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GTM with AI - Aditya Kothadya
Aditya Kothadiya: And our belief was that we wanted to help reps workflow. Automating the note taking, automating the CRM data entry, automating the scheduling, those things we did. And we said the byproduct, the other side of the coin is your leadership also gets insights. The solution was deployed as a workflow automation solution, not as a intelligence and monitoring or analytics tool.
Connor Jeffers: Hello and welcome to Go to Market with AI. A podcast for sales, marketing and customer success leaders using AI to scale their growth operations. I'm your host, Connor Jeffers and I'm joined today by Aditya Kothadiya, Founder and CEO of AVOMA which is very relevant to the AI conversation and so I will let him introduce AVOMA and how it fits into all of this and all of the cool stuff they're doing, and then we'll get into it.
Aditya Kothadiya: Thanks, Connor. Really excited to be here and yeah, as you introduced, I'm a Co Founder and a CEO at AVOMA. We have been building AVOMA for the last six years. AI is obviously a buzzword now, so everybody's adding some part of AI to their offering, but we were one of those AI first company from day one. That was the hypothesis. We'll try to get into that as also how we started it but fun fact, what AVOMA is, and even just the name, it's an acronym for a very organized meeting assistant. And so when you think about it, that's really how we started thinking about building an AI assistant from the day one. And what it does, it records, transcribes all these customer facing conversations, analyzes them, automate the note taking for you, automate the notes and save those notes into CRM, and so provide a lot of, actionable insights. So that you can for all customer facing functions, can perform more effectively. So that's a very high level overview of what AVOMA is.
Connor Jeffers: I remember the first time, I don't remember if it was you or Mark, your customer success leader, but someone on your team told me that AVOMA was an acronym and I was like, this is the most amazing thing I've ever heard because I think, I think not only is it, it's a perfect name in that it is both, linguistic, it's pronounceable and it means something, which is much more to be said for all other sort of like five letter startup names. So I love it! Maybe something as a starting point and I don't know this story and I'm legitimately, extremely interested in it, which is you say sort of AI at the outset and I think to your point, everyone's talking about "we do AI this, if you add dot AI, you know, your series A number goes up" and from the outset before AI was cool, you were out here seeing this. Tell me where did sort of the, not the idea, but the "I'm going to make this into a company. I'm going to build this into a thing". And what was sort of the response at the time now that AI and conversational intelligence in this space has become a thing and you were starting this business and raising money for this business before that ever happened?
Aditya Kothadiya: No, you're bringing me now in my old memory lane. So, but, yeah, this is, this journey started, I would say I will not take full credit for this and, my previous company, this is back in 2009, was in the social commerce space. It was called Shopalize and we were building social support and marketing offering on top of Twitter and Facebook.
Connor Jeffers: Was that your first one? So your serial, that number one, this is number two?
Aditya Kothadiya: Yeah, this is my number two company. So that company, again, I got lucky enough, fortunate enough. Company got acquired by a large customer support company called 247.ai and, in 24 seven, so they wanted to acquire our company for all the customer facing conversations on Twitter and Facebook. So we were analyzing all this Twitter or Facebook conversations. At that time, natural language understanding was still popular so it was part of machine learning AI stream to understand the customer sentiment, what's going on in the customer support world.
Connor Jeffers: So that was mostly text at that time?
Aditya Kothadiya: Yeah, it was predominantly text. And, this is where, how I got exposed to the voice side of the things as well. So my first company got acquired and this is back in 2013 and, I stayed there company for many years and, part of the story, so the visionary CEO at that company pushed me to start figuring out what is the self service experience of customer service is going to be. And one of the technologies that they had at that time was, if you remember, what people call IVR, this, you call 1 800 number and then you listen to the menu. Press one to do this. Press two to do this.
Connor Jeffers: I remember I was doing, what, 2013, probably 20, I remember like TalkDesk. I don't know when TalkDesk was a thing, but I remember this was a big deal in the sale. This was like the hot trend in CS was you can make them route themselves and you can get it to the right place and do this omni channel thing and everything else.
Aditya Kothadiya: Exactly. Exactly. And so that's exactly what we were doing, but for enterprise geared customers. So 24 seven operators in the similar space with the contact center, you know, customers like Amex and Capital One and Best Buy, these were their customers, very large enterprise. So any few minutes that you automate, they have thousands of customer support agents. So you imagine the customer support volume they have and so any few minutes that you can optimize in their customer support used to be huge time savings.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah.
Aditya Kothadiya: So I was given this charter that what is that, self service experience? What can we automate from these live agent interactions and at that time we initially build the product for the text chat based support, chat support interaction that you see now in intercom and all of that. Again, I'm telling you literally, we had this back in seven, eight years ago.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah.
Aditya Kothadiya: We would automate these things. We would not, the generative AI that you're seeing right now, it was not as advanced, of course, but at that time, the deep neural network was getting really popular. So DNN is what we call. And one of the things I realized that we were working with Microsoft speech recognition engine at that time and I saw the accuracy was phenomenal at that time. And I was like, "Oh my God", if the AI can detect the speak to, the speech to and translate into text that accurately, there were so many different options that were possible and my aha moment was that I was in the product leadership role there. So I used to still build the product, but I would be constantly in front of customers, pitching on new ideas, new vision, trying to sell, go on our sales calls. And I realized that so much insights were getting, getting shared at that in those calls that our product team were never having had any access to those conversations. So my view was that, "Hey, why don't we", I had domain expertise now of building AI products in text and some sort of speech model, but I was building it for customer support domain. And I realized that me as a B2B kind of a professional selling to B2B companies, I felt my life was all over the place, I'm doing all the bunch of meetings, taking notes, manually typing all these notes, sharing different flavors of notes with executives, different flavors of notes with our engineers, and it just felt like I'm spending way too much time. And the nuances of the feedback is getting lost. So that's when I, realized that, "Hey, if the accuracy is so good, why don't we do something in my own, solve my own problem and start solving for the meetings?" So that's was the aha moment for AVOMAs journey. By day one, we knew that this is going to be AI based product and we also knew that it's actually a very complex product. So I'm going to probably dedicate 10 years of my life to solving this problem. I made sure that my co founders had that kind of commitment that this is not going to be quick, easy sell because my first company, to be honest, got sold pretty quickly within three years. I got lucky. We made decent money and we thought, okay, now we found to solve the next problem. It has to be a lot more complex problem. Nobody had anticipated generative AI would become as popular as it had became. But yeah, we have been working on the generative AI for the last six years, pretty much.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah. So something that I'll get back to, you and I had a conversation, I don't know, some back before it was cold in New York. So sometime this past summer about fundraising and I was sort of going through the same thing and you did a really good job of putting my pain in perspective. I was complaining about going through this fundraising, like, "Oh my God, you're doing all of these on Zoom".
Connor Jeffers: Like I had to go to California and block whole days. And like, now you can actually work during it. And I thought that that was very prescient. What was the reaction as you were going through that at that time to AI centric pieces because right now, I mean, now there's like venture memes of, "Oh, are you doing AI"? "No, like, Oh, I'm not super interested". It didn't sound like it was a super easy conversation to me when you were telling me about it, but.
Aditya Kothadiya: No it was not, it was not. So the funny thing was that even though...
Connor Jeffers: if you aren't seeing this on video, Aditya's face just went back to his, like, he just saw the explosions and smoke out in the distance of his war history.
Aditya Kothadiya: Though it is, I mean, it's, it's like, "Oh my God", you're trying to remember me all those days, the painful days. There were actually some good moments as well. And, so the interesting thing would happen at that time when I started AVOMA I left my job full time. I did not have Co-Founder, we did not have a product, but I knew this is the problem I want to solve. I met with lots of PhDs, lots of people who had worked on this summarization problem, but unfortunately no one was willing to actually start a company. Eventually, after six months of constantly talking to lots of people, I was doing customer research and trying to go deep into the problem understanding and at the same time, I was trying to build a team. Eventually I, had my Co Founders agreed to join startup with me. We started building the product at that time. And when we started talking to people, people at that time, Gong and Chorus were already live, they had raised a lot of capital, they were instilled, but the product was already out and we didn't know this and I was like, "Oh my God, it's exactly what we wanted to build". But they were much ahead, more kind of, senior people who had done some of these things also. A lot ahead in the game also, and the other hand, we also saw some other companies like YCR and Otter, they were also, they had also raised a pretty decent amount of capital, they had also launched the product. So when you get into the market, that's when you realize that now there are, you're not the first one and there are many companies, but at that time it was not. I still felt like both these products were solved in a different way, where the way we were thinking on the problem was not exactly that. So there was no U turn for me to go back and join another company again. So I still kept talking to investors. We decided to raise capital at that time, knowing that, okay, there are people who are much ahead of us. And so we said, "okay, we also got to now invest resources". And we got lots of notes, lots of rejections, largely because people thought there are four or five players, the market is over and I was like, how can that be over? Here is the gap that the way I see in the market. And, but, very few investors got ready to invest
Aditya Kothadiya: and all you need is one investor. So that helped us to raise our seed capital, which is 1 million dollar at that time. And very little capital compared to all the other providers. But eventually, the problem was also was you're raising capital also you're building and you're trying to sell. And so at that time before the COVID happened, you have to go the way you had to come to California. Even we are living in California, every investor meeting takes five hours and then it was taking so much time away from your meet on day to day operations and running business. It was very painful process, especially when you get so many rejections. And the worst part was I would be absolutely happy if I would get rejection on the first call.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah.
Aditya Kothadiya: The problem used to be, people would love our immediate differentiation, our initial prototype, what we had built, the generative AI capabilities we had built at that time and then the first partner would get excited. The more they get excited, then they would bring the same argument. "Oh, what about Gong? Why wouldn't they do what you're doing? What about Otter? Why wouldn't they do what you're doing?" And eventually we would get "no" and it, by the time you're investing this four or five meetings. So that's when I've had a little bit of frustrating moments early on the pre COVID fundraising.
Connor Jeffers: I think, the thing that I just I want to latch on to because I just like is resonating with me so much, which is the same thing. You're like, I spent one call with you. We had one conversation. You didn't get it. It's not for you, whatever. And I think you have this. At least I felt anyway, that this, this air of, reverence feels extreme, but like reverence or deference to, to the investor folks are like, Oh, these are really smart people that are going to get it. They want it. And then you like are spending a lot of time and you get to the end of it and they're like, "Ah, I don't know. We just don't like it". And you start to wonder, am I crazy? Am I doing the wrong thing here? And I think that was something that I feel before going down the fundraising path, a lot of people had surfaced to me and said, and you're like, "Oh yeah, you know, it's hard". And I don't know man, it's just like getting hit in the face every day.
Aditya Kothadiya: Yeah. But you learn, right? So this was my first time raising that kind of capital and then when we started building our business, it started growing and then we, we got to a million dollars in ARR. So we said, okay, now let's do series A. And at that time we, I had a completely different mindset. Yeah. First of all, this is right after COVID and so people, investor was still on Zoom. Everybody was still on Zoom. People are not meeting in person and the window was about to open. So I had to time like, okay, I'm not going to go through this in person meetings again, chasing all these investors. Before everyone starts in person office, as long as everyone is on a Zoom, let's immediately start raising capital. And our revenue also had reached to a point where I felt comfortable. So we went and raised capital. So the two things I did, one is I would say 99. 99 percent investors I met on Zoom. So, we didn't even our series A investors, lead investor. We did not meet them in person. Post, after the round was closed and everything else. And there were all these myths of "Oh, you can't build relationship" and all of that stuff. I didn't believe in that. If you're authentic, if you're transparent and everything else, even with Zoom, you can build great relationships. I felt like those are just the excuses people have, but yeah, so it didn't really matter, so we raised the capital, we got a lot of commits and everything else, but the, here's the thing, another thing I did. Second time around, I told investors by the time, the funny thing was that many investors who had rejected us in the beginning because of COVID, Zoom became popular, the remote work became popular. Our story started resonating and everyone wanted to invest and people are still funding this 10th player, 15th player. I'm like, when we had five players back in the market was saturated and now you're funding the 50th player. I don't understand, but investors also, I lost a lot of respect from investors to be honest, at that time. I realized that these guys are all formal guys, nobody has a context. nobody has strong belief of some or certain things and so they had capital and they just wanted to deploy at any valuation for anything. Didn't really matter. Is it truly going to be a hundred million dollar company or not? And how many hundred million dollar companies you can build in this space, Gong and Chorus were already much ahead. So, that was definitely a perspective we had. And so then I started, when I went for series A, I was very strict about this thing. Like if you're going to eventually give me the reason that Gong and Chorus are there and that's why you don't want to invest, give me that answer right now in the first call itself. I don't want to invest time with you going through the rabbit hole of this process, three, four meetings, and then you bring the same reason after talking to your all partners. So, I was very little bit to some extent, arrogant, but maybe a little bit of that, that confidence was there that. You come on board here are the objections.
Connor Jeffers: Nothing makes people more excited to buy or invest than if you're like, I don't just, I don't really care. You just let me know.
Aditya Kothadiya: To some extent it was there because we were growing, we had revenue, things were working and we needed capital no doubt about it. We also got a lot of rejections, but I was trying to optimize my time. Rather than sacrificing running business. I said that I'm not going to invest more time with you if you're already not committed. This is not, let's not kind of learn and you get educated by me sharing a lot of information. So that's what happens and so I was mindful of my time based on my previous learnings. But again, obviously you need that level of confidence. You need that traction. To kind of demand those kind of things, but yeah, those are the experiences of my fundraising journey at AVOMA.
Connor Jeffers: Oh, thank you. That's amazing. Tell me about, so something that, that I think is really interesting and I'm curious about both where, what segment you guys started with, but where you're at is, AVOMA is not just focused on, sales and sales centric function, which I think a lot of the folks in this arena are kind of focused on more of that sales centric
Connor Jeffers: and a lot of people love building sales tech because it's easier to sell. They have budget. They're trying, nothing's easier to prove than, Oh, it'll help us get more cash on the door. And I'm super interested in where do you see functions of teams? And what do you guys see some from customers beyond just like the sales recording an coaching component?
Aditya Kothadiya: Yeah, and this goes back to, from day one, people always ask me, "well, did you how many times did you pivot, or what all different things you tried"? And to be honest, this is exactly what we have been trying to build from day one. The reason was that we had extensive customer research and, I'll tell you, the reason I said that why we still felt there's a gap in the market, while Chorus and Gong existed at the time, they were predominantly focused on sales coaching as a primary use case and when I look at any time competing in any market or any product as a startup, I look at three things. What's your market? What's your product? And then, what's your go to market? And you, if you want to compete, you have to have differentiations at least minimum two, the best is definitely you have to have in three. So can you have a different market? Can you have a different product? And can you also have a different go to market motion? So when I looked at Chorus and Gong, they were all top down, focus on sales coaching as a primary market, going after mid market and enterprise customers, very top down sales led motion. So the go to market motion was also a sales led. And I felt like, okay, I see that's a primary practice, but I didn't believe that in the next four or five years, that's going to be a predominantly the motion that people are going to love it. On the other hand, you had the, Otter and YCM. These were insanely horizontal products. So a meeting professional can use it, a student can use it, journalists can use it, a podcaster can use it. So the problem...
Connor Jeffers: When you say horizontal, you mean non specialized in any particular function.
Aditya Kothadiya: Exactly, exactly. So all functions, any use case. And the problem was that with that approach, I felt it was predominantly just the transcription play. There was not much workflows that were built. Not much kind of AI analysis was built around that. And so I felt these both approaches were good in their own thing, but I felt there was something in the middle. And for me, it was corporate professionals, but customer facing professionals. And when I say customer facing, it was not necessarily only sales.
Aditya Kothadiya: It meant that you could be client engagement, customer success, partnership and I felt even recruiting to some extent and all this, even a sales leader, when I've looked into it, they do some sales calls, but they also have a lot of internal one on one meetings. And even there, the note taking was important part. So I felt restricting a sales tech tool only for coaching and only recording external calls. I felt it's limited, but I didn't want to also go to horizontal where anybody can use it. We wanted to still optimize the workflows for knowledge professionals who only do meetings. So we say no to podcasters, we say no to students, universities, that's not our ideal customer profile. If somebody only wants AVOMA for sales coaching only use case, then we get them in the door, but eventually they realize that, okay, they can use AVOMA for more than just the sales coaching, for internal note taking, collaboration, all the other use cases also happen. So that's kind of the vision we had from day one, that we believe that, go to market functions work very collaboratively. There's a, handoffs happen throughout the process, starting from SDR to sales, sales to customer success or sometimes implementation. And I felt you need to build a tool that goes across all these functions to persist the conversation history with that account.
Aditya Kothadiya: Because SaaS companies have optimized their functions. Oh, AEs are going to only do this. They're going to hand it over to CS. CS are only going to do this, then hand it over to somebody else. And, but the customer is only the same person. We are handing over for our efficiency, but the customer is getting bad experience. Because now after AE does discovery, CSM is going on the call and CSM says, "Can you share me your business initiatives"?
Connor Jeffers: I just spent a super long time telling everybody else upstream. Yeah.
Aditya Kothadiya: Exactly. So the whole idea was that how do we really simplify this account handoff process? And make sure that there's a context persisted, people understand these things, people leave. There's already churn in some of these go to market functions. So when these happen, how do we not end up giving bad experience to our customers? So that was the vision I already had that we need to build a product that scales across all the functions, not just for the sales coaching but for customer success and not taking workflows as well. So that's, that's kind of the genesis we had at the beginning.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah. I mean, so it's super interesting for me and we, I'm an AVOMA customer across two different businesses. What's interesting about what you said is, we use it for everything. And so I, at no point, I'm, this gets to a question, I promise, but I think for us at Aptitude 8 for services, our sales team uses it. We take all those call recordings, they inform our scoping process. So sales engineering, they can go escalate and ask other people who weren't on the call and we're not saying, "Oh, well, do they do this thing"? And you're like, "I don't remember. And my notes don't say it". And instead we have the call recording. I think there's an efficiency component of that, but there's also just nothing better than the actual customer language and what the customer is looking for. And so we see that use case there. We use those every time we have a new deal move from our sales team to our service team, there is a step in our internal onboarding of all of everyone on our service team reviews all the AVOMAs. It's noted, you're written in our internal systems. They go through, they watch all those calls to understand what is the customer trying to do? What is their problem? How does it inform what I'm doing? And our services team uses that to inform everything they do. And then in the event, there's, a escalations for us as a whole other like account management engagement. There's a customer. Maybe we're behind schedule. Maybe it's their fault. Maybe they're upset about something. We use keywords in AVOMA to flag and trigger CSMs to get involved and go talk to those customers when they're frustrated. And we also use it across recruiting. But what's interesting is, and we do it for technical interviews. We record all of our technical interviews so we can circulate them to other people and get their feedback as well and then on the software business, hapily, we, I think what you touched on at the beginning, right? And I think most people in product are like, I should build a product for product people. And then you're like, there's not that many product people and no one gives them budgets, so let me go build a product for other people. ,But we do it a lot for a customer researcher Slack all the time is, "Hey, you should listen to the snippet. We just showed a preview of this product to somebody. They're really excited about it. You should hear about it". And I think for me, I'm so spoiled being an entrepreneur living in the world of recorded meetings where I can just be like, "Oh, send me the recording and I'll watch that". And that like thinking about not having that freaks me out. And so my question for you is like, when you're having these conversations with customers,
Connor Jeffers: how often is it a single team and a single buyer? Is it, are people looking at it as I want to buy across the entire organization? Do you have to do a lot of education for them to understand why they do that?
Aditya Kothadiya: So look, I have to give credit to Gong for being a Gong as a market leader, right? So they're amazing in what they've done in marketing and they've educated the world and the world looks at this world in a unique way. Like, Oh, the sales team is what we need this for. So a lot of the times that's what people do come in and there's demand
Connor Jeffers: It is interesting for sales, right? Is like, at least I feel it comes from a position of distrust. Like people are just anxious about what their sales team is doing all the time. And so it's like, I need to, the sales team having calls that I can't review and I can't coach them and like, what are they telling people?
Aditya Kothadiya: Yeah.
Connor Jeffers: And that, that fear was a big motivator.
Aditya Kothadiya: There is, there was that effect. Like Gong, a lot of Gong customers come and tell us that, "Hey, this is about a big brother monitoring the way of sales is monitoring my calls". Sure, Reps do get value. But the way we were, this is where Avoma's solution was very different from a story point of view. So if you look at it, what Gong's positioning and story has been that observe what your reps are saying. They are saying pricing were at this point or they're not saying these things at that point. And so that's what the emphasis was on how reps are saying certain things. That's important. But what we did was we said, well, it's not just for the big brother monitoring. Let's actually help people who are on the front line, which is the reps themselves. What are reps going through? So we looked at reps end to end meetings life cycle. What did they do before the meeting, during the meeting, after the meeting? What did they hate most about those workflows? So note taking was a big workflow, entering data into CRM was a big workflow, scheduling back and forth was another workflow. So we started listing down all these workflows and we said, when we want to deploy a solution which has higher retention and higher adoption in the product, then let's go ahead and build something for the reps who use this every single day. Here's the thing inside the we had at that early on was people were going buying Gong 10 licenses 20 licenses, and when I would go and ask vp of sales, "how do you like Gong"? "Oh, we love Gong." "How do you how often you what do you do"? "Well, once in a while i'll go back and listen to the call". So it was basically a insurance policy. You would go back watch calls once in a while and then I would ask reps "how many of you are using it"? Well, you know, three people are actively using it. So you bought 10, 20 licenses. Only three or five people are using it actively. Something was missing because reps were still taking notes manually. They were listening to calls if something was forgotten, but the CRM data entry still was happening manually. And we said, these are the gaps are in the market. The way the solution was built for coaching use case. Fine. Leaders are getting value once in a while. What if you give value to the reps on an everyday basis? And this is where even our pricing reflected that, we said we will offer monthly pricing. Why are we locking you down in an annual contract? If you are happy with monthly pricing, we believe in our product giving you value on an ongoing basis. If you fail, you will churn. So we took that bold step. Nobody at that time was offering this monthly kind of pricing. And our belief was that we wanted to help reps workflow. Automating the note taking, automating the CRM data entry, automating the scheduling, those things we did. And we said the byproduct, the other side of the coin, is your leadership also gets insights. But the primary thing we, the solution was deployed as a workflow automation solution, not as a intelligence and monitoring or analytics tool. And that's the difference that we did with from a positioning point of view. We had to educate customers. Customers would come in because Gong was educating them. The demand was being generated by Gong. So we had to capture the demand and then try to tell us that, how are we different? We were not like, "Oh, Avoma is a cheaper Gong". Sure. We will, we want it to be affordable and flexible, but that does not mean that I want it to be a cheaper Gong. And, we had this story narratives were different. We were challenging customers that, you're starting here, but what about your customer success team? What about your internal teams? Even though, I would ask the sales leaders, "how do you do your pipeline review"? And they will say, "I do this, I do this". "Do you give feedback to the reps? Do the reps, take notes for those, action items you're telling them in those pipeline review meetings"? "They do". And then, "are you recording those meetings"? "They're not". "Is the feedback then actually getting implemented? How do you know that action items are not getting dropped"? So when people, when we educated our buyers like that, they immediately started realizing how are we different than Gong? Compared to just, Oh, this is not. And so people started telling me, Aditya, now there are six or seven conversation intelligence tool. All of them we compare in one bucket. Everyone Gong is the top in that bucket, Gong, Chorus, Clari whatever. There were a couple of other ones and the AVOMA is completely different. It changed how you have told us in terms of the workflow as an organization. Some people come, came and started telling us. This is our operating system. You mentioned some of this thing that even I had not heard how detail you use it across different meetings. So people started calling us that this is operating system for our go to market function and even the product function and that was something enlightening and that's kept us going, even though the market was getting competitive, all of those things. But, we realized that what we believed early on is resonating with the market and people are liking these differentiated product offerings.
Connor Jeffers: What is the, is there something that you think of either that your, your team does, or that you have a customer that's done that's just, I'll give you some more context. I think the coolest part of building product is not when people do the thing you want them to do and it works, but when they do something that you never even imagined that they would do, and you're like, wow, that's incredible! Is there anything that jumps out to you or that you guys do with the AVOMA that you think is really, really different or unique, tied to using it as a, as an AI meeting tool?
Aditya Kothadiya: Oh, so many things like a lot of, to be honest, I give a lot of credit to our customers who are pushing us all the time. They are leveraging AVOMA in different ways that we didn't think about and, like some of these interviews and you talked about. AVOMA has a very built in privacy centric approach. So one of the simplest thing was that we realized that Gong's philosophy was that every call is visible for anybody to go and listen to, right? When you're doing internal meetings, you don't want your internal meetings to be available for the rest of the org to go. So then you have to manually go change the permission, all of that stuff. So, when people started using AVOMA for internal meetings and one on ones and recruiting calls, they wanted a certain level of flexibility in terms of how this default privacy works. And so we said, "okay, all internal meetings by default will be private. And all external meetings, you can define have more controls. You can decide you want to private or visible to org or public and all of that stuff". So those are the kind of things. People started loving the way how they were using it. I'll give you another example. Recently, one customer came in and we had Slack alerts for a long time. So one customer came in and he showed me how many Slack alerts he had implemented. And I asked him to show me some of the things that are the way you're doing it. One of the things, was that a lot of the time salespeople or customer success people will say on the call that, "Oh, let me talk to my product team". And, those words talk to my product team is they say that to the prospect, if the prospect hired certain, they forget about it, they're not getting paid to go and share feedback to the product.
Connor Jeffers: That means like, don't worry about it and we'll move on and if you sign, then it'll be, thats let me talk to my product team.
Aditya Kothadiya: Exactly. And so, but we said, okay, how, how can we actually learn this voice? And so this customer had implemented these different phrases and they had implemented the Slack alerts. And so I learned this from them. We, I did not see how my sales service was saying, and they were exactly saying the same thing.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah.
Aditya Kothadiya: I went back and looked at it and now we've completely automated how you get the voice of customer. And so our product team monitors the Slack alerts and they're getting some distilled notes, the deal size. So there is no back and forth. "Oh, what's the deal amount? Is it important feedback? Should we give"? So now you know what is the deal amount, what is the use case? What are the key notes that have been discussed in that you automatically get all of this information in a Slack alert. So, the reps even don't have to manually explicitly share this information. So the voice of customer, is automatically being shared and product team is acting on it. So those are the, some of the things that, yeah.
Connor Jeffers: Like, can you claim that you're a customer first or a product? Like if you don't record these interactions and circulate them through your organization, then you're going to be very hard pressed to be like, "Oh, we're extremely customer centric". Cause you're customers that will take the time to talk to you and give you the feedback when you follow up with them centric, which is a completely different thing.
Aditya Kothadiya: I have such a huge gratitude for our customers or people who have given us feedback who have pushed us like there is no way. Now, obviously I will say this, but if you go and talk to my team internally, you will see that one of the constant feedback I end up giving every single day, how does this benefit our customer? Start from customer. How does this benefit our buyer? How does this benefit our reader? Even if you're writing a blog post or an ebook or whatever it is, are we thinking about them or are we thinking about us? Sure. You have, as a customer success manager, you have goals to book more meetings with your customer to go do the renewal. What's in it for them? Have you thought about their goals, their things? So every interaction that we are trying to do, the customer centricity is cliche, I know it. But, as you can see how we operate on a day to day basis without customers.
Connor Jeffers: Honestly, the more it's funny. I think the more that I lead organizations, the more things that in the beginning you sort of like roll your eyes and you balk at, and I think of things like, Oh, you know, like leadership, having leadership of people who can do leadership is so important, the culture is so important. Transparency is so important. And you hear these things and I think it's easy to be like, Oh yeah, you know, whatever. And like, I totally agree with you. And I think it's, it's really easy to be like, Oh, we really listened to the customer and it's really hard to do well.
Aditya Kothadiya: And, I, here's another thing, right? So we rolled out one change yesterday. Some customers did not like it. And, immediately I got backlash. There is a particular CEO who reached, I did not even know the CEO to be honest but, I was somehow connected with him on LinkedIn. He immediately came back on LinkedIn saying that, "Hey, big fan of AVOMA we raised our series A hundred million dollar valuation. And most of the credit goes to AVOMA. Like literally, from day one, we have used AVOMA to understand the voice of the customer, build the product the way customer wants. So all our growth, I, and he's like, I want to write a special letter to you. You have no idea how much I love AVOMA". And I had never met this person in the past. And then he said, "the only thing right now, this yesterday's team that you launched, team is not liking it. Can you do something about it?"
Connor Jeffers: That's a powerful, " but"
Aditya Kothadiya: Exactly. He was buttering me up to make sure that I've made the change.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Aditya Kothadiya: But really then it also, and then when I said, "no, no, no, so you're not alone. We got the same kind of complaints from other customers. So we are rolling back that change and we will have this change by tomorrow." So I was very happy again, again, he said the same kind of positive sentiment. So you can see that companies are, some people believe that AVOMA or something like this is only useful when you have a large sales team and then you're trying to do a sales coaching at that time. I said even when I was an individual Founder, selling and talking to customers, is how we build the product.
Aditya Kothadiya: I would not have time to go and share the sentiment, the way you said, like, it's not just the voice of the customer in what tonality dimension. It's important, your product and engineering team understand the voice. One of the biggest thing I used to focus on that you know, Paul Graham had this, that there are sellers and then there are builders. These are the only two people you need in the company and a startup. And my goal was that, how can I get these two people as close to as possible? So the go to market team, get them together from sales, CS, all of those to work with really well with each other. At the same time, how do we divide the gap between the product org, what they're building and what go to market team is selling? When you reduce the gap between these two functions, that's when you have the fastest product market fit. And so I cannot comprehend you on that, that even AVOMAs, we, when we were at 1 million ARR we were, I think, what, 15 people company.
Connor Jeffers: Yeah.
Aditya Kothadiya: And at that time, the idea was that we were able to quickly understand what was the customer's requirement, we would immediately go back and optimize it and build it. Here's another thing, when we hired our VP of sales, we started talking about, the deal win rates. And we said, okay, he told me that the, "your win rates are pretty high, 50%. And, the industry standard is around 25%". I said, "50 percent is high? Why is not 70%?" So I'm like, why should you lose a deal? If somebody is coming and talking to you, and then I told, our VP of sales that look, "if any feedback a prospect shares in our call, if it aligns with our vision, I need to know that." The way AVOMA got to this point is immediately prioritizing those requirements on the workflows that customer cares about, the workflows they need. Sure, you might lose one or two deals, but the next time somebody comes up with the same requirement, I don't want us to lose the deal. This whole SaaS industry believed these benchmarks that, oh, 25 percent win rate is good enough. Complete crap. Then you put a lot of money at the top of the funnel. You have this, Oh, it's a numbers game.
Connor Jeffers: Money is too hard to come by now.
Aditya Kothadiya: Yeah. And now it's difficult, right? So now you want to convert every single deal. So my view was that 50 percent is not good enough. I want 70 percent win rate. Only if somebody has some completely random needs and requirements, sure, we will lose that deal. Who has time to go and evaluate products and not buy? If somebody's spending time with me, that means they have an intent to buy. Why don't then I convert them? So that used to be my mindset that I don't think understanding customer requirements and immediately giving it to the product team and product team acting on it on a priority basis is how you become truly customer centric. And then you try to get the product market fit sooner. And you, you definitely improve your win rates purely because of that.
Connor Jeffers: So something you just told me, which I don't know, it made a connection in my head that's so interesting, which is, at the very beginning of hapily when we launched Zaybra I was doing a lot of founder centric selling and I feel like I was able to move out of founder driven sales much, much faster because we were using AVOMA and because we were doing the call recording, because I was able to immediately give somebody here, look, go look. I onboarded the first rep and I was like, "here are the top 10 deals we've won. Go watch all of those calls, read all the emails, read everything, go through the CRM. Here are the top 10 deals that we lost. Give me and write me up a summary of why did we win these ones? Why did we lose those ones?" I couldn't do that if we didn't have the call recording.
Connor Jeffers: No chance. And I could go and have him send me anything. I'm like, Hey, this came up with a customer today. I didn't know how to handle it. And now I can coach him and talk to him about it. I think what's so interesting is. I, and I don't know that I have the, here's Connor, I could make a really annoying viral LinkedIn post. So like if you're starting a new business buy these tools, but I will tell you at the very beginning of hapily I immediately went and bought HubSpot, I bought Gmail, I bought Slack, and I bought, I went and got, we use Rippling for HRIS. I bought that and we added AVOMA instantly. Like I, it seriously wasn't even a consideration because I felt so strongly that I don't, I think there's tremendous value in being remote. And I think that the value of having all of that knowledge, recorded, shared, available, being able to be distributed throughout the organization. I don't know. I've never built an organization that I didn't have that and I, it like freaks me out. Like it makes me sweat. I can feel it. I can talk to you for hours.
Connor Jeffers: I have one last thing that I really love your perspective on, because I think that you have probably one of the best ones in the space because you and your team spend a lot of time thinking about it, which is, you guys are coming in and advocating for an AI product. You are probably one of the first things someone is buying and investing in that is an AI centric tool. How does somebody who is looking to bring that into their organization, help get people over the hump of, we should make this investment, we should make this change?. And I think that you guys are probably one of the first ones that come into an organization. And it probably gives people one of the first experiences of, wow! This is incredible, like where else could we use this? and I'm sure that there's those early adopters, but how do you help them articulate the value and sort of build consensus in an organization?
Aditya Kothadiya: Yeah. So without getting into specific to AVOMA pitch, right? But, the stories are important when you try to bring AI, people always also have this, this whole risk of AI, both in terms of job displacement, also in terms of, the bad experiences when AI goes wrong. So the way I always encourage people to think about from two different lenses, one is when you're trying to think about AI, first of all, position it for what is the experience customer experience is going to be and also what is the employee experience is going to be when you think about customer experience. I do not like to deploy AI immediately wherever your customer gets personalized experience. So you want to probably deploy a automate something internal stuff first and do not like start sending fully automated emails.
Connor Jeffers: Is that, is that crawl, walk, run? Is it just like, it's lower stakes? You can, it's okay to make some errors there?
Aditya Kothadiya: Exactly. Because internal stakeholders, you can be okay, if you made some decision.
Connor Jeffers: You can apologize too, right?
Aditya Kothadiya: So it's understood. But when you, the brands are so important nowadays, so you don't want to go and deploy AI with your customer facing, customers or prospects and just have fully automated approach there. And eventually it would get there, but there's also maturity curve of where the AI is today. So my recommendation is always start with your internal team, start optimizing internal workflows, improve the efficiency there, and then slowly use that to optimize your customer experiences as well. So when you think about even employee experience, the stories matter there, like the way we said, let's say, AVOMA versus Gong story, we did not position it as a call monitoring big brother effect kind of a tool. We said, "this is your personal assistant. It's going to help you to automate the note taking and automate the CRM data entry". So understand the pain points of these your employees have. Where are they focusing their time? One of the things I ask people that there will be job displacement. That's no doubt that's going to happen. But how do you empower your team? Have the conversation with them. What are the strategic things that you do? And what are the tactical things, tasks that you do? Help them to focus more on the strategic things that they do. Having great conversations, having, coming up with more creative ideas. But, if you're doing this tactical stuff of writing some basic stuff or doing this data entry and all of that, optimize that, automate that. So I help people to think about it, elevate your team to do more strategic work and help them with AI to take care of their low value tasks that they do and automate those tasks. So that way employees feel great about themselves that I'm getting better in what I do best and I'm not, I don't have to waste my time in doing the boring tasks. And that's kind of how the best way of deploying AI. And then that way you're happy employees are now giving the best experience, most strategic experience to your customers rather than immediately deploying AI to write automated emails or something like that. So that's kind of how I think about how to deploy AI. Start with employee experience first. Automate the tactical part first. and use the learnings to give the better experience from a strategic point of view.
Connor Jeffers: Thank you so much. Aditya, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours. You are seriously one of my favorite entrepreneurs. I think you are, if you don't follow Aditya on LinkedIn, I highly recommend it. He is great. He has very great, non cringy, amazing content. I think you are a philosopher CEO who clearly thinks very, very deeply about all of the things and I truly, truly am honored to be able to spend the time with you.
Connor Jeffers: Thank you so much for coming.
Aditya Kothadiya: Thank you, Connor, for bringing me. This was great sharing all my past experiences and learning. So still learning a lot, but this was great sharing some of those.
Connor Jeffers: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Check out Aditya on LinkedIn. Check out AVOMA thank you guys so much for listening. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of go to market with AI. This episode was produced by Ryan Gunn, Jordan Mikilitus and Saasly.Video. Until next time, this is Connor Jeffers. Stay curious. Stay innovative and embrace our robot overlords.