Startup Spotlight Q&A: adam.ai
CEO of adam.ai, Ahmed Kamel, has always been a techie, building world-class products for the past 15 years. This is his second company to co-found, his first one was also a software-based company founded in 2011 and since then grown exponentially to 150 employees in 3 continents.
My second company, adam.ai is a meeting management tool, focused on transforming the way meetings are run in the modern workplace.
— In a single sentence, what does adam.ai do?
adam.ai helps teams plan, run, and follow up on their business meetings.
– How did adam.ai come to be? What were the problem you found and the ‘aha’ moment?
Funny enough, when we first started, we built an actual robot which was essentially an assistant, that was used to manage in-person meetings.
COVID hit and then we had our ‘aha’ moment, which was to begin emphasizing remote meetings.
Today, we have a full comprehensive meeting management software that captures all internal, external, online, and offline meetings to continuously build and update a centralized meetings knowledgebase.
— What sets adam.ai apart in the market?
Our number of integrations. The beauty of adam.ai is that it takes about 30 seconds to set up, and literally works with the tools you use every day.
Like your email to view meetings and send meeting minutes, your video-conferencing tool to schedule meetings, your CRM to log a copy of the meetings under your contacts, your project management tool to send actions to specified projects, or import projects to adam.ai, your file-sharing tool to import and export files and links, Slack or Teams to share the minutes to any channel.
Our flexibility (even with regards to hosting) and ability to integrate with any 3rd party excites our customers the most, as well as our ability to predominantly build any feature for them based on their current meeting workflow.
— What milestone are you most proud of so far?
COVID ironically. We grew 5X during the pandemic as everyone is looking for tools to manage remotely, especially for meetings.
– What KPIs are you tracking that you think will lead to revenue generation/growth?
# of Users
# of Paying Customers
# of Partners/ Alliances
# of leads from Partners/Alliances and conversation rate to paying
# of website visits
Word of mouth, Network Effect
Customer Journey on both website and trial
Conversion rate from trial to Pro
ROI on Marketing activities including ads, events, webinars, social media, SEO, content, etc
Customer feedback (NPS surveys, feedback forms, etc)
— How do you build and develop talent?
My other co-founder, who is also my brother, physically went to universities when we first started and started pitching to all the top students.
After a rigorous process and thousands of applicants, we selected 20 students. Fast-forward 3 years later, we still have 100% of our founding team.
— What are the biggest challenges for the team?
Remote working. Some of our employees were mentally affected by not being in an office, bringing down overall motivation and task completion.
We started having lunch weekly together all on camera, starting fun online games together — creating competitions and prizes, also once every 2 weeks one of our adamee’s will give a talk on something he or she is passionate about.
We also offered each one of our employees our full support in whatever they needed to work at home, whether it being a chair or a table, or a screen, internet or phone bills, or even as simple as a notebook.
We invest in our team, as they are our biggest investment.
— What’s been the biggest success for the team? How did you celebrate?
Our enterprise wins. The fact that a company as big as 40,000 employees is running adam.ai is truly something to celebrate.
Each time we close a new enterprise deal, we take the whole team out to a place of their choice anywhere they choose. Later on, when we receive more funding, we plan on implementing an annual retreat.
— What’s something you’re constantly thinking about?
Our end-users. Yes, growth and financial gain are important, but at the end of the day, we do this for our customers.
Every decision needs to be based on our customers, every feature is based on a customer request, any new release/update is based on customer feedback and every new hire is based on how we can make the customer experience better.
“If you’re not making someone else’s life better, then you’re wasting your time.” Will Smith.
— What advice would you give to other founders?
Play on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
— Have you been or are you part of a corporate startup program or accelerator? If so, which ones and what have been the benefits?
Startup Grind, Startup Growth program
Microsoft for Startups program
— Who is your cloud provider?
Microsoft Azure
— Besides business, what do you enjoy doing?
I like to express my creativity through painting and drawing :)
