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For customers. They don't actually care
what technology we are using. AI or any other technology
is just a medium to provide the value to the customers. So one day one of my customers
told me that hey Joseph, I don't care if you use AI or not. What I want is to get my job done
using your solution. We ended up selling our company for $200
million and it took us almost, I would say, three years to generate the revenue. So hi, I'm Joseph,
co-founder and CEO at Syncly Syncly is an AI platform that helps to
understand the customer feedback at scale, so everyone in the company
can get benefited from customer feedback to build a better product
or do better marketing campaign. We are a recent YC company. I started a company called
SUALab back in 2015. It was a four years and we ended
up selling our company back in 2019 for $200 million
and started my another company last year. We've been in AI world in the last decade. I've watched how AI evolved
over the course of time. This is really exciting time
for all of the AI startups, so I'm excited to be part of this journey. Back in 2015 when AlphaGo came out, built
by great company DeepMind, and AlphaGo actually was shocking the entire world
that AI can actually outwit the human beings in the space that nobody think of. Nobody like not many people. Understood
in what area I will make an impact. To be honest, I had no idea back then. That's why I thought I should jump into AI
and do the business on my hands to actually make the change. Manufacturing has been operated
in the same way for the last 50 years. What we saw is that AI is really good
at understanding the patterns. The one of the pattern that
the manufacturers wanted was when it comes to like analyzing or understanding
defective products is all done by human. But we thought that that's
what I can do really, really well. We ended up selling our company
for $200 million. The growth was crazy. Every year we grew five times, but it took
some time to actually find the first ten customers, and it took us almost, I would
say, three years to generate the revenue. In the first three years, we tested
different verticals to which verticals that we can make the most impact. The first vertical we go after
was the fashion industry, but we have no connection there. Yeah, I'm not from fashion
industry at all. So what we do is just pick up the phone
and dial the number to try to talk to who can actually
make a decision in that company. In total, we called around 500 prospects
in fashion industries, and it's actually almost every company in Korea back then. After that, we just went to the factory
and bring our laptops and one pager on my right hand and left hand. So CEO, me CTO at the time,
we didn't have a product. We just had like a technology
and an algorithm. We just try to show them the end goal,
try to start from there. If things work, they're here
or the business impact that you all get. Give us three months
to prove the value from the scratch. If not, then you don't need to pay. But if you think there's a value,
pay whatever you think is valuable. Three out of four
actually ended up paying. For customers. They don't actually care
what technology we are using. So one day one of my customers
told me that, hey Joseph, I don't care if you use AI or not. What I want is to get my job done
using your solution. That was actually really a big turning
point for me, how we should look at AI or any emerging technology. Generative AI is definitely getting
a lot of highlights nowadays. If we look at the history,
the trend is always changing. Evolving AI or any other technology
is just a medium to provide the value to the customer. So I would say that focusing on the value
that you try to deliver by leveraging technology makes sense. But just framing or just building
something using AI that provides like zero value to the customer,
it doesn't really make sense. And even if you raise some money
by leveraging the trend, it doesn't last long that much. It just lasts like maybe two years your
runway and you'll be in like a big danger once you cannot figure out the value prop
that you try to bring to the world. The reason we started a new company is
that we want to actually go into the new different market, a new, different domain. My last company customer base was mostly
focused on the Asian market, and now we try to make a more global product. Right. It's like a whole new market,
a whole new customer base. And when you talk to customers
in the beginning, they don't actually tell what their real problem is. They have like no incentives to do that. You got to know them really deeply,
try to understand their workflow or their day to day life deep as possible. But to do that, they need to trust you
to tell what the root cause is, what the real pain is. Right now, we try to open up a lot of like
meetups or like training sessions for our prospects to actually provide the value
first and help them to actually engage with the people in the same community. And we try to actually provide
our solution after that. So building your social proof as much as
possible, maybe leveraging your services, leveraging your school or leveraging your
personal network, you got to do whatever it takes to actually get to the point
where people heard of you at least. The way we try to find hair on fire. Problem is, we doubled down
their workflow and what their pains are. We start with what's your goal?
What does the success look like this year? There are like some bullet points
that we can actually come up with, right? We take the bullet points
and meet the new people. Try to say the bullet points. If there's something
that resonates with them as well, then you can narrow down a bullet points. I say in the beginning you have
like a five different bullet points. That could be a potential hair
on fire problem. Once you talk to ten customers,
it could narrow down to three. Once you talk to 1500 customers,
you will hear the one common bullet points that is hair on fire. That's how we try to narrow down
the scope in the beginning. If you look at the market, there are
like so many great products that's been in the market for ten years, 20 years. Right. So you cannot outbid them. From a product perspective, I would say
when you started your company four weeks ago, but what you can do is that not like
bigger companies, you can actually use your entire capability and use your entire
co-founders to actually solve that issue, no matter they use your product or not. At least you can actually
do something for them, right? Even if you don't actually have
the product to deliver. I think you as a founder who has
a strong vision, you should sell yourself, not the product, to actually solve the
customers pain points in the beginning. And once customers see the value,
then you can start building your product. Especially nowadays, because people are
using so many different SaaS tools, they are super busy to do their day to day job. Nobody wants a tech stack
on top of existing tech stack. So what we try to do is so we hear
the problem and we know what solution could work out, but the way we deliver
the output is not providing our like a new four weeks buggy product, but we try to
use the tool that they are using already. It could be like Google Looker or it could
be existing customer support platform and if they see the value off of it,
that's when we started building our own product, own dashboard to actually provide
them more granular level of details. The reason I ended up starting
a new company with my previous CTO was that we were such a great fit
to actually create something new. We've been working together
for the last decade. We know how we work, who we are. Finding co-founders
is almost like a marriage, right? You should have a great fit
to each other in many different aspects. For instance, do you care
the technology first or customer first? There's a deep tech company who actually
focus on building a great technology. It's not something wrong, but if you have
different mindset in terms of your value or which one you should prioritize,
it's really hard to go along with together for the longer period of time. And the second one is that always better
that co-founders have a complementary skill set? If you are good at A and your co-founder
is good at B, it's much easier to actually work together in the long run
because you guys need each other to build the best company. So CTO and I talked about
what we can do with AI more. One of the pains we also experienced then,
and we also noticed that other companies are experiencing, is basically
understanding what customers want for like consumer apps and for e-commerce. This problem has been existed
for many years, but the reason there was no better way was that the technology was
not mature because a large language model getting much better. Now, this is a great timing
to actually provide this type of value. We know that I can change the world
much more than before. We've been in the AI world
for the last ten years, and we've observed the change in the last ten years as well. Right? So creating a new value using AI
is something that I really enjoy doing. The process of running this company,
the journey that I'm I'm going right now is, is really make me excited.