Digital Pond: EP#6 Saurav Chopra — Resilience in Digital Entrepreneurship
In this episode, we’re joined by Perkbox co-founder Saurav Chopra.
Saurav’s passion for entrepreneurship began when he first started working with his father in a family business. Through persistence, passion and resilience, he’s gone from strength to strength, working with Yahoo mobile and Deloitte. Before co-founding Perkbox in 2015, during the chats, we explore the role of persistence and how Saurav uses first principles in digital entrepreneurship and how small and midsize businesses can better nurture and grow their talents.
You can listen to the webinar in full on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
You can find the full transcript for the podcast below.
Transcript
Danny Bluestone
Saurav, absolutely delighted to have you, I know you’ve got a packed schedule and I really appreciate you taking time out of the day. So first of all, how’s it going? How’s the commuting into London, getting back to normal assume?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, thank you all for having me. It’s great to be here and talk about my story and whatever I can share with others, I’d be more than delighted to.
Yeah, it’s great, things are coming back, which is really awesome, coming into Logan, commuting, seeing people, something new, we’re still getting used to it, I’m still getting used to it. But it’s great to see more and more people out on the streets coming into the office. So, hopefully in a few months we’ll be back to where it was or probably close to where it was over the course of the rest of the year. So, I’m excited to be back in the office.
Danny Bluestone
So obviously, you’re an accomplished entrepreneur and privileged knowing you and getting to chat, outside of work. So obviously, we’ve met before but it would be great to hear about your journey as an entrepreneur and what really provoked you into becoming an entrepreneur and business leader. Was it early things that happened in your childhood? Your upbringing? What took you down this particular career path that you’ve taken?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, so actually, from childhood, my father started a business, those manufacturing technology business. So, I use to help him out and I saw all the struggles he went through the resiliency he had to the business, in that business and all the trials and tribulations of that business, so probably one of the first experiences for me was just working with my father, seeing him both at what you say the peaks and troughs of a business, seeing him very, very happy, very proud of what he had created. But at the same time, dealing with a lot of problems and seeing how we actually dealt with them got me excited about having a business, building a business and really experienced firsthand, the joy.
And sometimes the pain that came with it, obviously my father and our families, I guess that was the first experience and then like for me I was always fascinated by technology growing up. And so, we are also a family of engineers and doctor. So, I decided to pursue the what I thought was easier route, which is engineering compared to medicine, which I think is much harder, at least in my opinion. So, I was fascinated by technology decided to pursue a career in engineering. And that’s where I said, I think these seeds off my entrepreneurial journey, we were laid, I suppose using technology to solve problems was really what I was excited about as, as I did my engineering and obviously, engineers are very problem solvers, actually.
So yeah, learning from my father then getting excited about technology, studying engineering and then re-deciding how to leverage technology to solve all problems was what got me excited, at least to the core of my education.
Danny Bluestone
Wow. Fantastic. Obviously, your father, family businesses because people talk about, like, what is the markup or DNA of an entrepreneur? And obviously, they are fairly rare breed. Do you think that there was something about being exposed to a family business? You’ve seen a family business, that made you kind of more entrepreneurial than probably other people.
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, absolutely. I think that definitely, if you use it digital terminology definitely improve the conversion rate dramatically. And because of having this first time, so it was not like I was suppose… you experiencing emotions and you say, hey, actually these emotions are something that I would like to embrace myself, both the highs and the lows and obviously building resilience, as well, as being an entrepreneur yourself for a long time, one of the key traits is just resilience. And if he experiences it firsthand day in, day out then the fear goes away, right? When the fear goes away and you have resilience, that I only experience through the family business, really.
So yes, the conversion rate dramatically improved for me personally, but that’s not to say that if you don’t have a business, you cannot be an entrepreneur, actually if you have a problem be more than happy anyone who’s got a passion, will solve the problem and has that resilience to persist and focus on it, can be it’s not rocket science, in my opinion.
Danny Bluestone
That’s fantastic. It’s interesting because with myself, obviously, my end folks, they never ran businesses but I had friends whose parents did so I was observing and looking at them. So, the message for the folk out there is even if your parents, family, do not run a business you can still learn from friends and potentially more distant family or relatives as well. So that’s really, really cool.
What about your education? Obviously, I saw you it was the Indian Institute of Technology. Right? That you…
Saurav Chopra
That’s right.
Danny Bluestone
…went to? So, do you think that they prepared you for your journey as an entrepreneur?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, I think engineering or something deeply technical really set me off for what I want to do, because my path was really picked when I was doing my journey that… I love the joy of solving problems, which is what engineers inherently do. And I really wanted to use technology to solve those problems so a lot of my friends, they went down the R&D route and some of them are professors in universities in California and other places and are teaching, I was not really fascinated as much by the feel of all this kind of things, but more about how to use technology to create and solve tangible problems in the near term, because R&D is a very long-term focus. So that was what fascinated me, I think entrepreneurs are problem solvers and the great thing about engineering, it’s really about problem solving. So, the few things actually, which are really interesting about engineering or technical education, which is that, you’re solving problems, that you can enjoy yourself from solving problems. And that’s what businesses is about, really, it’s about solving problems, in my opinion. And the second thing is that it’s really…you don’t take things for granted.
So, it’s very first principle of thinking, which is you don’t make assumptions, you don’t take things for granted, you question everything, you challenge everything and you challenge your own thinking and you use data to make decisions. And for my education, those principles were really laid out. Plus, combined with that very analytical approach to things is what really helped me and nothing really is…you’re not in fear of things because you’re solving problems or problems are thrown at you every day, when you’re learning and studying and your job is to solving a problem and you get joy out of it. So, I think it definitely education, conditioned me and is pretty in line with what I’m doing right now. And the fear of complexity goes away, if you can break every complex problem into little bits, go to base principles, question everything, use data and user analytical thinking solve problems. So, big problems become smaller problems, then we solve the small problems and then solve the big problem.
Danny Bluestone
That’s great, how you’ve applied that engineer’s mindset to business and how there’s each kind of job or role that you’ve taken before becoming an entrepreneur impacted you because obviously, being an entrepreneur, I’d imagine that you had that within you, but at what point did you feel ready? And how did the previous kind of roles that you had helped you to prepare to become an entrepreneur?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, so after my engineering, I applied, I wanted to use technology to solve problems. So I thought one of the best ways to do that was to become a technology consultant. So, I worked with Deloitte Consulting, that was my first job and as a technology consultant, then actually I pursued an MBA because here in London Business School because I felt that it was a technology consultant. I wanted a better business training, I wanted a better view of understanding how all the different aspects of business not just the technology, but the marketing, the business modeling, finance, all of it. And really, a lot of engineers and a lot of technology people can be in all of business and the other aspects of business and feel as there’s is this secret sauce, there’s some magic in marketing, there’s some magic in financial modeling. But frankly, there is no magic, nothing’s really that complex if you break it down into simple principles, I want you to get rid of that about the old or the thinking, oh! there’s something really complex out there in business. So, I did my MBA, and then, obviously, this was boom times in the digital world so I joined Yahoo and started from consulting it really… technology consulting in particular is really about problem solving. And applying it in the real-world context. So, moving away from theory, to real practice.
So, for me that training and applying those principles in the real business world was obviously very, very good because there was a proof, a demonstrated proof of how technology can be used to solve big problems with big company, which big companies were facing at that point in time, which obviously, Deloitte help.
MBA gave me a business rounding and then digital was where the fastest pace of innovation was evolving in the technology world that preceded courier, that agreed with Yahoo and then I was working with Yahoo, I was just very fortunate, I was in a role, which was really around business development. And where I would build partnerships with startups through Yahoo. And while working with these startups, I was just really amazed by the pace of innovation that was happening in the digital world and so at that point, I was like, hey! this is actually a lot of fun. And it was giving me a lot of positive energy and excitement. So, at that point, I was like, okay, I want to do something entrepreneurial after my time at Yahoo because the pace of digital was evolving so rapidly and it was just the buzz you get right? When you get a buzz and you got an itch. You just got to do it.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, and yet Yahoo was an incredible business at one point. I mean, I guess it still is, in many ways, but they were almost the search engine of choice, and what sort of products were you involved with when you were there?
Saurav Chopra
Well, I was actually responsible for business development for Yahoo mobile, which was basically back in the days before the days of the iPhone and Android. So, we’re the dominant players of companies like Nokia, and mobile operators pretty much decided what went as an app on your handset. So those were the times and obviously, Yahoo Mail still is one of the biggest Yahoo properties of the Yahoo media. So, it’s basically about distribution of Yahoo products on different mobile devices and then including third party accounts and things like that. But you’re right those were different days and the world as moved on. And so, after my time at Yahoo and experiencing and engaging with some amazing entrepreneurs, helping them and partnering with them, they become part of the Yahoo ecosystem. And our distribution network is what really gotten me excited about, hey! this is the time to give it a shot.
Danny Bluestone
Cool. After Yahoo, what were the next steps after that? When did you do…
Saurav Chopra
I set up… that was my first crack at entrepreneurship, I setup a venture, which was basically a social network aimed at the emerging markets. So, India really initially was social we were focusing on all means in India, which actually didn’t work out at all and so I had to shut it down actually in nine months and then went back into the startup world. And I worked with some really interesting Silicon Valley based startups. One was the first mobile advertising company worldwide, actually, some companies are based in Israel, in San Francisco in Europe.
And really well funded, it was called a Mobi. And then I worked with, which exited the Singapore Telecom, a few years later, then I also worked in a company which was Bike mobile. So, I felt after my failed venture that, I couldn’t just jump from a big company to a…and start my own thing, I just felt that I needed a better understanding of how startups actually grow and scale before launch when each one so that’s when I spent another five years in other ventures and both these ventures that I worked with, the classic Silicon Valley Ventures with significant capital behind it and both were very successful eventually when they exited. So, I did spend four years of another grounding understanding before owning my own venture again, with my co-founder which eventually became what is Perkbox now, yeah, you’re always learning.
Danny Bluestone
That’s fascinating. We’re almost doing like the self-diagnosis, right? Saying like, Am I ready? Am I not ready? So that’s really incredible stuff.
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s not about,
[inaudible:00:15:22]
being ready or not ready, I think every venture you do in my opinion, obviously you’ve done it before you do risk, but it’s new, if you’re doing new things and not replicating what you’re doing, It’s, almost like starting from scratch, it’s just that you can do it much faster, you can do it better, you’ll have a lot of learnings, learning from your mistakes in the past, learning from what went well. And you’re just iterating faster and learning faster but it is new every time, a lot of it and this is why it’s so fun and exciting because otherwise, it could become a bit boring if you’re just thinking with and just repeating the same thing over and over again for 10,15 years. Innovation brings a lot of joy because it is new and exciting.
Danny Bluestone
So, with that excitement you started Perkbox, how many years ago was that now? like when you [crosstalk:00:16:19] with your co-founder?
Saurav Chopra
It’s actually just over 10 years. So Perkbox originally did not start in the form that it is right now. So, first few years, we’re basically… the model was different initially when we started off, we were really trying to solve the problem that SMEs faced in terms of scaling and growing businesses. So, it was for lack of a better world, almost like a Groupon for SMEs when we started it. And that business went through a few pivots before it became Perkbox, again, learning and iterating. And it’s just really been turned to Perkbox that we found something that really started growing very quickly, exponentially.
So yeah, there was a few pivots before it actually became Perkbox. But yeah, it was started about 10 years ago, that original version one.
Danny Bluestone
Can you talk a bit more about where Perkbox is today? In terms of its success, market penetration and things like that?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, absolutely, for Perkbox as an employee experience platform, his world leaders are Worldwide, we started off with the UK and then we launched new markets like Australia, France and we have just launched a global platform where we were actually supporting our customers now, over in 30 plus countries, helping them harmonize their culture, helping them improve the overall experience. And it has definitely been quite a journey, starting from one market and opening up international markets, we’ve worked with over 5000 companies worldwide and all the way from SMEs to larger companies as big as Nando’s for example. And it’s a problem, that’s even more exacerbated now with the flow of remote work and what COVID has done, people are distributed. I’m sure you’re seeing that people are working, can even work from anywhere, especially if you’re in a world where it’s deskspace work or technology driven work.
So, I think what mess we are unable to help you solve your low experience challenge help you, as a business, harmonize your culture regardless of where your employees are, is really resonating really well with the market. So, the next 12 to 18 months, you’ll see rapid scaling of the international proposition of Perkbox moved from being UK to a few markets to truly global in the scope of services and platforms that we offer to our customers. And it’s a very unique position because the way Perkbox is offering employee experience and the opportunity to harmonize culture of employees is not something anyone else is offering in the market because there are a lot of point-by-point solutions on a country-by-country basis, but no real global platforms.
Danny Bluestone
The pandemic must have impacted, because people worked in different locations and moved around to be in their resident country, at least that happen here with us. Quite a few of the people went back to their primarily European countries to be close to their families. So, I’m assuming that that impacted your business model as well to a certain extent.
Saurav Chopra
Absolutely. And in fact, with everything, good or bad. So, what did not really work so well for us is because obviously a lot of our customers who are in hospital and retail, those people who were infected and people are just not buying new platforms. On the other hand, that gave us the opportunity of rethinking some of our architectural promises of the platform, say, how do we take this remote working trend and leverage that to deliver more value to our customers?
And our customers are coming to us and saying, hey, well, now I have John in Malta and Emily in France and Jack in Spain and you’re obviously not local. How can you help us reach these guys? Because, as you know employee’s experience cannot be disjointed and it has to be harmonized. People you want to feel and we can feel a part of the culture. So, he’s like, okay, there’s something here that… something’s happened on work. But this trend is something we need to work on. So, we actually took the time last year, to really work on the architecture of the platform to enable a global platform, which we then capitalize on that opportunity, we distribute it the market and we’re hoping to scale over the next few months, the rest of the year, next year.
So, that’s what’s exciting about it. Because every situation you got to find the good and bad, right? And fortunately, everything’s going back here as well. So, obviously, there’s a lot of positive momentum in businesses, I feel the spirits are getting better, people are ready to grow their businesses again. So, we’ve seen that positive momentum begin in the domestic markets that we operate also.
Danny Bluestone
Now, it’s absolutely great to hear that, obviously, the economy is picking up, we can see it as well and obviously with your platform Perkbox. How do you guys listen to the businesses and obviously their users? You do user research? What do you do to innovate the products from a roadmap perspective?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, so obviously we have a great pool of 5000 plus customers and the customers have their dedicated account managers. So does the bigger customers have dedicated account managers, some may have shared account managers, so the account managers are constantly talking to their customers, which in our case Perkbox seems to be HR teams primarily. So obviously, the flow of feedback is constantly happening. And obviously, Exect at Perkbox also engage with the Exact at their customers or HR leaders or their customers. So, the feedback method is constant and as you need to have software as a service business. And on top of it, we also have NPS tools running on the platform. So, when you log in the platform will ask, would you recommend Perkbox? What are the things you’d like us to see and that’s on an employee level as well?
So, we have kind of two stakeholders, if you will. So, one of the employees that he manages who are working with a product using the products or using the rewards for their team and so on and so forth. And then you have the HR leaders who actually put our platform into place and the Exec team around those HR leaders. So, there’s two levels of stakeholders, so obviously, account managers manage the relationship and the feedback loop with the stakeholders, the HR stakeholders and the Exec teams, while the employees and team managers were using the platform that’s storm through software, pretty much constantly, they will be back.
Let me just point we have the… obviously it’s going to be overwhelming we have to close our feedback loop, which then feeds into what we call the voice of the customers via voice of the customer analysis we do constantly based on the customer feedback at different levels and then they get into our product development process.
Danny Bluestone
Wow. you’re truly being user centric here, where you’re taking, obviously, the voice of the customer. And that’s essentially shaping the strategy of the platform roadmap, isn’t it?
Saurav Chopra
Absolutely.
Danny Bluestone
Well, and obviously, I’m assuming you’re like…I think when we last spoke, you were saying that you know, a couple of 100 of people at Perkbox, is that still the case?
Saurav Chopra
A brand of People mostly in the UK, some in Australia.
Danny Bluestone
So obviously, throughout the journey of building up Perkbox, I’m assuming that like org chart, the structure of the company and how you facilitate things like user research account management. Have you had to change the org chart quite a few times over the years?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, the only constant in these growing businesses is change, really. And actually, most recently, we had to also make some optimizations to align with our global rollout strategy.
So that’s pretty recent.
So, I think the only constant is change really and you have to constantly get things like organization set up for the future is all the teams set up in the right way for the customers we want to service, we set up in the right way to meet the needs of the customers, in different segments across different teams. So that’s absolutely ongoing process. And obviously, because the size of our customer base, we’re 5000, that’s something that we double down on and we are constantly doing that.
Danny Bluestone
How do you in a business like yours avoid a situation where the leaders are growing really quickly, but the middle management, let’s say are not, how do you really invest, train and build up the middle management to create a culture where leaders don’t have to get involved in the detail and middle management and senior management can just come in and basically get things done?
Saurav Chopra
So basically, it’s a challenge that I think most startups scaleups, growth companies, because you succeed, you grow really fast, you obviously promoted early on for two reasons, obviously, you want to reward the people who have helped you get there but at the same time, you also know that they have the most domain knowledge and expertise. So, I think one has to do it at multiple levels. So first of all, you know at the top level it’s really about communication and setting the KPIs, the key KPIs of the business in a very, very clear manner. So obviously, I’m sure, you know a lot of companies, especially in the tech space, we use a system on OKR. So, we defined the OKRs. And that’s communicated by top management to the teams on a continuous basis, also, how we are tracking against those OKRs that’s communicating on a continuous basis.
Now, what’s really important is not to just define the OKRs but also defining why those OKRs are there. Because a lot of companies say, hey, this is your problem but a lot of people don’t explain why this is a target? Why is this important to the Business? So, why is production a lot? And I think that the Exec team does really well, reading the OKRs top down but also explaining why the rationale and just repeating it, right? So that’s one thing at a top level that I believe most companies need to do.
The same thing is that, how the manifestation of that. So obviously we have lots of email in the remote world, obviously, we have a lot of what we call that stock sessions, having open feedback sessions with the whole business, which are attended by most people in the company, our townhall sessions, where we explain what’s going with the business and having that feedback causing… even more important when people are so remote, it was easier when everybody was in the office and you could just do it together.
But then it’s about what kind of value systems you build inside a company, so for Perkbox values are, curiosity spirit, unique unity and trust. And trust is about empowering your people, empowering your managers to make the decisions, if the OKRs are clear and people understand why those OKRs are in place, they understand what the business goals are, then they need to be empowered to make decisions. And then you’ll be empowered to make mistakes. One should celebrate failures, one should celebrate mistakes because there’s no way and anyone can learn without making mistakes. And so, I think that’s a system of communication, goal setting, regular communication and then have a process around that communication, whether it’s… or systems around that communication, that online sessions or let’s start or whatever you call it, townhall sessions and then empowering people and truly empowering people trusting them to deliver, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you let all system go and make…let everybody decide whatever they want.
Obviously, it has to be the constraint of the OKRs. But at the same time, there should be room for making mistakes, lots of mistakes, there should be room for failure, but the more important thing is learning from those failures. So, I think ultimately, it’s about empowerment, but obviously, you need to supplement that with the appropriate training. So training and learning which Perkbox happens on a pretty regular basis but obviously more needs to be done I think most companies need to do more about learning and development.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, which is a great pathway into our next topic Learning and Development. So, tell us a bit more about your new venture.
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, absolutely. So just to set the context, so about the end of last year, I became the Executive Chairman of Perkbox, having been the founder and running the business for almost six years and we elevated our MD, to the CEO position. And the MD has been with us for five years plus and then brought in more great talent to the Exec team. So that’s the background and obviously, I’m still very actively involved with Perkbox as a major shareholders Executive chairman of the business.
Money venture, it’s called Five Minutes, which is like five minutes and the whole idea around Five Minutes is to really inspire each and every employee manager leader in a business to really unlock their true potential by learning and growing every day.
So, the reason I started this is because I felt that, whatever I’ve accomplished, has been really by just learning absorbing information and growing every day, little bits of information every day. And I do feel at some points in my career, I wish I did spend more time learning but not necessarily about the business I was targeting or the venture I was creating but more about the softer side of running the business, like the soft skills, the leadership, those things that people really forget what is essential for rolling and growing people and building a business.
So, the leader that started five minutes is… personally whatever I accomplish, is through learning and growing and secondly because I felt I could do a bit more in my early days. And secondly, I think learning in companies is really broken, I think companies themselves, I think providers, especially when you look at small to medium sized to mid-market companies, they need a lot of help, I think the ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of learning is completely broken. And there’s a vast majority of companies in the world who are obviously SMEs and mid-market companies, where there’s really no systematic way of learning that is happening, which means that we have got billions of people out there who are not really learning and growing and unlocking their true potential, it’s a real, real shame. So, I want to do my little bit to solve that problem that I’ve experienced and also something that I’ve benefited from and I want to share that to this new platform.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, absolutely. The internet is a blessing and a curse because you have so much information, almost like too much information, which gives people a cognitive overload.
But then at the same time, it’s very hard to find curated content, isn’t it? It’s why there’s all of this information out there. Where the people go to learn and I think there’s often a confusion and obviously, I’m sure you’ve done like, landscape analysis. Where you’ve got everyone on, like from the Coursera’s and the Academies, all the way to the YouTubes and the Nemos and these smaller providers out there that have a quick pretty kind of niche, like Learner, programming language and through an app and stuff like that. So, where’s your sweet spot in this new world that you’re entering here?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, absolutely. So let me give you a background.
So, what I see as a problem right now. Which is that, you talked about the ‘How’ of learning which is actually spot on. There is no curation and there’s just too much noise out there. One thing I’d like to add to your comment is the formats of learning are pretty old school, boring, you pick up any company learning platforms, lot of buzzwords used in all this, but they’re real boring compared to some of the things in other platforms, you see like the Tiktok rolling, highly, highly engaging. So how as welcome does anything learning will be a two-hour webinar or this 30-page PDF, which you know people agreed to type and the formats are broken that’s ‘How’ piece I think there’s a fundamental problem, especially inside companies. That’s the space I’m targeting. We’re not targeting b2c models right now because we haven’t built a lot of experience around how to solve problems inside companies probably, so before companies, first of all, and really small to medium size and mid-market company where there’s no L&D team, there’s no money manager, there may be an HR team but there’s no money manager.
So, your R&D Manager, if you will, so that’s why it is a problem and gives you this having to run venture as sizable business is that a lot of companies and Managing teams are really heavily focused, they’re not fostering the right motivation to learn. So, what a lot of management teams are doing is that any company, any training that you give or learning that you give to your employees is very, very employee centric. And how do you foster the right motivation? Are you getting your people excited about learning? They’ll be excited about learning if you give them more than what is required to learn for your business. So, help develop their life skills, which is absolutely key and soft skills also. Which is what most companies don’t do, they only focus on very, very specific technical skills and hard skills that are crucial for the job. That’s one thing, getting the right motivation is really important. That’s missing from most learning systems and you want to get your people to get out of bed every day and excited about learning something today
[inaudible: 00:36:06)
And that ties into the ‘What’ because the ‘What’ of learning, like what are you getting your people to learn? If you go beyond the core company specific learning and how people get skills that they could use to the rest of their lives and even in their personal lives? That’s another way to solve the ‘What’ problem, what are they learning? And then the third bit around the ‘How’ which is, formats are great and there’s some other subtle things that we’re doing which is around leveraging a lot of the great learnings we have from the b2c applications, like Duolingo, great language learning platform that elements run unification, leader boarding, run the game mechanics, insights, you make it fun it’s not supposed to boring, those are mechanics.
But again, our focus is really small to medium sized businesses, getting workplace learning and upskilling, in companies that really don’t have any manager or any system in place. So that software becomes their…as the tool, if you will.
Danny Bluestone
Now since you spoke amazingly about the ‘Why’ and the ‘What’, what about the ‘How’? Clearly, obviously, one of the biggest challenges is going to be with content rights and identifying, learning, use cases. And then obviously you spoke about the format and you can go on YouTube and you can watch a one-and-a-half-hour video. But at the same time, like a good trainer or a great trainer could pull that down into a five-minute clip or two-minute video clips.
Clearly there’s so many topics that people need to learn, soft skills, potentially some harder skills, what’s your approach to almost the content strategy for your learning platform?
Saurav Chopra
So that’s actually really interesting question because that’s what we’ve actually learned a lot over the last two, three months frankly. So, what we essentially do when it comes down to the question around the ‘How’ of learning and a content strategy? Is that the formats we know don’t work. I think video is personally one of the best formats out there.
However, the format of video that’s out there is very long form and if you want to drive daily learning right you can’t expect people to spend half an hour, we just have very little time right now, so the key is short form format and we already know that works with Tiktok and the amazing engagement they get, even YouTube has about YouTube shorts now, which is following the Tiktok button because everybody knows that the Tiktok about works so that’s one of the formats of a short form video.
Now the question is, one thing we actually learned was that during our tests, as we tested products is that a lot of people, inside companies, especially small to medium sized companies don’t really know what to learn, if I want to be great at customer successor, what is my skill path here? What is my learning path here? What does my skill matrix look like? What are the skills I need to build?
So large or small this would probably for large enterprises, you will have a box standard, competency matrix, skill matrix, lots of data for small to medium size company within a few 100 employees, they don’t have. So that in outside is also tied to the ‘What’ because the ‘What’ piece is tied into the skills you need to develop. And the ‘How’ is taking the people on a skill and a learning path tied to those skills using short form video using quizzes and all that stuff you see in the b2c app. So that’s one piece. Now the problem that creates is that if you look at a company or an employee tech business, there’s probably about 40 to 50 roles across the board and each role has a skill matrix. Now that creates 100 Plus skills. We have document 100 Plus skills. And that means you need videos for each of them.
Now the great thing is that if you look at something like YouTube, it has got insane amounts of information and some great creators everywhere in the world creating content. So, what we have done is basically partnered with these experts and harnessed their catalogue that’s already there and then brought it onto our platform, but again, reducing it to short form so you don’t have to spend 20 minutes on a webinar, if you don’t have the time, when you can get the synthesis of what that creator is talking about, that expert is talking about through our platform in two to three minutes, max. Obviously, if you want to go and listen to the whole webinar, you’re more than welcome to because we link you back to that content. But at the same time, you can get a lot of value if you only have two, three minutes. So, the creation problem, we have started by working with the amazing creators out there and curating that content to our platform because if you go to YouTube, you will know who to go after because there’s so many.
Danny Bluestone
I think the concept of the app is incredible because as you said that there are at least… I am not aware of any short form video platforms like this. This is going to be… obviously I’ve seen the app, it’s looking pretty incredible. So well done. What do you say is the main challenges? Just to wrap up now, for you guys moving forward?
Saurav Chopra
I think the main challenges would be in any venture. It’s always new. So, it’s day one. And that’s why it’s exciting, I think the first challenge will be the distribution model, just because the pin point is there and people recognize it, it’s resonating and it’s about cracking the right product market fit which means the new distribution model because our plan is primarily to have a free new model. So, give the app for free and charge for a few new features, which has never been done before. So, there’s a lot of learnings to be done around, cracking the product market fit for the right audience and then tying a distribution model that’s truly scalable globally and is truly cost effective. And then obviously, once you tag that product market fit title to the distribution model, then always the problem is going to be around, hey, how do you scale it? How do you get the right people involved in the journey? But it’s all fun. So that’s where the fun bits come in. Otherwise, it won’t be that exciting.
Danny Bluestone
And just one final question. You spoke at the beginning about your principles and your first principles, how are you going to apply your principles to this new venture?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, so we are already applying it. So, one of the key things was when we looked at the content sourcing a lot of traditional learning platforms have the way they would produce content would be hire studio, get torn of peoples, when we started, we always ask people, everyone’s like, hey, your content is going to be so expensive! so expensive! so expensive! He’s like, okay, why is it so expensive? One of the drivers of cost, how about if you did it this way? So, we dramatically reduce the cost of content production by simply using the first principle thinking, okay, why can’t we use existing content? Which is why we went to the creators and on YouTube, was one way and the other area was where a lot of feedback we got was okay, you have to target HR, L&D managers.
That’s your first point. Now we’re doing it differently. Our focus is really team managers inside companies. So that’s, again the first principle of thinking of questioning everything. Why does it have to be the way that everybody else has done it? So, it’s pretty much everything is kind of first principle thinking, right now, that’s the only way, as a general category, L&D is pretty crowded, so, although the SME mid-market is completely, is not law, solutions out there, they’re actually solving people’s problems. So, because at a macro level as a product segment, you always have to think first principles pretty much around everything. Who’s the market target audience? How do you do production? How do you make it engaging? Who’s exactly the ideal customer, all those things.
Danny Bluestone
Cool. And when is the app launching officially, are there any campaigns that you’ll be running to promote market awareness?
Saurav Chopra
Yeah probably, I think we’re still in a kind of testing mode. So, we’re testing with some companies, so probably our target is around end of Q3. I think we’ll be ready to launch it properly in the market and get some real users to play the app.
Danny Bluestone
That’s, that’s fascinating. So, thanks so much Saurav and hopefully see you soon in person for a nice beer.
Saurav Chopra
Yeah, great to be here and thank you very much for having me and I really enjoyed the chat. And yeah, I look forward to catching up with you too.
Danny Bluestone
Thank you for listening.
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