Sajan Nair - Founder and CEO - Agaamin Technologies

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[00:00:42] Welcome to Follow.us Startups, your exclusive gateway to the world of early-stage startup founders. This is your front row seat to dive headfirst into their business pitches and stay updated with their business updates. Let's go!

[00:01:00] Choosing your name wasn't always in your hands but choosing your online identity can be. Hi, welcome to Follow.us Startups, I'm your host Ankitapawa and today we have with us Sajan Nayar, the founder and CEO of Agaamin Technologies.

[00:01:12] Agaamin is a smart name registry built on handshake, offering unique online identities. Don't worry, we will demystify it all. So with a diverse background ranging from management to client servicing, advertising and even filmmaking, Sajan is the true polymath.

[00:01:28] Now he's channelizing his expertise into creating this smart name registry on Web3. So please join me in welcoming him. Hi, Sajan, welcome to Follow.us Startups. Hi, Ankitapawa, thank you so much for the warm intro. Happy to be here. It's a pleasure to have you here, Sajan.

[00:01:44] So before we get into any details about Agaamin Technologies, please take a moment to introduce yourself and walk us through your professional background. My professional background is actually far away from what I'm currently doing. I started out after my school, I wanted to become a chartered accountant.

[00:02:02] I studied up till Inter and Plunked. So then I figured that, you know, that was not for me. And so then I still finished my B-Com honors, did my MBA and went into mass communication and advertising.

[00:02:13] I was placed in a college right out of, I mean, in a institute, in a company called Enterprise Nexus. I was one of those happening agencies back then and I was placed out of college there.

[00:02:25] I spent about seven, eight years working with some of the top network agencies like Ogilvy, Havas, Puglises and all of that. Basically, you know, God, God, Kapani, he has saved the industry. In 2011, I started my own production house and even that's gone through evolution.

[00:02:42] We started out more making television commercials and then we moved into augmented reality, virtual reality, digital content, off late and things like that, branded content and stuff. Social media got added on in the process and stuff. It was somewhere during the pandemic, two things happened.

[00:03:01] The first episode was, you know, the pandemic itself. Shooting is not something you can do remotely. It is something that you have to do face-to-face, right? If I have to shoot you then I have to be there. And when the pandemic started, there was, you know,

[00:03:14] I had no idea whether this would ever end or if I would even have a career in terms of shooting because if everything was going to be removed. So I always had an interest and passion for technology. Usually techies get into filmmaking when they get a break.

[00:03:29] I decided to get into technology when I got one. I learned how to code, learned a bit of solution, architecture, infrastructure, DNS, things like that. Basically I spent about a year studying on Udemy and precodecap.org at various places online. In the meanwhile, I was introduced to Handshake

[00:03:47] which is an open source protocol on which our tech stack is built. And it just seemed like water was there when the duck was ready to swim. So I just took the plunge and here we are. So that's the first episode. The second episode was an added incident

[00:04:03] which was I got myself a new phone. And as someone who's always been a big believer at open source and stuff, I naturally got myself an Android phone. And when I was booting it up for the first time,

[00:04:13] I thought can I use this without giving my Gmail ID? And it took me all of 10 seconds to realize that you know, you won't really have a smart phone if I don't use my Gmail ID, just a feature rich phone because you can access the Play Store.

[00:04:26] I also realized it's the same case with Apple users. If you don't have an Apple ID, no App Store. And suddenly dawned upon me something that was always there in front of me that your ability to have a smart phone, one of the most fundamental requirements

[00:04:41] of the human race today, depends on identities given to you by just two companies. Maybe China is an exception, but most of the world if you don't have a Gmail or an Apple ID, you don't have a smart phone. It's just that simple. Yeah, it's always there,

[00:04:56] but you never truly think about it and the implications of it. That's just two companies. That's it. If they decide that we are not giving an ID, means you won't have a smart phone. That's it for you. You're basically booted out of everything in the information space.

[00:05:09] Before we dive into the specifics of our Gaminazer business, I think it's essential to grasp the broader vision that's driving your efforts. So I would love for you to start with telling our audience what exactly is Bhartiya Internet and why it holds such a paramount importance

[00:05:25] in today's digital landscape? Even Bhartiya Internet, as big as that scope, looks at it's actually still a smaller scope as to the larger picture what we are doing here. But there are 2.5 billion people out of which about a billion comes from India,

[00:05:39] South Asia, the Middle East, Far East. They belong to non-English speaking culture. So we are building a vernacular Internet for all 2.5 billion people on the Internet. You may say what is the need for vernacular Internet because there is vernacular content.

[00:05:55] But if you look at the infrastructure of the Internet, domain names are English. Yes, vernacular domain names are possible in India. Those extensions exist, but there is no ecosystem around it. So they don't work. So domain names are English, MLIDs are English,

[00:06:10] user IDs are English, passwords are English, digital identities are English. Then comes vernacular content. Now to us, it seems intuitive, but to the average person who does not understand English, they are basically managing. They're just managing on the Internet, jitna hausakta, they use it,

[00:06:27] but they do not truly use the fullest potential of it the way we are able to. We can pretty much get anything done on the Internet. I mean literally anything. Right, that's not how it is for them. For them getting on the Internet beyond say,

[00:06:41] sending a recorded voice message on WhatsApp because typing can be a bit of a hassle and watching YouTube videos, they're not really doing a lot, which they should be and they could be if the infrastructure was in vernacular.

[00:06:54] So we are going to do it for two and a half billion people, but as a startup you have to start somewhere. So being in India, I'm looking at Bahara because that's a huge market. Each state is like a country in terms of population.

[00:07:08] For instance, Kerala has 35 million people who speak Malayalam. The population of Saudi Arabia is 35 million. That's pretty much and Kerala is the smaller state. So look at the bigger ones and the chunks. So each of them can be a country by itself

[00:07:22] and an ecosystem from domain names to digital identities to smart, your financial address to all kinds of services. Think of it as a Chinese Internet where all kinds of vernacular services, goods and services are available on the Internet of full ecosystem and you don't really have

[00:07:40] no English to operate in that ecosystem. So that's what we are building and we are going to start using with a thing called a smart name. Yeah, smart name is going to be the seed that is eventually going to become this plant.

[00:07:56] So what exactly is a smart name? Can you just walk me through that? So to make it very simple, if you can just look up on the Google or anywhere on the Internet, just look up sarjan.bh3 that is sajan.bh for Bharat and numerical three.

[00:08:13] Now, if you do that on the Internet on Google or anywhere, you will find that it just leads to all my links, my Twitter, my LinkedIn, all my other social handles. Everything comes up. Now, this is just a very simplistic demo,

[00:08:26] but the idea is to give you how one name can represent me on the Internet. So here's sarjan.bh3, bh3 is at the LD, much like a .com or a .org or a .in like a domain extension. So here bh3 stands for Bharat 3.0 and sarjan.bh3.

[00:08:44] So sarjan.bh3, if you have a web tree-compatible browser, can be a domain name. It can support email IDs like say, Hi, hello, and there it's sarjan.bh3. Sarjan.bh3 will be my UPI ID. Sarjan.bh3 will be my Bitcoin address.

[00:08:58] Sarjan.bh3 will be my avatar in the metaverse. Sarjan.bh3 has a single sign on to DAPS, the way we use Facebook or Google to sign in. So basically it becomes one unified name for myself. And in the long run, our vision is that we should be able

[00:09:14] to create a mobile operating system where you can use these names as a sign-in. We have not really reached out to Madras IIT, but we did read that they came out with Bahro S and we find that very interesting. Maybe we will look up to collaborate with them.

[00:09:29] So that's what a smart name is. So that smart name can do everything that happens on the Internet. It can be a website address. It can be an email address. It can be a sign-in to things. It can be a financial address.

[00:09:41] And now imagine 5 million or 2.5 billion people with these names of their own that can either be used for business or personal purposes and it can do all of it. Now mine is in English because I have been a city of friends from all over.

[00:09:56] I need to communicate with a wide range of people. But what if you were someone from Uttar Pradesh and you have a smaller circle and you are more familiar and comfortable with Dev Nandri. There can be Sergeant.Bha for Bhara.

[00:10:09] So we have a Dev Nandri extension like a .com. So we have a .bha for Bhara in Dev Nandri. Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, each every language we have a .bha and individuals can then get smart names on that and they can then simply use it

[00:10:22] in their own vernacular language if they don't want to have, you know, if the reach is small and they prefer to type in that language and that's their ecosystem. It works for them. It could be Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, whatever.

[00:10:34] So the idea is you don't have to really interact with that English ecosystem as a whole. An entire series of things can happen simply with whatever language you are comfortable with. That's amazing to build a free internet with multi-lingual smart names as an identity mirror.

[00:10:51] I mean, the concept itself, it's so new. It's so fresh. So Sergeant, if I were to ask you to define your target market at this point, could you sum it up for me in just two lines? Okay. So while all this,

[00:11:01] while I was talking about the big story, we have a smaller story. And the smaller story in two lines is we are going to top 150 colleges and building smart ecosystems for their students in alumni. Top 150 colleges means IITs, IIMs, XLRI, Bitsbilani, you know,

[00:11:17] the NITs and the rest of them. Prominent colleges like Xavier's and so on and so forth. Lady Prabha and LSR, you know, quite a few of these that feature in the top 150. Now why are we going to these people? Now two reasons.

[00:11:32] Once, one is when we reached out to Bharat, we found out that Bharat has been spoiled on the internet. They're used to getting stuff for free that they don't like to pay. And rightfully so if you can get it for free, why not use it?

[00:11:43] So we decided to go to the builders. Now we are talking about 150 means the top percentile of the intellectual capital of India. Okay. There are two reasons that are very, you know, that syncs perfectly. One, all of these people like to

[00:12:00] like the fact that they belong to a certain Alma matter, you know, belonging to IIT or belonging to IM, you know, has a lot of respect and honorable, honor value, you're part of various ecosystems and people like to talk about it. Like I am from IIT.

[00:12:14] So, you know, when you have a name, say if you are saved from IIT, so Ankita.IIT. So it's like Ankita.IIT is your domain name. Ankita.IIT is your UPI address. Ankita.IIT is your avatar in the metaverse. And you'll be telling people Ankita.IIT by UPI,

[00:12:30] Kardo Ankita.IIT with Bitcoin, Bezos. So people are like, oh, Ankita from IIT or I am XLR, IBIT, whatever. You name any of those top colleges. So it's just there. That's one. So they have a natural incentive to have an identity that represents and signals their Alma matter.

[00:12:47] That's one. Second, it is also possible to build exclusive ecosystems for these people because when you say again, 150 colleges means the top intellectual capital of India. What if tomorrow there was a job site where you said you need these smart names to log into this job site?

[00:13:04] So now when a Google or a Facebook comes for recruitment to this sites, they know that everyone here is a genuine diamond, top percentile of India. No fake, no scam profiles. Everyone is a brilliant one. So that's, you know, you are absolutely sure that everybody here

[00:13:21] is the best of the best. Is that a good idea Mahini? So yeah, and you can spin it whichever way you want. Like these people would have the best jobs. That means they would buy the best cars, houses. They would be the best investments.

[00:13:34] There's a lot of scope to build stuff for this HNI group. That's one. But we don't want to stop there. This is not about HNI. It's actually the opposite. It's about the mass. But to come down and the value chain and build for mass, we need these builders

[00:13:49] to build out various other services as well. And by making them a stakeholder in the ecosystem, we are looking for a network effect where we will anyway build stuff for the world and people. But many of them will also build amazing startups, billion dollar companies for Bharat

[00:14:07] and the world nuclear internet in general or maybe even for their networks. So Sagar at what stage is Agamind.in currently in terms of its development and market penetration? So Agamind.in, the website is in public beta. So people can check it out.

[00:14:23] Agamind.in, you can get yourself a .bxt smart name or you can get a smart name on some of the vernacular languages. We've launched about seven to eight of them. The top college ones are not there because we will have separate frontends for them

[00:14:39] because it is mandatory for the student or alumni to have that college email ID for you to be able to get one of those names because otherwise it makes no sense. Right? So if you have an IIT email ID, you can get an IIT smart name. Otherwise, no.

[00:14:52] It's only exclusive for those people. So we have separate frontends for them. They will not be on this Agamind.in. We have about 3,000 extensions which we will slowly, slowly launch. So apart from the ones that are there, we have .bha in all the names.

[00:15:06] We also have all the surnames in their own respective languages. So imagine a pava in say Hindi or a sing in Gurmukhi or a nair in Malayalam or a chakraborty in Bengali or a Shah or a Modi in Gujarati and so on, so forth.

[00:15:22] So the people in their languages can get what they want. And this is just India. We have a whole separate section for the Middle East. Arabic extensions which we will build out later. We need to focus on these 150 colleges. Then expand to India, then Mina. That's great.

[00:15:38] So you know, let's talk some numbers. So would you be willing to share any noteworthy business numbers on metrics that you are particularly proud of at this stage? So one, we've worked with one of the top IIT colleges and we've onboarded about 1200 students from there.

[00:15:57] IIT, Mundi that is. We've got about 250 users from BM Munjali University as well. We are also, so that's about 1500-1600 people who have already onboarded. We are already talking to one, two, three, about four colleges right now as we speak. And we expect to build them as well.

[00:16:19] So yeah, that's where we are. So Sazan Vail, we are another topic of numbers. Tell me what's your revenue model like? Specifically how do you plan to price these smart names? So the smart names are pretty much like domain names. They are basically technically speaking domain names

[00:16:34] created on a public blockchain called Handshake and they are annually renewable. That's the primary revenue model as of now. And the names can vary from 200 rupees per year for a Hindi name to maybe 2500 rupees per year for an alumni name because you have a decent job

[00:16:55] to maybe 500 bucks for a student name. Interesting, okay. If you're an IIT student then it'll be less than once you pass out and you have a job then you are expected to be a proper fee. So we have from 200 to 2500 depending on what target, what profile, what audience

[00:17:11] the pricing is done. So that's a primary model but as we build these services like a job site and stuff they can also be monetized and they will be monetized. And as someone who is in the digital identity ecosystem there are many opportunities that will come

[00:17:28] where you can monetize. So I have to ask with such a powerful vision are you leading Agamind or Tint Solo or do you have a co-founder accompanying you in this journey? Right now we are it's solo. It's primarily led and funded by me.

[00:17:44] I am definitely open to co-founders in the technical space but right now for two years it's been me as a small family, team of six, four of us are there are four developers. I'm like a semi-techie so out of six five of us are techies

[00:17:59] techies people and one of them is Dakshita she looks into marketing partner relations digital marketing and things like that. So very tight fact on ship. Are there any plans in the pipeline to raise any capital in the future? Yes we are actively fundraising right now

[00:18:16] so we've been bootstrap mostly I've been putting in my cash into it. Then we recently got selected for government seed fund I guess the government found value in our regular internet so and thanks to be a Mungali university who has elated in this their incubation center

[00:18:35] and now we are actively reaching out investors to raise capital institutional capital. Amazing so Sajan I've saved the most important question for the end with the brilliance of the technology and it's far reaching impact also comes a very significant concern

[00:18:50] which is security and we of course as Indians we cannot compromise on that. So as fantastic as the concept of creating these smart name sounds security I think it still holds a very significant concern in this digital realm. How does Agamind ensure the security of TLDS

[00:19:09] on the handshake blockchain particularly considering that you operate outside the ICANN framework? So we have to first understand to understand security we have to understand handshake and I don't want to take a very long time I'll leave a quick snapshot.

[00:19:22] Now we'll have two aspects to our tech stack we will have smart names that are based on blockchain technology so here users will manage them themselves and they are responsible for its security. Our job is to ensure that the blockchain is you know the layer is managed correctly

[00:19:39] but as far as the individual name is concerned you are responsible the user is we don't get into it that's how we ensure it by not having it at the R&D but we will have some centralized names like not everybody would prefer a decentralized name

[00:19:52] because taking a decentralized name means taking responsibility for it managing it and having some element of tech familiarity with that ecosystem if you don't have it you'll mess it up. Yeah also there could be sensitive names institutional names that may require slightly more you know sensitive handling

[00:20:11] so those will be centralized structures in standalone structures air gap to ensure that you know there is no data issues and also to ensure that the authorities are taken care of we will ensure that all of that data and everything is managed within India itself

[00:20:27] and you know complies with all the Indian laws that are required in this space. So Sartan it's truly incredible to see how a garment is just changing the way we use the internet so now that we have plans to promote this discussion

[00:20:40] this video to large enterprises potential investors tech giants and a broader startup ecosystem is there anything specific that you would like to mention that could help you find any external assistance that you are looking for like consider this your call for support?

[00:20:54] So we are building something really big and we are building something that will truly change the direction of over one third of the human race. Yeah an opportunity like that comes once in a lifetime and most people are would and should consider themselves extremely lucky

[00:21:12] if they get that opportunity which I do yes we need support with funding we would love youngsters to come and build new stuff on this internet we are happy to mentor them we are reaching out to all the top 150 colleges and saying guys

[00:21:26] let's build something get on the smart team thing we can figure out you know what kind of resources need to be spent you want the names for yourself just like that so that you can build on it

[00:21:35] we can figure out all of that but those are the micro things the bigger thing is that we have a once in a lifetime chance to change the direction of one third of the human race it's a once in a lifetime maybe multiple lifetime opportunity

[00:21:50] let's build that internet for Bharat let's build that internet for the larger human race that's pretty much my pitch out there at the end isn't it great if you can do something that is truly exciting gets your blood pumping makes you want to wake up every morning

[00:22:09] and still make money out of it to be able to truly do that you know now is a blessing most of us having from a spiritual perspective most of us die of boredom in life

[00:22:21] I assure you if you choose to work on this one you won't be bored that's it that's great and on that note let's get to our rapid fire round are you ready yes okay question number one a book that you would like to recommend to the youth

[00:22:36] that has greatly influenced your career journey Aghora at the left hand of God question number two which productivity tool or app do you find most helpful in your day to day work uh canva okay question number three a fun fact about you that most people don't know yet

[00:22:52] I am a reader holic if I have moonfully I will read the cover of it you know every bit of that so that's one and yes I have varied interest from reading to meditation to chess to martial arts to technology to filmmaking to meeting people to traveling

[00:23:10] everything is a is a is pleasurable so yeah I like the full vibrant colors of life okay question number four so you know there's a saying that don't

[00:23:21] tell me who you are just tell me what brands you use so describe yourself using the names of just three brands my favorite watch is HMT Jenta used to be very popular maybe you know before you were born I like

[00:23:35] uh samson phones okay and uh Nike shoes Nike shoes of course well thank you so much sarjan I hope this was worthy of your time before I let you go I want you to make a wish for your startup that

[00:23:52] you hope comes true in the near future any wish out loud it is my wish and belief that we at argument technologies will change the direction of human race in ways that are not

[00:24:06] currently you know imaginable okay well here's to a future where connectivity knows no bounds all the very best and thank you so much for joining us thank you it's been a real pleasure and thank

[00:24:17] you for having me if you'd like to stay updated with the latest developments and business insights from agamind make sure to follow their channel on follow dot us slash start up thank you for tuning

[00:24:33] in if you want to listen to more such interviews with innovative new founders don't forget to visit dot follow dot us slash startups and if you want to showcase your startup feel free to drop me a

[00:24:44] note at Ankita dot bahawa at the rate follow dot us we'd love to hear your story