Shams Edge Ep. 2 | Conversational AI & Business Growth

What if your business could respond to messages instantly, automate each conversation 24/7 by AI, and generate more sales? If it sounds like the problem that you’re trying to solve, we have something in place for you.

For the second episode of Shams Edge, today we have Karthik Jagnathan, the CEO and Co-Founder of Galabox, a modern AI conversational company. Today, we’ll learn about the future of conversational AI, how it helps generate more leads for our businesses, and the collaboration between Shams and Galabox and the value that we bring to our clients.

Hi Karthik, it’s a pleasure to have you with us today.

Diva, hi. Thank you very much for having me on today here.

It’s a pleasure. Okay, so let’s dive right in. Let’s imagine Galabox was a person at a networking event. How would you introduce yourself?

That’s fantastic. Okay. Hi, I’m Galabox. I am a software that helps you convert your conversations to customers, whether those conversations are through WhatsApp, Instagram, voice, or on the web.

What Galabox does is it takes those conversations, qualifies those as leads, and moves them to bookings, meetings, appointments, and gets you as close as possible, as fast as possible, to orders.

As a marketeer, that’s music to my ears. Thank you for that introduction.

So Karthik, founders usually build solutions around the problems that they’ve experienced firsthand. Would you like to tell our viewers about the problems that you faced and how Galabox came into being?

Sure. In my experience working with businesses of different sizes, especially small to medium-sized businesses, over the last several years, I’ve seen one single trait that is quite common, which is that businesses will leave no stone unturned to generate new leads.

Whether they do it using marketing or whether they do it by the founder and the senior leadership going out and selling, they become masters at actually selling and therefore generating new inquiries, pipeline, and so on.

But oftentimes, businesses may lack the infrastructure, the capability, and more importantly now, the technology that is available that can convert these leads to deals.

In my earlier roles, specifically in a local services marketplace company that I used to be part of, where I was employee number one, I spent almost a decade building this, working with about 70,000 businesses in India and in the US.

I saw this firsthand. We would generate leads because we were a local services marketplace. Users were looking for a local service, and there were businesses willing to pay to be put in touch with these users. We would generate these leads and sell them to these businesses.

We saw a very interesting trait, which is that the most successful customers, the paying customers for the company, were the ones who were able to respond to those leads almost instantly.

They knew one thing: leads have a shelf life. They were able to respond instantly, have a more engaging conversation with these customers, invest time to understand the context, and then make the effort to close that as well as possible.

But it was like a bell curve. Only a few businesses were able to do that. The large majority didn’t have the ability to do that, and maybe they didn’t have the enterprise to do that to a large extent.

So we figured that technology can solve this problem. If you make available technology that is easy to use, simple to deploy, and doesn’t require a certification, something as simple as using Instagram and WhatsApp, where we spend most of our time anyway, then it can be made available to thousands and thousands of businesses around the world.

They can be busy producing what they do, whether it’s a product or service, and they continue to generate leads, which is really second nature to them. Then the technology takes over and helps them convert those leads to deals.

As a founder, as co-founders, and as a founding team, we are very privileged to have discovered this one problem and this one insight. That’s what we are obsessed about building for small to medium-sized businesses, not the large enterprises, because the large enterprises have already figured this out.

They have the deep pockets, the wherewithal, the infrastructure, and the know-how to use conversational AI to do this. But it is really the medium-sized businesses and rapidly growing startup businesses that we built this insight on and continue building for.

Absolutely. I think it’s a great problem that you’re solving as well, especially for startups because they are looking to grow rapidly. I think social media and WhatsApp is the way to go. That’s where the audience and the clients are as well.

Absolutely. Especially in the Global South, like India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other parts of Latin America, we have seen that technology has behaved very differently compared to the West.

We were never really on email, for instance. We kind of leapfrogged because smartphones with social platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram gave us an opportunity to communicate faster, in a more engaging manner, and in a more asynchronous manner.

With email, I send you an email, then you see it when you can, then you reply to me, and I see it when I can. It’s not real time. These messaging platforms make conversations real time. Of course, we all speak a lot, so we need these platforms where we can have engaging conversations. That’s the space that is very interesting for us to look at.

Absolutely. You’ve really got the pulse of the market, isn’t it? It is all about rapidly responding to the client and selling to the client who’s looking for your service. Sales is all about the time, isn’t it? The quicker you reach out to your clients, the quicker you are to sell to them as well.

So definitely, it is going to be from your clicks to conversions in no time, and we’ve experienced it firsthand with Galabox. So I can vouch for it.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

So Karthik, you have dealt with thousands of businesses through Galabox. What is one trend that you’ve noticed about the fastest-growing companies?

I’d say the speed of response. I think that’s the common denominator trait for some of the most successful businesses we’ve seen, irrespective of technology era.

Technology grows in generations. There was technology in the early 2000s, and then every decade, maybe every five years, and of course these days, every six months or every year, there seems to be a generational shift.

But if there’s one trait, irrespective of technology, geography, size, and shape, it is speed of response.

How quickly are you able to respond to a customer? Obviously, the quality of response is very important. But if you’re engineered for speed of response, I’d wager that most likely you’re building quality into that speed in some form or another.

I’m sure you’re seeing this from your vantage position in marketing. You generate pipeline for Shams. The speed at which we respond to those customers is super important because every lead, like I said earlier, has a shelf life. There’s an expiry period for every lead.

With Shams, we guarantee clients that they’ll be called back within 60 seconds of filling in the form.

That’s fantastic.

So we are riding on the same tide as you.

That’s fantastic. I have seen significant growth in the number of businesses registered with Shams as well because of the speed of response that we have, whether it’s for our sales team or the marketing team. We are on our toes 24/7.

I want to double click on that one point. We’ve seen that customers are on multiple platforms. We don’t get to choose which platforms the customers ought to be on. We can’t say, “Come onto my app and talk to me only on my app.”

Absolutely not. I think Galabox builds that bridge, isn’t it? You are where your clients are.

Right. The insight driving that is that customers have their own favorite platforms. Sometimes I am on Instagram, then I switch from there to WhatsApp, then from there I’d like to make a call, or I want to visit a website and figure out something on the website.

So I’m a single customer, and I’m going to engage with the business across all of these platforms.

To allude to your point, how quickly are you able to get in touch back with the customer, whether it’s on voice or text? Let’s say the customer sees an ad, they’re interested, and very quickly you’re getting your team to call them back. That wow moment is what speed is all about.

I think we’re able to do that well today because each of these platforms can be stitched together. We are able to discover that this customer came through this platform and then build all the analytics that are possible today.

Absolutely. With Galabox, it was a brilliant move from your side to stitch together both the platforms that are really popular among clients and are good converting platforms for marketing as well.

We saw that Instagram is increasingly becoming a very major discovery platform. It’s not just for us to go and see pet pictures and videos on Instagram. A lot of products and services are finding serious buyers there.

It’s not a flippant platform in that sense. The way we have constructed this ecosystem is that Instagram is a discovery engine.

WhatsApp is a very engaging first port of call where you could have automated conversations, bots doing your conversations, AI bots doing all of this, and of course, the human agent providing empathy and the human touch.

We’ve stitched that along with voice, where customers expect to talk because we are human beings and we like to talk to each other. So we have the voice feature built in as a channel.

Customers can make a call and receive a call. Of course, AI is going to do that to a large degree, and we’ve built it in a manner where even that can be handed off to a human agent when the customer or prospect really wants to talk to a human agent, or if the conversation requires a human agent.

We’ve also added the website to it because a lot of conversations can start from the website. That’s really how we’ve seen these four channels working with each other.

The three big things we are focusing on within the product are:

One is to help businesses qualify leads, because we’ve seen that a precious amount of human time goes into answering very mundane, repetitive questions. An AI can today easily do the job very well, allowing the human being to focus on more value-adding work.

The second thing is that for conversation-heavy businesses, let’s take Shams for instance, a prospect wants to know a lot of things. It’s a good problem to have. They want to know how long it takes, what it costs, how soon they can start, and all of that. A conversation is really meant to become a meeting. An inquiry, when it moves to a meeting, is the closest surrogate to scale.

The third thing we are focusing on is bringing all of these conversations across all of these touchpoints into one single dashboard and one single inbox. A human agent, who is always the driver of all of this, can see conversations coming through different ways, see the status, and take charge to move that conversation further to commerce.

So there are these four channels and these three features. That’s really what Galabox is all about, and that’s what we’re working on to get better at every single day.

I think you’re doing a phenomenal job with that as well because there are times when businesses are actually looking for insights to understand what platform is working well for them and where they should put more focus. I’m sure Galabox is able to help with that as well.

Absolutely. In this day and age, every touchpoint is a data point. Every touchpoint that becomes a data point can be used for analytics.

If you are really curious to know where your leads came from, where the quality conversion is coming from, you have dashboards that can tell you all of that. It’s a single source of truth.

You can see which campaigns are working for you, what kind of pitches are working for you, and what’s the mean time or fastest time you should work toward to get yourself ready so your conversions can get better.

We are working within this boundary: you know your product and service as a client, and we know you will do everything you can to generate pipeline and leads. Once that is done, this is the boundary within which we’d like to work to help you move those leads further down the sales funnel.

Fantastic. So Karthik, Shams, as you know, is home to a diverse community of entrepreneurs of different shapes and sizes. What excites you the most about bringing Galabox solutions to our clients?

Sure. Shams has already built and continues to build a vibrant ecosystem of entrepreneurs drawn from different parts of the world.

What excites us truly about this is that it gives us an opportunity to empower these businesses of different industries and verticals with technology, automation, AI, and all the other capabilities that we are building today.

Whether they’re startups, small to medium businesses, or any of those, as long as their business is all about having conversations with customers, I think they will benefit from using Galabox.

Just as Shams is a Galabox customer and uses Galabox to move leads to deals, similar technology is now being made available to these businesses.

I’m also excited about another fact, which is that to all of Shams’ customers and the entire community, we are offering AED 4,000 worth of free Galabox credits that they can use to get started.

Thank you for that, Karthik. I believe that is really going to bring value to our clients. They’ll be able to utilize your platform and, like you rightly said, convert leads into deals.

Yes. I’m very excited about this.

So are we. So Karthik, what is the biggest mistake that you’ve made and what are the lessons you’ve learned from that?

Like they say, learn from others’ mistakes so that you don’t make them yourself. Great question.

Oftentimes, we think it’s easy to discover who your ideal customer is. One of the things that we didn’t do well enough in the initial part of our venture was that we didn’t define the ideal customer persona, the ICP.

Let’s leave the jargon out. What’s critical for businesses, especially in this fast, rapidly evolving environment, is to be very clear about who your customer is.

Whether it is called target audience, target group, or ICP, it’s super important to know who your customer is and be able to build the product and the entire go-to-market motion around reaching that customer and making that customer successful.

The mistake we made was that we built and then went after the market. We did a lot of marketing and made a lot of efforts to acquire customers, and then we discovered that we were not acquiring the right customers.

My advice is to pay attention to who your most successful customers are. Analyze them, examine what the persona is, and only go after those kinds of customers that you can acquire. That way, you’ll waste less time and effort, and once they become the denominator of customers you serve, you’ll be happy to do that.

That’s a great lesson to learn from. Thank you. So, if I can put it in a nutshell, it’s all about identifying the problem you’re trying to solve and then finding the people with the same problem, isn’t it?

Yes.

That’s amazing. In order to make this even more interesting, we have a set of rapid-fire questions for you, Karthik. Are you ready?

I am.

Your first question is: one word to describe Galabox.

Outcomes.

I’ll say this: outcomes can happen in different ways, but outcomes from conversations are what Galabox is striving for. Conversations are what you have with your customers. We help you generate outcomes from those conversations.

Brilliant. AI: overhyped or underhyped?

I’d say underhyped.

The hype seems to be around the wrong reasons. The hype is around, “Oh, we’re going to lose a lot of jobs,” or “It’s going to take away some of the things I love doing, like writing.”

But I think the key is that it is a productivity multiplier tool. AI won’t take away jobs. AI will take away jobs from people who don’t use AI.

It’s a question of how well you’re able to use it. For instance, we use it at Galabox for engineering, marketing, and sales in different ways. The way we see it is that it’s a productivity multiplier tool to support businesses and not take people’s jobs away.

One habit that made you a better founder?

I’d say I’m by nature very curious and want to learn. Being able to learn from anywhere, whether from folks at work who are significantly younger than me, from customers, from books, or generally being very curious.

Every habit that came from curiosity, whether it’s reading, watching podcasts, or anything that can help me, also comes from some level of humility. You should stay hungry and remain foolish. Only if you’re hungry will you want to learn more.

Absolutely. Like they say, curiosity is the mother of all inventions.

One habit you cannot live without?

Fitness.

That’s a good habit to have.

If you were not a founder, what would you be?

A co-founder.

Actually, in truth, we have had our own share of ups and downs. But there’s one thing I always tell myself: if I had to do this all over again, I could do it all over again.

That’s the drive of an entrepreneur, isn’t it?

Yes, because it’s the thrill of being able to solve a problem. You build your own ways to do that, you have a great team around you, and you have some great investors and partners. What else do you need?

What’s your guilty pleasure?

Vacations. It’s a pleasure, but sometimes on the second or third day into it, I feel like, “Oh my God, what am I doing?”

I could be there working, isn’t it?

Are you part of the 4:00 a.m. club?

5:00 a.m.

Not bad.

Actually, my alarm is 4:56 a.m.

Still counts.

One business book every founder should read?

It’s a classic. There are many, but if I have to pick one, I’d say The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

I reread it every time I have to look at a problem that requires a solution. I read it and somehow try to find different answers from it.

I love how your passion is about solving all the problems.

Curiosity.

What would you give as a piece of advice to a new founder?

I think the ability to say no.

Often as founders, we are eternal optimists. We tend to take on everything and say, “We’ll do this and this and that.”

But the ability to say no and say, “I am not going to do this,” brings focus. Strategy is jettisoning. To say no means, “I’m going to do only this.”

People start to take you more seriously as well and respect your boundaries. Initially, you may think you’re saying no to a lot of things, but that means you’re actually focusing, fine-tuning, and sharpening the one thing you want to do.

Karthik, thank you so much for joining us in the conversation today. I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs will get so much motivation and take away so much from this insightful conversation we had today.

Thank you very much. It was really a fun conversation. I enjoyed doing this and loved sharing what we’re building at Galabox. I can’t wait to work with you and your team a lot more and help Shams customers.

Likewise. We look forward to that journey.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone, who tuned in to today’s episode of Shams Edge. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and were able to gain some valuable insights. We’ll see you in the next episode. Stay tuned.