In a constantly expanding world where everyone has more connections than they know how to handle, Chirag Kulkarni is bringing people together. Kulkarni is one of the founders of Insightfully, a SaaS app that scans and finds opportunities on social networks where people can help each other. “New age of staying engaged with your network,” Kulkarni explains. “businesses get 76 percent of their business from their network, but the reality is most people waste time discovering ways to stay in touch and engage in value driven ways.”
Kulkarni saw that there was an opportunity to make networking easier and faster, connecting people who had similar wants and needs, making networking effective instead of a waste of time. With lightning fast analytics, Insightfully’s AI is saves the time of combing through often huge online social networks, trying to find the right connections to grow your business.
I sat down with Kulkarni recently to find out how his business started and how others can use his technology to build their own businesses.
How did you come up with the idea for Insightfully?
Insightfully came about when I grew my
Essentially, the idea for Insightfully was to make looking for relationships that could be mutually beneficial into a streamlined process. Insightfully is SaaS application that is a 24/7 AI employee to manage your networks. It scans with predictive analytics for those relationship opportunities that I had to do by hand, reducing the time-consuming effort. We wanted people to be able to grow their businesses by helping others, and being helped by others, so they could scale their business the same way that I did.
How did you meet your co-founders?
I originally ran into Ajay Saini online through AngelList while trying to learn more about building Insightfully from a technical standpoint. Ajay ended up joining Insightfully because he is deeply passionate about predictive analytics, and has had great success with social networks. Three months after I met Ajay, Jingyu Li came on board, who is classmates with Ajay at MIT. Jingyu has extensive experience in artificial intelligence, and was a welcome addition to the team.
This is obviously a new and exciting field; what challenges have you overcome?
There have been multiple challenges on the technological side, of course. But there were also challenges early on with hiring. At first, Insightfully would parse data straight from social media, but we found that there was a low frequency of tweets where people are posing questions to their network. At the same time, we started getting inbound requests from interns that wanted to help, which we were very excited about, and followed up on. We ended up having people that didn't fit our culture and attitude towards what we were building, and that slowed us down considerably.
How did you pitch to investors?
We actually used the exact same model that we set out to build, because it works. We started off by finding people through our networks -- using Insightfully -- and started helping them with areas in which we could help. That's what took a lot of the investors from "cold" connections to "warm" relationships. From there, we reached out to investors that have a similar passion or interest in our same space. Then we focused on showing constant progress and moving as fast as we could to get our product to market and get feedback.
Investors want to invest in entrepreneurs they get along with, have strong morals, and can execute. Our founding principal of help-based relationships that “pay it forward” is in alignment with what investors wanted to see. With Ajay and JingYu creating such brilliant technology, investors are very excited to see what we had.
How did you get funding?
Insightfully is currently fundraising, and we’ve had a lot of interest. Relationships, according to philosophy, are one of the top four areas of life that people care about. Yet, we only engage with one percent of the people that we have in our networks. VCs are interested in us because there is inherently value in finding out ways to make our relationships stronger in our ever-expanding world. We’re excited to see interest, and we’re looking for the right relationship (of course) that can help us scale in everyone’s best interest.
How has building Insightfully changed how you view social media marketing?
There is a saying that marketers have: “Decisions that are made without keeping data in mind are mindless.” Similarly, one of the biggest mistakes that marketers make is planning, executing, and then forgetting the last step -- measuring. Surprisingly, one of the biggest conclusions that The State of Social Media report made was that while the majority of marketers feel they effectively leverage social media data and analytics to optimize their marketing strategies, they don’t feel social media data impacts their company’s overall business strategy. Insightfully was created because we know that data is one of the most important things in a social media marketing strategy.
Aaron Miller, who works for General Mills, made the conclusion that to be a successful marketer and successful brand you have to leverage social media and digital tech properly. 48 percent of surveyed businesses believe that social media data and analytics impact a company’s social media marketing strategy.
What are your plans for the future?
We are using this beta period as time to refine our hypothesis and analytics. We’ve been spending more time with our customers to learn what specific use cases they have for our product, which has been incredibly useful. We will also be announcing some interesting developments moving forward.
Do you have any advice for others who are building an app like yours, or for Entrepreneurs in general?
First, build something your customers will love. Without that customer base of people who will follow you anywhere, you don’t really have anything. Stay close to your customers, as they are the driving force, the meaning, behind everything you’re doing. Do your research with them, and test, test, test!
Second, Focus. Use your time wisely, and stay close to yourself. When starting a business there is so much noise: advice, desires, criticism, praise. Take what you think you need, but don't take advice from everyone.
Third, when you’re hiring, recruit someone better than you every time, not someone who follows orders. You don’t want a room full of followers without passion and capability. You want a room full of people who have brilliant ideas and can push you even more than you thought you could go.
Murray Newlands would be thrilled if you’d share this story with your networks. You can find him on Twitter(@murraynewlands), Vine (murraynewlands) and learn more about his work at www.murraynewlands.com
