Manoj Shinde - Co-founder and CEO - Orbo
follow.us/startupsApril 30, 202400:36:13

Manoj Shinde - Co-founder and CEO - Orbo

Finding the right beauty products based on your unique skin type, to achieve that perfect makeup look, is a different ball game altogether that we don't often expect everyone to understand. Today, we're diving into the world of innovation with Orbo.ai with Manoj Shinde, an AI research company that's reshaping the beauty industry as we know it. Their flagship product, Beauty GPT, powered by artificial intelligence, is here to answer all your makeup-related questions and more. To watch the full episode, visit: https://www.follow.us/fms/share-messages/neyq-fqzh-ogtw?client-id=101 Company Name: Orbo.ai Co-Founder(s): Abhit Sinha & Danish Jamil Headquartered: Mumbai Category: Beauty tech One line pitch: As recently seen on Shark Tank, Orbo.ai specializes in AI-powered tools tailored for beauty brands, elevating customer loyalty, engagement, and sales conversion rates. Beauty GPT, its flagship product, analyzes facial features, demographics, skin issues, and weather to offer personalized recommendations using machine learning and vision transformers Website: www.orbo.ai Employees: 35 Contact Manoj Shinde on: Email: manoj@orbo.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finding the right beauty products based on your unique skin type, to achieve that perfect makeup look, is a different ball game altogether that we don't often expect everyone to understand.

Today, we're diving into the world of innovation with Orbo.ai with Manoj Shinde, an AI research company that's reshaping the beauty industry as we know it. Their flagship product, Beauty GPT, powered by artificial intelligence, is here to answer all your makeup-related questions and more.

To watch the full episode, visit: https://www.follow.us/fms/share-messages/neyq-fqzh-ogtw?client-id=101

Company Name: Orbo.ai

Co-Founder(s): Abhit Sinha & Danish Jamil

Headquartered: Mumbai

Category: Beauty tech

One line pitch: As recently seen on Shark Tank, Orbo.ai specializes in AI-powered tools tailored for beauty brands, elevating customer loyalty, engagement, and sales conversion rates. Beauty GPT, its flagship product, analyzes facial features, demographics, skin issues, and weather to offer personalized recommendations using machine learning and vision transformers

Website: www.orbo.ai

Employees: 35

Contact Manoj Shinde on:

Email: manoj@orbo.ai

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

[00:00:00] When I was a shingles, I always felt like a jaycee's jettke lag rahe hai. Sach mein, aisa dirt dosman ko bhi hain ho. Welcome to follow.us startups, your exclusive gateway to the world of early state startup founders.

[00:00:48] This is your front row seat to dive headfirst into their business pitches and stay updated with their business updates. Let's go. Finding the right beauty products based on your unique skin type to achieve that perfect

[00:01:05] makeup look is a different ballgame altogether that we don't expect everyone to understand. But hey, times are changing because what if I tell you that a new ally has emerged in the beauty landscape? Hi, I am Ankita Pahawa, your host at follow.us startups.

[00:01:20] Today we are diving into the world of innovation with Orbo.ai, an AI research company that's reshaping the beauty industry as we know it. Their flagship product, Beauty GPT, powered by artificial intelligence, is here to answer all your makeup and skincare related questions and more.

[00:01:36] You might even remember them from their stellar pitch on the season of Shark Tank. Hands down, they left an indelible mark. And today I'm thrilled to introduce you to Manoj Shinde, the CEO and co-founder of Orbo.ai.

[00:01:48] With a track record of strategic leadership spanning two decades, Manoj brings a wealth of expertise in retail, computer vision and effective global market liaison to the table. Hi, Manoj. Welcome to follow startups. Hi, Ankita. You're most welcome, Manoj.

[00:02:03] So before we jump into the world of Orbo.ai, I'm curious about the journey that brought you here. So could you share a bit about your background and that light bulb moment along the way that led you to dive into the world of beauty AI? Great.

[00:02:18] I think my background spans, as you rightly said, 20 years into the industry. Largely focused on the retail side of the story. I've spent about 14 years in the US. Work with some of the marquee companies like Adidas, Reba, Kraft, Lauren, Quicksilver. Largely focused on techno-commercial role.

[00:02:40] My cubelite moment sort of came in in 2010 when I started an innovation lab for Adidas in Boston. And that is when I was given a chance to build an innovation cell in a room called about 12 by 12 room where I started the journey.

[00:02:59] Within six months of our efforts into innovation within the small sphere of our office, the CIO took a note of that and then eventually the same innovation lab turned into an innovation program for Adidas.

[00:03:11] So there's been a very pivotal moment in my life where a small effort that we started putting into the innovation turns out to be the enterprise-wide or a company-wide innovation program. So eventually I became not only the torch bearer of innovation but also the facilitator of innovation

[00:03:30] as well. I brought in the first augmented reality platform back in 2010, 2011 connecting the physical footwear stores to augmented realities, bringing physical and virtual together. So that's how the AR capability that came into the market and much before your Pokemon

[00:03:48] go came into existence or the AR hype that you see today, we dabbled into augmented reality almost 13, 14 years back. So that has been the pivotal moment and obviously fast forward eventually the lines brought me here to head the e-commerce. I've been associated with them for quite some time.

[00:04:09] Eventually went back to the US did a lot of research with MIT Media Lab, the professors from Stanford and the University of Montreal to learn about the basics and the underlying technology that requires for camera and imaging.

[00:04:25] And my love for camera obviously started with the advent of innovation that I've built for Adidas back in 2010 with augmented reality. That sort of pushed me into the realm of understanding that tomorrow's world will be driven by the visual interaction or visual communication.

[00:04:44] I've been extremely gung ho about that pattern that came out in 2010 and eventually in 2015 when I was doing research on computer vision and artificial intelligence. I took that learnings and understanding from my learnings from those professors and research

[00:05:01] work and came back to India eventually to start Orbo AI as a first AI research company. So the mandate was very, very different with Orbo AI. Typically if you see most of the startups in India, they start with the mindset of building

[00:05:16] a product, building an application, building a platform and then they get into the market. Visa, we Orbo started with a very, very different mindset. We decided to build IPs, intellectual properties and a lot of core research in artificial intelligence.

[00:05:33] And when we started obviously there were hardly any tools or ecosystem that existed back then. People didn't even know more so about AI. The Yorika moment came about AI when chat GPT started and people started to understand what AI is all about and after that rest is history.

[00:05:50] So yeah, that's that's been about me and myself. Thanks for sharing that Manoj. So you know, let's dive into the heart of Orbo.ai which is your start layer particularly beauty GPT.

[00:05:59] So paint us a picture of what it is and what pain point it sets out to resolve. And I think I would have really wanted to ask you this question because that's really close to my heart.

[00:06:12] So look, I think before beauty GPT we started Orbo almost or Orbo's beauty incursion literally 14 months back where we had do it yourself approach or DIY products that were already available in the market and we were selling it to the likes of Unilever and many of

[00:06:31] the beauty companies. So learnings from those DIY products really compared us to understand that how many people actually know about beauty as a whole. So today if I ask you question, Ankita, let's just say if you have flaky skin and you were

[00:06:48] to buy some skincare product yourself, what are the chances that you would actually know about what regime or what tool or what cream that you would want to utilize it? So this is invariably 98% to 99% of the women or men alone.

[00:07:04] They wouldn't know what exactly that actually going to help them out. So then they go to uni-directional platforms like Instagram, YouTube, they hear most of these from influencers and tutorials and so on and so forth. But again it's uni-directional because you're just hearing from one side of the

[00:07:25] story. They don't know who Ankita Pahawa is and what her problems are. So that is when we started to think about it that most of these platforms have unique problem of education and understanding and that education and understanding has to

[00:07:40] correlate with the personal preferences and context and that is when the journey of beauty GPT started and we used to get a lot of questions and remarks and not just remarks but a lot of queries from customers on our support channel asking,

[00:07:57] hey I have hyper-vegmentation and dark spot what do I do? Or you know I have dark circle and I have dark spots on my face. What regime would you recommend? So those are the kind of questions started coming.

[00:08:09] Same thing with hair, same thing with makeup, there are a lot of question people used to come. And similarly these are the same questions if you go to amazon.com's review pages you will learn these similar kind of questions being asked.

[00:08:22] But how many times Amazon was actually taking up a mantle in their hand and responding to each and every question or each and every query so that doesn't really happen. So we saw a great amount of untapped potential in understanding making sure people should get that

[00:08:40] hyper-personalized recommendation or education with the help of product. That's when beauty GPT was born. So now beauty GPT can not only understand your context, your intent, your preferences through means of by you know the means of the prompt that you're writing.

[00:08:59] But at the same time I'm also getting to know who you are as a person by you know looking at your image. Right? So fusion of that is when we start to understand how we can correlate some of the problems

[00:09:13] that you have with these solutions that are up for your skin or for your skin problems and so on and so forth. So that's how the beauty GPT is working behind the scenes.

[00:09:23] Interesting, so you know today the beauty industry is honestly bustling with brands offering their own personalized beauty advisory tools like to name some Sephora and L'Oreal. So now amidst this very vibrant landscape tell us what makes beauty GPT shine? Like what's your unique value proposition?

[00:09:42] Two things that were missing in the market. One was customer centricity and second was hyper personalization. Right? Everything was driven by ads and offers and discounts. Right now if you go to Google and Facebook ads all you do is that you know you're throwing some 20% off

[00:09:58] or 300 off or 100 rupees off right and then the customers who actually get lowered by these offers and come back to you they're not necessarily going to stick to you forever. So there's no loyalty piece that has ever been ingrained into this you know the existing system

[00:10:14] and that is also one of the reason why most of the beauty companies never saw the daylight of profits because there's still a lot of burning, a lot of money.

[00:10:22] There's still dependent on a lot of venture capital funds right so that to spur that growth year after year. And I think somewhere you know these people started to realize after 2022 meltdown of staffs

[00:10:33] that there is no end to this customer acquisition cost right because out of 800 maybe 5 will find their best putting in the ground become profitable and you know do well. But what happens to rest of the 795? Are they going to burn out? Are they going to shut down?

[00:10:51] Are they just going to get consolidated with other brands right? So there is a lot of unanswered segments in the industry and that is where we came into picture. I said we are giving you that additional hand right.

[00:11:04] If the customer comes on to your platform, you know we're able to you know relay him to a proper information, proper education so they are obviously going to stick to you because because you're offering that experience the stickiness and then engagement will always be on the higher side.

[00:11:21] So today if you've done some skin analysis on my platform 15 days later or 30 days later you would want to see that okay how my skin has evolved after the regime has been recommended to me.

[00:11:34] And hence you're going to come back to your website so that is how repeat will also be generated on the higher side. So those are a lot of tangential benefits that our platform can provide it to beauty and skincare brands.

[00:11:47] So while we are on the subject of customers, could you walk us through the individuals or groups you primarily cater to? We started we're essentially started as a B2B company like we cater to large enterprises like Unilever or L'Oreal of the world.

[00:12:01] We also work with mid-market companies in terms of you know they're offering some of them could have say 50, 100, 200 SKUs and we also deal with SMBs which are small size B2C brands who are making their headwinds in the skincare or beauty market.

[00:12:18] So for us the consumer is the primary benefactor in this process because from the day one you know what we you know the vision that we've actually thought through is to empower these consumers with the education, understanding and leveraging our AI to provide them a hyper-personalized service.

[00:12:39] So if they are happy naturally the brands are going to get the benefit of that. So would you care to share some insights into your existing clients and maybe share how they have benefited from integrating any of your services?

[00:12:51] See look I can't possibly dwell into the numbers and you know the ROIs to each and every customer. Of course yeah. That you know that is enjoying with our platform but I think by and large if you look at we are working with like Subtata,

[00:13:07] Stop working with ITC we're working with global companies from Singapore to Japan to Spain and France and obviously a lot of US customers are coming on board.

[00:13:18] We're also going into the smallest smallest countries such as Estonia, you know Israel and Cambodia there are many countries were coming forward and also neighboring countries are also reaching up to us to do our products and services.

[00:13:34] I think and this is not because of Shark Tank this has been happening much before the Shark Tank actually came in. Obviously Shark Tank has added a fuel in our journey and we're extremely happy with the results through Shark Tank

[00:13:49] and I don't think we could have expected anything better than what has happened on the Shark Tank. We are considerably you know seeing the results and the outcome of you know for Shark Tank effect is monumental for us and we highly obliged to that.

[00:14:06] But in terms of you know the consumer growth we are seeing massive growth from across the world. There has been a lot of approaches that have happened from retail companies would want to take a pie of our software

[00:14:23] and utilize in the regions of UAE, Saudi Arabia, Southeast Asia, Australia. There are many partners who are coming forward to align with us to take our technology because somewhere deep down people relate to the problem that we're trying to solve

[00:14:41] and it's a problem that has been unresolved for the longest time right? And somewhere we also created a very seamless experience of you know giving an experience before buying something. If you have those things covered I think the rest follows seamlessly for you.

[00:15:00] So where would you position our board AI in terms of its current stage of growth? See I think from the financial standpoint I think we are somewhere in between the you know early revenues to growth

[00:15:12] we are somewhere in between as I said on the Shark Tank and I can repeat here we've been commercializing our product only for about last 13 to 14 months.

[00:15:21] So it's fairly new when it comes to our commercial foray into the business so it's very early days for us but having said so I think the kind of businesses that now we are working with

[00:15:35] they're all large scale businesses right? As I mentioned some of the names such as Tata's, Shopper's Top, L'Oreal, Unilever, H&M and many of these big brands are in conversation with us or have already adopted our solution and started rolling out across pan India or globally.

[00:15:55] So there's plenty of clientele that we have in the pipeline which is going to utilize or have already been utilized our solutions and start. So where is your office located? So we're based in Mumbai next to the airport.

[00:16:13] Okay so you know Generative AI the foundation of your platform it stands as one of the most exciting frontiers in technology today and it's amazing to see how many businesses are emerging because of it.

[00:16:25] So with that being said how do you envision this space impacting your business segment and where does or will fit into this evolving landscape? I think there are plenty of opportunities in Generative AI.

[00:16:40] I think people are only scratching the surfaces with text generation and image generation and I don't see they are typically the big opportunities. Generative AI as a whole as a subject can have a monumental effect on across the industries, across the segments, across the communities as well.

[00:17:01] If you look at my own segment we're obviously as a beauty AI company we've captured almost 60 to 70% of the genetic way essence of our industry.

[00:17:13] The remaining part is where we see potentially Generative AI can be utilized is creating the research frontiers which can facilitate custom skincare regimes and so on and so forth.

[00:17:26] So for example you know customers who are staying in Hyderabad, where customers staying in Mumbai versus Jaipur could have different needs and could have different skin problems per se. So sort of making one product fit for all may not be the right approach.

[00:17:46] So you will see 2 years, 3 years down the line custom skincare products will come up based on your skin condition based on your skin problems and also physiological changes that happens in the human body.

[00:17:58] So that is a representation whatever happens in your entire body that could potentially reflect on your skin as well. So it's a complete holistic understanding of your body and its impact and how it's resulting otherwise.

[00:18:14] So that space is where I feel that Generative AI can be extremely helpful. The second part is also the backend data that you collect and how a marketing can be effectively managed using for example our tech.

[00:18:32] Previously only demographic data was being captured so male, female, location, age, gender and so on and so forth. But imagine the amount of data that our product is able to capture.

[00:18:46] So the segmentation of those users and reaching out to the right set of audiences with the help of our efficient data pipeline can also be another virtue for marketers to see it.

[00:19:00] Instead of me throwing and spraying advertisement on Facebook and Google where I don't know who will basically stick to that particular ad and come back to you. And whether or not that traffic will be genuine traffic or just something which is non useful traffic.

[00:19:18] In this case now you have people who are utilizing these capabilities and service who are highly segregated, segmented or identified as key value customers which with your marketing effort you can reach out for a very, very specific and personalized campaign.

[00:19:38] So I think that's the second area that I see could be very revolutionary area for Generative AI as well.

[00:19:46] I'm very curious about the pricing strategy that you have set in place for all the services that you offer and how it varies for different groups since you also cater to SMB small businesses.

[00:19:56] So can you give us a glimpse into the revenue model rather than getting into the details of what the price point is? I'll just make it very simplified.

[00:20:04] We segregated our price as per the SMB mid market and enterprise because each one of them has different kind of consumption and different kind of visitor and traffic that comes to their website. Our aim is to democratize these solutions to everyone.

[00:20:22] So we didn't want to just stick around and say that hey, because you're Laurel in Unilever my solution is only meant for you because you can afford to pay.

[00:20:30] But we're also going to the small D2C companies and giving them the same strength and power of AI so that they can also build their own customer growth and so on and so forth.

[00:20:41] So somewhere we are democratizing the pricing for everybody to avail our services and product. So as far as the offline gamut is concerned where we are providing our software and hardware together that is again a rental business because we feel that it's very simple economics is there.

[00:21:05] And then Piyush asked me this question today I'm taking an opportunity to answer how simplified that pricing is right. When we said that you know this is going to cost you 30,000 or roughly.

[00:21:17] We evaluated the salary of a beauty assistant or a sales associate who work in the beauty industry or the retail store and so on.

[00:21:26] Now they are definitely be given some sort of a target to achieve on a monthly basis right now if my hardware and my software is adding even 1 lakh rupees or 2 lakh rupees worth of additional revenue to that retailer.

[00:21:42] I'm pretty sure they wouldn't mind spending that 30,000 rupees right. That's one. The second thing is that this industry sees almost 40 to 60% of the iteration rate. That means one sales person coming in he may not work more than six months in one company moved to the second company right.

[00:22:00] But that means the longevity of the service does not exist. That means whatever learnings and understanding that I've gathered about you know say retail partner a customer right. It will go with me if I leave that retail brand and go to retail brand we right.

[00:22:20] So that means if the customer comes back again there's a new person at the helm who's treating that customer but imagine the mirror doesn't change the mirror stays with you.

[00:22:30] Mirror understands you as soon as you come back. That means your knowledge stays with you your learning stays with you and there are so many salient benefits that the retail sales person will not be able to replicate. Now imagine there are 1000 skews inside your store.

[00:22:48] Is it possible or other is it humanly possible for you to remember the strength and weaknesses of those products. It is impossible right second would you ever possible to remember the ingredients that are part of these SKU right.

[00:23:04] It is again humanly impossible right but the mirror and the AI understands and recognizes that right. So the retail sales person will not be able to replicate or other you know replace mirror what mirror does in return.

[00:23:20] It will only understand the customer it hyper personalizes the recommendation and it helps the sales person to augment the experience and education. So that the retail sales person will be able to sell the product better to their customer right.

[00:23:35] So it's an adjunct or it's a it's a it's a benefactor beneficial product for every retail company to have this thing to provide don't look at this as a conversion product.

[00:23:46] Although it is called magic mirror the magic is not going to happen unless and until you use it to the fullest potential of that product. It is an education device. It is an experiential device. It is also saving saving your time and effort.

[00:24:00] There is a possibility that the customer would just come into your store to buy a more sureizing. Right but after doing the analysis on the magic mirror the regime that will get recommended for that customer could add two or three products.

[00:24:16] That means you have an opportunity to sell or upsell some additional product so that your AOV increases your sale increases. So there are so many salient or direct benefit of having our technology inside the store rather than just looking at as a conversion device.

[00:24:34] So Manoj about your funding status. Well it's no secret that you recently raised one carol from Vinita Singh on Shark Tank. So could you give us some insights into your current investment status and future plans.

[00:24:46] See look I think financially as far as the funding is concerned you know there are different avenues have already been looked at. We are you know we are in a better stage than where we were probably last year March in terms of our funding status.

[00:25:02] Obviously there's tremendous inbound interest globally to invest in our goal because of the potential that it you know it has to revolutionize the beauty industry across the globe. And we are looking at each and every aspect of investment slightly differently while the money is on the table.

[00:25:20] We're also looking for partners or investors who can roll up the sleeves who can be partner in executing our strategy

[00:25:29] and taking this product to every nook and corner of the world right. Those are the kind of investors that we're trying to look for in our future fund raise right.

[00:25:37] So yeah that's where we are you know so we also caught a glimpse of other two members standing alongside you while I was watching Shark Tank.

[00:25:45] So I believe they were your co-founders correct. They are Danish and Abed were the first employees of Orbo whatever I'm going to say it's probably going to be less about them.

[00:25:57] I mean or rather would be less if I say so. They have done a tremendous job on building the culture of our company. Showing the integrity showing the passion showing the resilience in even the you know the worst of times that we've seen right.

[00:26:15] And this literally stood like rock next to me in terms of you know my journey. So you know a couple of years back when I actually reached out to both of them saying that look guys you know I'm individually steering the ship of you know Orbo.

[00:26:33] I need some help here and I'm actually looking to bring you on board as co-founders. Evidently they obviously never really expected this would happen but I think all those hard work or that persistence or integrity that they have shown over the years

[00:26:50] has led me to bring them on board as a co-founder and I don't think I would have gone to any other person to make them as a co-founder you know other than Abed and Danish.

[00:27:00] So I think Orbo is where it is today is because of these two gentlemen's hard work in the tech side and now they're also moving from tech to other business side so they're taking participation, participatory role

[00:27:16] in driving the business and delivery and execution as well. So hats off to these two gentlemen to be part of you know Orbo's journey and aligning with me to drive the next set up.

[00:27:28] Alright so with the three of you what's the total strength of your team and like how are the roles divided within the organization?

[00:27:34] So we're at total 35, we are based out of two cities with primarily a corporate main office in Mumbai but we are also based in Noida where you know our remaining people are actually working out of Noida.

[00:27:48] Between Abed, me and Danish we have three specific roles while I look at strategic business and product. Danish looks after delivery, post client success and engagement and Abed is predominantly focused on AI research.

[00:28:05] So Manoj I want you to take a moment to reflect on Orbo's journey so far so tell us what do you attribute to its current status and success like any key factors you believe that have propelled Orbo.ai to where it stands today?

[00:28:18] I think you know funding aside, the product aside, the technology aside. I think one of the secret source of our success or wherever we are today it definitely gets attributed towards my team.

[00:28:36] I think I don't think we would be here if my team wasn't here. I think the kind of contribution, kind of work that these people have done it is outstanding and outstanding it will also be an understatement.

[00:28:52] One of the key KPI that I wanted to share with you Ankita here is in my company the attrition rate is about 3.5% right and when I say 3.5% that means there's one person leaving per year in my company.

[00:29:08] How many tech companies or startups can actually boast about this kind of an attrition rate right and I wouldn't even call that as an attrition rate. It's something that is an unfortunate rate.

[00:29:20] The person who leaves us is probably unfortunate and this is happening by the way, people who have left Orbo are coming back. They want to work with Orbo right they want to associate with Orbo.

[00:29:33] That's the kind of culture that we build and that is the culture that we wanted to take it forward even if we grow from 35 people to 100 or 200 or 500 people.

[00:29:42] I think the kind of participation as a founders or as a human being that we've done or the other way around the team has done, we've seen marriages of our employees, we've seen kids being born to our employees.

[00:29:58] We've seen highs and lows of our employees. I mean we have one good family here right and I think the single most benefactor of that family is Orbo right. The whole team is a biggest attribution to our success.

[00:30:13] That's sweet. So are you on the lookout for any potential hires?

[00:30:17] We always are looking out for it right. I mean we don't have a periodical offering strategy rather we have a very constant offering strategy in the sense that we're always looking out for people who are willing to make or break things right.

[00:30:34] That doesn't mean that you have to come from a pedigree school or a pedigree college right. We want people with a bit of an adventure, a bit of risk taking ability, a bit of breaking the mold kind of personality.

[00:30:52] Those are the kind of people we are always in lookout for and that is why we have this culture within Orbo, Ankita that why people don't want to leave Orbo because of sure empowerment, sure learning experience being part of the large family,

[00:31:07] being part of getting to do things right. I mean how many companies can actually post about them giving the empowerment an opportunity to take the risk on their own and drive those things passionately.

[00:31:20] So our employees take that mantle in their hand to drive those things. Any new hire that comes in, it is no longer my responsibility to explain the culture of Orbo to them. It automatically happens with the help of other employees who are associated with us.

[00:31:37] Well guys here's your chance to apply and work at Orbo.ai. So Manoj keeping in mind that we will be promoting this video to large enterprises, investors, tech giants and a broader start of ecosystem altogether.

[00:31:50] Is there anything else you'd like to put down that could help you find any external assistance or support in your concerned areas?

[00:31:58] I think I've said it all, I talked about what kind of investors we want, what kind of employees we want, what is our culture, what are our values, where we come from.

[00:32:08] We are very very rooted people, we are not the kind of people in fact you'll be surprised I was against of participating in shock time.

[00:32:18] It was my team who forced me to get onto a shock time and said that people generally talk about the innovation only comes from US, Israel and other parts of the world. We've always been considered a copycat country where we copy innovation from China, US and other countries.

[00:32:35] So my employees have been very very persistent and pushy to a level where I say that up until now we've always put our head down and we never really put ourselves out in this social media or global platform where people should recognize the effort that we've done.

[00:32:54] So I think somewhere down the line that we wanted that recognition people should understand there's a genuine innovation that is coming out of India and hence I think we chose the shock time as a platform or a launchpad to showcase our capabilities and our products.

[00:33:09] I'm definitely waiting for your next milestones and I hope we get to discuss all of those here on follow start up as well.

[00:33:17] So now Manoj as we are reaching towards the end of this episode, I think I would like to crank up the excitement with a quick lightning round five quick rapid fire questions. Are you ready? Sure. Absolutely.

[00:33:30] Okay, so Manoj a book that you would like to recommend that has greatly influenced your career. Seven habits of success you might. Interesting. Okay question number two which productivity tool or app do you find most helpful in your daily work? My notebook.

[00:33:47] Okay. Question number three a fun fact about you that most people don't know yet. I'm losing the seconds here but I can bat and bowl with both hands. Okay, I think we got to talk about that after the episode.

[00:34:02] Okay question number four what is your favorite quotation on mantra that you live by? I never really thought about I'm sorry I'll have to pass on this. I really thought about any mantra as such who could potentially drive me but.

[00:34:15] Okay, well since you decide to pass on this question I have a fun one for you. So can you name five makeup products that you believe are essential for anyone's complete makeup routine? Eyeshadow lipstick bronzer foundation and eyeliner. Oh my God. Great.

[00:34:33] And Manoj what is your one piece of advice for the young audience watching this? I think just never give up. Amazing. Well thank you so much Manoj and one last question.

[00:34:43] Is there any wish that you would like to make your out loud for your startup that you hope comes true in the near future? Any wish? I think I would jinx it if I do a wish here because there are a lot of fish.

[00:34:57] You know when I have really not spoken about it they came out true. So I would still store them in my heart and then maybe it'll find its way out to be in front of the audience somehow. But I definitely have a wish for you Manoj.

[00:35:14] So here's to you becoming the foremost personal beauty advisor in the market all the very best. Thank you. Thank you so much Ankita for having me here. It's wonderful chatting with you and thank you for those lovely questions.

[00:35:26] So if you would like to stay updated with the latest developments and business insights at allbu.ai you can follow their channel on follow.s slash startups. Thank you for tuning in.

[00:35:41] If you want to listen to more such interviews with innovative new founders, don't forget to visit www.follow.s slash startups. And if you want to showcase your startup feel free to drop me a note at anketa.pahawa at the red follow daughters.

[00:35:55] We'd love to hear your story.