I started my tech career at intercom. So customer service platforms are something that I'm deeply, deeply familiar with, albeit in a very different area to you guys. And was just interesting in how I started to think early in my career about how businesses kind of used and managed feedback from customers as that flowed in. Yeah. So, yeah. So that's, that's just a little bit of a of an intro, Intro to me, but, yeah, awesome, awesome to connect and and don't usually get to speak to such awesome founders. So thanks for taking the time. Oh
yeah, thanks for the compliment. Hi. Yes. So same here. I mean, great to be connected. Thanks for reaching out. I've been doing tech business for 14 years now. Channel top has been my fourth product, and it has been like seven years now. Yeah, so nice, yeah. It's been quite a journey. We started from Seoul, Korea, and we expanded to Japan. So what's I would say, like, what's different as a positioning in the product wise, we are, you know, like 70% of our customer base are B to C businesses, yeah. So I would say, compared to, like, intercoms, main target, which, like enterprise businesses, it's, it's the other area, which we usually compete with, Zendesk or gorgeous, like econ business, you know, supporters. So that's, that's what have we, you know, what we have been doing in in Korea and Japan market, right? Yeah,
I think that was, it's going pretty well, yes,
yes, it's, it's been going pretty well, especially, you know, in two countries, we are definitely, you know, number one and dominating to markets, market share. So it has been quite nice journey. We quickly reached out to, you know, 30 million ARR in six years. So that has been nice. And, yeah, recently, from this year, I am, I moved to New York, and I am, you know, in the lead of expansion to US business. Nice, congrats. Yeah, thanks.
Nothing. I'm, I'm in New York in in two weeks. I'm there for a week, meeting, meeting, kind of some of our really early design partners. So, so we're about to New York. Are you based? Are you Manhattan or Brooklyn? Or where
Manhattan? Uh, Soho, cool. Yes. Grab a coffee or something. Yeah. We'd love
to, love to, if you have the time. I know you must be crazy, crazy busy it, you know, I actually ran the last business out of Europe, but 90% of our customers were in the US. We we found a niche in non, non unionized states in the US that that didn't regulate the technology that their blue collar workforces were unable to use. And so I spent, I spent a lot of time in some wacky places in America that were very different to home, but, but it was just just where we found good use of our product, and we scaled quickly in hotel companies and other sorts of companies. So what I was hoping to pick your brain on today, I mean, so where we're really focused is on on two areas, right? And to give you, and I wouldn't usually kind of go into the level of detail, but you get it right, having built successful business yourself and understand the founding journey, we're targeting two areas. Firstly, the fact that you know, business intelligence tools were built to help leaders make faster decisions, to combine data all in one place and help them make better, faster, data driven decisions. What's changed in the last two decades is that BI tools now effectively and carry 3020, to 30% of your data. Right? They're not built to handle unstructured data, especially conversational data, and so the remaining 70, 8070, to 80% of the company's data is scattered across all these various points of issues would be examples. So if you can imagine, you know, CEOs trying to get answers to questions like, hey, what's all the feedback that we're getting on our latest release, or what sales positioning is working best on sales calls, or what are a lot of the bugs that are getting reported? What's the positive and negative feedback generally on our business, on our product and our pricing? Whatever? The answers to those questions are extremely difficult to get because they don't live anywhere, right? They are, by their nature, scattered across all these various tools. One challenge that we experienced deeply as we built and scaled our last business was, how do you manage access and use all of the customer feedback that comes in on your product, on your service, on your pricing, on your business model, whatever it may be, and how do you start to make sure that that's used across your organization, making decisions every day? So that's one place I kind of just wanted to start with you. When I position that bi tooling only covers a very small portion of your data, you know CEOs needing access to those pieces of information to make better decisions and and also writing customer feedback. What are some of the kind of thoughts and things that come to mind when, when I explain that,
yeah, I mean, it's definitely right, like, who you I would say, definitely regarding, like, who you want, like, reach for I would say it because the whole amount of like priority, day priority and product interface could be different, because we do have partner, you know, leveraging our platform as AI analysis and Helping out like decision makers to understand, like customers, recent feedbacks and but they're mostly targeting for econ Business Show. So they are integrity, bringing our data, but this is the company partner in Korea that we I would say everything is in Korean. So maybe, maybe it's hard for you to understand. But actually, I was surprised, because one first thing was that, you know, before channel talk, my business was also business intelligence area called Walk insights. And the idea was to provide Google Analytics for offline retailers. So we built up, you know, we developed this hardware that detects mobile devices and distance based on, you know, signal strength, and because we were tracking me address data, which was unique device data, we were able to create, you know, cross visits to, you know, districts and stores and conversion rates to, you know, outside traffic, inside conversions and everything. But so you went, Well, honestly, I mean, for three years they reached out to like 4 million AR quickly, we reached out to like 4000 stores. But we, we quickly noticed that, you know, small businesses didn't really care about any analytics, because they're, you know, short of budget. And also the lot of like, you know, investment or budgets were basically our target became enterprise businesses. In beginning. In the beginning, we thought, you know, we should just make it for small businesses and, you know, cafeterias and restaurants. But we noticed that they're not too intelligent, and they, they don't really care about, you know, analytics. And it's, it's sometimes, you know, the only ones who are interested in this analytics were very, very niche, you know, vertical, who's was also intelligent, but also, you know, does a small business. So we, we noticed that they're, like, less than 1% of the market. So
we was that because they had bigger problems, or because the quantum of data, they're honestly in
the verge of like survival, like they they don't know their business will last or not. So they but honestly, I would say, if you understand your circumstances and your customers, you know that's actually better ways to keep your business maintained and, you know, sustainable, but for them, it was mostly about daily sales and revenue tracking and the fact that they have to so what I'm trying to tell you is that first, like, I, my experience with analytics and bi was definitely targeted the natural market, and the big, bigger market was always on the, you know, at least mid market or enterprise size, because they, they have teams and, you know, people who are responsible to get, you know, intelligent. And that's actually minimum of, I would say, like 200 employees, because that's when you start to, like, even from our company, you know, we started to look into Salesforce and Tableau when we were over like, 100 people. So, you know, before that we, we honestly didn't care. We just, like, did sales and operation and development. But after like, you know, 100 to 200 range, we started to look for, like, you know, we need to make things in scale. We need more efficiency, and we need better, like, decision making process based on data. So that's, honestly, I think that's one of the points that what I was surprised about, like, how, you know, voc studio played out, because they're targeting small businesses, honestly. So that's something I was trying to tell you. I never knew that market would exist. So we honestly didn't really care about any analytics from our end, but they actually, they leverage our data and create their own business. So which was, I think it's actually growing fast in Korea. So they're but they're really based on ecom businesses. So that's why I was surprised. What they do usually is that they try to summarize, you know, the tags. They summarize the conversation. So one there they recommend, you know, tax because like creating tags and managing it is it definitely takes time and effort. So they do that, like automated. They with a AI agent. And also they try to, you know, summarize and report you based, basically try to create reports like, hey, this. This tag is trending like this, so you might want to fixing your, you know, refund problem. Maybe you have a, you know, problem with recent launch, or you have, you have, like, you know, unusual traffic increase or inquiry increase coming into your in a business. So you should look into something like that. So
is it valuable? Is it actionable? Like, do you do you rely on it?
Honestly, I'm not sure. I'm just telling you this because I was surprised that this business is actually, you know, growing, because I was sort of skeptical and in the beginning, but the fact I haven't really checked on them, because we have several partners, because we have open API and, you know, web hooks that, you know, anyone can just jump in and leverage that to their business. Yeah, and yeah, I was surprised. So that was, that's why I'm just sharing, like, there might be a, you know, if you're, I don't know if you're targeting enterprise business or, you know, medium sized businesses, but Yeah, honestly, I this is the, you know, very rare thing that I actually saw from,
yeah, where we're targeting, what we're thinking initially is seed to Series C technologies, predominantly in the US. And the reason we're thinking that is because really early in the life cycle of a company, you start to get too much unstructured data on sales calls, on Customer Success calls, in emails and support tickets to actually stay on top of everything, and it happens much earlier in our customer lifecycle than people appreciate. And so what we're thinking is, okay, how do we create a really, really simplified way to connect to all these unstructured data sources like teletuck, like intercom, like Zendesk, like Gong, and how do we apply AI to that so that we can pre process, understand and really mine that content for insights, so that we can just tell leaders what's going on when you think of managing customer feedback for you guys. Now, what do you think are some of the biggest, like macro problems? What are the big, high priority problems of managing that sort of feedback for you in this in this stage, you hear me?
Oh, sorry, I think you're
back. Maybe back. Yeah, I'm back.
Your we work Wi Fi isn't so good.
Maybe, I don't know if it's Wi Fi or my laptop, but yeah, that's, that's a good question. And we have, you know, CX team actually working on it our sex. I was mentioning this to you because we there were several options that we got offered for our six team to actually use and try and get more insights from our own even our own platform, and that's from my team is using voc studio right now. My Korean team is my Japan team is not using anything. They're just like, you know, they're just getting insights from direct, like reports and US team, it's where we have very few. So I mostly like to, like, just direct, directly develop the insights from US customers these days anyways. So I think in that case, I would, I just want to share one more, you know, they
Yeah, these
guys, yeah. I think they're the most like similar vision that you've shared and exactly the target that you are reaching for, I think, but there, I think I heard that recently, going for, like, you know, larger fish, like, not skipping, like stage, but for Series B Series C. Like, that's a that's like, they, I heard that CEO was talking about, that's the sweet spot they're actually targeting purpose before, like, everything is, like, too fixed, and, you know, before, you know things are too hectic because they have other priorities. They, I think that they mentioned, like, series A to Series B, like, there are some rooms to improve, yeah, but that's what, that's what I heard they this year, I think they're doing around like 1 million, Arr, so they're still relatively small, but okay, they've been around like three years, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah. So not, not growing super quickly then So, so let me give you where we're thinking with our MVP, right? So you get the stage that we're at right super early. We're bootstrapping the business and the funds from our previous exit. We'll raise money in due course, when we're ready to do so. But what we're thinking is okay, so. So if you cast your eye back to how business intelligence started, really in the in the 80s and 90s, in any meaningful way. What those tools were built to do is just to provide reports to leaders on things that they care about. And so how we're thinking of starting is, hey, let's connect to all of the places where unstructured data comes into a business, customer feedback is a great example, and just generate Uber high quality, curated reports for the CEO, for other people on the leadership team, that break down everything that was shared in the last week. For example, for one of our design partners, they just got a report the other day. It had, you know, they had done their series A they're doing about 500k Arr, and they had 47 gone calls over the previous week. And so the CEO and the CPO can't keep on top of all those gun calls right, there's just too many. And so we give them a highly curated report every Friday that Brexit.
Yes, is that it, like, is that just where we start? So I'd be curious for you, as you, as you've led your business, like, is that something you get already in other ways? Do you have, you know, do you have manual ways that you do this? Like, what? How do you think of that when
I suggest it as kind of a first product? I think that's great. I think that make sense. Because if you know, if you want to get into like insights or any value, it's it should be, either, you know, driving revenue for your customers, or, you know, saving enough resources for, you know, their their budget, I would say, if you like, among a lot of like feedbacks or reports, if you just focus and highlight and prioritize the revenue generator, like, you know, summarizing gold performance and showing some trends that, hey, your team is doing well, or your I think your team is doing At a little risk, because we're doing it, we our sales managers are doing it, our sales enablement, and managers are actually checking randomly of the quality. Yeah, yeah. Call qualities. And, you know, doing assessment, I think, honestly, random sampling is definitely it helps a lot. But to understand, I'll say, if you can, you know, get make it right, and if you're, if not, if I get those reports weekly, and I feel like, yeah, yeah, this is definitely qualified result that I can trust, then it makes sense. It makes sense. But if I feel like this is, this is something that I have to speculate again, and, you know, look, look at all the details again, and it's, it doesn't really, you know, it's not really worth your my effort to just get some reports. So I think it depends. It definitely has a value. I would say it's a matter of how much the price would be. And, you know, how much quality that
I can actually trust about this report. Yeah, two things on that, that's what we're thinking through right now, is like the pricing and how much people would be willing to pay, because it's very complex and expensive to build something like that, right? There's a reason that if you just chuck all of your call transcripts into GPT, it does a really bad job, because it hasn't preprocessed all that data. It doesn't actually have context on you as a person, you as an organization, what you care about, and how can kind of understand that in terms of processing of the information. So that's 1.2 trust is something that we hear a lot, because even though we can provide source of quotes, we can say, hey, here's, you know, here are the themes cross your calls in the last week. Here's the sorts of headings. Here's the quotes that back that up. Here's the Source Link. People just naturally have skepticism about some of this stuff. So where we'd like to get to once we raise money and once we have some capacity to build it, it's say, hey, the report could start to become much more dynamic. It could actually have embedded audio snippets, embedded video snippets. You could, for 10 seconds watch that section of the call where they're speaking about it. You might be interested in, Hey, how are salespeople positioning this week? And actually click some examples and watch that. So we're thinking of ways of just bringing that content and bring that unstructured data to life for leaders. Why? What? What are for you some of the biggest burning questions that that you have on repeat, but like, if you could think of certain things that you want to know about all the time, what? What are they? And I'm thinking, imagine you had a you hired a person, and their job was to go through all the calls, all the emails, all the support conversations, like, all the surveys, like, whatever, like, what? What would you want that person
that you hired to find out for you on a regular basis.
There are a lot, I mean, ton of, ton of information that I would love to, you know, get to understand. But the the fact is, I think there are tremendous effort to, you know, invest and define the job in the beginning, but after that, you you just, like, leave it to you delegate to someone, and you just get reports, and you just, you know, you just leave it over like that, because it's like half an hour. You trust the reports, but you also don't fully trust the report. You just know that at some point you have to, you know, get back to that job and just, you know, thoroughly review everything again and just see, evaluate where, whether this report was great or not, from, right? So I have multiple priorities, and definitely from, from my end, I'm working on a US expansion, so that's my primary job. And there aren't this is like something really hard to tell, because I would say, you know, my US team right now is at a seed stage, and, you know, my Japan team is at a series B stage, and
Korean team has a Series C, series D
stage. It's like three different companies, yeah, yeah. So it makes everything so complicated. So that's why I'm trying to tell you that I have, like, different expectations for, you know, the reasons? So, yeah, interesting, yeah, and it's very pretty chaotic. I wouldn't believe I, honestly, as a seed stage, you know, founder in here, I wouldn't believe any, any data points yet, I would just have to, like, meet everyone, just feel everything, you know, because I even reduced my, you know, head count in here when I was getting reports and I couldn't trust them. I decided, just like, spend that time directly having a conversation, calls and video video calls by myself. And that's actually much more effective and productive. So I would say if, if there are something that helped me to get to get myself, like, more personal meetings, or that's my major priority. Like, how would I meet more ICPs and, you know, understand, help them, you know, fill out my calendars with meetings so I can actually, you
know, accelerate my process of thinking. But yeah, so you can want validate or invalidate
some of the stuff you figured out. Yeah, yeah. Like, how many calls? I mean, we do, like, you know, we have metrics. We have rsdr in Korea and Japan, they usually do, like, 5050, calls a day. That's their KPI. And, you know, yeah, with the 50 calls you usually get, you know, 123, opportunities per person. So that's, that's like, our basic metric, right? And if I can just keep, I mean, we do have, like, record recording, you know, applications, and we have, yeah, we have, like, call insight for sales, but I think I haven't really, honestly, I mean, since when we turn over to, like, before it was, like, emails and video calls. I mean, for AE and sales meetings, we have like, you know, note takers or fireflies to just record and analyze. But for phone calls, I don't think we have proper, you know, softwares yet. We have, we have a, we're using Apollo and other, you know, you know, sales tools, but not in Korea yet. But that's some, some reason that I want to, I want to make some productivity with the, you know, call quality, checkups and everything. Anyway, that's like, I would have at least, like, you know, five to five, three to five SDRs to start, like, you know, thinking about efficiency I have, I have, like, three, three to five SDRs in Korea and Japan each. So yeah to six to 10 SDRs generating, you know,
yeah, 100 to 200 meetings a month. So yeah, that's,
that's, that's awesome, and they're called calling. Yeah, they're primary call calling and also emailing as well. But yeah, is the primary method from our end. But I don't know if you know that's, I mean, we're enterprise business, we're SaaS, and we're, you know, customer service. So it makes for us, for, you know, those who answers our calls are the targets that we want to talk to. Yes, yeah. So it's, it has been easier for us to, you know, contact that way, and, you know, skip the gatekeepers, and we have sort of know how's how to reach out to, like team managers with calls. That
has been the, yeah, that has been the recipe so far. Okay, interesting. So I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to pitch this because we're too early, and we definitely don't integrate, and we don't support Korean. So I think the language, the language barrier for the product would be hard right now. But would that be valuable to you, to have all of those SDR calls recorded and to say, hey, here are the sales, here are the SDR out bank calls that worked, and here the ones that didn't. And here's some insights, like, like, would that be
a value, or, or, or not? That's a crazy value. That's honestly, like, really, really great value. Okay, I'm sure that if you speak to any enterprise, you know, SaaS CEOs or CROs, that's kind of a huge value, because none of, none of, like, you know, apono or other you know, product
has been offering that function. Interesting, yeah. And I even find, because I use otter, I see fireflies have used Gom, use chorus like the issue with all those tools is they say the revenue intelligence, well, one their transcripts are like the shittiest transcripts you've ever seen. They just do a terrible job. And so therefore the insights don't really give you the stories and the anecdotes, which you know or what fuel good calls and good sales pitches and good positionings? It's, it's not that sentiment on topics is increasing over a certain time. It's, it's, you know, what's the story in the anecdote that you built with the with the prospect that helps you to position better in a way that that they can understand the pain that they're experiencing and the value that use it to provide. And I just don't think any of the rev intelligence platforms out there are doing a good job with that. So that's why I think sales calls is one angle. You know, customer feedback through CS calls and tickets and emails is another angle that's interesting. Okay, awesome. I want to be really respectful of your time. Is there anything else that's come to that's come to mind as we've kind of had
this conversation, or anything you can think of? No, I think you know. I think you know all I really want have a heart for every founders. And yeah, I'm glad you reached out to me and I but we can have this conversation. And yeah, hope you, you, hope you find your
you know right sweet spot, and you know for sure. Yeah, we're working we're working through it. It's, it's, it's kind of that scary, stressful journey right now where it's, it's trying to figure out exactly how we want to launch and position and then try to raise some money to do that. But yeah, I'd love to keep you posted on whatever we decide doing if you're up for it, and yeah, really, really great to connect. I will. I will be in New York all week, the 23rd 24th if you have time, would love to buy a coffee, but I know you have a lot on, so don't feel under pressure. You've
already been good enough to give me 30 minutes of your time today. No worries. Yeah, yeah. Josh, great to meet you.
