Latest / AI for Founders with Ryan Estes / Zero to $6M ARR with AI SDRs

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Zero to $6M ARR with AI SDRs · AI for Founders with Ryan Estes

0:00
Welcome back to AI for Founders. I am Ryan Estes, president of
0:04
Black T-shirt Gang. Today's episode is electric.
0:07
My guest is Gaurav Bhattachara, CEO and Co founder of Jiva dot
0:12
AIA company that's rocketed from zero to 6,000,000 ARR in under
0:17
nine months. Whoa.
0:19
Jiva is building AI sales agents that don't just help you
0:23
prospect. They do all the heavy lifting,
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finding leads, enriching data, drafting outreach, managing
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calendars, even prepping you with meeting research.
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This conversation is for founders, Indy hackers, sales
0:34
pros, and anyone who's ever gotten customers in the door.
0:36
Go to market. You'll learn how agentic AI is
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changing sales, what's broken and e-mail deliverability, and
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how to replace a half dozen sales tools with one streamlined
0:47
stack. If sales is oxygen for your
0:49
startup, this episode is going to feel like pure rocket fuel.
0:53
Let's get into it. But first, some business AI for
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1:36
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1:40
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1:44
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1:46
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1:50
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1:56
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1:58
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2:07
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2:14
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2:18
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2:35
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That's warm. Start dot AI and use code AIFF
2:42
AI live tonight. Shine stars.
2:43
Computer Life. AIAI take the flight in the glow
2:57
with neon bright. What's up G, Thanks for coming
3:04
on the show. Austin and Ryan, excited to be
3:06
here. Thanks for having me.
3:07
Yeah, G is my favorite nickname because I'm a child of the of
3:12
the 90s. Oh yeah.
3:13
Called everybody G back in those days.
3:15
I like that. That's awesome.
3:18
I'm so excited to hear about the progress that you've made with
3:22
your company. And what I'd like you to do, if
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you don't mind, is just kind of introduce us to Jiva dot AI.
3:29
Yeah, Ryan, Sam Altman has his code, which I love, right?
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He says that at some point every job becomes a sales job.
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And I truly believe it. I've been a third time startup
3:38
founder now, and I feel like more than coding, more than
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marketing, 99% of my time is selling.
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And there's a lot of founders out there, entrepreneurs like
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you. There's also sales reps and I
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feel like even engineers. And even if you're selling
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coffee at Starbucks, you're selling everyday.
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So what we're trying to do is we truly believe that we, we want
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to make everyone a 10X salesperson.
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You know, that's the vision that we have.
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And we're obviously like focused on, you know, selling our
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product, which actually helps people find leads and rich data,
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do personalized outreach across LinkedIn, across e-mail, can
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respond to your emails, can clean up your calendar, give you
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summaries of your meetings all the way to just booking slots
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automatically for you. The AI can go back and forth.
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There's tons of functionality, but all we're trying to do is
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how do we use AI in the powers of AI and agents to help you
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become a better salesperson. Now, whether you're an actual
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salesperson or account executive or BDRSDR, or you're just an
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indie preneur hacker entrepreneur that is just trying
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to be a good salesperson, and that's kind of what we do.
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So I'm taking like my lifelong learnings as a founder and
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having to learn sales the hard way and trying to say that can
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we actually give someone a tool that can make their lives easier
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if if some part of their job is sales?
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I love it and on multiple ways. One, I'm a lot of things, but at
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heart I'm a sales dog. Yeah, yeah, I love it.
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There's nothing I love more than closing deals, I'll tell you
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that. Totally the most exactly.
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I would rather if if I could close a deal every morning, I
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would I would do that for the rest of my life and give up
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coffee like the dopamine, right? It makes you up.
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The dopamine is crazy. It's it's the best feeling ever.
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Yeah, it really is. And sometimes I've actually had
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kind of like some time for reflection because I, I feel
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like sometimes I allow my sales or lack of sales a little bit
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too much credence in my mental state, you know what I mean?
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Yeah, totally. When it's going really good, I'm
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really good. When it's challenging, I'm kind
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of like. I totally got in no.
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Like, like it. So if I'm, if I'm in a situation
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where it's challenging and I'm, I'm not really feeling it, This
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is where Jeeva comes in. So I I'm looking at the the
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features and the solutions on the website and it's deep.
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It's very deep. It's very deep.
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But walk me through I'm a. Let's say I'm a I'm a founder.
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I'm getting ready for go to market.
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Everything's in place. All that I got to do now is get
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leads on my calendar and close deals.
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How can I use Jeeva to help me? Yeah, totally, totally, Ryan.
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Actually now that as soon as you said that, what I would say is
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like actually what we've tried to do is make this product very
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wide instead of going extremely deep.
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So I'll give an example. It has a lot of coverage of
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different tools. So the first thing that as a
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founder you come in to do is you have to find leads, you have to
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find the right contacts. So what you can do is you can go
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to Jeeva AI. Obviously, what we do is we are
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competing here with Zoom info, right?
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Or something like even a clay. Now you can in natural language
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say that, OK, I sell to let's say CRE companies.
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One of my customers is JLL. Go find me all the other real
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estate companies, commercial real estate go find all the
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managing directors of Northeast region and everyone who
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basically uses sales force in their environment.
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I'm making a scenario of the agent go in and we'll try it.
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It's best to find really good quality data for you find the
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right accounts look alike audiences go build like find the
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right managing directors and partners and VPS that you might
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be looking for. Then going to use waterfall
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enrichment to go find your emails, their cell phones, and
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then knowing your business, you can feed it stuff like, hey,
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here's what I do, here's the pin points I solve for, here's what
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I'm trying to do with my startup, here's the value
7:24
proposition, here's some proof points that I have or no proof
7:27
points yet. You know, I'm trying to create
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something from the ground up. It's going to then create hyper
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personalized messaging and not like the fake messaging.
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Like I love that. I love what kind of restaurant
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you go to or, or something like that.
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But it's actually going to go do deep research and a persona and
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a profile and then write really good messaging guy copy that
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converts. We use something called, you
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know, psychology of influence in our copy.
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The AI would also use something called predictability rational.
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These are like some of the sales methodologies that we use.
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The copy would be simple, concise and will be personalized
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to the person reaching out to and kind of a piece to their
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role, what they do, what's happening in the industry to try
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and get them to respond across e-mail and LinkedIn.
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So imagine like what we are trying to do is like it doesn't
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go as deep as like for example, it does not have like call
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routing functionality that sales off the outreach would have,
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right? It would not have like the NACIS
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codes that zoom in for us, but it just does enough in a very
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simple way that can help you find leads, enrich data with
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good emails and cell phones, do deep research on these
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prospects. Then do personalized outreach
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across LinkedIn and e-mail. And if you're adding WhatsApp
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and texting and even AI voice drops in the future.
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So it can cover all of those aspects for up until the point
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someone responds. Now, when someone responds,
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Ryan, it actually plugs into your e-mail.
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So it would be plugged into your Outlook or Google.
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It can actually detect a response.
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If it's a positive response, it's going to draft on your
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behalf and basically be like, hey, Ryan, thanks for your
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interest. By the way, it has access to
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your calendar. So we like Tuesday, 9:00 AM
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Pacific Time is wide open for me.
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Can I, can I actually send you an invite at that time or
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actually go back and forth with the prospect, actually book
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something on your behalf? So you just, I mean, there's
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work involved, but 95% of the work should be done by AI.
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So you hopefully in an ideal world, wake up to meetings or
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wake up to like good conversations as a business
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owner, as a founder. Incredible, you know, and
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agentic solutions have been promised to basically remove,
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remove friction, right? And there's certain processes
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that I know I've got that could use agentic support, but I
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haven't 'cause I'm like, boy, there's a lot of nuance.
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This is 1 area. So I'm, I'll walk you through
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kind of my use case. You know, let's say I go to
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pitch book, I find the data I'm looking for, I bring it down.
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I take that into Hunter just to double check all the emails,
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make sure they're cleaned, you know, then I'll take that list.
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I bring it to instantly. Instantly it's going to push out
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all the emails and then I'm going to get an e-mail.
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Somebody responds. Now I take them, I bring them
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into HubSpot. I send a HubSpot link for my
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calendar. So my calendar books to HubSpot.
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Now it's on my Google Calendar. Then I have a call that whole
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setup. Now, are you telling me that I
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can basically repeat or replace what I'm doing right now with
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Jeeva A? 100%, that's exactly right.
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The only thing that we would not do is we don't have a CRM
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system, so we're not trying to build HubSpot, but it can go
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back and forth with HubSpot Sync automatically, but it already
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has access to your calendar. So it can automatically take the
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times you're free and and propose those times always,
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right? So in your sequence, instead of
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a random time, it'll be like John, by the way, like just
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reply yes, if you want me to send you a quick report or
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here's three times that I'm open.
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So we can actually go back and forth with the prospect from the
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beginning when you're doing so you can actually replace
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something like a clay or pitch book for you to get the data.
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No need for Hunter. We actually partner with Hunter.
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So I don't want to talk shit about it.
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Actually like we do waterfall enrichment.
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So we use Hunter, Prospero, people, data labs, data, Hagma,
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like all these guys contact out. We do something where it would
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go and find Ryan's e-mail on Hunter doesn't find it, go to
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Apollo, doesn't find it, go to Lucia, doesn't find it, go to
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Crunchbase. So that's kind of what we're
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doing on emails and cell phones. So it'll do that.
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Then it's going to send the sequences out on your behalf.
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And, and, and also can go back and forth and hopefully book
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meetings where you actually get a calendar invite.
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That's kind of what you get to that's a step.
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That's that's the workflow. So it replaces, it obviously
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doesn't go as deep as like for example, pitchbook would go, but
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we have the same data. It won't go as deep as Hunter,
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but we have the same emails, right?
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It can, it may not have like the ability to warm up emails like
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instantly does, for example, but we can send out.
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So we do enough to cook, take and stitch it together.
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Basically make it make it super easy for founders.
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Incredible. So the e-mail deliverability is
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always on crucial. Is this, is this coming off of
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like your primary domain? What?
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Where's the emails coming from? It does.
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OK, so I'm going to give give away the secret sauce here.
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And and the funny part is I'm like, when I started this
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company, I was like, man, I'm going to be an AI expert.
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I'm going to wake up and talk, just think about AI every day.
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And I'm literally an e-mail deliverability expert.
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That's all I do. I wake up and I read, read like
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the rules and stuff. So what ends up happening is if
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you use like different domains now, so domains have to be
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warmed up for a long time. Now.
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I need at least a year for warm up of domains.
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There was a lot of stuff that instantly introduced, which was
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amazing like 2 years ago, three years ago, which was like
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warming up of different emails. You can buy 50 or 100 different
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inboxes, you can warm it up, you can rotate them.
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None of that works anymore. And I can tell you just why
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because what ends up happening, Ryan, is now Microsoft and
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Google have this check which basically looks for API tags on
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emails, which means that if you're using any automation,
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whether it's HubSpot or instantly or Outlook or not
12:46
Outlook, but like anything that is automated sales law outreach,
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there's gonna be an API tag. And Google and Microsoft will
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basically tag it as saying it's machine generated.
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Doesn't mean if it's AI or not, it's machine generated.
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More likely it's spam. They're gonna reduce
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deliverability by 90%. So what ends up happening is if
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you send use any automation, you're gonna end up, you know,
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90% of the times the e-mail is not gonna go through no matter
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what you use. But now actually, if I want, I
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want you to run this experiment, right?
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Take 100 emails from even from your primary domain, best
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domain, whatever you have and send it through instantly or
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anything and take a hundred same 100 emails, copy paste it, send
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it manually and you'll see that you'll get like 25% positive
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response rate. Everything will work if you
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manually send the emails. It's because of the API attack.
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So what we do is we, and no one else does this yet, but we just
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send it to your inbox. We'll send it as a draft and,
13:36
and we would create the draft. We won't actually send it out.
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So all you got to do is you just wake up in the morning and hit
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send, send, send, send on your drafts.
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And it's basically mimics manual sending on e-mail.
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So it's still personalized. We do all the work.
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We'll follow up on your behalf, but we would just have this one
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unique aspect where you have to do 5 minutes of manual work, but
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improves the deliverability by 90%, actually helps your domain
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reputation because you're actually, you're manually
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sending all that stuff. That's a new way of inbox
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cracking these days, which basically means take 2 three
14:05
team members. You don't need multiple emails,
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you don't need multiple domain. Just manually send them
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technically. And that way is your
14:11
deliverability would be great. Your domain is going to be
14:14
protected because you're manually sending.
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You're not automate, you're not using automation technically.
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So that's what we recommend to our customers.
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Again, I know this is manual. Some people are like, I don't
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want to like wake up and hit send, but it's like 5-10 minutes
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takes 5 minutes for me to do a hundred 200 every day.
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It also increases the limits because now you're not using
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APIs anymore. So Google has a limit of 5000
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emails a day. Outlook allows you to do 6000
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emails a day. You can actually do many more if
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you can do 200300500A day instead of, you know, only doing
14:43
50 per inbox basically. So that's like some of the new
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e-mail deliverability acts that, that that I know about or at
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least we we kind of prescribe to our customers.
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Amazing, you know, and I have considered myself a e-mail
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deliverability expert as well, just out of dire need.
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Or not, right. Chemical.
15:02
I know you have a newsletter, right?
15:03
You're, you have to be like you. You're like, yeah, yeah,
15:06
absolutely. Well, and, you know, I can speak
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to that exactly because, yeah, the, you know, we will have
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issues sometimes with like HubSpot, like meeting
15:15
notifications going to spam. It's like it's not even coming
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initiated from our domain at all.
15:20
It's coming from HubSpot. But Hubspot's getting
15:23
blacklisted, you know, so it's very, very frustrating.
15:26
Now, a part of that, though, people are afraid that if it's
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coming out of their primary domain, there's a chance that
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they might get blacklisted. But you're saying that like
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because you're manually throwing it out there that you're not
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going to or you have a lower chance.
15:40
Now none of this stuff is like 100% and it changes all the time
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because I can remember clearly, I think it was like about a year
15:48
and a half ago when it, it was like Outlook, Gmail and Apple,
15:52
all of them like really clamped down on these API calls that's.
15:55
Exactly right. That's exactly right.
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It's all about AP is it's there's only three things that I
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think the rule of thumb if you have a old enough domain, which
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is great, it doesn't matter how reputable it is.
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It only matters if it's age is important.
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If you have like a old enough, for example, e-mail, then that's
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like one more thing that is important.
16:14
If you have a brand new e-mail, I recommend not like starting it
16:17
instantly and now just, you know, blasting 500 people.
16:21
The only other thing that truly matters is if you have less
16:23
bounce shades and if you basically, you know, send send a
16:26
lot of emails to people that are bouncing, then that can get you
16:29
flagged. Besides that, there's no rule.
16:31
There's no rule of numbers. If you're manually sending it
16:33
the way that I recommend that I told you there's 99.99999%.
16:39
There's no way that this would get blocked or blacklisted or
16:42
any anything. That's what we do with hundreds
16:44
of people, thousands of people. That's what we recommend and
16:46
actually much easier because these managing of these
16:50
different mailboxes is like super painful.
16:52
At least it's awful. It's absolutely horrible.
16:55
Yeah, you have to log into them. They keep like getting
16:58
disconnected time. I've done this like, you know,
17:00
right before this campaign, I was doing it from other startup
17:02
and that was super painful and I was very frustrated all the
17:06
time. Very cool.
17:07
Okay, so I put in to Jeeva, I add my ICP.
17:12
It says, okay, we found 100 people right here.
17:16
It's gonna automatically create emails which populates to drafts
17:22
on my Google Workspace e-mail account.
17:24
Then I go in there, go. I go send, send, send, send,
17:27
send. If they reply back and they're
17:28
like, hey, that sounds good. Then does Jeeva automatically
17:31
say, awesome, let's hop on a call.
17:33
Here's some good times. That's exactly right.
17:35
It's going to say that now. Now it's going to.
17:37
It can go back and forth with customers.
17:38
It has access to your calendar. So basically be like, hey, I'm
17:42
open from, you know, tomorrow, 3 PM, 4:00 PM on Friday and open
17:48
at 12:00 PM. If these work, let me know.
17:50
If not, here's my booking link or something like that.
17:52
So you can, you can, you can change up the messaging, but
17:55
it's going to automatically detect it can even detect the
17:58
time zone the the other person's ad.
18:00
So we can recommend in Central or Pacific or IST or whatever,
18:04
whatever time zone they're in just so that we can, it can make
18:06
scheduling much faster, better. Incredible.
18:10
So cool. Then from that point I pick up
18:12
the conversation on on the on the calendar and I'm moving.
18:15
Is there anything further that GVD goes after that?
18:19
No. So we have a few things.
18:20
Basically we have a note taker after that and what the note
18:23
taker does, there's a couple of things we do with the note
18:25
taker, which is very innovative. So in, in, in the old days like
18:29
or in the other note takers, what, what they usually have is
18:32
they would just give you a summary, right?
18:33
If they follow you around, if you go on a call with a
18:35
customer, what we do is we, because we have access to your
18:39
e-mail as well, we would actually draft an e-mail ready
18:42
to go. So let's say if I do a meeting
18:43
with you and GYN, no, take a role, follow you, they can push
18:46
notes to a HubSpot, a sales force on what we talked about.
18:50
We can basically take the band and put it in the right fields
18:52
and stuff like that. We already have the contact
18:55
data, so we can enrich it for you.
18:56
We can we can do a really good job there, But what we also do,
18:59
Ryan, is like on your e-mail, you wake up and a draft will be
19:02
ready right after the meeting would be like, Hey, G, it was
19:04
great talking to you. Here's what we discussed.
19:06
Here's how you can partner with me on my newsletter.
19:08
Here's how much it cost. Here's here's action items for
19:10
me, here's action items for you. So you can actually do a follow
19:13
up e-mail right after that. So we do everything from sorting
19:16
your inbox, cleaning it up, drafting emails on your behalf,
19:19
taking notes on your meetings and then following up on
19:22
meetings for you, putting pushing it to CRM notes and then
19:24
also like drafting emails. That's like that's all we do as
19:28
part of like moving deals through the funnel.
19:30
Like for a long time we've been discussing about building like
19:34
revenue intelligence type functionalities, helping you
19:36
close deals faster. We're not there yet.
19:38
That's not our core focus, but that's what we do throughout the
19:41
funnels like taking notes, following up for you, drafting
19:43
emails, like just helping you speak to leaders, everything.
19:46
How do we get you that lead that you work so hard to to nurture?
19:51
How can we help you close that faster through the sales cycle?
19:53
And that those are some of the things we do.
19:55
All of them are on calendar and e-mail right now.
19:58
Incredible. That's a heck of a stack.
20:00
Tell me about the AI inbox. It says triage to reply faster.
20:06
Yeah. So what we do, Ryan, is
20:08
basically like imagine you wake up in the morning, we have a few
20:12
labels in your inbox because we can read your emails.
20:14
We can say that, OK, this goes to marketing.
20:16
This should go to, let's say a meeting update needed.
20:19
This goes to FYI. This needs a comment.
20:22
This this is actually needed. Like these are the people you
20:25
need to respond to Look, surgeon Mark to you.
20:28
It's not FYI. So that's that's number one.
20:30
So we will just sort your inbox. Make it easy now like this is
20:34
our most loved feature. Like we we build this recently
20:37
we rolled it out to all our users free of cost basically,
20:39
and they loved it. So we productized it.
20:42
The second thing it does right after that is all the action
20:44
needed. We already know your tonality,
20:47
we know your industry, we know your voice, we know how you
20:49
talk, right, because you're reading your emails.
20:51
So we understand we have like a persona for you.
20:54
So on your in your voice and in your tonality, it's going to
20:57
draft the response based on what ideally we feel you would
21:00
respond with. And it would, it would basically
21:02
because it has access to your ICP or leads, stuff like that,
21:05
you know, from what you fed us all along, or at least like when
21:08
you created your first campaigns.
21:10
And it can just draft the response ready to go.
21:11
All you're doing is just editing it, sending it, editing it,
21:14
sending it. So you're kind of you're never
21:16
missing out on an e-mail, never missing out on a deal and saving
21:19
almost like, I think, I think we did this study like 7.6 hours
21:23
per week, which is almost one work day.
21:25
Unbelievable that you're saving just by having AI do your emails
21:29
for you. So that's, that's like the big
21:30
benefit of this. And we do something very similar
21:32
with AI calendar too. And every morning you wake up,
21:35
Brian, I'll tell you like AI will tell you what are your
21:38
meetings for the day? Do deep research on everyone and
21:40
say that, hey, you know, this, this, this, this person
21:43
basically is a big Dodgers fan, by the way.
21:46
And, and here's what's going on in the company you're talking to
21:49
Airbnb. Brian Chesky just did a 10K
21:51
report. And here's what Airbnb did.
21:53
Here's what he talked about. Here's how Airbnb is going to
21:55
use AI in sales, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever is
21:58
important to you about the company.
22:00
Give you notes every morning about about every company basic
22:02
base. So you know, like what's going
22:04
on and what you have to do. So there's like small things
22:06
that we do here and there, but it's all about like, how do we
22:08
help you get to your inbox faster?
22:11
How do we draft responses for you so they're ready to go So
22:14
you can basically never miss a meeting, never miss a lead.
22:17
How do we get you help you get to your day faster with meetings
22:20
and better prepared so you know the context.
22:22
You can just crush it every meeting you're in.
22:24
That's all sales, right? In a way like you just go in
22:26
prepared, you know, if I go in a meeting with let's say John and
22:30
I already know what John likes and what John talks about and
22:33
what's going what John CEO is saying, then I can build rapport
22:36
faster, build trust faster. So and people buy from people
22:39
they trust. So there's, there's a lot of
22:40
nuances we do around inbox and calendar that we feel is very,
22:44
very powerful, very useful, very simple AI features too.
22:47
Like there's no like secret sauce.
22:48
If a lot of my investors always say like anyone can copy this, I
22:52
totally get it. But it's kind of like how it
22:53
works together, you know, it's like simple workflows, how they
22:56
work together. People love these features that
22:57
we have and and I think those are some of our killer features
23:01
with the AI inbox and calendar. It's awesome.
23:04
I love it. You know, the the data
23:05
enrichment, one thing is going to validate you have the right
23:08
contact information. It's going to go outside and
23:11
find out the big dodgers for fans and get, you know, Otani's
23:14
like snack for the week. But enriching the data that's
23:19
most important to me, which becomes the calendar, the note
23:22
taker from calls and my CRM data in my inbox.
23:26
So if you're in all those things, then it can say, you
23:29
know, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but it's like, hey,
23:31
you know, you spoke to them three months ago.
23:33
He spoke to six, six months ago. Here's what might be pressing.
23:37
And so it kind of creates an internal context.
23:40
Yeah, that's exactly right. Here's the action items.
23:42
Your fight calls with these guys already.
23:44
And here's the last what you mentioned and here's what your
23:47
actions were, by the way, here's what's happening in the
23:49
environment that's different, right?
23:51
Pepsi is getting you know, coming out with like buyback
23:54
program for their shares. So budgets might be tighter now.
23:58
Just so just so you know, or something like that, maybe MNA
24:00
happening all of this, right? Like is what's happening
24:03
internally and externally and what's some action items that
24:06
you said you were going to follow up on and you might not
24:08
have just reminding you. So there's a lot of things that
24:11
come from your data, come from your come from HubSpot, come
24:13
from calls and emails that you're on that.
24:15
If we can kind of combine those two, then we can create like a
24:18
shared memory and help you help you be better at closing for
24:21
short. The other thing that we have,
24:23
you talked about enrichment, right?
24:24
But we have a really cool feature we call agent search
24:27
where you can actually search for anything.
24:28
And behind the scenes, it's a crawling mechanism.
24:30
It's kind of like how open AI has chat GPTS deep research.
24:34
You might have used deep research.
24:36
I, I love that feature. So we built a mini version of
24:39
it. But what we can do is we can
24:40
actually go to then URLs as well and can find information.
24:43
So I'll give you an example. Like we have a customer where
24:46
they have a sales team and they sell like transportation company
24:49
and they want to find how many trucks are on their fleet.
24:52
How many franchisees do they have?
24:54
What year was this company founded?
24:57
You know what, what what are some construction projects that
24:59
are live? I'm making, I'm literally making
25:00
this hour. Where did Ryan go to school?
25:03
Right? Like all of this stuff, like
25:04
whatever is important, you just ask the agent and we're going to
25:06
go crawl the Internet. Try to find that answer for you,
25:09
return it to you in a simple way.
25:10
Now you can have like multiple enriched data.
25:13
So you have not only do you have leads and emails and cell
25:15
phones, but you have like what when was this company founded?
25:19
What you know what it what what boards does the founder state on
25:23
anything that you want to know how many trucks do they have on
25:25
fleet? How many franchisees do they
25:27
have now? How much revenue they make per
25:29
franchise? You know, when was the last
25:31
press release? Like any nuanced information
25:34
that can actually help you do better and close this deal
25:36
better help qualify this lead faster.
25:39
Now you can do that, but just like a simple search interface
25:42
which is which is pretty phenomenal.
25:45
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defining together. Incredible.
27:53
And it also looks like you have additional LinkedIn features
27:56
that does Outbound. Tell me about those.
27:59
Yeah, it's multi channel outreach.
28:00
So Ryan, we can do everything from let's say send a first
28:02
personized LinkedIn message, write or send a connection,
28:06
request, personalized connection request, pause for a few days,
28:08
then open up with a first personalized e-mail to the
28:11
prospect. Right?
28:12
Then it can pause. Then it can if they, if it gets
28:14
accepted, then if it's not, then it's going to nudge the user.
28:17
If it's accepted and it's going to go to the prospect, then
28:20
write a first message, pause for a few days, send a second
28:22
personalized LinkedIn message. It can do it in mail as well.
28:25
Then it can do like e-mail sequences, like we're also
28:28
working on features like liking, commenting, sharing on LinkedIn,
28:31
just like making a multi touch multi campaign right now.
28:34
So it's emails and LinkedIn messages and connection request.
28:38
And then emails like those are the two channels that we have
28:40
for outreach. But we're, we're looking to add
28:42
commenting, liking posts, doing sharing.
28:46
We're also looking to add like WhatsApp messaging, AI voice
28:49
drops, just like make it a multi channel outreach basically
28:52
because what we've seen is like no one channel works, but multi
28:55
channel works very well together.
28:57
If you can do everything or you know some of the other things
29:00
and the the likelihood the response just just so much
29:03
higher. It's so cool and I want to get
29:06
the the features are so dense. Now tell me about the the Chrome
29:10
extension. Yeah, OK, So Chrome extension
29:12
doesn't actually do much. It's it's very simple.
29:14
We don't we don't even do much with it right now.
29:16
But what we what we launched it for Ryan was 1 is a a lot of
29:20
folks complain about manually hitting the send button, right.
29:23
So because we have to create drafts and then they have to go
29:26
hit send, send, send. So we create a Chrome extension
29:28
that can look at any GR drafts that are out in your inbox,
29:31
automatically send them if it's on.
29:34
The other thing it does is like if you're on LinkedIn, it can
29:36
just help you find the e-mail and the cell phone for that
29:38
person. So we haven't actually gone
29:40
super deep for the Chrome extension.
29:41
We just want to build something to see if there's appetite.
29:43
We didn't get, you know, a crazy head view.
29:46
We had aspirations that Oh yeah, people would love it, they'll
29:49
use it everywhere. But we saw that people actually
29:51
don't use it everywhere. So, so we, we kind of start
29:53
building that. We're still there.
29:55
We're not doing much with it at least now, but maybe in the
29:58
future we'll still we'll pick it up and try to add more
30:00
functionality there. Fantastic, now you have an
30:04
amazing ascent here. So from what I saw you went zero
30:07
to 3,000,000 ARR in six months, is that correct?
30:10
Yeah, 6 now 6,000,000 now. Yeah, exactly.
30:13
Less than nine months growing super fast and it's been like a
30:17
journey and I'm not seeing all sunshines and rainbows, but
30:19
definitely like, you know, my last startup we we granted for
30:23
five years to get to 1,000,000 and it was very hard.
30:25
And I feel like there's natural product market fit here also
30:28
because our market is like all sales people, right.
30:30
Sales people love buying stuff. That's one.
30:33
I did not make it easy. You know, the Jai Ryan, whatever
30:35
can give you the edge to close a deal or close like close your
30:39
quarter, make your number. I think, I think people have
30:41
that. They'll just pay their own
30:42
money. If you have tons of users, we
30:44
just like pay, pay from their own pocket.
30:46
Just put a credit card 20 dollars, $50 your PLG plan that
30:49
does very well. Obviously we have customers that
30:51
are paying us 5000 two $100,000, but that's like a big focus is
30:55
PLG for us. The the second thing I would say
30:58
is that it's incredible pull in the market.
31:00
I feel like there's like companies like Cursor and
31:03
Windsurf and Lovable and Replay that have done this exact same
31:06
thing we're doing, but for developers and software
31:08
programmers. And we feel there's a market out
31:10
there to do this for sales people and sellers and and
31:13
everyone's in a sales job. So I feel like this this has a
31:16
natural tendency for expansion pretty quickly as well. 100% did
31:20
you use jiva to grow Jiva from day one and. 100%, yeah, 100% of
31:24
our pipeline is GYAI sourced. You know, this is like a big
31:27
push for for us. That's why I was talking about
31:29
the newsletter that you have because which push for us to
31:32
like go branch out now, you know, create a pipeline outside
31:34
of GYAI, they go do marketing, spend some money there, but you
31:38
don't, you don't always spend on marketing so far.
31:41
Incredible. So tell me about your your
31:43
serial entrepreneur when you had the idea and kind of how you
31:47
financed in the beginning and how long did it take to get to
31:50
actual product launch? Yeah, Yeah.
31:53
I mean for this one, Ryan, I have like a really interesting
31:55
story actually I actually did. This company was called Involve
31:58
AI before. So we pivoted, we didn't massive
32:00
pivot. We didn't we didn't do a new
32:02
company and and with the company had raised a Series A funding.
32:06
Like, yeah, I had a board, I had investors on and we just
32:09
couldn't find product market fit.
32:10
Like we were just we were really struggling.
32:12
We had a very different idea, different product, small team.
32:16
Actually, at one point we were fiftyish people.
32:18
And then then unfortunately I had to lay off 90% of the folks
32:20
here left with like a 6% team and nothing was working until
32:23
late last year. Actually went back to the board
32:25
and I said, you know, guys, you know me, I've tried, we've tried
32:28
everything and we're just hitting a brick wall now and,
32:31
and things are not working. We're going to respectfully,
32:33
whatever money we have, We had very little runway left.
32:35
We're going to give you your money back and just go do
32:38
something else. And my board asked me like,
32:40
what's your next idea? Are you going to go find a job
32:42
somewhere? Like, you know, and I was like,
32:44
probably not. I'll probably start another
32:45
thing. They were like, what are you
32:46
going to do next? And I said, you know, maybe I'll
32:48
go towards sales AI because we had built this internally,
32:50
right? And we were using bits and
32:52
pieces of AI to do better prospecting, better lead Gen.,
32:55
better enrichment, better outreach.
32:57
So I said, you know, maybe there's an opportunity out here.
33:00
And we called this product internally, we called it R2D2
33:03
because we're just Star Wars nerds.
33:04
We called it R2D2. And we were like, let's call
33:06
R2D2 to do prospecting for us and book meetings for us.
33:10
So I was like, maybe we'll, maybe we'll go to market with
33:12
this. And the board was like, we love
33:14
you and you know, we love your team.
33:15
You should just keep going, go back you, we'll give you some
33:17
more money to just extend your runway and keep going.
33:20
That's what we did. So we called it R2D2 be launched
33:22
in January of this year basically, or February or like
33:26
late December last year. Instantly #1 like in 10 days I
33:30
got a cease and desist from Disney.
33:31
Like within 10 days they were like, shut it down.
33:33
We can. You cannot do that.
33:34
You cannot call, you cannot call yourselves R2D2 or, or pay us
33:38
$10 million to get. I was like, screw this $10
33:41
million to pay Disney or like screw with Disney.
33:44
Yeah. So we changed the name of the
33:45
company and yeah, the rest is history, you know, so, so Long
33:48
story short, and like we had already billed this and 90% of
33:51
the stuff was already there. We just had to package it and
33:53
make it better. So this is a very different
33:56
product idea because we had built this over the last six
33:59
months, a year, just internally. And we just took it kind of like
34:02
the Slack story. I don't know if you're the Slack
34:04
story, but Slack was actually a gaming company and they were
34:07
using Slack to communicate. The developers had built it to
34:09
just talk to each other. And when the company died,
34:12
Stuart Burfield, the CEO, was like, maybe I'll just use the
34:16
the thing that we've built internally and see if there's
34:17
any market out there for it. And that's exactly what we did.
34:20
And we found, they found a market, obviously a massive
34:22
market and I think we've found a market too.
34:25
Yeah, it's, it's such a classic tale, you know, because I think
34:30
as founders, we we get really excited by the idea process and
34:34
you see all the flashing lights and you're like, wow, this would
34:36
be so cool. And you take it to market and
34:39
people are like, yeah, it's all right.
34:40
But everything it took to get it to market, often times that's
34:44
where the the real jewels are. You know, what did you do
34:48
different to ship the product? Be like, well, there's, there's
34:50
the thing that people don't have that you had to make.
34:53
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
34:55
Fascinating. So the company then kicks off
34:58
January, it's called R2D2. Amazing.
35:02
And now you've got a $6 million run rate this fast.
35:05
This is incredible. Now talk to me a little bit
35:07
about the business model because you have kind of classic
35:09
pricing, but it's based on credits.
35:12
So exactly what is a credit? Is a credit a an action?
35:16
Is a credit a contact lead? That's exactly right.
35:20
So around what we do is number one, we have like this, this
35:23
individual pricing and I want to talk about that.
35:25
That's like our favorite plan is $0.00 a month.
35:28
You can use it for free forever with a few credits.
35:31
Then it's 20 bucks, 50 bucks, 100 bucks.
35:34
The more you use, the more you pay us.
35:35
And this is for prosumers, individual users and
35:38
entrepreneurs, indie entrepreneurs, growth hackers.
35:41
Then obviously we have like a traditional package or the team,
35:44
right? It's like anywhere from $6000 a
35:47
year, 12,024 thousand, 36,060 K. So we have these plans that go
35:51
up. The way that we do it is for
35:53
prosumers, it's actions. So it's basically it's very
35:55
simple. You don't want to make it
35:57
complicated. It's like the more you use, the
35:58
more you pay for enterprise. Actually we have a really
36:01
innovative pricing. We call this outcome based
36:03
pricing where a couple of things. 1 is we have this model
36:06
where either you can just do it on leads and and like not just
36:11
the actions, but only when you get a qualified result in.
36:14
So let's say you find a list of 500 people.
36:16
Only when you get only the 20 that you select where you go do
36:21
agent search, you find the right emails, the right cell phones
36:24
and and you verify it. That's like when we will
36:27
actually deduct the credit for you.
36:28
So it's very outcome based pricing that we are working
36:31
towards. We also have some customers
36:32
where we're running like a percentage of revenue.
36:35
So we're saying, saying that, OK, we will not charge you until
36:38
you, you get revenue and you pay us 3% of all deals that you
36:41
close. So there's different things
36:43
we're doing, but we're, we're very focused on trying to go
36:46
towards this outcome based pricing model, which is new so
36:49
that we can be innovative and it's working really well for us.
36:52
So that's kind of how the pricing is built.
36:54
It's like a, there's a team enterprise section, but which is
36:57
not on the website, but then there's like an individual
36:59
package that, you know, very focused on PLG and, and trying
37:03
to get, and we get a lot of our leads to it.
37:05
Like every morning, every we get about 100 and 52150 signups on
37:09
the website organically. And then out of that, I think
37:13
like out of that 1010 would raise their hand and say that,
37:15
hey, we could actually be a sales prospect for you because,
37:18
because we love the product and we want to use it as a team
37:21
basically. So that's kind of like a big
37:24
part of our lead Gen. come from that.
37:26
Amazing. Yeah, I had a great conversation
37:29
with Mark last week. I just published the episode
37:31
today. He's from New dot IO and he was
37:34
really differentiating like outcome pricing versus usage,
37:37
pricing versus seats. And basically what he's doing is
37:41
pricing for all the big AI companies.
37:44
I mean, his logos are insane. It's like Anthropic and Open AI
37:49
and all these like huge companies.
37:50
And then that sounds awesome. Totally.
37:53
Great guy, really cool product and kind of like a whole new
37:56
category of like pricing because like you said, like outcome
38:00
pricing is becoming very popular because you, you get what you
38:03
pay for. But determining what the outcome
38:06
is can be kind of the hang up. So when it says, if it says 200
38:10
credits per month, basically that's 200 qualified enriched
38:14
datas. And then and then the the
38:17
automation features that is coming through LinkedIn and and
38:20
inbox is just kind of like that's however else you're going
38:23
to use it, it doesn't have anything to do with the credits.
38:26
Yeah, that's exactly right. And only, and and So what we
38:28
have is basically for it for outreach sequences either per
38:32
positive response or if it runs through the entire sequence
38:37
basically and you get no response.
38:38
That's that's the two things we charge credits for.
38:40
So let's say if you enroll 100 people and 50 of them responding
38:44
not interested, we won't charge credits for you.
38:46
If it bounces, no credits get deducted only if you get 10
38:49
positive responses means 10 credits.
38:51
And if you, if, if people run through the entire sequence, you
38:54
don't get anything. That's, that's also when we
38:56
charge credit just to, just for, because we pay a lot for
38:59
consumption. So everywhere the pricing is
39:01
more towards getting some qualified leads, getting some
39:04
qualified results and only then we'll charge money for you.
39:07
I mean, the ideal scenario would be if someone closes a deal, we
39:10
take a percentage off it. But there's a lot of complexity
39:13
there because we have to like track to the sales cycle.
39:15
We also depend on the seller's ability to sell and close a deal
39:19
and all. Unfortunately that's also like
39:22
on us basically or at least it's on them.
39:25
But that would be ideal scenario like if I was a customer, that's
39:28
what I would want to pay for. I know as a business owner like
39:31
we can't exactly do that, but we are trying to close us to be as
39:36
close to results as possible that we can be by running a a
39:39
solid company and and a profitable business.
39:41
Model. I'm sure you've thought about it
39:43
though. How would you show attribution?
39:45
Is there like a blockchain application here or something?
39:48
I don't know, I mean, attribution is the hardest one,
39:50
even if it's like crowd sourced, like if the reps can, you know,
39:54
manually tag it and make make make it a trust based algorithm.
39:57
I think that would be 1, but it's very tricky.
40:00
Attribution is the hardest challenge because let's say, if
40:03
even if it helped you help close a deal, what is what is it to
40:07
say that this lead wasn't already existing?
40:09
There's warm connections there. It's really hard to like both
40:12
ways, right? It could be.
40:14
I think it's very hard to attribute it, but imagine if I
40:17
was coming to you and I said that we will only charge 5% of
40:20
all deals that you close. And that's how Geo works.
40:23
I mean, it's a no brainer business model, right?
40:24
If you're able to do it, then that would that would be such an
40:27
easy like salary. Why wouldn't someone buy this?
40:30
So I think a lot about this, but also I think it's baby steps
40:33
towards that ultimate goal. Yeah, I, I guess one way you
40:37
could do it is just spin up like a kind of a sister agency that's
40:40
actually charging for the service.
40:42
And then you could go to a company and say, hey, we're a
40:44
fractional, fractional CMO and what we want to get paid on is
40:48
the the delta of growth. So then you're, you're using the
40:52
software, but ultimately billing as a service.
40:56
Yeah. Are there a lot of agencies that
40:58
are doing that kind of sales agencies that are using it as
41:00
kind of their, their, their sales tools?
41:03
Not right now. We, we actually don't have a
41:05
massive poll in agencies as of now.
41:07
I don't know why that is. Like maybe we haven't spent a
41:10
lot of time, effort in marketing.
41:11
They already have their tools that agencies use, these couple
41:14
of really popular tools like Instantly and NAN and Clay.
41:17
Maybe they're already embedded. You haven't done any marketing.
41:21
What we're trying to do is like make the product so simple that
41:23
reps can use it. Like that's our entire pitch.
41:25
It's basically you. And, and I mean, I love agency.
41:28
We partner with them all the time, but we're basically saying
41:30
maybe you don't need an agency to do it.
41:31
Maybe you can just run it on your own, right.
41:34
That's kind of that's kind of our pitch, our value
41:35
proposition. Maybe that's why, but we'd love
41:38
to build a flywheel because we've seen all these tools that
41:40
are so successful, right? Like Clay is a great example,
41:43
NAN is a great example, Instantly is a great example.
41:46
And I think 9090% plus their growth comes from agencies and
41:50
and consumption. You know, there's a lot of folks
41:54
that listen to the podcast that are always looking for ideas.
41:58
Either they're trying to get their first idea out or they're
42:01
in between ideas. But this is $1,000,000 idea
42:04
right here. An agency that's using Jiva to
42:07
go out and sell. Because like, if you're a
42:10
closer, like if you're out there and you're selling cars or
42:13
you're out there and you're selling financial products and
42:15
like, you know how to like, you know how to do that, you can do
42:19
that to anything and go out there and just just close deals
42:23
for people. And typically in the past, it's
42:25
creating, you know, it's, it's creating pipe that's the most
42:30
challenging. But if you have something that
42:31
can automate it and really like get the right people on the
42:34
calls, now your job is just to close, close the deals and
42:37
that's. Also, I totally agree.
42:39
I guess that's phenomenal. I feel like, I feel like there's
42:42
a world out there. I was even thinking that we'll
42:44
create like an SDR, BDR, AE marketplace that are just like
42:48
super smart. They know how to use AI, they're
42:51
good closers, they're good and they'll be trained on Jiva for
42:54
free. We're thinking, I mean, if I had
42:57
an infinite amount of money, that's like, I would totally do
42:59
this. And then what I'll do is like
43:01
these guys will go to whatever companies, they'll go work for
43:04
open AI one day they'll go work for get startups and different
43:07
companies and they, they would take G of it them because
43:09
they're already trained in G by AI and they know how to use it.
43:12
So that was like an idea that I had, you know, create like a
43:15
talent marketplace that we could use as well.
43:18
And, and, you know, even even like, and also for, for
43:21
companies they would love to hire SDRS and BDRS and account
43:24
execs were trained in AI, right? Like they know what to do.
43:27
They know how to search, they know how to build lists, they
43:29
know how to prospect, they know how to hunt, they know how to
43:32
close and just be very effective using AI.
43:35
Why wouldn't people want to hire them?
43:36
So I think that was like if if he were Microsoft or had
43:39
Microsoft level funding or money, like I would definitely
43:42
spend millions of dollars in spinning up a program like this.
43:46
Yeah. So is this why you're doing
43:48
podcasts? Because this is pretty product
43:50
LED sales and I can tell. I know that you want to do demos
43:54
and you want to. They were totally, yeah, you
43:57
know what I mean? It's a huge part of like
43:59
creating the founder brand. You know, it's new for us.
44:01
Like we're very product focused. So now getting getting the word
44:04
out there, I think one of the things that that kind of like
44:07
always disappoints us is like, I think we're doing really well,
44:09
but we have competitors who have raised a lot more money than us
44:12
that they have billboards, they have ads and everything.
44:14
And we are very lean. So trying our best to like be
44:17
very capital efficient. So being on podcast and and
44:19
thanks for the opportunity is awesome, right, Because gives us
44:21
a forum. Hopefully your listeners will
44:23
learn something, maybe get inspired by my story, you know,
44:27
failing and then trying, then finally succeeding.
44:29
But at the same time, we get, you know, if people are
44:31
interested in GYI, they can go there and check it out and maybe
44:34
we'll get some more leads. So so I absolutely.
44:37
It's so cool. Yeah, it and the the zero to
44:40
6,000,000 ARR in since January is so phenomenal.
44:43
Tell me how that feels. Did you buy anything cool?
44:46
Did you buy like a gold chain or something?
44:49
Awesome. No, dude, that would be awesome.
44:51
What are you thought about not be a plenty of the idea.
44:54
I definitely want a gold chain, maybe a 10 million that would
44:58
that would be awesome. Yeah, but.
45:00
Human links with some diamond studs.
45:02
Like that? See that sounds amazing.
45:03
Get my gold. He would, Yeah.
45:05
I'm actually missing a tooth here.
45:07
I haven't had time together. We'll try to.
45:10
Maybe I'll get like a molar, like a gold, gold molar.
45:13
That's, oh, that. 'D be awesome, yeah.
45:15
That sounds awesome. Yeah.
45:17
No, Ryan, I haven't haven't done any of that.
45:19
You know, very. I'm thinking like what what cool
45:23
thing have I done? I actually bought a new MacBook,
45:25
which I'm really excited about. I bought one of those.
45:27
Yeah. The the the new, the processor
45:30
ones, right. The Mt machines, they're very
45:32
sick from Apple, you know, so I've been very excited about
45:36
that because I'm, I'm still a software programmer at heart.
45:38
So I'm always coding and I, you know, and then Zoom is like, I'm
45:42
sure you've seen this, right? Zoom slows everything down these
45:45
days, right? You need a good computer.
45:46
Otherwise, if you're running schemes.
45:49
Yeah. So, so I think that would be
45:50
like a good purchase from me. Hey, what else?
45:53
What else have I bought? Not nothing you can think of.
45:58
That's a good one, though. I, I actually just bought a new
46:00
Mac mini and I'm shocked how fast it is.
46:05
It's, it's great. Amazing.
46:08
I want to talk a little bit about the future, not only of
46:10
Jiva, but where you see kind of a pug going with AI.
46:13
You said once, either you're as close to AI as possible or
46:17
you're as far away. There is no middle path.
46:19
That's exactly right. That's crazy.
46:20
You, you read that, but actually it's not my code.
46:23
It's it's Sam Altman's brother, Jack Altman, who is, who is an
46:27
investor. He has a really nice fund called
46:30
Alt Capital, by the way, and he's awesome.
46:33
He was ACEO of company called Lattice that I think $5 billion
46:37
now and and he's doing investing now.
46:39
But here's this code, which I love, which is like in in
46:42
today's age or, or at least in the next decade or so, to be
46:44
hyper successful, mega successful, not like decent
46:47
average success, like mega successful, you either have to
46:50
like be as close to AI as possible or as far away from it
46:54
as possible. Like either are you like, either
46:56
you're like, you know, a farmer who is, or you know, an A track,
46:59
an electrician. I don't know what that is, or
47:01
plumber, or you're like a hardcore AI technician,
47:05
practitioner, whatever. Right?
47:07
I think that's those are the only two paths because either
47:10
it's going to be everywhere. Like either you choose a path
47:13
and and it's OK, live with it basically, right?
47:15
You can have acid and and, and Ryan, the way that I said why I
47:19
say this is because I see a lot of resistance from young folks.
47:23
I don't know if you're seeing this, but I have a lot of
47:25
developers I work with and I love them, but they're they're
47:28
so, you know, stuck up about not using AI because you're just
47:31
like, oh, it's not good enough. Yeah, but it's, it's literally
47:34
getting better every single hour.
47:35
And it's going to be much better than you are, or at least a 90%
47:38
of task that besides like the creative thinking, right?
47:41
Being like a product expert, having taste.
47:43
Yeah, it's not going to have that because you have to prompt
47:45
it, but at least all of the other parts like writing
47:47
functions, writing code, it's going to do that for you.
47:49
Same thing with I think sales. Everyone's like, oh, these
47:52
emails suck that come out with these AI systems.
47:54
I hate getting these emails. Oh yeah, sure, but now, right,
47:57
it's going to get much better. It's going to do everything it's
47:59
going to get better every day and it's kind of like it's OK,
48:02
just adopt it and and be, you know, get better at it and and
48:05
just practice it. I think that's going to be a
48:07
pretty big edge in the market. Even Sam Altman has a code, but
48:10
he was saying that Anthropic CEO says that too is basically one
48:13
of the number one things you can learn is like be well or worse
48:16
with these AI tools. Like understand how how they
48:19
work and try as many tools as possible from all these
48:21
different large companies. Small companies get good at it
48:25
and some will work, some won't work for you, but you'll kind of
48:28
understand these systems and how they're built.
48:30
And I think it's going to be very meaningful skill to have.
48:33
Like I have a marketer, you know, I used to have like a
48:35
massive marketing team and they were not producing anything.
48:38
So I just now have like a small team, like couple of people and
48:41
they use AI for everything, right?
48:42
And like from like creating videos to audio to LinkedIn to
48:46
e-mail, like whatever it is like, right.
48:48
And you know this right, like there's a hundred tools out
48:50
there and I just need two people and and that's all you need
48:54
these days, right? So I feel like that's a skill
48:57
set in itself, right? If if you're an early adopter of
48:59
AI and you use it every day, I think you're you're likelihood
49:02
to get a job, land a job, keep a job, get promoted increases
49:06
significantly. Yeah, I love that quote.
49:09
And I, I find that like, personally, I need both.
49:12
So I am as close to AI as I possibly can get.
49:16
And I've seen massive leaps like you're talking about, but also
49:19
as a result, like when I'm away from my desk, boy, I got to be
49:23
away. You know what I mean?
49:25
Like I need to be in the woods. I don't want to look at a screen
49:27
all weekend. Like I used to be able to kind
49:29
of tinker around on the weekends and do this or that, but I feel
49:33
like the pace is coming. It's such a, there's like a
49:36
Monday ramp where like I have to like, Oh yeah, OK, I have to
49:40
ramp back up to the pace I'm used to now by Tuesday
49:42
afternoon. Now I'm absolutely flying.
49:45
And it's, it's great. But I find downtime to be
49:48
incredibly important. How about you?
49:50
How do you find time away from the screen?
49:52
What do you like to do? Jamie, I've I've a lot of dogs.
49:55
So what I do, Ryan, is I take them, you know, I have a cabin
49:57
up in Big Bear just loves that. Just just being in the woods,
50:01
you know, just downtime and being away from the screens.
50:04
And even if I work there, I feel so good being in nature, looking
50:08
at trees and listening to birds chirp.
50:10
I think that's the best. And my dogs can run, roam the
50:13
free there. So I think that's like a big,
50:16
big, big benefit and getaway. I'm in, I don't know where you
50:20
are on, but I'm in California. So I'm very lucky.
50:22
I'm like 2 hours from the like, oh, I'm not even 2 hours, few
50:25
few minutes from the beach, 2 hours from the mountain.
50:27
So be lucky to be here. I like, it's like the California
50:31
tax that we pay is is worth it In a way it's worth it.
50:34
Yeah, I'm, I'm just South of Denver, in the foothills.
50:38
Oh, that's not Denver City. I'm a big nugget.
50:42
Man, you got to love the Nuggets.
50:44
You're a big basketball guy, right?
50:46
I do. I do all the all the sports,
50:48
yeah, all sports, yeah. I just love watching sports.
50:50
Going to live games, actually, that's a great, great getaway
50:53
for me. I say going to live sports, live
50:55
events, like just with with friends or family is like super
50:58
fun. I love doing that.
50:59
I've been doing that since I was a child.
51:01
I was a big cricket fan growing up in India.
51:04
But yeah, when I came to the USI started just following
51:07
everything, baseball, basketball, all the sports here.
51:10
Yeah, well, and we're just leaving that like, terrible time
51:14
between end of NBA season and the beginning of NFL season.
51:19
College football's back. It's like, OK, now baseball
51:21
starts getting interesting again coming into September.
51:25
Yeah, it's a good time. It's like, oh, the season's
51:27
going to start soon, too. NBA starts soon.
51:29
Soon enough. Yeah.
51:30
It's like a big lull in the middle, right where you don't
51:32
know, but everything's ended. I mean, you do.
51:35
It's sad. It's like, all right, golf, I
51:37
guess. What are we doing?
51:39
Yeah. What?
51:40
What are we, how you doing? Amazing.
51:42
So looking to the future, let's talk about near future, far
51:46
future. Where do you see kind of AI
51:48
developing quickly? Well, if we look at the last two
51:51
years, what really the strong innovation in AI was chat.
51:56
You know that a simple chat interface is how people want to
51:59
use it. Do you see that continuing?
52:01
Yeah, I think, I think, I think chat's going to become like at
52:04
least a status quo, like you need it.
52:05
Otherwise it won't, your application won't work.
52:08
I do see a world where agents become very, very powerful, very
52:11
useful. Everyone has them.
52:13
You have chat, GPD creates your own personal agent.
52:16
There's tons of tools that create agents for automating and
52:19
taking decisions. I think the difference between
52:21
an agentic system and and a normal AI system is that agentic
52:24
system can actually make decisions on its own and you
52:27
don't need a lot of human input. Like obviously you can have some
52:30
human input, but you can basically decide and make edits
52:33
and make improvements. I think that's the best way of
52:35
saying it. And and I do see a short term
52:38
world where some of these tasks get automated more and more and
52:43
and the adoption curve is slow. Even though I think Brian Chesky
52:47
was saying this like there's chat GBD so different, but how
52:50
we live our world is very similar and it's it's going to
52:54
change sooner rather than later. So I'll say the short term then
52:57
long term, there's there's a lot of debate about like do you
53:00
need, do you do you need, do you need a salesperson anymore?
53:02
Do you need a software engineer anymore?
53:04
I feel like those two skill sets will never get replaced.
53:06
I do believe that the world will need tons of software engineers,
53:09
tons of like sellers, like good sales people.
53:12
So that's what I am betting on. So I feel like that's going to
53:15
be, that's going to be important.
53:17
I don't know what's going to happen like very, very, very far
53:20
in the future at least like maybe even 203050 years.
53:25
What I do know is at least in the mid term or short term, AI
53:28
is going to have a significant impact.
53:30
It's going to be everywhere in every device, every application,
53:33
every way that every job is done, from education to how kids
53:37
learn, personalized learning all the way to, you know, like even
53:42
like athletes and sports. And I think it's going to truly
53:45
like affect every aspect of life and get more and more integrated
53:49
and everything instead of like replacing things completely,
53:53
right, Like that. I think that would be like my
53:55
assumption or bet as an example, like industrialization made a
53:59
lot of jobs like defunct. Basically you need to like move
54:03
the machine. Now the machine moves on it's
54:05
own. So I don't think that's AI.
54:08
What AI does, I think it just go goes deeper and deeper
54:11
everywhere and how you live and how you do it.
54:13
Not 100% replacement. At least that's my hypothesis in
54:16
the short term. Yeah, You know, Jeeva is a great
54:19
example of productizing agentic work because, you know, I love
54:26
trying out and demoing all these new tools.
54:29
But when it comes down to core operations, it's like I've been
54:32
using Zapier forever and doing automations here and there.
54:35
But when you look at like the big ones, like what what Jeeva
54:38
does, it's like, I could sit down with N8N and piece together
54:43
all these workflows and then it works for three days and then
54:46
broke, it's broken. And then and then you're pissed
54:49
and then you just let it go. So, you know, for, for what
54:52
you're working on, there's a big hunger for these things that are
54:55
like, it's just out of reach of like really wanting to do a 50
54:59
step, you know, N8N workflow. That's exactly right.
55:03
I'm. Trying to think, oh, sorry, go
55:04
ahead, no. No, that's exactly right.
55:06
Sorry, I'm getting excited, but that's exactly right.
55:08
Like our audience is like, like one that level of workflow, but
55:12
don't want that level of complexity in setting it up.
55:14
And that's that's kind of who we want to serve and who we serve.
55:18
It's it's an extraordinary and the, the trajectory your own is
55:21
insane. What other kind of big workflows
55:24
like that, not sales maybe that do you think is an opportunity
55:28
out there that can have a similar growth trajectory?
55:31
I right, I do. I do feel like there's a lot of
55:33
back end tasks like it could be with accounting, FBNA analysis,
55:37
it could be with just back end operational tasks.
55:40
I feel that's like a truly underserved opportunity.
55:43
There's a lot of companies and, and I, I know I picked sales and
55:46
I love it and, and some days I hate it, but I feel so many
55:50
competitors in Myspace, so many competitors in customer service
55:53
and marketing, almost like maybe two companies or two good
55:57
startups that I know that are doing like back end operational
56:00
work. Basically could be with HR
56:03
automation, could be with financial operation automation,
56:06
you name it. But there's a big market out
56:09
there. There's tons of people who are
56:11
like in operations doing some level of operations that is
56:15
manual for any industry. And I think that could be
56:17
automated pretty quickly and and can be a significant market grab
56:21
and easy to implement. It's just not as glamorized.
56:24
So not a lot of people like going there, but I feel like
56:28
there's a lot like a big opportunity there.
56:30
Like a truly even MIT came up with a study.
56:32
I think, I don't know if you saw that.
56:33
I was talking about like a lot of the sales and marketing
56:35
adoptions failing in the enterprise, but what is working
56:38
are these back end office tasks that like no one wants to do.
56:43
And I think those would be like easy bet for AI to do.
56:46
But it's not as glamorous. Is it sales?
56:48
I mean, saving money is one thing, but earning money is a
56:51
whole different. I totally agree.
56:54
That's my pitch. It's like, yeah, we could save
56:56
you a lot of lot of, you know, like with consolidation, we can
57:00
save you a lot of money on these tools, but it's not about that.
57:03
Can we help you get 5 more five more customers this month or or
57:06
next month? I think that so.
57:08
And that's like my pitch and that's that's what I trained the
57:10
guys on in my yeah. Well, I couldn't agree more.
57:14
I mean, it's like there's not a problem that sales can't solve.
57:19
That's exactly right. Definitely fixes everything.
57:21
Absolutely cool. You've been so generous with
57:24
your time. I really appreciate it.
57:26
G We're going to end with the Founder Challenge question from
57:29
kickcaster.com. Anybody can take a look at these
57:33
questions. It's at
57:34
media.kickcaster.com/founder Dash Challenge.
57:39
And I do not expect you to remember that anyone who's
57:42
listening, but I do expect that my note taker will put the link
57:47
in the show notes. So I'm going to give you 4
57:50
categories you get to choose from.
57:52
We're going to go 3 categories. So either it's unfiltered,
57:56
intriguing or or risky. Oh, I'll take risky.
58:01
Risky. All right, let's go.
58:04
What's the wildest thing you've seen on a startup, retreat or
58:06
off site? Oh man, wildest thing.
58:10
So so so the the funniest thing is, and this was like my first
58:13
startup and we had we used to have an Angel investor who had
58:17
made a lot of money on Twitter. And basically, have you seen
58:20
that show Silicon Valley where this one guy, basically the
58:23
investor puts the tequila bottle, the guy who says like
58:26
doors should open like this. The the rest commas guy, yeah,
58:29
believe it or not, I'm not going to name this investor, but he
58:31
reminded, he basically behaved like that.
58:33
He reminded us of that. And he basically intentionally
58:36
or, or maybe by mistake, he wanted to get into code base and
58:39
check it out and he'll delete in 90% of our files like like
58:43
months worth of work. And and literally the, the
58:46
episode Silicon Valley episode was afterwards.
58:48
So when we saw that, I was like, holy shit, this actually
58:50
happened to me. I think that's like the wildest,
58:53
funniest thing. Like it was obviously like very
58:56
disappointing when it happened because months worth of work
58:59
just literally vanished because of this guy's error.
59:02
So it's like the that's like what comes to mind as soon as
59:04
you said that. I love it.
59:06
I love it. You know TJ Miller, I went to
59:07
high school with him. He's a great family.
59:11
He's awesome. I think that guy's hilarious.
59:14
Awesome. What's the best place for people
59:17
to contact you online? Yeah, so my email's super easy.
59:20
It's G at jeeva dot AIG EE VA dot AI.
59:24
I'm on LinkedIn. Gaurav Bhattacharyya Jeeva AI
59:27
very very active on e-mail or LinkedIn.
59:30
Incredible. Gee this has been so so fun.
59:33
I love talking to sales guys. I love seeing sales products
59:36
win. Congrats on all your success.
59:38
Thanks, Ryan. Thank you so much.
59:39
Thanks for having me you. Bet.
59:43
Hey founders, let me ask you this.
59:45
Are you building with AI or getting left behind by it?
59:49
If you're serious about scaling smarter, faster and bolder, you
59:53
need to check out AI for founders.co.
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Founders. Now back to the show.