Navigating the Road to Business Reliability with Aayush Jain of Cliff.ai
Hashmap on Tap Ep. 127
“One thing that we have learned is that it’s much better to find the customers that fit into your niche — rather than trying to satisfy every single customer. . . It’s better to say ‘no’ to customers [in order to] focus on the core value problem and fine-tune your value to the existing customer.”
— Aayush Jain
Imagine that it’s 1995, and you’re on a road trip. You’re about halfway to your destination, and you realize it’s been a while since you last stopped for gas. You glance down at your car’s dashboard to check your gas level and see that the needle is in the red — you’re about to run out of gas. You start to panic and look for the next highway exit with a gas station so you can fill up — while thinking to yourself, “Wow, I looked down at just the right time…it really would have been great for the car to give me some kind of heads-up…”
Fast forward to the present — many of today’s modern cars have reliable alert capabilities. In most cases, you can rely on the car to alert you — typically with a beep or a message on the dashboard — when your gas level is low, maintenance is required, what road to turn on next, or even if a collision is detected. Due to the nature of these alerts, it’s incredibly helpful for the car (and its systems, dashboards, etc.) to be reliable.
With the advances in these types of features, you can rely on more than just yourself to avoid experiencing issues or delays. Aayush Jain is no stranger to the concept of reliability when it comes to running a business, and he offers valuable advice on this topic as a guest on a recent episode of the podcast, Hashmap on Tap.
What’s on tap for this episode? Tea! Aayush is drinking what he calls “grandma’s tea” — an iced, Indian medicinal tea that your grandma might serve you when you’re feeling under the weather (hence where the name comes from!) Kelly is drinking a fruity, hibiscus tea with a hint of lemon cream honey that complements the flavors without making it too sweet.
Aayush is the Founder and CEO of Cliff.ai, and over tea, he shares how Cliff.ai is helping clients monitor business reliability to help find and fix business issues as they are happening by using data. Prior to Cliff.ai, Aayush founded multiple other companies including Greendeck and TrueMD.
“Imagine physicists and biologists not enjoying their science degrees and wanting to do something else. The only common thing that we found together was computer science.”
— Aayush Jain
So where did Aayush begin his journey and how did he become interested in technology? Well, Aayush reveals that his background is actually in biology, and he got into tech as a distraction from his science degree since he “absolutely hated it.” The other two co-founders of Cliff.ai are Aayush’s college friends and former roommates, and they both come from similar backgrounds with degrees in physics. Like Aayush, they were looking for the opportunity to do something new.
Their first company, TrueMD, offered users generic alternatives to medicines to help cut down healthcare costs, and it progressed from a platform to a full-fledged pharmacy. After TrueMD was purchased, the co-founders began brainstorming ideas for the next problem to be solved, and as a result, they landed on pricing. The idea for Greendeck, which began in 2017, was to help online fashion retailers make better pricing decisions with the use of AI. What began with just 3 co-founders grew into a team of 22 people. Now, Greendeck and Cliff.ai operate as one company, but with two different products.
While business reliability is their ultimate outcome, Cliff.ai is fundamentally solving the problem of dashboards. The dashboard relies on a person to be able to continuously look at the metrics for making decisions, which is unsustainable. To improve the functionality and reliability of the dashboard, Cliff.ai notifies users about marketing metrics and notes unprecedented spikes. Additionally, Aayush discusses how Cliff.ai utilizes three principles to reduce the number of alerts the end users are getting.
Aayush also offers insights into the customer base that can derive the most benefit from Cliff.ai’s technologies. As he explains, the customers who see the most value in the platform are the ones who already have a data warehouse in place. For that reason, Cliff.ai is focusing on cloud data warehouse integrations.
Want to know what tip they’ve learned when it comes to building a customer base? Aayush shares the insight that it’s preferable to find customers who fit into the company’s niche rather than trying to satisfy everybody. Cliff.ai certainly understands what it takes to grow a customer base — their company’s growth has been completely organic, and they’re now receiving over 45,000 visitors on a monthly basis.
As the episode wraps up, Aayush discusses the new interesting side project his team has been working on. Additionally, due to their company’s growth, Cliff.ai is currently hiring, and Aayush describes the qualities that make up their ideal engineering hire. Want to find out what they’re looking for (and more!)? Make sure you listen to the full episode below!
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