The Exchanges

Q Why? Why can't you just go close them now and get them to pay up front and use that money to drive growth?

A So we, we will potentially do that starting, starting next year is, is to leverage the money up front. Um, the easiest way has been to say, you know, we give you like for 10,000 dollars, we'll give you a snapshot analysis of your, of one of your products against a competitive category set. And then at that, at the end of that month, it turns on into a 10,000 dollar a month subscription. And then we start expanding to additional channels. So that process to get, to get paid Like large amounts from these brands is a longer process. So right now we're still, we're not getting enough revenue in to catch essentially all the opportunities that are coming in. So we're trying to accelerate this.

AI assessment note: “to get paid Like large amounts from these brands is a longer process.”

Q Is it push or pull? Are you pushing on a survey that customers have to Fill out and you're analyzing the survey or is it some other way you're pulling information from them?

A Good point. Yeah, we're definitely pulling. So this is unobtrusive research. This is a way of asking users without really bothering users. What we found actually, and, and I know you've, you've interviewed lots of folks that have, uh, you know, approached this space in terms of customer feedback, market research, lots of times, and all of the approaches are really good. And what, what we found is a lot of users and customers are actually trying to communicate with, with the brand almost every day across lots of different channels. And a lot of the firms we're working with have hundreds of thousands of customers calling in, sending support tickets, support emails every month. So they're trying to do, trying to understand what are the issues to their customers, but they're also buying a bunch of research that tells them that does, you know, surveys that conducts other, you know, marketing research companies conduct surveys, et cetera. That, that is, that is a push type of survey. So there's push and pull going on. So what we realized is all of that data is valuable. What we do is we collect all of that data that has been survey data, that is submitted organic user data. We actually integrated with our system to create this, um, essentially there's a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. That are ranked with, uh, with our deep learning system. So we're actually giving…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we're definitely pulling. So this is unobtrusive research.”

Q I see. I see. Okay, cool. Um, very cool. What else? Anything I'm missing before we wrap up?

A Uh, yeah. So I've, what I found is honestly that there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of really interesting shifts going on right now, right in, in the industry. And I'm really excited about that. It's being recognized by, by, by these brands. So all these brands have been talking about, you really care about customers. We really want to focus on what customers care about. But what I found is that really none of them have the resources or tools to look at all of their customer feedback. They actually don't know what all of their customers care about. And on top of that, they have no idea what their competitors customers care about. They're not looking at any of that. And I think that's such a huge missed opportunity for folks to not just for the brands, but for customers to have companies really listen to them and start fixing stuff. And so that's where we're kind of trying to wedge ourselves in is to really help these brands understand What are the things, what are all the things that are top of mind, really the most important things to your customers to drive loyalty and adoption and to drive sustainability. And like, we're working with these luxury brands. They're thinking they're building multi-year strat, multi-billion dollar strategies to like, we, we have sustainability initiative. We want to fix animal welfare and carbon emissions, but they don't know what about ani…

AI assessment note: “what I found is honestly that there's, there's a lot of really interesting shifts”

Q How bad was it? Like you burned a hundred grand or 10 grand or what?

A Uh, yeah, actually a little under a hundred grand maybe. I mean, maybe like 50 grand of building a website we didn't really need that since then. You know, a bunch of, a bunch of founder stories that were really true. And since then I've realized, okay, we can actually bootstrap a lot of this in a way that, um, partnerships let you bootstrap in a way that, that you couldn't otherwise. So GSV Labs is, we're a portfolio company of GSV Labs. So through that partnership we have Lots of, lots of really great, um, you know, discounts and, and credits and things like that that we've been leveraging. Um, like, like there's law services and there's, you know, hosting services. There are hundreds of thousands of dollars of credits, for instance. The other side of this is we do have cheap labor, essentially, because the folks that are, that are involved with the company really believe in, in what we're doing. So the team right now has grown to 13 folks. We have, uh, about half, a little less than half of the team is full-time at this point. And the rest is part-time. The, the full-time folks are taking still a discounted salary. Basically, we, we started very small trickle of pay at the beginning of the, of this past year for, for our executive team. And basically the idea is we're building this in order to get it commercial ready by the end of this year, when we reach essentially series …

AI assessment note: “actually a little under a hundred grand maybe. I mean, maybe like 50 grand”

Q And I guess why, if you're planning to go raise a big round, like When you hit the 1.3 AR mark in Q one, like why spend a bunch of time right now trying to raise three million?

A Uh, well, actually we got preemptively reached out to by, by a number of investors. Uh, I, I was not going out and raising right now. I thought actually let's just focus on these contracts, um, get them to expanded revenue between each contract and then next year go out and raise a larger round. But the advice has been, we can bring on additional folks. I can bring on sales support. I'm doing sales myself right now. Like I can bring on an S how many are on the team right now. Um, it's essentially my school. We have, we have folks that are part-time and full-time. We essentially have the same team that we started with still, and it's just not, we don't know how, how many is that? We have nine people still basically the same, same participating folks that were part-time and full-time. And what we started doing is bringing on some of those folks full-time, but that's still not enough capacity.

AI assessment note: “we got preemptively reached out to by, by a number of investors.”

Q Why do you need to raise right now? Like what, what, what, why do you have to, you know, have that kind of money to grow?

A Yeah. So I've actually, this past year, I've just switched gears from anything other than sales. And I've had the opportunity to speak with dozens and dozens of CDOs, CTOs, CSOs, CMOs, CEOs across these fortune, 100 brands. And I've literally spoken with 30 or 40, like fortune, 100 C-level executives. And what I found is that we can actually We can launch this pretty easily because we are offering something really different than, than what's in the market. We're not looking at sentiment. We're not looking at overall what's happening for your overall brand. We're understanding each individual dimension, what matters. And I've been able to get a, um, and we have a new subscription process that we go through. It's an annual agreement that has a three day trial that's attached to an annual agreement already. And so because of all these conversations and this easy piloting process, I've actually created a pipeline of Way too many, way too many active engagements, basically, that I'm realizing we can hit all these if we have additional revenue, if we have additional funding.

AI assessment note: “we can hit all these if we have additional revenue, if we have additional funding.”

Q Doesn't everyone right now kind of feel the same way, which is scared shitless. Like do I have to do as a brand after in our survey to my customer base to be like, how are you feeling right now?

A But you know what? So yeah, but you can do that and you can ask a few customers, how are you feeling right now? But what you want is you want to be able to really have a baseline measure. Of how are people, how are competitor customers feeling against my customers? What's making my customers really anxious and upset? What's really driving this? Like you, you, so brands are really focusing on how do we make customers Less anxious. How do we improve the lives of our customers? How are you baseline measuring that without really asking everybody, everybody in person? So what we found is actually there's a much better unobtrusive way of baselining. Where is that customer psychographic sentiment at?

AI assessment note: “So yeah, but you can do that and you can ask a few customers”

Q they try and If they email their customers and say, how are you feeling right now? What are you most anxious about? You know, three months ago, Equinox person might've said your gym is dirty or capital one. People might've said your CDs don't pay enough right now. Everyone is saying I need a fucking face mask and hand sanitizer and I don't want to die. Right? Like everyone's right.

A So that's a good point. So those are the top three, four concerns. So that's, so what you're actually, what you're actually telling me is one of the top reasons that, um, product managers especially think that, no, we have, we have market research covered. We already know what our biggest issues are. We, we know that people just hate insulation so that that's what we focus on. The problem isn't, isn't what are the top three most important things to customers are screening about? The thing is, has it leveled off? How are overall conditions impacting this, the trend of each thing? And are you as a company trying to fix or improve any of this? So then how do you measure that as an improvement or is this increasing or decreasing? In terms of anxiety or whatever you're trying to change, whatever your PPI is, what you have to do as a company is then go call the person and ask them again, are you less anxious now that we did this? We put out a new campaign. How do you feel about this?

AI assessment note: “The problem isn't, isn't what are the top three most important things”

Q Well, so let me understand. So you use in 2020, you said you had nine customers. So you still have nine customers today, but they're different customers and paying you way more. Is that right?

A We were running POCs in 2020 with, with a number of folks like Sephora's of the world, um, trying to understand basically what we are deploying and what we are solving for them. And what we realized is really where the real pain point is across all of these brands is they're running surveys on all of their customers, but what they're not doing is they're not serving all of their competitors customers at that same scale. So when they make product changes or estimate market opportunity, They're really only estimating in a, in a bubble, in a vacuum. They're estimating what they're doing. What we realized is by actually looking at the external data, we can actually measure the size of the opportunities for these brands. And what we found is who specifically is using these insights. So what we were initially doing is just exploring with, you know, So a year ago, those nine were not customers.

AI assessment note: “We were running POCs in 2020... So a year ago, those nine were not customers.”

Q It's like, how do you actually get new customers in this kind of environment? People don't I don't care about running research reports like their latest mock-up UI on their new product. People right now are like, how do I get messaging right so my brand doesn't look like an ass in the middle of a global recession and a virus outbreak? Like, that's what I'm trying to figure out.

A That's totally fair. And that's, by the way, you know, I don't have the answer, obviously, to kind of what do brands do and should people keep buying or selling? My sense is that the world does not need to stop. My sense is we need to be really focused on what is the most impact for what we're working on right now? Where, where is it bringing sort of the most value? And from my perspective, brands and companies shouldn't fully stop services. For instance, developing, like we're working with, with the largest brands, kind of fortune, 105 hundred folks. They're global brands that a lot of their, a lot of their products, customers still, you know, There's a lot of, there's a lot of large manufacturers, for instance, that still develop things like refrigerators and toaster ovens, and they're not going to stop building those things, and they still have this slated in production, and there's still brand new big appliances that are being launched, and there's small appliances being launched still. This is not going away. I mean, these are billion, multi-billion dollar businesses that people still need to, to, to work on, right? So, These, these, these times are shifting priorities, but they're not completely throwing the baby out with the bathwater in terms of what's important still.

AI assessment note: “I don't have the answer, obviously, to kind of what do brands do”

Q to trying to scale in the midst of a global recession and massive crisis to like, so the world hasn't really seen before. I mean, how many of these full-time, you know, you have your executive team can keep working for just equity when maybe their spouses at home just got laid off or don't know what their work's gonna look like. I mean, how do you handle all this?

A No, absolutely. And this is, this is such a crazy time right now where, you know, lots of uncertainty drives a lot of, Um, you know, a lot of, a lot of behavior that, that wouldn't have been, wouldn't have been otherwise. What I'm seeing right now is, is again, kind of this divide between Folks that have a little bit of buffer and are using this time to meditate and to grow and to kind of focus on things and folks that don't have a buffer that didn't have the luxury of, of having resources like this all around them that are, are jumping to, okay, what do we need to do? The folks that we have on, on, on my team, we are, we do have the luxury of having a buffer. So right now is actually a very productive time for us. We have brought on board a new big customer in the last actually, um, kind of about a few weeks. Um, the idea being, the idea being that this is a way to actually Work within the system. Our, our company, the idea of our company is to be able to capture the, the general emotion and sentiment that people are trying to convey to brands to improve the products and services.

AI assessment note: “The folks that we have on, on, on my team, we are, we do have the luxury of having a buffer.”

Q So with these new partners, you know, you launched in 2018. When you last came on, which was November of 2018, you told me you had about five customers at the time. How many are you serving now today?

A Right. So that was, that was really, really cool. So we've, uh, you know, as you know, we're an early stage kind of technology company. It's To, to ramp up the growth is, is very important to do carefully in the correct focus. So we've been very careful in who we're partnering with. So since then, um, last year we've, uh, essentially did a, did a couple of POCs with some really big, big brand names. Um, and, and a, and a number of smaller pilots with some, uh, mid mid tier folks. And from that, we've actually found that retail and market research is, is our beachhead essentially. So we've now partnered with, um, with two additional large brands. So we've actually engaged with a, uh, one of the largest media conglomerates. And we're working on a very, very cool use case with them. And we're actually working on an expanded, expanded, uh, pilot.

AI assessment note: “did a couple of POCs with some really big, big brand names.”