In this episode of the Thrifty Titans Podcast, we had an engaging conversation with Krish Advani, the co-founder and CTO of QuickWork, a Mumbai-based startup specializing in no-code, real-time enterprise automation solutions featuring over 1,000 pre-integrated apps.
Our discussion revolved around how business automation tools can enable a single-person company to scale effortlessly, the essential aspects every solopreneur or freelancer should automate using QuickWork's enterprise automation platform, the ways in which marketing automation contributes to enhanced customer retention, and so much more valuable information on business automation.
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00:00:09
Saikat Pyne: Hello. I'm sa marketer, creative and all around Alpha nerd.
00:00:15
Saikat Pyne: Welcome to the you incorporated podcast On this show, I
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Saikat Pyne: catch up with some truly bad ass entrepreneurs, business leaders,
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Saikat Pyne: marketers and content creators to discuss thoughts, stories and ideas
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Saikat Pyne: at the intersection of business influence and design. If you
00:00:32
Saikat Pyne: want to stay ahead of the curve and build your
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Saikat Pyne: brand your voice your way, you're in the right place.
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Saikat Pyne: Please join me in welcoming Krish Advani, the co-founder and
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Saikat Pyne: chief technical officer of Quick Work, a Mumbai based startup
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Saikat Pyne: that offers no code real-time enterprise automation solutions with 1000
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Saikat Pyne: plus pre integrated apps with users in 130 plus countries.
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Saikat Pyne: Quick work is helping multiple brands simplify business and marketing automation.
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Saikat Pyne: Welcome to the show, Chris.
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Krish Advani: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
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Saikat Pyne: OK, Chris. So for the uninitiated, what exactly is business automation?
00:01:36
Krish Advani: Sure, it's an overloaded world. OK, so it sounds extremely
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Krish Advani: complicated to say, business automation, however, what pretty much it
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Krish Advani: is trying to automate your redundant work or work that
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Krish Advani: you were, I would normally do manually and get them
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Krish Advani: to be stitched together in a way where you simply
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Krish Advani: don't have to put in any more efforts in that anymore.
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Krish Advani: So it's like somebody else is taking care of it
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Krish Advani: for you,
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Krish Advani: where all of your business logic of what you wanna
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Krish Advani: accomplish is already accommodated in these services. So that's what
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Krish Advani: I would define. Business automation.
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Saikat Pyne: That sounds really simple. How can business automation really help
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Saikat Pyne: somebody who's just founding a startup? Some somebody who's maybe
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Saikat Pyne: a solo or just a single person company? How can
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Saikat Pyne: it help them?
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Krish Advani: Sure, so one of the key target audience for a
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Krish Advani: business automation per se is generally people who don't really
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Krish Advani: have enough resources in house to do these things on
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Krish Advani: their own. They are focused on either growing their revenue,
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Krish Advani: getting more customers and building a more engaging product or
00:02:41
Krish Advani: service for them. Business process automation is generally the most
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Krish Advani: important thing, because once they have figured out, what is
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Krish Advani: it they want to accomplish?
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Krish Advani: It's best for them to figure out a way to
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Krish Advani: automate it next. So once they've done that there, there's
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Krish Advani: no need to do it again because there are better
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Krish Advani: and bigger things to do, or a sore specifically who
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Krish Advani: already go through kind of a lot of hardships while
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Krish Advani: building their their organisation, their startup or whatever you wish
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Krish Advani: to call it, So I could give an example where
00:03:09
Krish Advani: you might have figured out that OK, Sending an email
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Krish Advani: campaign to circle Target audience makes sense, but you don't
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Krish Advani: want to go on on on your Gmail account or
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Krish Advani: your outlook and just go and send emails one by one.
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Krish Advani: To these people, which would be extremely slow, you won't
00:03:25
Krish Advani: be able to reach to the respective target audience. You'll
00:03:27
Krish Advani: have to invest a lot of your personal time in it,
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Krish Advani: so I believe this is just an example. But there
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Krish Advani: are so many areas that I believe we will discuss
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Krish Advani: in the future. Now, in this call where this could
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Krish Advani: really benefit an entrepreneur.
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Saikat Pyne: If I am a solo preneurs considering business automation, is
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Saikat Pyne: it necessary for me to be an engineer or be
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Saikat Pyne: able to at least be able to code? Let's say
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Krish Advani: sure. So wait. Going to a more broader aspect of
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Krish Advani: these no code low code systems, right? So you pretty
00:03:59
Krish Advani: much see that there is no code and no code
00:04:01
Krish Advani: for lots of different industries, and verticals like you can
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Krish Advani: even design a website. You can design data pieces now
00:04:08
Krish Advani: without code or build integrations like what we do without code.
00:04:12
Krish Advani: The whole goal of these no core movement is pretty
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Krish Advani: much to ensure that we get business users instead of
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Krish Advani: your I T users in here. And business users don't
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Krish Advani: necessarily know how to core. They simply know what they
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Krish Advani: wish to accomplish. And they want to figure out a
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Krish Advani: way where they can convert their ideas or imaginations in
00:04:32
Krish Advani: their mind
00:04:33
Krish Advani: into something more visual and accomplishable and manageable, where they
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Krish Advani: don't have to dig in into the code view aing
00:04:39
Krish Advani: logs and events and all of those complicated things, which
00:04:41
Krish Advani: are mainly restricted to I t. Executors or developers of
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Krish Advani: that passion. So the answer to that question is absolutely
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Krish Advani: no right. There are places or areas where you will
00:04:52
Krish Advani: run into challenges where coding is perhaps the only way
00:04:56
Krish Advani: to solve those problems. But those problems tend to come
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Krish Advani: very infrequently, so
00:05:03
Krish Advani: I believe that it is certainly something that a business
00:05:05
Krish Advani: user can easily consume and at least automate 50 to 60%
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Krish Advani: of their work without any external assistance from, let's say,
00:05:13
Krish Advani: a developer, what
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Saikat Pyne: are the couple of things that
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Saikat Pyne: every solo Rene should automate right out of the gate.
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Saikat Pyne: What are a couple of the lowest hanging fruits? So
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Saikat Pyne: to say that you should be automating if you're willing
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Saikat Pyne: to save time and money for yourself?
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Krish Advani: Sure. So, for instance, OK, 11 thing that they should
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Krish Advani: automate is their time management and organisation, right, because that's
00:05:39
Krish Advani: the most important thing,
00:05:40
Krish Advani: whether it could be integrating with services like Calendar or
00:05:44
Krish Advani: with your Google calendar with something else along with it,
00:05:47
Krish Advani: that's absolutely essential, right? It's time management, I believe, is
00:05:50
Krish Advani: the most important thing for Rene or or an entrepreneur
00:05:54
Krish Advani: set of entrepreneurs who might be building integrations.
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Krish Advani: Second is customer service and customer success. So whether you
00:06:02
Krish Advani: are using your own inbox to accept support queries, which
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Krish Advani: could be the case for most of the people who
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Krish Advani: are getting started at the moment and don't really want
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Krish Advani: to invest in a customer support tool like zendesk or
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Krish Advani: freshness or any of those systems,
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Krish Advani: then it makes a lot of sense. OK, when an
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Krish Advani: email comes in my inbox, OK, let me just at
00:06:21
Krish Advani: least give an automated reply to that user and then
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Krish Advani: I can probably have somebody on my team or myself respond.
00:06:28
Krish Advani: But at least there's some initial response in place in
00:06:31
Krish Advani: a zendesk or a fresh desk as well. They can
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Krish Advani: pretty much set up, let's say a Gmail or an
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Krish Advani: outlook automation. And they say, OK, when I receive an
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Krish Advani: email in my inbox, I want to send an automated
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Krish Advani: reply in a professional manner, which is well described,
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Krish Advani: which pretty much gives them. An indication is at least
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Krish Advani: as an initial response right.
00:06:49
Krish Advani: Furthermore, if you want to increase your reach right to people,
00:06:53
Krish Advani: WhatsApp happens to be a pretty popular medium to deal
00:06:57
Krish Advani: with your customers and users. So most of these solo
00:07:00
Krish Advani: preneurs that lined up on our system they just built
00:07:03
Krish Advani: really beautiful customer service bars, which they pretty much
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Krish Advani: help the customer engage on WhatsApp while solving their customer
00:07:13
Krish Advani: requests or queries that they might have with regarding their
00:07:16
Krish Advani: products or services. So it just becomes extremely easy for
00:07:20
Krish Advani: an Rene to invest pretty much close to nothing, because
00:07:23
Krish Advani: most of these services are
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Krish Advani: and establish these three or four integrations that I just
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Krish Advani: specified to gain a lot of productivity for a very
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Krish Advani: low investment after
00:07:34
Saikat Pyne: you've automated these three most basic things. What is the
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Saikat Pyne: next step of automation after this one? You
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Krish Advani: see, one of the things that people start doing is
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Krish Advani: people tend to have difficulties in identifying what to write
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Krish Advani: next about. Or how do I
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Krish Advani: perhaps figure out a way to emphasise on a specific
00:07:55
Krish Advani: topic which has suddenly become trending in the areas that
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Krish Advani: I'm of course, interested in as a as an entrepreneur
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Krish Advani: or solo? Right? So people tend to configure, alerts and
00:08:04
Krish Advani: triggers tweets hashtags on Facebook, twitter and reddit
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Krish Advani: and get informed on what people are generally talking about
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Krish Advani: and what are the trends in the areas where they
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Krish Advani: are interested in. They also establish integrations with services. Let's
00:08:19
Krish Advani: say Cora stack overflow and other tools and forums where
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Krish Advani: people tend to ask questions where your product could be
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Krish Advani: the solution of. So they made those things and get
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Krish Advani: an alert and then get informed so that they can
00:08:32
Krish Advani: just go ahead and take an appropriate action, right? One
00:08:35
Krish Advani: of the other key areas where we see that there
00:08:38
Krish Advani: is
00:08:40
Krish Advani: a lot of benefit is in auto and auto writing
00:08:43
Krish Advani: content or auto authoring these content, right? So people tend
00:08:47
Krish Advani: to also connect with tools like jasper dot a I.
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Krish Advani: And there are many such other where they pretty much
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Krish Advani: say OK, as soon as I get a topic heading,
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Krish Advani: let me take the tags and the keywords So that
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Krish Advani: message in Auto generate and auto author a non plagiarised
00:09:01
Krish Advani: article using great tools like the ones that I mentioned,
00:09:05
Krish Advani: like Jasper A. I
00:09:06
Krish Advani: and generate an article where you will have at least
00:09:08
Krish Advani: a basic wire frame ready where you can just develop
00:09:11
Krish Advani: more on those ideas.
00:09:13
Krish Advani: So it's pretty incredible what people can accomplish with automation.
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Krish Advani: This is just like scratching the surface of what you
00:09:19
Krish Advani: can do. But if you are, if you really want
00:09:20
Krish Advani: to go even further sales and marketing automation with services
00:09:25
Krish Advani: like Lua and connecting your C R M on top
00:09:28
Krish Advani: and you don't even need to have AC R M.
00:09:29
Krish Advani: You could just have a Google sheet where you say OK,
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Krish Advani: when a lead is inserted in the sheet, send it
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Krish Advani: to Lucia and rich it for me. Get me more
00:09:37
Krish Advani: information about the customer over the Web and send a
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Krish Advani: more personalised email as an outcome
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Krish Advani: as an output rather to the lead, so that maybe
00:09:46
Krish Advani: you can get a better conversion rate, right? So these
00:09:49
Krish Advani: are some of the more slightly more advanced
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Krish Advani: integrations that people can build if they're trying to start
00:09:55
Krish Advani: a business or already have a running business and want
00:09:57
Krish Advani: to make it more productive and better.
00:10:00
Saikat Pyne: Sure, sure, sure. Let's dig a bit into marketing automation creation.
00:10:06
Saikat Pyne: Marketing automation for people who are uninitiated would just seem
00:10:13
Saikat Pyne: to be, in some ways, scheduling messages. What can I
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Saikat Pyne: really automate in marketing where it operates as
00:10:22
Saikat Pyne: an entity
00:10:23
Krish Advani: of its own? Honestly, marketing is a space where you
00:10:27
Krish Advani: generally have to invest a little bit to get some
00:10:30
Krish Advani: outcome right. So perhaps if it means that you have
00:10:33
Krish Advani: to run campaigns and advertisements, or maybe even doing what
00:10:38
Krish Advani: generally people
00:10:38
Krish Advani: tend to do in those kind of stages, which is
00:10:40
Krish Advani: pre Series A and Series A is to do more
00:10:43
Krish Advani: an outbound kind of communication. They would not rather go
00:10:46
Krish Advani: and spend on inbound or operations because they might not
00:10:49
Krish Advani: really have enough content to engage the user when they
00:10:53
Krish Advani: lined up on their service of
00:10:55
Krish Advani: so focusing only on the outbound. The best things that
00:10:58
Krish Advani: they could automate is automated email sending and follow up. Correct.
00:11:02
Krish Advani: We all know it it and scientifically proven that simply
00:11:06
Krish Advani: sending out an email once to your prospect may not
00:11:11
Krish Advani: yield you the best quantity of responses. But setting an
00:11:14
Krish Advani: automation wage if there are no responses automatically follow up
00:11:18
Krish Advani: with a subsequent message
00:11:20
Krish Advani: could be immensely helpful for such a startup. Uh, also
00:11:24
Krish Advani: being being clever and getting to know whether they are
00:11:27
Krish Advani: actually even opening those emails or not.
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Krish Advani: Have they spent enough time on it? Have they visited
00:11:33
Krish Advani: your link?
00:11:35
Krish Advani: Our website after opening that email gives you some indication
00:11:40
Krish Advani: of the level of interest, right? So tracking those kind
00:11:43
Krish Advani: of metrics with these automation makes a lot of sense, right?
00:11:46
Krish Advani: One of the other areas is consolidation because you are
00:11:50
Krish Advani: gonna try multiple channels as you go along. You might
00:11:53
Krish Advani: say that. OK, emails
00:11:54
Krish Advani: are not working for me. Maybe I'm more of a
00:11:57
Krish Advani: B to B player and in the m v p
00:11:59
Krish Advani: s that I've designed. Maybe I should try LinkedIn campaigns
00:12:03
Krish Advani: and LinkedIn in email or LinkedIn campaigns over all, running
00:12:07
Krish Advani: LinkedIn specified messages that rose in land
00:12:10
Krish Advani: to people's inboxes, so you might be running two experiments,
00:12:13
Krish Advani: and you might want to consolidate these responses into a
00:12:16
Krish Advani: single place. That's where you can also automate that part.
00:12:20
Krish Advani: And maybe honestly, as I said, your data source for
00:12:22
Krish Advani: all this information would be just as well be a
00:12:25
Krish Advani: per sheet. You don't really necessarily need to invest in
00:12:28
Krish Advani: an expensive product or a tool, which will charge you
00:12:31
Krish Advani: thousands of dollars a year to perform these experiments. You
00:12:34
Krish Advani: can say OK, once I get a response or an
00:12:36
Krish Advani: open email, Let me just put this into a Google
00:12:39
Krish Advani: sheet and similarly with LinkedIn. If somebody responds, let me
00:12:42
Krish Advani: just plug it in my Google sheet and maybe generate
00:12:45
Krish Advani: charts and graphs, which gives me an indication of where
00:12:48
Krish Advani: should I invest more in and what campaigns have been
00:12:51
Krish Advani: working for me the best. So these are some areas
00:12:53
Krish Advani: where
00:12:55
Krish Advani: in very beginning stages, with very minimal investment, and entrepreneurs
00:12:59
Krish Advani: can use these
00:13:00
Saikat Pyne: automation for the uninitiated. When Chris and I were speaking
00:13:04
Saikat Pyne: about outbound and inbound marketing, outbound marketing refers to any
00:13:09
Saikat Pyne: kind of marketing where a company is initiating the conversation
00:13:12
Saikat Pyne: and it sends this message out to an audience, right?
00:13:16
Saikat Pyne: So outbound marketing. The examples could be some of the
00:13:19
Saikat Pyne: more traditional forms of marketing and advertising, like TV commercials,
00:13:22
Saikat Pyne: radio ad print ads. It could, of course, also be
00:13:25
Saikat Pyne: cold calling, sending out emails right? Inbound marketing is the
00:13:29
Saikat Pyne: opposite where the customers are finding maybe when they need
00:13:34
Saikat Pyne: you or you you're channelling traffic to your
00:13:37
Saikat Pyne: so it could be something like, let's say, paid search,
00:13:39
Saikat Pyne: marketing or content marketing, or maybe opt in email, marketing
00:13:43
Saikat Pyne: stuff like that. So how does quick work enable this journey?
00:13:49
Krish Advani: One of the key things at quick word that we
00:13:51
Krish Advani: focus upon is to be different by being a real
00:13:55
Krish Advani: time system. We understood very well that most of the
00:13:58
Krish Advani: use cases are in marketing that you're going to implement,
00:14:01
Krish Advani: require it to be either real time or at least
00:14:04
Krish Advani: semi real time for you to get insights. And this
00:14:07
Krish Advani: is where Wick has incorporated and built enough integrations with
00:14:13
Krish Advani: thousands of applications, many of which are marketing oriented, which
00:14:18
Krish Advani: work in real time
00:14:20
Krish Advani: so that you can see exactly how your systems are
00:14:23
Krish Advani: performing at any moment of event and let me just
00:14:25
Krish Advani: give you the value aspect of being real time. So,
00:14:29
Krish Advani: for instance, if anybody has ever used Google Analytics, which
00:14:32
Krish Advani: is a common and fairly easy to, uh, tool to
00:14:35
Krish Advani: get started and plug it in in your website,
00:14:37
Krish Advani: you generally get real Time Analytics section in these kind
00:14:41
Krish Advani: of services. And the reason why they give you that
00:14:43
Krish Advani: real time insight is for you to see what is
00:14:47
Krish Advani: working with minor changes that you are going and doing
00:14:50
Krish Advani: in your campaigns, whether inbound or outbound like you, so
00:14:53
Krish Advani: rightly explain where it gives you the ability to see OK,
00:14:56
Krish Advani: just making one change and sending an email to 1000
00:14:58
Krish Advani: people gives me a better impact to return to my
00:15:01
Krish Advani: website instantly by doing so and so forth. Campaign correct.
00:15:06
Krish Advani: So the real time becomes a huge value for these customers.
00:15:11
Krish Advani: So apart from that, as I mentioned integrations with tools
00:15:15
Krish Advani: of which are inbound and outbound, both oriented like you will,
00:15:18
Krish Advani: you'll find Facebook at leads. You'll find Facebook Messenger WhatsApp.
00:15:23
Krish Advani: You'll find send grade and many other such applications around
00:15:27
Krish Advani: 100 and 50 of them, which are in the marketing space.
00:15:30
Krish Advani: Some of them as I mentioned even just write the
00:15:32
Krish Advani: content for you so that you can even reduce your
00:15:34
Krish Advani: work even further, which is tools like jasper dot a i.
00:15:37
Krish Advani: Those are the things that quick work has to offer
00:15:40
Krish Advani: out of the box
00:15:41
Krish Advani: to our users, our customers, so that they can leverage
00:15:45
Krish Advani: marketing automation to the very best. Further, we have built
00:15:50
Krish Advani: a store of marketing automation. So sometimes what happens is
00:15:55
Krish Advani: a Rene or an entrepreneur. Getting started
00:15:57
Krish Advani: lacks the knowledge vector of what they need to do,
00:16:01
Krish Advani: perhaps in marketing or what they might not know what
00:16:05
Krish Advani: will work or what may not work. So they have
00:16:06
Krish Advani: to experiment with tonnes of combination.
00:16:09
Krish Advani: So one of the things that we do is provide
00:16:12
Krish Advani: something called the Journey Store, and the Journey Store is
00:16:14
Krish Advani: basically a collection of integrations that are prebuilt for entrepreneurs
00:16:19
Krish Advani: and sore preneurs, where they can simply just click, import
00:16:22
Krish Advani: and start using it where they don't have to sync
00:16:24
Krish Advani: or analyse. Whether how to build these services, which apps
00:16:27
Krish Advani: to use. This kind of service will help you get
00:16:30
Krish Advani: started instantly, further reducing the knowledge of technicalities or a
00:16:36
Krish Advani: programming knowledge that you require to get started with
00:16:39
Krish Advani: an integration like that. So I believe that's what quick
00:16:42
Krish Advani: work has to be. And
00:16:43
Saikat Pyne: how is quick work different from other players in the
00:16:48
Saikat Pyne: segment when it comes to automation, when you're speaking about
00:16:52
Saikat Pyne: players like Z PR or Integra Mat, how is quick work? Different?
00:16:58
Krish Advani: Sure so, First of all, Z, APR and Integra are
00:17:01
Krish Advani: great tools, right? They have been around for quite some time,
00:17:05
Krish Advani: and they have built a real good ecosystem for entrepreneurs
00:17:08
Krish Advani: and sores. Where I do see lacking in these companies,
00:17:13
Krish Advani: it's not generally lacking. I would say it's that they're
00:17:16
Krish Advani: designed to do simple things right, Like where you would say,
00:17:22
Krish Advani: I want to perform two or three step workflows where
00:17:25
Krish Advani: it's my operation just ends there.
00:17:27
Krish Advani: Then there is nothing wrong with choosing a zap or
00:17:30
Krish Advani: an integral man. Their problem really becomes in when you
00:17:34
Krish Advani: start to grow. As an entrepreneur, you start to see
00:17:37
Krish Advani: that there is so many limitations that you start jumping
00:17:40
Krish Advani: into where you can't simply develop a more complex workflow
00:17:45
Krish Advani: when required to improve your process. So when you start
00:17:48
Krish Advani: using it and you've built a few workflows,
00:17:51
Krish Advani: you start to realise that's the biggest problem or challenge
00:17:54
Krish Advani: that you start to face. Second problem. As I mentioned,
00:17:56
Krish Advani: one of the key areas that quick book focuses on
00:17:59
Krish Advani: is being real time. Having real time gives you the
00:18:02
Krish Advani: ability to work with messaging systems, for example, which Zaire
00:18:06
Krish Advani: simply doesn't choose to offer. So you will never see,
00:18:09
Krish Advani: let's say, a communication channel like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger
00:18:12
Krish Advani: as a trigger where you can build a conversational flow
00:18:16
Krish Advani: for your customers for better customer service or engagement.
00:18:20
Krish Advani: And third, I would say that
00:18:22
Krish Advani: the pricing really does hurt a solo. Rene and an
00:18:26
Krish Advani: entrepreneur was just getting started with this kind of a service, right?
00:18:29
Krish Advani: So zai at least the day of this recording of
00:18:33
Krish Advani: this podcast, and they charge by the step
00:18:37
Krish Advani: right? So if you perform one email sending, that's just
00:18:41
Krish Advani: one email send. That's one step, and they will charge
00:18:43
Krish Advani: you X amount of dollars for sending and performing that operation.
00:18:47
Krish Advani: And the prices start at a much higher pricing, where
00:18:52
Krish Advani: you have to pretty much just commit $20 to just
00:18:55
Krish Advani: do 10 or some of the art steps. And don't
00:18:57
Krish Advani: quote me on that, but you can check it on
00:18:59
Krish Advani: their website. So what happens in that kind of scenario
00:19:01
Krish Advani: is you don't have enough capability to experiment. Play around
00:19:06
Krish Advani: at all. So you are pretty much stuck with whatever
00:19:09
Krish Advani: they have to offer within those restrictions, along with the
00:19:11
Krish Advani: fact that you'll be paying a very premium fee for it.
00:19:15
Krish Advani: Why quick? What it does really differently in this area
00:19:19
Krish Advani: is that we bill for transactions. So it's you can
00:19:24
Krish Advani: perform 10 steps in one transaction and you will be
00:19:28
Krish Advani: built just for the one transaction. So you're pretty much
00:19:31
Krish Advani: saying that what ZAPPIA has to offer in the $19
00:19:35
Krish Advani: plan you get it in the free plans. One single transaction. Uh,
00:19:40
Krish Advani: so it's like a huge sum of transactions that you're getting,
00:19:43
Krish Advani: which is, by default. You get 10 transaction free forever
00:19:47
Krish Advani: in quick work to get started,
00:19:49
Krish Advani: which is an incredible quantity of transaction. So most startups
00:19:52
Krish Advani: and most entrepreneurs who lined up on our system they
00:19:55
Krish Advani: are generally very happy, not ever upgrading from 10 transactions ever,
00:20:00
Krish Advani: and we are OK with that. That's something that has
00:20:02
Krish Advani: worked out for you, for them and us, for both,
00:20:04
Krish Advani: because they are able to drive decent traction in their companies,
00:20:08
Krish Advani: and so are we right. And we are able to
00:20:10
Krish Advani: create value in the lives of these entrepreneurs
00:20:13
Krish Advani: purely by offering this free pricing plan. So this this
00:20:16
Krish Advani: is the third area and the final one that I
00:20:18
Krish Advani: would like to mention is the severe lack of support, right?
00:20:23
Krish Advani: If you go to zap here and you are a
00:20:24
Krish Advani: new person over there and you can just go to
00:20:27
Krish Advani: YouTube and you learn more how to use zap here.
00:20:29
Krish Advani: But let's say if there's a use case that you
00:20:31
Krish Advani: wish to implement there, which is more specific to your requirements,
00:20:34
Krish Advani: and nobody else has built it out there,
00:20:37
Krish Advani: you don't really have anybody who you can ask a
00:20:39
Krish Advani: question to. You can't ask it to anybody in there
00:20:42
Krish Advani: unless you would just want to post it on the
00:20:44
Krish Advani: community and wait for several days or months if somebody
00:20:48
Krish Advani: even gives you a response over there, because that's somewhat
00:20:51
Krish Advani: depending on the community responding to you here, whether you
00:20:54
Krish Advani: are free or a paid customer,
00:20:56
Krish Advani: just ping us on the chat window on the right
00:20:58
Krish Advani: hand side corner and you'll get the assistance to at
00:21:00
Krish Advani: least get started with your 1st 5 10 workflows where
00:21:04
Krish Advani: you can at least start organising your company and automating
00:21:06
Krish Advani: your operations extremely well.
00:21:09
Krish Advani: So I believe these four areas is where I believe
00:21:12
Krish Advani: we differentiate significantly from zap here. There's a
00:21:15
Saikat Pyne: pretty exhaustive list on the website, but let's say by chance,
00:21:20
Saikat Pyne: the app that I want to use to to that
00:21:24
Saikat Pyne: I want to run this automation programme on is not
00:21:27
Saikat Pyne: on this APP directory. What is my best bet? Can
00:21:31
Saikat Pyne: I contact quick work for a custom workflow? How does
00:21:34
Saikat Pyne: that work out then?
00:21:35
Krish Advani: Sure, sure. So our teams have been aligned very well
00:21:39
Krish Advani: to ensure that we deliver integrations to our customers even
00:21:42
Krish Advani: though if we don't have them right, so it's just
00:21:45
Krish Advani: a ping it where you can just request our team
00:21:47
Krish Advani: to add a connector is what we call an app.
00:21:50
Krish Advani: A connector and you would get a connector within three
00:21:53
Krish Advani: working days up and running as I mentioned. Whether you
00:21:55
Krish Advani: are paid or a free customer, it doesn't really matter.
00:21:58
Krish Advani: At this moment. We have 1800 applications published on our
00:22:02
Krish Advani: service
00:22:03
Krish Advani: and we are adding roughly 25 to 30 per day
00:22:06
Krish Advani: and more per day. So we are gonna have a
00:22:09
Krish Advani: very exhaustive list of integrations already available. But the users
00:22:12
Krish Advani: are free to request for something that is more specific. Also,
00:22:17
Krish Advani: we understand that it might be possible that you just
00:22:20
Krish Advani: instantly want to start using your service and you are
00:22:23
Krish Advani: not OK waiting for three days for our team to turn.
00:22:26
Krish Advani: There are two things that you can do. You can
00:22:28
Krish Advani: even build your own connector. However, that will require technical expertise.
00:22:33
Krish Advani: Or second, you can use one of our universal connectors,
00:22:36
Krish Advani: which allows you to connect to any service by just
00:22:39
Krish Advani: plugging in in their API. I do realise that the
00:22:42
Krish Advani: last two options that I gave are
00:22:45
Krish Advani: technical, and they will require some level of technical expertise.
00:22:49
Krish Advani: But at least you are not enough options in case
00:22:52
Krish Advani: you are not OK, waiting for the three days that
00:22:55
Krish Advani: it takes to to us to develop launch tests and
00:22:59
Krish Advani: put it on production for it.
00:23:01
Saikat Pyne: Let's dig a bit into the new code aspect of
00:23:04
Saikat Pyne: quick work here, Chris, When I log into quick work,
00:23:09
Saikat Pyne: what is the simplest way for me to create an
00:23:13
Saikat Pyne: integration could you take me through how somebody could set
00:23:16
Saikat Pyne: something like this up?
00:23:18
Krish Advani: Sure. So let's start from the very beginning. If it's
00:23:20
Krish Advani: first of all, register, no credit card required, you can
00:23:24
Krish Advani: just jump in and log in into the product. All
00:23:26
Krish Advani: you have to do is plug in your email and
00:23:28
Krish Advani: you're good to go.
00:23:29
Krish Advani: Once you are in there, it will ask you to
00:23:31
Krish Advani: create a journey. That's what we call a workflow or
00:23:34
Krish Advani: an integration. They're all basically the same thing, but our
00:23:36
Krish Advani: nomenclature dictates it's a journey. So you click on the
00:23:39
Krish Advani: new journey button
00:23:41
Krish Advani: and you can directly start choosing. What is it going
00:23:43
Krish Advani: to be, your event? An event being? If this happens,
00:23:47
Krish Advani: that's your event, right? If this happens, you want to
00:23:49
Krish Advani: do something right. So that's your event. You can figure
00:23:52
Krish Advani: the event, which, let's, for the sake of example, take
00:23:55
Krish Advani: Gmail whenever I receive a new email in my Gmail.
00:23:59
Krish Advani: This should happen then in the action side, which is
00:24:02
Krish Advani: basically what should happen when there is a new email.
00:24:05
Krish Advani: You just I can choose from a list of apps,
00:24:07
Krish Advani: which you can just say OK once a new email
00:24:10
Krish Advani: comes in
00:24:10
Krish Advani: and it's coming to my support inbox, for example, respond
00:24:14
Krish Advani: back with by saying
00:24:15
Krish Advani: Hi x y z comma. We have received your request.
00:24:19
Krish Advani: We shall respond to you back in 24 hours. That's
00:24:21
Krish Advani: basically probably your first step, and you just hit the
00:24:24
Krish Advani: start workflow, and then you're good to go. Uh, it's
00:24:26
Krish Advani: as simple as that. So that's how you would get
00:24:28
Krish Advani: started with a one step workflow. Where it's all you're
00:24:31
Krish Advani: doing is when something happens. You do something else, and
00:24:34
Krish Advani: you don't need to stop that. Of course, you can grow.
00:24:36
Krish Advani: You can add
00:24:37
Krish Advani: more steps below it. You can just press the plus
00:24:40
Krish Advani: icon and keep on adding as more steps as you like,
00:24:42
Krish Advani: and go deep in in your workflow and perform these
00:24:45
Krish Advani: steps sequentially.
00:24:47
Krish Advani: That's how you would overall get started with quick
00:24:50
Saikat Pyne: work.
00:24:52
Saikat Pyne: And is it primarily Dragon drop connecting these apps? Or
00:24:55
Saikat Pyne: do I have to consider any other steps before the
00:24:58
Saikat Pyne: workflow is live authenticate to any enter a code? This
00:25:03
Saikat Pyne: that O. T. P. Is there any of that that involves?
00:25:05
Saikat Pyne: Certainly
00:25:06
Krish Advani: not. I do see the stress on the part of
00:25:08
Krish Advani: the O. T. P. s and I believe that we
00:25:10
Krish Advani: are all tired of entering O T. P s everywhere,
00:25:12
Krish Advani: but no certainly
00:25:13
Krish Advani: where we have taken our inspiration for building an interface
00:25:16
Krish Advani: like we our goal was to ensure that anybody should
00:25:20
Krish Advani: be able to build their workflow whether they are technically
00:25:23
Krish Advani: expert or not. We went and studied a tool called
00:25:26
Krish Advani: as M I t Scratch. OK, m I t scratch
00:25:29
Krish Advani: is a tool which is no code tool as well,
00:25:31
Krish Advani: which is designed to teach kids how to code so
00:25:34
Krish Advani: it doesn't have anything in terms of coding.
00:25:37
Krish Advani: It's just all drag and drop elements with blocks and
00:25:40
Krish Advani: these kind of things, like a Lego set of pieces
00:25:43
Krish Advani: where you can see OK, I wanna put this Lego
00:25:44
Krish Advani: piece here and that Lego piece there. And it's all
00:25:47
Krish Advani: very nicely colour coded and described very well to you
00:25:51
Krish Advani: so that you can visually understand what you're building without
00:25:54
Krish Advani: having any technical expertise. So to answer your question,
00:25:58
Krish Advani: we have gone to great lengths to ensure that we
00:26:01
Krish Advani: are more like the M ID scratch of integrations, right,
00:26:04
Krish Advani: because if they can teach kids to programme, I think
00:26:08
Krish Advani: there's no better benchmark for us to say that. All right,
00:26:11
Krish Advani: that normal users who are not tech savvy or are
00:26:14
Krish Advani: simply not interested in tech
00:26:16
Krish Advani: should be and will be able to build integrations on
00:26:20
Krish Advani: quick work. Yes, to answer your question. Absolutely. Now,
00:26:22
Saikat Pyne: let me ask you a bit more about quick work
00:26:26
Saikat Pyne: and how it started, because it definitely is something that
00:26:30
Saikat Pyne: can be a lifesaver for a lot of people. So
00:26:33
Saikat Pyne: how did you stumble upon the idea of creating a
00:26:35
Saikat Pyne: tool like this?
00:26:37
Krish Advani: Sure. So, at quick work, we were not really an
00:26:40
Krish Advani: integration product to begin with. We had started with conversational
00:26:44
Krish Advani: bots in the year of 2016,
00:26:47
Krish Advani: uh, where we were integrating bots for enterprises in India.
00:26:51
Krish Advani: So you would have, uh, companies like Tata A I
00:26:53
Krish Advani: A a i g and those kind of firms h
00:26:56
Krish Advani: g f c and so on. Uh, when we were
00:26:58
Krish Advani: having the discussions with them, When we are building these bots,
00:27:01
Krish Advani: they would say, Hey, listen, the bot is OK, but
00:27:04
Krish Advani: we really want to connect to some system underneath. We
00:27:06
Krish Advani: wanna connect to our HR m SI. Wanna connect to
00:27:09
Krish Advani: my c r. M. I wanna connect to my Google
00:27:11
Krish Advani: sheet that this used to be a common use case,
00:27:13
Krish Advani: and the systems used to vary
00:27:15
Krish Advani: significantly from a company to other, right? So we we
00:27:19
Krish Advani: just really struggled a lot to build these integrations on
00:27:23
Krish Advani: our own. Even though we had a pretty large tech
00:27:25
Krish Advani: team in in in in House, it was just too
00:27:28
Krish Advani: cumbersome and too difficult and a lot of intercommunication required
00:27:31
Krish Advani: between these companies and our resources. So we decided then,
00:27:35
Krish Advani: all right, it seems to be like a genuine pin
00:27:37
Krish Advani: point where integration is an absolute necessity,
00:27:41
Krish Advani: where companies are investing in hundreds of systems as they grow.
00:27:45
Krish Advani: So if you ask any startup which has, let's say,
00:27:47
Krish Advani: crossed the Series B bar and probably have 100 and
00:27:50
Krish Advani: 50 or more customers,
00:27:53
Krish Advani: you will hear them saying, All right, we have Zenda
00:27:56
Krish Advani: for this. We have got intercom. We have an A
00:27:59
Krish Advani: jira for a github and you name. It's like all
00:28:02
Krish Advani: kinds of tools,
00:28:04
Krish Advani: and this is none of them can talk to each
00:28:05
Krish Advani: other because none of them have integrations with each other,
00:28:08
Krish Advani: which is bit each other out of the box. And
00:28:10
Krish Advani: that's where things start to get really complicated, and that's
00:28:13
Krish Advani: where we actually decided that Zaire and isn't really cutting
00:28:17
Krish Advani: out for us for building these integrations. Plus, they are
00:28:21
Krish Advani: not offering us the compliance and the security requirements that
00:28:24
Krish Advani: a startup would need to work with larger enterprises, which
00:28:28
Krish Advani: could be the case for.
00:28:30
Krish Advani: So that's where we decided to orchestrate and build a
00:28:32
Krish Advani: product like this, which will go to simple will do
00:28:36
Krish Advani: simple workflows as well and is able to cater to
00:28:40
Krish Advani: complex workflows when required. So when I say complex workflows,
00:28:44
Krish Advani: I really mean
00:28:46
Krish Advani: the ability to build business logic with if cases loop
00:28:49
Krish Advani: over last Data sets like looping over your records in
00:28:54
Krish Advani: Google sheets and performing bulk operations on. So this might
00:28:57
Krish Advani: not be of interest to an entrepreneur when they are
00:29:00
Krish Advani: getting started, for sure. But as soon as they grow beyond,
00:29:04
Krish Advani: let's say, five or 10 customers, they'll start to get
00:29:07
Krish Advani: to know that they need to make their integrations more advanced.
00:29:11
Krish Advani: So with all those things in mind, we put our
00:29:14
Krish Advani: team together, put our heads together, and we decided to
00:29:17
Krish Advani: build something like this.
00:29:21
Saikat Pyne: So you faced an issue and you decided to solve
00:29:24
Saikat Pyne: for it. and the solution became the product. That is
00:29:28
Saikat Pyne: quick work.
00:29:30
Krish Advani: Absolutely kidding. He was completely
00:29:34
Krish Advani: sorry to interrupt you there, but yeah, it was completely
00:29:37
Krish Advani: customer driven insight. We didn't have any incredible vision to
00:29:40
Krish Advani: begin with, But I truly believe that in most of
00:29:43
Krish Advani: these cases it's better to really listen to your customer, uh,
00:29:47
Krish Advani: and leaving all other aspects behind To really understand, What
00:29:51
Krish Advani: does the market really need at this very moment? Things
00:29:54
Krish Advani: could change in the coming years. But right now, this
00:29:57
Krish Advani: is where
00:29:58
Krish Advani: seems to be the most prominent thing to do for
00:30:01
Krish Advani: us as soon as we started engaging and interacting with customers.
00:30:05
Krish Advani: And
00:30:05
Saikat Pyne: today, enterprise is small
00:30:07
Saikat Pyne: to slightly larger enterprises as well as in using this
00:30:11
Saikat Pyne: to power integration. API s conversations at scale. I was
00:30:16
Saikat Pyne: going through your website a couple of weeks back. I
00:30:20
Saikat Pyne: think you power integrations for fresh works into it. Access
00:30:25
Saikat Pyne: Yahoo s, I think even Harvard University, Am I right?
00:30:29
Krish Advani: That is correct. So these users are from across the
00:30:32
Krish Advani: globe from 144 countries as we speak, using our services
00:30:37
Krish Advani: on a daily basis to power their integration and not
00:30:40
Krish Advani: to just overwhelm you with those big names because that
00:30:43
Krish Advani: generally comes with a burden on your head as a
00:30:45
Krish Advani: solo preneurs and an entrepreneur. But we have had companies
00:30:49
Krish Advani: in in here, which I'm not sure if I'm able
00:30:51
Krish Advani: to mention their names. But we have had companies here
00:30:54
Krish Advani: which started with a two member team,
00:30:56
Krish Advani: have scaled up to 100 and 50 160 member team,
00:31:00
Krish Advani: raised their pre Series A and Series B as well
00:31:03
Krish Advani: by completely running their business on quick work. And these
00:31:07
Krish Advani: were mainly in the financial sector Fintech companies in Based
00:31:10
Krish Advani: out of India who just decided to build everything on
00:31:15
Krish Advani: quick word to get started with.
00:31:17
Krish Advani: So that's the level of things that you can do
00:31:19
Krish Advani: can literally build an organisation from scratch to a very
00:31:23
Krish Advani: well funded company with lots of people and creating enough
00:31:26
Krish Advani: jobs just by taking your ideas, your intellectual ideas and
00:31:30
Krish Advani: converting them into a visual integration and just launching it them.
00:31:35
Saikat Pyne: That sounds really exciting with that. It's a wrap, folks,
00:31:41
Saikat Pyne: thank you so much for being on the podcast. Chris
00:31:44
Saikat Pyne: really appreciated your inputs on how a sour or a
00:31:49
Saikat Pyne: creator can automate their business processes and their marketing. Please
00:31:55
Saikat Pyne: tune in next week for the next episode of the
00:31:58
Saikat Pyne: U Incorporated podcast. See ya,
00:32:11
Saikat Pyne: Thank you for tuning into the you incorporated podcast with me.
00:32:16
Saikat Pyne: You can write to us at high at the rate
00:32:19
Saikat Pyne: the u ink dot com d m me on LinkedIn
00:32:23
Saikat Pyne: or check out my blog blog dot sa p dot
00:32:27
Saikat Pyne: com for more interesting content on brand building content, creation,
00:32:32
Saikat Pyne: productivity and influence.
00:32:34
Saikat Pyne: Catch you guys in the next episode.