Sarthak Shrivastava - Co-founder - Floworks

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[00:01:00] Ever wish for a personal assistant who could effortlessly tackle all your routine tasks? Floworks is a generative AI SaaS company aiming to revolutionize workplace productivity. How you ask? The answer is flowy.

[00:01:11] Welcome to Follow.us Startups, I'm your host Sankita Pahava and today we have with us Sarthak Shrivastava, the co-founder of Floworks. Sarthak is no stranger to entrepreneurial ventures having navigated the e-commerce, logistics and financial services industries across India, Singapore and Philippines.

[00:01:28] Now fueled by his passion for problem solving, he's channelizing his expertise into building Floworks. Without any further ado, let's extend a warm welcome to Sarthak. Hi Sarthak, welcome to Follow.us Startups. Hey Angetta, it was great meeting you. Well, it's fantastic to have you here.

[00:01:42] So before we get into any details about Flowork and your flagship product, Flowey, could you please take a moment to introduce yourself? Sure. Thank you for this. I don't think I can do a better introduction than you did. But still I'll try to do like that.

[00:01:58] So yeah, I've always been a startup buff. I've always worked through startup and always wanted to start something of my own. Starting my career with a company called HAPE which was into B2B Express management. They recently got acquired by CRIP.

[00:02:09] There also I was doing relationships and relationship management and getting new partnerships in. Later on I went and worked with India's largest logistics unicorn called Blackburn. Might have heard of them. I've been doing business which did over 30 million dollars in annual revenue while I was still working there.

[00:02:31] Then that had a big lead to basically doing more of ops and doing more of new initiatives. I went and worked for a global company that was essentially working with companies like Gap, Laplace, Max, and Spencer to automate their e-commerce experience across South Asia, Philippines, India

[00:02:50] and basically then rest of the world has been home. Over this whole thing, I basically became someone who has always become someone who is really impacted by solving difficult problems. So yeah, that's when I started to do that.

[00:03:07] Awesome. So Sathak, I'd love for you to start with telling our audience what you guys do at FlowWorks. What are the pain points you are trying to address with it and what's past the idea of building FlowWorks?

[00:03:19] Sure. I'll do it in the reverse order. I'll start with how it started. So it's a very personal thing but for lack of a better word, I generally am someone who doesn't like to update things. I procrastinate there a lot.

[00:03:34] Get rid of sales through and through the day, get rid of operations through the day. I'm happy to be on the customer calls but get rid of updates this year and one hour every day in my life in the rainbow.

[00:03:44] That was really the problem that I was trying to solve. I was trying to solve a problem for myself so that I could not or I would not do this mundane, repetitive, manual work.

[00:03:55] Rather, I should focus on what I was basically paid to do which was actually selling or getting on boarding time. That was the original story of FlowWorks. I met with my co-founder. He's an IT guy from Top of His Patch.

[00:04:12] Amir is with the IA. He's one of the leaders of AI in this world right now. He has credits in genetics as well. I might have enjoyed it when I was like, I have this bug. I really hate this problem that I need to update.

[00:04:26] I need to do this manual work to get things done and to basically get the end result in. Can we solve this out somehow? He was like, hey, have you heard of this amazing thing called GPT?

[00:04:40] The interesting part of this was 2021. This was before 2023 when Chai GP came over. He was basically working on that and he was like, cool. Let's see. We started exploring it out and we just soon realized that the power of general AI could just solve everything out.

[00:04:55] Very quickly, we were telling what our solution does. It's simply an AI employee or your sales organization. What is an AI employee? Let me ask that. Every sales organization works in a very similar fashion, which is you first get leads or email ideas or form numbers

[00:05:16] or basically cold emails to be reached out to the coldest. Then you basically have a prospect sequence where you basically cold email or reach them. Then get them to basically follow up, answer the questions, do multiple things. This is the manual work.

[00:05:31] Then you basically set up a meeting and go on that meeting. Now just as the human gets in, basically get on the meeting, do that sale. Cool. Now you get off the meeting. Next step is now going into the CRM cycle where you upgrade things,

[00:05:44] do the task that has been asked in the meeting and this group continues through our data and finally close the team and move on to the next sale. In this whole cycle, if you actually look at it, the places where actually a human was needed

[00:05:58] was getting that prospect list in because you need to tell what are the customers that you need to reach out. Getting on an email or getting on a meeting, continuing on doing that meeting and actually finally closing the sale.

[00:06:11] Rest of the work which is essentially, if you look at the whole conversation with seemingly 81% of the work, can be automated. And that's what FlowWorks is. So literally automates the rest of the work that you are basically looking at.

[00:06:23] You just have to be there present in the meetings, closing the deals and then when you will keep on flowing in your company and you will keep on doing very well. So that's what FlowWorks is all about. So that must save a lot of time.

[00:06:36] So can you walk us through how do you do that? Simple right? Generally the biggest thing that gets unlocked is that it gets the listening of the communities because we understand the conversations. And as soon as you are able to understand conversations

[00:06:53] you suddenly start understanding or realizing that hey, everything that is happening in sales call essentially some kind of conversation. And as soon as the system can understand the intent of that conversation it can take those decisions where earlier a human was required to be in the lead.

[00:07:09] So I'll give you a simple example. The SDR flow or the sales development flow. Anytime you also call them, call them the lead generation flow. What is that? You have a list of prospects like 500 emails are there.

[00:07:20] Now you need to send out each of them in personalized emails, follow up with them. Whenever they respond back, you need to now answer those questions. That's when the intent comes in. You have to see what the email is then answer those questions

[00:07:34] and then convert those questions and answers and that email will be to a meeting with the SDR. Earlier the part of follow-ups, the part of sending out emails was still doable but understanding the intent was not doable. Hence you required a human value

[00:07:48] and in India someone paid, people paid 50,000, 50,000, please call them to your user. Also to SDR, which is the digital entity and US someone was paying 600,000 dollars or 700,000 dollars for the same job. Someone to be in that loop and answer those questions.

[00:08:03] Suddenly a switch is turned on where now you have generative air. Generative air can understand that mail's intent and can give actually right answers to those intended views because it also has the glossary of all the numbers

[00:08:18] and it can also now push the user to this set of a meeting. Suddenly the human value is not required anymore. You can actually scale up your sales orders in multiple and suddenly this whole operation is over. Similarly the SDR part, you have just had the meeting.

[00:08:32] You have the presumed transcript or the five-page transcript. Earlier someone was required to look at that full transcript find out the right things to operate in the SDR and go and add those action items on the CRM to remind us that there is an anything.

[00:08:45] Put that to alternative air system, it's in the flow works and you find all those actions for you and it will also go and update those things in the CRM, in the emails, in the calendar's way. That's how systems are basically,

[00:08:58] it just removes the redundant requirement of a human to understand something, understand the content and understand the internet. So what's the range of apps that flow works the most? Right now it's already integrated with the whole of Google Suite. So it's email, Google Calendar, Google Sheet, Google Drive

[00:09:16] and also it's connected to Scarrant. So sales for the house for the two meters, Scarrant is a vector for right now. Frontend is connected to Slack. So you can talk to this whole experience using Slack directly. In the near future we are also coming out

[00:09:31] with our own web UI where you'll also not be dependent on Slack, it will actually even traffic back. And are there any other apps which are on the horizon for integration? Yeah, bunch of them.

[00:09:44] So if the aim that we have with for us is to make work easy for salespeople or salespeople across the globe, we are adding more and more sales tools. So starting with tools like Outreach, tools like GOM, Fireflies, Zoom for example, Microsoft's ecosystem, Dynamics, the horizon is endless.

[00:10:04] In the next six months we definitely have a bunch of tools in the contact or lead generation domain getting higher. So essentially things like Apollo, things like Outreach, GOM, and again in the meeting experience domain like Zoom. These are the first few tools that are being integrated.

[00:10:23] Got it, got it. So Sathak if we were to narrow down your target market while we understand your aim is to enhance productivity for sales organizations, could you specify exactly who you are targeting with your value propositions? So again sales, the understanding that we actually have

[00:10:40] is end to end sales organizations can benefit from this. But again the biggest advantage that any team will get out of this is the team that has high touch sales and have long-term sales. Let me explain a little bit about what is high touch sales

[00:10:54] and what is long-term sales. High touch sales is basically a company that doesn't do just sales, you know, buy or sell or send out videos. It's actually someone who is basically having a salesman going on a call and doing the same.

[00:11:07] And then a longer sales cycle is something where there is not one call that just basically ends into a conversion but rather there are multiple sales for data needed to get those conversions. Now a few examples of the industries that have this are essentially software industry, insurance industry,

[00:11:23] bank, a tech, right? So essentially a lot of those industries, again, the focus right now is right now we are focusing on the US market and the Australian market. Because again there's the higher print capacity for these markets for software, productivity softwares like Flowers.

[00:11:39] There we are specifically targeting BFSI and software industry. So from all these industries could you give us the names of some of your existing customers that have benefited from Flowers so far? So we have a lot of businesses going on right now

[00:11:54] but a few that have been converted. Our companies like Contact Out, they are actually a lead judgment company that we might be integrating very soon as well. Then we have companies like Phini, Markoah, Unstripped, Aina who are already using our solutions.

[00:12:09] So Sathya, let's talk about the user experience a little bit. So tell me how intuitive is Chloe for new users and what kind of onboarding process do you have in place to ensure a very smooth transition if any company wants to integrate FlowWorks in their operations?

[00:12:24] So we have this saying that using Chloe is as simple as talking to our human beings. That's the aim that we have right. So this is generally where the aim which we started with, the way we started start telling all Chloe is that it's an AI employee.

[00:12:41] Now what should you be expecting of an employee is the same thing that you expected out of Chloe. It's very good to know, you just start starting to it. So the onboarding Chloe is very simple. You log in with Google or you log in with your email ID,

[00:12:54] whichever you see you prefer. Then you go in, you have an invite code because we only are letting in right now private beta customers. We do not have a public access available right now because again, we want to basically have this controlled

[00:13:06] when we're going out of the market. But once you have that in, very simply just go to three clicks, which is three clicks. One click is basically with saying yes to Google's integration like Google works with integration. Second year is to a Slack integration

[00:13:23] and third year is to a CRM integration that you need. Three buttons within five minutes, you are ready to do things. And now what you simply have to do, to Slack, you'll find Chloe ready to be there already having every context that it requires

[00:13:36] because it's already connected to your Google and your CRM's workspaces. Start chatting right in plain English. Say hi and start having a conversation. That's it. Amazing. When you model by inside the tell us how does flow work start AI monetize its platform.

[00:13:52] So we actually charge a per user per month on a per month basis. So currently we charge $100 per user per month. Or if you're taking an animal packet, it's $1000. So it's 17% $83 per month. That's what it comes out to. And it's simple right with this, what you get is

[00:14:11] in the email campaigning part, we limit their only start a little bit like the email campaign. So every month you get 250 emails or in a year, you get 3000 email campaigns that we basically try to do it for the search. If you want one more email campaign,

[00:14:25] you can basically put an add on and apart from that unlimited sales operations calls. So within the unlimited updates, unlimited inbox management and but unlimited email management and so on. Right? So that's basically the simple. Got it. And would you be willing to share any note for

[00:14:42] the business numbers or metrics that you are particularly proud of? Yeah. The random way was supposed to be a magic pill and for flow works users, it is. So a typical user with flow was saved around 18% of the daily working hours where they were earlier

[00:14:58] spending on doing all this work with us. One and a half hours to be exact. Every day is what they save right now. Over 70% users when asked if we take our flow, how will you feel? They were very resistant to it.

[00:15:14] In fact, they will not be very happy. That future comes in this right? So yeah, we are very happy with the users. Growth has been significant and I think the best thing that is now coming out because I mean we are

[00:15:29] in a little bit of a safe right now is now we are also seeing people's like teams sales numbers go up directly. Right? So around 20 to 25% increase in sales in leads is something that we are seeing because now they're having a limited number of bandwidth people

[00:15:49] and basically who are managing the sales calls is just going on. People are not losing on calls. People are getting back, getting back to customers at time. More leads, more leads. They are actually getting to do the real work which you are getting paid for so amazing.

[00:16:06] So where is FlowWorks based out of in India? So in India we are based out of Bangalore but technically we actually are a delivered cooperation. So we were a 500 company of friend 23 batch. Hence we are a delivered cooperation CECO. We have a subsidiary based out of Bangalore except

[00:16:24] where the whole team is. So you said you have a co-founder right? Could you introduce him to us? So my co-founder name is Sudeep Thaviswar. Amazing technical guy. He is the one who has made everything here possible. IIT Kharagpur top of his bag 2016.

[00:16:41] Later on he went and was in Golden Sachs. Actually the one who was working in the risk team trying to prevent 2008 not happening again using AI basically by the way. Then has built out his first company and Philly Labs where he was automating

[00:16:57] umpiring processes and umpiring process in cricket because he was an avid cricket fan. Too bad he realized later on that you know well hey people love the drama of Thadampa. He did not want to remove the empire. But yeah he did his funds for that as well.

[00:17:14] He actually goes to the pitains for that. Later he worked as the proud manager who led the GST project at ClearTechs and which is right now being used by millions of SMEs across India. 21, 222 we started from this. Speaking of fundraising only. Do you have any investors on board?

[00:17:35] So yeah we have already raised around 1.5 million dollars in funding in 2023. Y Combinator led the round there. Sensei is a notable investor who also led that round. We have very notable investors who actually became a part of that round. Investors like Beyond Capital, Endurance Capital, Tinku 8,

[00:17:56] HyperCircle and a couple of others. And are you in the process of raising capital now? Not right now but in six months. We actually are in an amazing growth spree. We want to capitalize on that and we have very good investor interest coming in because

[00:18:14] Y Combinator generally we are doing really well for some of our customers. So yeah in November is when we start a series A process. So Sathak with you and Sudipta what is your total team strength as of now? 12 people along with the two corners.

[00:18:34] Most of them are engineers. Just one more marketing person apart from me. Okay and are there any specific positions that you are looking to hire? We are looking at marketing pro-marketing right now and somewhere who can help us with AI.

[00:18:48] So we are an AI company, we are always looking for AI talent. If there's any good people who are looking to work in the cutting edge, literally like the cutting edge space who are interested in working on new novel models.

[00:19:02] By the way FlowWorks actually works on our own proprietary model called FlowOne. So it's not out there. It's a very good model. So if someone is interested in that space if someone who is going to AI definitely just reach out to me

[00:19:16] or reach out to Sudipta as a founder and the second piece is marketing people who can help us with AI. Yes guys, go ahead. This is your chance. Okay so Sathya we are almost towards the end of this conversation. So tell us are there any exciting updates or

[00:19:32] developments on the horizon for FlowWorks? Like what can we expect in the next three to six months? I think FlowWorks actually the most exciting things that actually happen right now which is the public beta launch. We just started that on 15th of April which we started the first

[00:19:48] take-off that and we have a flurry of customers coming in. So the things that you should look for in the next six months is essentially how we scale up to multiple million dollars of inter-income have some of the best customers using us and how FlowWorks

[00:20:04] actually redefines how people are selling globally anything. The aim is to change the way people work. We have been working in a very inefficient way for the last hundreds of hundred plus years since the official work office introduced. We want to basically make

[00:20:24] so that everyone in this world is actually doing what they are supposed to do or what they are paid to do not the external, not updating the trackers. Absolutely. So Sathya considering that we have plans to promote this discussion this conversation to large enterprises potential investors, tech giants

[00:20:42] and a broader startup ecosystem is there anything specific that you would like to mention that could help you find any external assistance you require like think of this as your call for support. Perfect. I am a startup co-founder always a co-founder. So yes potential investors

[00:21:00] definitely if you guys are interested in the RedEvi are looking at something which is sitting out of India changing the world. You know David versus Goliath Stone reach out to us we are the perfect divots. Number 2 for customers yes if you are a company looking for generating solutions

[00:21:20] something which can help your sales team be better. I give you the number. 80% growth is what we are getting already from our customers. You can have that too right. So if you are looking for that do reach out to us. We are looking for

[00:21:34] good customers who can start using our solution is ASAP scale is not a problem. We just want to get this going and specifically if you are also looking at something if you are selling or you actually have a team which is global our solution is perfect for you

[00:21:52] because the fun fact is that it is not language bound. We are looking at a solution. You can talk about English, French, Latin some obscure languages no one has heard of as well. It can understand reply and do everything you know last but not the least

[00:22:08] if you could take a moment to look back as a founder. Tell us what has been the most rewarding aspect of building flow works for you if you could just pinpoint three factors that have played a very significant role in propelling your business's growth

[00:22:24] along the way. So what would they be The most rewarding part has been the team. I think this is what Vinod Khosya said I will paraphrase what he said great companies are built by great teams it's a very powerful sentence because great team is not

[00:22:42] a great individual. It's a team it's a collective of some amazing individuals who are scattered around the world somehow brought it together with a single mission and they now are running towards making that mission a reality or that future reality that is the most rewarding. I have

[00:22:58] the best people in the industry actually working with me the best candidate like it doesn't matter you are from IIT whatever you are from this doesn't matter as long as you are passionate and you can find a place in this company it works wonderfully because

[00:23:14] you can basically become a part of a change which is so powerful and as I am sitting there in that team that revolve that basically power of change comes to me which has been so the most rewarding three most important factors not one of them definitely the team

[00:23:32] any founder right now who is investing their time in anything the first thing they should be investing is a factor and these are the co-founder we work at the right co-founder and continue putting the company number two which has greatly helped us is the charity

[00:23:48] we started in 2020 but we were not expecting the world to know about chativity we thought it would be hard to say how will I tell someone that he is an employee that can do all this stuff so in the beginning

[00:24:02] we came along and now no one asks how will this actually happen we just tell it think about chativity think sales was a power by chativity and suddenly you just understand then we are like you know we are not able to take that

[00:24:14] so that is number two and number three I will say the investors they do matter a lot what I mean by that is think about the investors who are coming in your journey as your partners if you have a good partner obviously investors would not be

[00:24:30] as invested in the company as a team is right but they will come in at the moments where you need them where an external party is needed for some kind of extra external maybe a customer needs it could be getting you back to the right problem

[00:24:46] basically helping you with solutions and your partners right so great investors across the world obviously vice-e needs no introduction but it's worth it people do ask me a lot of times is vice-e worth it I am like the expert it's you know vice-e apart from that

[00:25:04] I definitely will check the morale endurance, sincure, beyond all the investors that I have have been super helpful so getting good investors early home is really very well said and on that note let's move on to a rapid fire round

[00:25:20] so I have prepared just five questions for you are you ready sure question number one a book that you would like to recommend to the youth that has greatly influenced your career journey hard things about hard things okay question number two

[00:25:32] which productivity tool or app do you find most helpful in your daily work I knew it why did I even ask okay question number three a fun fact about you that most people don't know yet I love cooking I have been experimenting through my life

[00:25:50] I am not a covert cooker like basically people who learnt cooking after I have been someone who has been cooking since early childhood and it's one of the best recipes in fact I purposefully give my cook holidays on days so that I can cook myself that's amazing

[00:26:08] okay question number four so there is a saying that don't tell me who you are just tell me what brands you use so describe your skills using just the names of three brands fossil apple that was quick okay last but not the least

[00:26:26] what is your one piece of advice for the young audience watching this change after your dreams otherwise you will regret it through your life entrepreneurship is fun exciting if you want to do it but if not whatever your dream is just run after it

[00:26:42] don't wait don't look for validation from others just look for validation from yourself great thank you so much Satsang and you know one last thing before we wrap this up I want you to make a wish for your startup out loud

[00:26:54] that you hope comes true in the near future any wish so billion dollars in revenue in the next 5 years well here is to flowverse.ai where every interaction every task automated brings us one step closer to a more efficient and collaborative tomorrow all the very best

[00:27:14] and thank you so much for joining us thank you that was amazing being here if you would like to stay updated with the latest developments and business insights from flowverse.ai make sure to follow their channel on follow.us slash start-up thank you for tuning in

[00:27:34] if you want to listen to more such interviews with innovative new founders don't forget to visit www.follow.us slash start-ups and if you want to showcase your startup feel free to drop me a note at ankita.pahava at the rate follow daughters

[00:27:48] we'd love to hear your story you