:04:16.070 Uttam Kumaran: I think building Vi is difficult. But also it’s like there’s so many parties involved. Right? There’s your back end team.
46 00:04:16.140 ⇒ 00:04:19.270 Uttam Kumaran: your front end team, your data team.
47 00:04:19.329 ⇒ 00:04:26.780 Uttam Kumaran: which data, really, it’s like, very uncommon for them to have any understanding of what front end or back end it is. They’re almost like.
48 00:04:26.780 ⇒ 00:04:27.330 Jie: Yep.
49 00:04:27.330 ⇒ 00:04:28.830 Uttam Kumaran: From a different world. And then.
50 00:04:28.910 ⇒ 00:04:33.329 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, your customer is like, also, if your customer is like, Well, I want this tweak you’re like.
51 00:04:33.570 ⇒ 00:04:38.919 Uttam Kumaran: oh, no, like we can’t have anything like kind of parameterize or something. So I I totally.
52 00:04:38.920 ⇒ 00:04:39.850 Jie: Yeah.
53 00:04:40.720 ⇒ 00:04:51.090 Jie: yeah, it. It’s been. Yeah. It’s been much more difficult than I thought it would be. And so therefore, that’s kind of like, yeah, we need to take a step back a little bit. And just
54 00:04:52.464 ⇒ 00:05:02.725 Jie: think more deeply about exactly what we wanna do. I will show you one thing that we launched. I don’t know if you got to see this at all.
55 00:05:04.120 ⇒ 00:05:09.600 Jie: you know. Just so. You know, round up some of the stuff
56 00:05:10.766 ⇒ 00:05:29.150 Jie: we improved the industry benchmarks. I don’t know if you sold us last time, but we converted this dashboard into more of a scorecard layout. You have your metric, you have the industry average metric, and then you have a centile representing, like where you sit against the industry, average right?
57 00:05:29.577 ⇒ 00:05:35.292 Jie: And so, you know, you can look at your current ratio. You could break that out. And then
58 00:05:35.918 ⇒ 00:05:38.070 Jie: you know, you can see where you sit
59 00:05:38.240 ⇒ 00:05:51.399 Jie: and the percentals, and where the rest of the percentile rankings are. You can, you know, change that in terms of time period you could change them in terms of book close industry. You’re in
60 00:05:51.490 ⇒ 00:05:58.119 Jie: the annual sales that you want to benchmark against other companies. So you know, this is more
61 00:05:58.590 ⇒ 00:06:01.180 Jie: like, you can look down and then.
62 00:06:01.180 ⇒ 00:06:01.530 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
63 00:06:01.530 ⇒ 00:06:12.580 Jie: Zoom in rather than be completely overwhelmed by a sheer wall of graphs. You like focus in on the metric that you really care about, and where you feel you’re strong, where you feel you’re weak. Right? So there’s that.
64 00:06:13.130 ⇒ 00:06:21.150 Jie: Then we also launch this thing called a profit and loss. Dashboard. This is the thing that I’m most proud of to be honest.
65 00:06:22.960 ⇒ 00:06:35.180 Jie: this is the customer’s own profit and loss statement grouped into our taxonomy. Right? And so we’re. And and most of this obviously is focus on
66 00:06:35.210 ⇒ 00:06:41.849 Jie: cost centers. So you got net revenue. But then you go down. You look at inventory costs, logistic costs.