Meeting Title: Uttam-Kumaran’s-Personal-Meeting-Room Date: 2024-08-30 Meeting participants: Suraj, Patrick Trainer, Ryan Luke Daque, Nicolas Sucari, Joshuadeveyra, Uttam Kumaran
WEBVTT
1 00:00:32.780 ⇒ 00:00:33.245 Uttam Kumaran: Yo.
2 00:00:33.710 ⇒ 00:00:34.470 Patrick Trainer: What’s up?
3 00:00:37.370 ⇒ 00:00:38.000 Uttam Kumaran: Everything.
4 00:00:38.000 ⇒ 00:00:39.810 Ryan Luke Daque: Hey, guys, how’s it going.
5 00:00:40.160 ⇒ 00:00:41.130 Uttam Kumaran: Hey!
6 00:00:45.030 ⇒ 00:00:45.640 Uttam Kumaran: Hey!
7 00:00:46.970 ⇒ 00:00:47.970 suraj: Hello! Everyone.
8 00:00:49.340 ⇒ 00:00:50.140 Nicolas Sucari: Hi guys.
9 00:00:56.160 ⇒ 00:00:57.320 Ryan Luke Daque: Friday.
10 00:00:57.690 ⇒ 00:00:59.140 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. Happy Friday.
11 00:00:59.460 ⇒ 00:01:01.549 Uttam Kumaran: I think this is the whole squad today.
12 00:01:05.121 ⇒ 00:01:15.029 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, cool. I mean, it’s been a really positive week. I guess I’ll share some updates on the business side of things. And then
13 00:01:15.080 ⇒ 00:01:20.104 Uttam Kumaran: I kind of want miguel, who’s on this call? Who’s been helping us with.
14 00:01:21.140 ⇒ 00:01:27.670 Uttam Kumaran: a lot of automation stuff to kind of give a really cool AI demo of a thing that we’ve been working on the sales side.
15 00:01:29.290 ⇒ 00:01:38.909 Uttam Kumaran: and we’ll kind of let him give an introduction and kind of talk about stuff we’ve been working on. So on the business side. So it’s been kind of like a really fun
16 00:01:39.582 ⇒ 00:01:43.690 Uttam Kumaran: and kind of chaotic 2 weeks. So we we got basically, me.
17 00:01:43.850 ⇒ 00:01:59.412 Uttam Kumaran: Pat and Abigail have been working a lot on the sales side to get Hubspot and a lot of our sales tooling up and running. But kind of 1st starting with the top of funnel. So how do we actually get clients in the door? How do we attract more clients? And how do we track them through the process and do outreach?
18 00:02:00.302 ⇒ 00:02:10.570 Uttam Kumaran: We’re primarily using Apollo, Hubspot, and instantly, and then, of course, like getting clients from a bunch of different ways outside of that but the biggest thing is like
19 00:02:10.630 ⇒ 00:02:19.270 Uttam Kumaran: to date. It’s been kind of just like I get leads, and I kind of process them. Instead, we’re starting to do outbound meaning. We’re going to go after folks
20 00:02:19.680 ⇒ 00:02:28.220 Uttam Kumaran: via email and via some other sources. So we kind of established a bit of lead scoring about what properties of leads are important to us.
21 00:02:29.225 ⇒ 00:02:37.510 Uttam Kumaran: We’re establishing like a score in Hubspot. And then basically based on that score and some other properties, they get sent like personalized emails.
22 00:02:38.680 ⇒ 00:02:50.049 Uttam Kumaran: so that’s like one way we’re doing. We’re also working on. We basically will get start to get leads through a couple of different funnels. And then, of course, we’ll start to post content and get some leads organically. Basically, starting next week.
23 00:02:50.489 ⇒ 00:03:00.409 Uttam Kumaran: So that’s been really great. We’ve had related to that. And through some other stuff that’s been cooking. We’ve had some other sales leads come through. None have been closed.
24 00:03:00.963 ⇒ 00:03:27.330 Uttam Kumaran: Which is really like I just don’t really get happy until that point, basically anymore. But some of them are very close. In particular, we met today with the C we met this week with the CEO of real and their head of sales and had a really really amazing conversation with them. That I’m happy to share notes from, and basically got a huge rundown about the future roadmap of the product.
25 00:03:27.698 ⇒ 00:03:32.960 Uttam Kumaran: But, more importantly, they’re planning on looping us into some clients that they’ve been actually doing
26 00:03:33.400 ⇒ 00:03:38.660 Uttam Kumaran: services for. And actually, they’re a software company. So they’re like, we can’t.
27 00:03:38.910 ⇒ 00:03:48.025 Uttam Kumaran: We can’t maintain, like the request. And all that stuff while building the product. So they’re actually thinking about bringing us on as service partners.
28 00:03:48.530 ⇒ 00:04:16.479 Uttam Kumaran: so should have some more news about that next week. We’re also partnering with another external recruiting firm. That’s actually looping us into some more enterprise. Level contracts. These are a little bit different, you know. We take on a multitude of types of projects. Right? There’s some projects where we come in and we own the whole thing meaning we are the data team for hire. There’s some projects where
29 00:04:16.579 ⇒ 00:04:37.469 Uttam Kumaran: companies just need one person to like, we have a spot for a data engineer. It’s a 6 month contract, and we just need someone to come in and handle that and so at the moment we are kind of doing both. There’s deals that are coming where it’s like cool. We have an established data team. We just need someone with a senior expertise to come in for 6 months or 12 months, and we’ll look to kind of.
30 00:04:37.540 ⇒ 00:04:47.863 Uttam Kumaran: you know. Push our folks into that and then the second thing you know, kind of like how cool parts account works is like, we are kind of like their data team, external data team.
31 00:04:48.610 ⇒ 00:04:50.569 Uttam Kumaran: there’s pros and cons to both.
32 00:04:50.800 ⇒ 00:04:52.310 Uttam Kumaran: At this point, like
33 00:04:52.420 ⇒ 00:05:11.359 Uttam Kumaran: there, the pros of like owning the whole thing and being the data team is that we can kind of govern the whole process. We can layer on more support. The trouble is the pro the cons with that is like those are rare for the most part. If if we’re going after medium or large businesses, they typically have some data person.
34 00:05:11.360 ⇒ 00:05:36.690 Uttam Kumaran: So it’s really depends. Our product offering depends on the size of company that we’re going after when there’s in a situation where it’s a more established firm. There is a lot of pros. Right? It’s like you can come in. There’s project management. There’s structure. It’s just like, get these things done, and it’s pretty simple. The trouble is, it’s like people are kind of on their own right. But at the same time we’re building a lot of internal resources that even if people go off
35 00:05:37.022 ⇒ 00:05:44.640 Uttam Kumaran: and like work within a firm there’s a lot of resources we have internally that we’re developing basically to help everybody speed up their work.
36 00:05:45.216 ⇒ 00:05:54.380 Uttam Kumaran: And then, of course, all of that comes to help the brain forge brand. So at the moment we’re we’re taking, you know, any situation we can get, and then over time
37 00:05:54.500 ⇒ 00:05:58.600 Uttam Kumaran: we’ll kind of align more towards you know what’s most beneficial for the company.
38 00:06:00.380 ⇒ 00:06:03.699 Uttam Kumaran: yeah. So those are kind of like the the biggest
39 00:06:03.850 ⇒ 00:06:07.009 Uttam Kumaran: things to shout out. We’ve been working on a lot of stuff
40 00:06:07.751 ⇒ 00:06:10.828 Uttam Kumaran: on the sales side as well in terms of
41 00:06:11.540 ⇒ 00:06:18.943 Uttam Kumaran: documents and materials, and I’ll just share a couple of things that Nico and I worked on, and then I’ll hand it over to
42 00:06:19.260 ⇒ 00:06:25.559 Uttam Kumaran: I’ll say one thing about SEO, and then I’ll hand it over to Miguel. So one of the things that we were doing
43 00:06:26.089 ⇒ 00:06:30.430 Uttam Kumaran: for a client, and we’ll kind of turn these into a little bit of better.
44 00:06:31.104 ⇒ 00:06:34.679 Uttam Kumaran: We’ll kind of have a bunch of variations of this. Basically.
45 00:06:36.930 ⇒ 00:06:39.550 Uttam Kumaran: this is, I’m trying to preview.
46 00:06:48.960 ⇒ 00:06:49.640 Uttam Kumaran: It’s not
47 00:06:50.060 ⇒ 00:06:51.780 Uttam Kumaran: one. Let’s just do this.
48 00:07:11.110 ⇒ 00:07:13.039 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, can you guys see this
49 00:07:14.290 ⇒ 00:07:28.375 Uttam Kumaran: cool? Yeah, we’re working on just better looking diagrams like this that will start to layer in on proposals, on outbound marketing, on documentation. But basically just like very, very nice looking
50 00:07:29.180 ⇒ 00:07:36.950 Uttam Kumaran: diagrams of like flow and things like that. So again, one of the things that I you know, I spent some time talking to a few designers. This week is
51 00:07:37.000 ⇒ 00:07:45.500 Uttam Kumaran: in our industry, in not only in data and consultancy, but in data, consultancies and in data. Broadly.
52 00:07:45.580 ⇒ 00:07:48.439 Uttam Kumaran: design is really like, not a priority.
53 00:07:48.760 ⇒ 00:08:13.360 Uttam Kumaran: Which is kind of unfortunate, because I feel like design smooths like everything out a lot of the tools that we use now. I would say, like Snowflake in particular, is really nicely designed. But there are tools like local local developer tools, other tools we use that it’s just really hard to use, because the design isn’t great, and I think about the same thing when you work with us. So one of the things that we do differently.
54 00:08:13.825 ⇒ 00:08:34.880 Uttam Kumaran: And I know that will help us propel us into the same level as some of these larger firms that we come off very, very professionally. So we’re investing a lot of time and resources into making sure that things are really designed. Everything from documents, the decks to our social presence. The way we engage with people. Everything is very, very professional, very, very buttoned up.
55 00:08:35.237 ⇒ 00:08:38.400 Uttam Kumaran: And I know it’s like a little bit of like a
56 00:08:38.549 ⇒ 00:08:52.910 Uttam Kumaran: for me. I I kind of weigh both sides. It’s like there’s a meaning to like we’re small, we’re scrappy. But also when companies are spending tens to $20,000 a month with us, which is like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year like, imagine if you were spending that
57 00:08:52.910 ⇒ 00:09:11.570 Uttam Kumaran: on somebody you you would prefer that they’re like buttoned up. And they’re like serious people. And for one of the ways that we do that is, by having all of our documents and the way we project ourselves look very sharp. And you know it’s it’s something that I think for a company. Our size is not. It’s pretty rare to invest
58 00:09:11.570 ⇒ 00:09:31.190 Uttam Kumaran: this amount of time into that. But, the amount of opportunities we’re getting, even the opportunities to partner with a company like real when we’re like a year old and kind of like no names is because of some of these sort of things right? And some of these things are very subjective. But I think it’s important. We’re going to start to get opportunities that are way bigger than us because of
59 00:09:31.400 ⇒ 00:09:32.840 Uttam Kumaran: initiatives like this.
60 00:09:33.291 ⇒ 00:09:37.370 Uttam Kumaran: You’ll see that a lot of engineering firms are run by engineers, and they’re not.
61 00:09:37.400 ⇒ 00:09:47.960 Uttam Kumaran: They’re not particularly good looking like they’re. You don’t go to their presence, and you don’t feel like, look, I can trust these guys. And we’re trying to do the opposite right? And so that’s the mix of the website. These sorts of things.
62 00:09:48.701 ⇒ 00:09:52.560 Uttam Kumaran: The last thing I’ll share is we’re starting to do stuff around
63 00:09:53.230 ⇒ 00:09:57.974 Uttam Kumaran: like SEO. I’ve kind of sent a lot of links into
64 00:09:59.150 ⇒ 00:10:07.428 Uttam Kumaran: one of the chats yesterday. But we have, like a quora profile. We have like a trust pilot profile. We have a crunch based profile.
65 00:10:09.310 ⇒ 00:10:21.359 Uttam Kumaran: basically. Just like if you search Brain forge I want. I mean, it’s not even showing up today. But we do have one if you search brain forge on crunch base, you should get
66 00:10:22.470 ⇒ 00:10:26.199 Uttam Kumaran: basically, you should be able to see our company out there.
67 00:10:27.330 ⇒ 00:10:41.319 Uttam Kumaran: So I just made it yesterday, so it’ll probably take a few days to list but what this helps for our SEO is increased backlink. So anytime people search for Brainforge snowflake data consultancy analytics agency. I want us to start to rank for that
68 00:10:41.824 ⇒ 00:10:45.789 Uttam Kumaran: and so these are all the things that are gonna help right? Having presence on
69 00:10:45.840 ⇒ 00:10:50.529 Uttam Kumaran: Linkedin Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Crunchbase, quora.
70 00:10:50.980 ⇒ 00:11:10.399 Uttam Kumaran: Like all of these different pages, anywhere where someone searches for us, I want them to be able to get to our site, and then also, when we publish content instead of just having Linkedin, we’re gonna have 10 to 15 sources where that content automatically goes. And this is something that I’ll I’ll be working with Miguel on is like, how do we repurpose assets?
71 00:11:10.400 ⇒ 00:11:21.819 Uttam Kumaran: For example, when we write a blog post? I don’t want that to just go up to email and to go to a website that needs to get posted on every single social platform we have. And we basically maximize our presence there.
72 00:11:22.324 ⇒ 00:11:25.469 Uttam Kumaran: So this is another thing that we’ve been kind of working on this week.
73 00:11:27.070 ⇒ 00:11:30.309 Uttam Kumaran: And then, Miguel, do you want to walk through the relevance?
74 00:11:31.273 ⇒ 00:11:32.800 Uttam Kumaran: Flow! For
75 00:11:33.040 ⇒ 00:11:35.299 Uttam Kumaran: on the recruiting thing that we were working on.
76 00:11:37.346 ⇒ 00:11:38.580 joshuadeveyra: You mean the job posting.
77 00:11:38.580 ⇒ 00:11:39.350 Uttam Kumaran: Yes.
78 00:11:40.000 ⇒ 00:11:42.969 Uttam Kumaran: and if you want to give us a little bit of an of an introduction.
79 00:11:44.210 ⇒ 00:11:45.100 Uttam Kumaran: yeah.
80 00:11:45.100 ⇒ 00:11:49.539 joshuadeveyra: Hi, everyone. My name is Miguel. So I just got hired, I think, about a week ago.
81 00:11:49.770 ⇒ 00:11:54.430 joshuadeveyra: So I specialize in development of AI agents and automations
82 00:11:55.390 ⇒ 00:11:58.820 joshuadeveyra: in primarily Zapier, Mega and Ghl.
83 00:11:59.210 ⇒ 00:12:00.949 joshuadeveyra: and hopefully, Hubspot soon.
84 00:12:02.333 ⇒ 00:12:03.100 joshuadeveyra: So yeah.
85 00:12:03.200 ⇒ 00:12:04.749 joshuadeveyra: that’s pretty much about it.
86 00:12:05.520 ⇒ 00:12:14.709 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. And then also, maybe give an overview of like relevance and like what you like about it before jumping into the you can even share your screen. But before jumping into the specific use case.
87 00:12:14.940 ⇒ 00:12:22.210 joshuadeveyra: Oh, yeah, so relevance. I like it because most AI agents like, for example, you could develop one using open AI assistance
88 00:12:22.230 ⇒ 00:12:34.110 joshuadeveyra: like, there’s no ui. Everything has to be prompt, based, you know. You have to create the back end for it. Our relevance fixes all of that right. So it’s just you have a ui, and they have already integrations to a couple of stuff.
89 00:12:34.380 ⇒ 00:12:37.720 joshuadeveyra: So it’s, you know, very easy, very simple.
90 00:12:37.979 ⇒ 00:12:41.050 joshuadeveyra: I I think it’s better with them if I can show it. No.
91 00:12:41.050 ⇒ 00:12:42.259 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. Please. Yeah. Go ahead.
92 00:12:42.640 ⇒ 00:12:45.019 joshuadeveyra: Yeah. Well, let me. Just
93 00:12:47.160 ⇒ 00:12:47.860 joshuadeveyra: sorry.
94 00:12:51.550 ⇒ 00:12:52.370 joshuadeveyra: Curse.
95 00:12:55.760 ⇒ 00:12:58.229 joshuadeveyra: So I think it’s this one. Can you guys see my screen.
96 00:12:58.570 ⇒ 00:12:59.210 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
97 00:13:00.270 ⇒ 00:13:22.479 joshuadeveyra: So yeah, so basically, we’ve been. So we’ve been, you know, working on a couple of agents the primary ones that we’ve been working on are this 3. So the job scraper one this is, I’m not sure if everyone has have seen it or have access to that specific channel. But basically, you post a link. It’ll run, you know. Let me show an example. It’ll run a couple of.
98 00:13:22.480 ⇒ 00:13:29.809 Uttam Kumaran: Let’s walk through an example. And you can also maybe share what the slack looks like. But yeah, I get. And I can give the business context after.
99 00:13:30.280 ⇒ 00:13:35.629 joshuadeveyra: Oh, yeah, yeah. So basically, you know, if we message something on
100 00:13:35.730 ⇒ 00:13:41.450 joshuadeveyra: a channel in slack, it’s gonna receive something like this. So we added like this Emoji
101 00:13:41.630 ⇒ 00:13:58.130 joshuadeveyra: that basically filters it out in Zapier. And then it’ll run a couple of tools. 1st is, you know, it just searches for that basically scrapes that URL, that job posting, and then, you know, gets the data, passes it to the agent. We use a polo here, but this one doesn’t have, you know.
102 00:13:59.040 ⇒ 00:14:08.689 joshuadeveyra: measure lab, we don’t. We don’t. We didn’t see anything. And then we try to look for talent managers. And then, yeah, just a couple of tools. And then here’s another agent that it talks to.
103 00:14:09.296 ⇒ 00:14:12.660 joshuadeveyra: Basically, it writes like, what do you call this?
104 00:14:12.720 ⇒ 00:14:18.560 joshuadeveyra: A personalized message for them. Maybe this is not the best example. Let me check
105 00:14:21.270 ⇒ 00:14:22.529 joshuadeveyra: this one either.
106 00:14:26.030 ⇒ 00:14:30.339 joshuadeveyra: So does this one have. Oh, yeah. So, for example, you know this one for sacks.
107 00:14:30.460 ⇒ 00:14:32.829 joshuadeveyra: Alright. So we found, you know, 3
108 00:14:33.905 ⇒ 00:14:36.390 joshuadeveyra: hiring manager. So we wrote, you know.
109 00:14:39.340 ⇒ 00:14:43.500 joshuadeveyra: basically a personalized message for them, and then we’ll send it to.
110 00:14:43.900 ⇒ 00:14:44.613 joshuadeveyra: you know.
111 00:14:45.010 ⇒ 00:14:49.529 joshuadeveyra: what do you call this? The Google sheets will send it to as it applied to the
112 00:14:49.780 ⇒ 00:14:51.980 joshuadeveyra: as a threat reply to the
113 00:14:52.603 ⇒ 00:14:56.660 joshuadeveyra: to the link. But yeah, I think that’s pretty much it on this end of time.
114 00:14:56.920 ⇒ 00:15:03.970 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, to to give you guys an a situation that we’re dealing with. Do you want to open one of those? The sacks? Link Miguel.
115 00:15:03.970 ⇒ 00:15:06.180 joshuadeveyra: Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Sure. Let me share my full screen.
116 00:15:06.180 ⇒ 00:15:16.649 Uttam Kumaran: So one of the ways that we’re gonna go after clients is through this concept of like signals. Right? So what is a signal that there is demand for a firm like us.
117 00:15:17.360 ⇒ 00:15:41.220 Uttam Kumaran: One is like, look, we also are pretty convinced that anybody who’s pretty large needs data. But beyond that like, what are some key signals that we know some people are looking to make a purchase for either a person like, or we bring on a resource, something they’re trying to spend money to solve data problem they have. One of is if they post a job posting right? And so one of the common ways that agencies like us go after leads.
118 00:15:41.220 ⇒ 00:15:47.840 Uttam Kumaran: you know, and and I’ve I’ve heard from some friends that they’ve had some success. Is you find a job posting for an analytics engineer.
119 00:15:48.210 ⇒ 00:16:05.059 Uttam Kumaran: And they’re typically trying to hire a full time person, as we all know, hiring tech right now, is really really tough. There’s you get a ton of of inbound. You probably have to interview so many people. It’s usually like at least a 2 month, you know. Maybe 3 month process
120 00:16:05.060 ⇒ 00:16:18.780 Uttam Kumaran: very expensive at that moment, though, we know that they’re hiring for somebody. And so at that point, what do we want to do? We want to go reach out to someone on the hiring team. Hey? We noticed that you’re hiring for an analytics person we happen to. That’s all we do.
121 00:16:19.070 ⇒ 00:16:34.159 Uttam Kumaran: We probably assume that you’re having trouble hiring that you’re not hiring at the pace you want. Maybe you’re not getting the talent you want. Here’s just a couple of folks from our team that maybe fit the bill. Let me know if you want to chat right? So that’s like that’s a process we want to go through. And
122 00:16:34.440 ⇒ 00:16:37.629 Uttam Kumaran: and that’s a place where we’re taking advantage of
123 00:16:38.130 ⇒ 00:17:06.299 Uttam Kumaran: a company outwardly saying we’re gonna hire somebody. The problem with that is that whole process is very manual, right? If I have to go find the job posting, then find the hiring manager, then write the email and then get it sent out. That’s if I work fast and I don’t get distracted, which is not gonna happen. I it’ll take me 30 min right? So what we built is. Basically, we have a slack channel where, if you put in a job posting
124 00:17:06.359 ⇒ 00:17:07.810 Uttam Kumaran: immediately
125 00:17:08.040 ⇒ 00:17:11.319 Uttam Kumaran: relevance, AI takes that job posting
126 00:17:11.490 ⇒ 00:17:26.739 Uttam Kumaran: scrapes, it finds the company finds the relevant hiring managers, drafts, emails to each of them and throws them to a Google sheet. What I do is then I every day, every few days I’m gonna look at the Google Sheet. Make sure that the emails don’t have anything weird in them and then fire them off
127 00:17:27.069 ⇒ 00:17:33.880 Uttam Kumaran: right? So we’ve taken a process that for one job posting was taken 30 min to now we can do
128 00:17:33.910 ⇒ 00:17:35.360 Uttam Kumaran: multiple a week
129 00:17:35.730 ⇒ 00:17:52.390 Uttam Kumaran: for like 0 time. Basically, maybe I spent 30 min reviewing all the emails for a week. Right? And so these are the levels of automation that’s gonna allow us to scale. And the the reason why we are going after this much volume is that conversion rates in our business are low, right? You can expect
130 00:17:53.280 ⇒ 00:18:04.269 Uttam Kumaran: like we could probably expect like one to 3% of conversion meaning we need to really hit like thousands of people for them to move from getting noticed about us.
131 00:18:04.280 ⇒ 00:18:09.719 Uttam Kumaran: to them, getting on a call with us to them, actually negotiating and then closing
132 00:18:10.070 ⇒ 00:18:15.880 Uttam Kumaran: the conversion rate so low. Right? Not even getting on a call with us is probably
133 00:18:16.100 ⇒ 00:18:17.530 Uttam Kumaran: 5 to 10%
134 00:18:17.590 ⇒ 00:18:20.190 Uttam Kumaran: right? And then beyond that, you have.
135 00:18:20.720 ⇒ 00:18:35.590 Uttam Kumaran: I? Half the people are gonna say, they can’t afford us. It’s not the right time. There’s all these objections. And then you get to negotiations, or maybe drop off, and then we close. So in order for us to hit those numbers, we have to hit volume right. So between job postings, between emailing out
136 00:18:35.640 ⇒ 00:18:57.970 Uttam Kumaran: folks directly, just like blasting emails towards company directors, towards getting people inbound through SEO getting people inbound through content. We’re gonna start to hit those like larger volume numbers to where we’ll start to see. Okay, we have, like 2 or 3 bookings a week over a month we should see one of these close right? That’s the kind of process we’re going to.
137 00:18:57.970 ⇒ 00:19:24.930 Uttam Kumaran: The nice thing is like we’re a data company. So we’re not shy about like knowing that. What conversion rates are, how a funnel works. Right? This is the same problem that we do for clients. The tough part is, it’s a hard pill to swallow, because it’s so low that we now are not only understand the data, but then it’s like cool. We. What are the systems in place to do that? So that’s kind of like what me, Abigail Miguel, are. All are all working on
138 00:19:25.480 ⇒ 00:19:27.800 Uttam Kumaran: and relevance has been an amazing
139 00:19:28.280 ⇒ 00:19:33.949 Uttam Kumaran: tool for that. You know, we’re starting to do a bunch of other stuff across engineering and project management as well.
140 00:19:34.440 ⇒ 00:19:35.509 Uttam Kumaran: but it’s
141 00:19:35.630 ⇒ 00:19:53.589 Uttam Kumaran: like it’s been super clutch for us to have a tool like that. That’s just gonna allow us to basically do this without me hiring a full time salesperson you know, which I I would ideally not want to do because I just want to have most engineers and mostly work, have all of our time and effort go to client work. So
142 00:19:54.870 ⇒ 00:19:59.254 Uttam Kumaran: any questions there, any thoughts on that or anything that stood out?
143 00:20:04.160 ⇒ 00:20:05.410 Nicolas Sucari: Oh, maybe
144 00:20:06.080 ⇒ 00:20:07.380 Nicolas Sucari: super useful!
145 00:20:07.430 ⇒ 00:20:16.910 Nicolas Sucari: The integration that you’re doing with Zoom and getting the meeting notes every time we finish a meeting we are receiving in a slack channel
146 00:20:16.950 ⇒ 00:20:20.129 Nicolas Sucari: a message with all of the details that were discussed.
147 00:20:20.180 ⇒ 00:20:22.130 Nicolas Sucari: And it’s really
148 00:20:22.230 ⇒ 00:20:25.600 Nicolas Sucari: much better than a transcript. So yeah, that’s great, too
149 00:20:25.610 ⇒ 00:20:26.950 Nicolas Sucari: being super useful.
150 00:20:27.670 ⇒ 00:20:30.709 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah. One thing, maybe I’ll just. I’ll just highlight that, because
151 00:20:30.890 ⇒ 00:20:35.289 Uttam Kumaran: I know it’s probably me and Nico that are in most of the meetings
152 00:20:35.480 ⇒ 00:20:36.889 Uttam Kumaran: and these days. But
153 00:20:36.930 ⇒ 00:20:37.960 Uttam Kumaran: you know
154 00:20:37.980 ⇒ 00:20:39.339 Uttam Kumaran: I’ll kind of give you
155 00:20:39.820 ⇒ 00:20:41.579 Uttam Kumaran: my take on. This is like
156 00:20:41.640 ⇒ 00:20:50.350 Uttam Kumaran: meetings are like to discuss, like, what are we discussing the discussion. And then what are the takeaways and action items? Right? Every meeting can be boiled down into that.
157 00:20:50.650 ⇒ 00:21:09.740 Uttam Kumaran: There’s a lot of people who are like, oh, I don’t want to do meetings because they’re a waste of time, but like wasted time is actually a symptom of like a bad meeting. But part of that bad meeting is because whatever action items you have to discuss from the previous one, someone just didn’t follow up on right usually start to you just rediscuss things. We no longer need to live in that world. Right?
158 00:21:10.300 ⇒ 00:21:37.670 Uttam Kumaran: I used to take very vigorous notes in all meetings, and then I would basically like, follow up on everything. Now we focus on the discussion. AI really takes care of the transcription and what the action items are, and then going one step. We’ll then start to actually assign those out automatically, right? Like, when we say, Okay, Patrick needs to go, take care of this. Who Tom should go. Take care of this. Not only does that get live as text, but then we’ll go talk to notion to add that as a task
159 00:21:37.670 ⇒ 00:21:46.919 Uttam Kumaran: we’ll talk to Github to add that as a task, right? So you actually just come to the meeting. You talk all of the kind of bookkeeping like secretary type stuff
160 00:21:46.920 ⇒ 00:22:09.600 Uttam Kumaran: is handled, and that’s actually what a meeting should be about like even this meeting I don’t worry about like oh, I said something in the beginning that, like I should take care of. I’ll get a slack message with everything. And so next week, when I’m like, Oh, there’s something that I wanted to do. I’ll I’ll actually know that. And then better yet, probably after in a few weeks that’ll automatically get into my task board with context about what we talked about
161 00:22:09.720 ⇒ 00:22:16.220 Uttam Kumaran: right? So that’s just like a very, very nice to have it shaves off 10 min per meeting. But I’m in probably 6 or 7 meetings a day
162 00:22:16.530 ⇒ 00:22:36.851 Uttam Kumaran: talking about like God knows what, across the whole business like I I already drop every ball possible these days. But now we have this tool. It’s actually very helping me tell me a lot to do organization and to kind of share like what that what that looks like. So here you can actually go to
163 00:22:37.550 ⇒ 00:22:48.749 Uttam Kumaran: meetings here in notion, and you’ll see the there’ll be a meeting. This meeting recording will pop up and show that up. But, for example. Let’s let’s just look at like
164 00:22:49.160 ⇒ 00:22:51.410 Uttam Kumaran: this is a meeting between. Looks like Siraj
165 00:22:51.490 ⇒ 00:23:01.269 Uttam Kumaran: Nick and Ryan, Nico and Ryan, and then, you know, there’s a bunch of tasks here. And then this 2 is clear action items, not only the action items, but when they’re due.
166 00:23:01.300 ⇒ 00:23:12.970 Uttam Kumaran: This is structured information that we’re just gonna put in directly into notion, which is like when it’s due, what the title is, who it’s working on. This whole thing is generating AI minutes after the thing.
167 00:23:14.440 ⇒ 00:23:39.160 Uttam Kumaran: and so this prompt will get better. But the nice thing is, look, all these meetings are getting added. And again, it’s it’s really nice to have this. The other thing that’s that is nice. That I’ll point out is there’s actually this AI Automations page, which is where actually, we’re tracking like the automations we want to build. So if you have any ideas on like, Hey, I do this thing every day, and it can be like really like large things, too, like.
168 00:23:39.170 ⇒ 00:23:44.050 Uttam Kumaran: Hey, I write this piece of code every day. I want to automate it, or like I do this specific task once a week.
169 00:23:44.060 ⇒ 00:24:02.410 Uttam Kumaran: That’s really tedious. I want to automate it. You know, I’m basically filling this out with everything that I do that’s repetitive. But we’re gonna start to build tools around talking to Github, talking to notion, talking to Hubspot, Apollo. And then basically we’ll be able to leverage AI to get those tools to do things.
170 00:24:02.480 ⇒ 00:24:11.640 Uttam Kumaran: and again gets allows us to focus on the job that needs to be done. You have the preparation, and then you have the action items. And that’s it. That’s all. Work is basically. So
171 00:24:12.131 ⇒ 00:24:15.019 Uttam Kumaran: we’re investing a ton of time into this
172 00:24:15.576 ⇒ 00:24:16.490 Uttam Kumaran: and this.
173 00:24:16.660 ⇒ 00:24:25.770 Uttam Kumaran: This is already affecting everybody’s work, because work that’s getting assigned. Everybody is coming out of a lot of these notes, but hopefully, soon you’ll kind of see this in slack and
174 00:24:26.324 ⇒ 00:24:27.780 Uttam Kumaran: this will start to
175 00:24:27.790 ⇒ 00:24:30.609 Uttam Kumaran: help you in your day to day, in one way or another.
176 00:24:33.010 ⇒ 00:24:34.260 Uttam Kumaran: so
177 00:24:34.420 ⇒ 00:24:36.690 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, I think that’s kind of
178 00:24:36.870 ⇒ 00:24:38.677 Uttam Kumaran: it for me.
179 00:24:39.470 ⇒ 00:24:41.359 Uttam Kumaran: any thoughts, thoughts there.
180 00:24:46.340 ⇒ 00:24:50.830 Uttam Kumaran: any ideas anybody had recently on like AI stuff. They wanted to try to do.
181 00:24:58.370 ⇒ 00:25:04.230 Patrick Trainer: Mostly been working like on prompt builders and stuff for like quad and whatnot, just to optimize that.
182 00:25:05.810 ⇒ 00:25:06.620 Uttam Kumaran: Watch that.
183 00:25:08.000 ⇒ 00:25:16.030 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I think what we’re gonna what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna move a lot of the claw projects to relevance bots because
184 00:25:16.470 ⇒ 00:25:19.849 Uttam Kumaran: I’m using the cloud stuff every day. But I find myself having to repeat
185 00:25:20.230 ⇒ 00:25:22.280 Uttam Kumaran: like certain things
186 00:25:22.460 ⇒ 00:25:34.890 Uttam Kumaran: and go to previous Claude to find the prompts. For example, one of the things pat that I want to build is every lead that gets a meeting gets its own, like homepage or not homepage, but its own like
187 00:25:36.370 ⇒ 00:25:46.539 Uttam Kumaran: sort of AI agent, which is basically like any materials, any emails that we’ve talked about. Their website gets great. Basically, it’s like it just becomes like the lead.
188 00:25:47.040 ⇒ 00:25:55.839 Uttam Kumaran: a project about that leader opportunity, right? Cause. I always am like pasting in like client email me this. And I have this opportunity. What do you think I should do?
189 00:25:55.860 ⇒ 00:25:59.540 Uttam Kumaran: I basically want that to get generated for every deal that we have.
190 00:25:59.640 ⇒ 00:26:04.549 Uttam Kumaran: So anybody that’s working on the deal or has questions about it can like, just go there and ask.
191 00:26:04.880 ⇒ 00:26:07.260 Uttam Kumaran: Because again, I’m talking to so many people that
192 00:26:07.740 ⇒ 00:26:13.820 Uttam Kumaran: there’s a probably an email from like weeks ago that I could reference, or I could gather information from so stuff like that.
193 00:26:16.080 ⇒ 00:26:17.579 Uttam Kumaran: that’s something I wanna do.
194 00:26:17.580 ⇒ 00:26:20.040 Nicolas Sucari: And can’t we feed that with Hubspot.
195 00:26:20.850 ⇒ 00:26:21.230 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
196 00:26:21.230 ⇒ 00:26:21.560 Nicolas Sucari: Got it.
197 00:26:21.560 ⇒ 00:26:23.950 Uttam Kumaran: Like there’ll be some sort of trigger.
198 00:26:24.170 ⇒ 00:26:34.440 Uttam Kumaran: But again, for example, like we have proposals that we send to people. All of that as we get further on the deal. I reference again and again. That should all shove into context somewhere.
199 00:26:34.540 ⇒ 00:26:37.489 Uttam Kumaran: These are a few documents, right? It’s not that much. So
200 00:26:41.180 ⇒ 00:26:43.230 Uttam Kumaran: I don’t know. Ryan’s yeah.
201 00:26:44.560 ⇒ 00:26:45.990 Ryan Luke Daque: Yeah, I was just gonna
202 00:26:46.440 ⇒ 00:26:49.248 Ryan Luke Daque: haven’t started working on it. But the
203 00:26:50.290 ⇒ 00:26:53.799 Ryan Luke Daque: the the post that you shared with me regarding the
204 00:26:54.210 ⇒ 00:26:57.780 Ryan Luke Daque: get her. I mean the the workflows and trying
205 00:26:58.060 ⇒ 00:27:00.429 Ryan Luke Daque: to see if, like AI can
206 00:27:00.910 ⇒ 00:27:03.020 Ryan Luke Daque: handle those and look into like
207 00:27:03.040 ⇒ 00:27:13.690 Ryan Luke Daque: any workflow errors or issues or whatnot. So yeah, I was planning on working on that this week. But I haven’t really started yet, so maybe I can start on that next week as well. So.
208 00:27:14.040 ⇒ 00:27:14.890 Uttam Kumaran: Cool.
209 00:27:14.890 ⇒ 00:27:17.570 Ryan Luke Daque: Yeah, hopefully, we get something out of it.
210 00:27:17.910 ⇒ 00:27:18.580 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
211 00:27:19.590 ⇒ 00:27:27.130 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, for me, I think of all these tools as like leverage, right? Like we are, our business is like a people business, right. It’s all of you guys that
212 00:27:27.340 ⇒ 00:27:29.279 Uttam Kumaran: the business isn’t anything but
213 00:27:29.370 ⇒ 00:27:32.690 Uttam Kumaran: connecting smart people like us with people that need help.
214 00:27:33.007 ⇒ 00:27:44.319 Uttam Kumaran: But I think about how much leverage each of us can have as engineers, you know, a lot of times people think about like this 10 X engineer type mindset, but that’s just like any that could be anything right. And so for me.
215 00:27:44.440 ⇒ 00:28:02.989 Uttam Kumaran: I think a lot about what are the things in the day to day of all of our folks that drag people down or get people distracted from the core work. And second, I would love to work on like 5 clients at a time. Right. And I do think that we all have that actually mental capacity to do that. Not only work and be like 5 clients at time doesn’t mean 5 times a work, though
216 00:28:03.120 ⇒ 00:28:05.049 Uttam Kumaran: it’s like, how can we actually make
217 00:28:05.170 ⇒ 00:28:27.899 Uttam Kumaran: boil 5 clients for the work into actually the core that you all know when you’re working on one problem for one client. There’s like so much back and forth to go to slack to find out what you’re doing. Maybe rewatch a meeting, reopen something like all those things. And then you actually get to the point where you write the small piece of code that fixes something right? So how do we get to that point? Faster? And then again, if if we can work on 5
218 00:28:28.150 ⇒ 00:28:29.920 Uttam Kumaran: times of projects per person
219 00:28:30.220 ⇒ 00:28:38.459 Uttam Kumaran: like everybody just gets paid way more to be quite honest. Like the economics really work a lot better in this business.
220 00:28:38.510 ⇒ 00:29:03.440 Uttam Kumaran: And I’ve talked about like kind of the economics of this business. But you know, you can compare us to someone like Accenture, you know, typically a company like ours is only making like 20 to 30% margin right for us to really expand that and be unique in that. We have to invest in in situations like this, where we could start doing service, doing a service business, expanding margins by leveraging, having everybody have higher leverage over work that they can do
221 00:29:03.480 ⇒ 00:29:13.530 Uttam Kumaran: right, and some of that will be AI will do some of the work. Some of that will be. It’s all AI system work, and some of that will be. It’s just like things you have to do normally right, there’ll be categories like that.
222 00:29:13.900 ⇒ 00:29:19.790 Uttam Kumaran: But stuff like meeting recordings. That’s that’s work about the work right? That’s like that is like a waste of time.
223 00:29:19.830 ⇒ 00:29:26.819 Uttam Kumaran: That’s like wasted time bucket that I don’t want people working on. So those are things that just help grease every single wheel we have in the company
224 00:29:28.440 ⇒ 00:29:33.100 Uttam Kumaran: and help the whole manufacturing process of like getting stuff out. The clients work faster. So
225 00:29:35.000 ⇒ 00:29:35.880 Uttam Kumaran: cool
226 00:29:36.210 ⇒ 00:29:41.399 Uttam Kumaran: any last things I know we’re just on time, but if anyone has any comments or anything
227 00:29:46.950 ⇒ 00:29:52.852 Uttam Kumaran: cool, if not, then I will talk to everybody in slack. I think we’ll talk on Monday.
228 00:29:53.630 ⇒ 00:30:01.267 Uttam Kumaran: but let me know if I can help with anything. I think, Abigail Pat, maybe we try to meet sometime later today, Abigail. I didn’t look at your schedule yet, but I will take a look.
229 00:30:03.020 ⇒ 00:30:03.730 Uttam Kumaran: and
230 00:30:04.160 ⇒ 00:30:05.919 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, cool. I’ll talk to everyone soon.
231 00:30:07.640 ⇒ 00:30:08.510 Uttam Kumaran: Bye, guys.
232 00:30:08.510 ⇒ 00:30:09.100 Nicolas Sucari: Otherwise we can.
233 00:30:09.100 ⇒ 00:30:09.770 Ryan Luke Daque: Bye, bye.
234 00:30:09.770 ⇒ 00:30:10.603 Uttam Kumaran: Thanks guys.