CEO & Founder – Hellowoofy & emojidata: Arjun Rai – S1E19 (#19)

S1E19 – CEO & Founder – Hellowoofy & Emojidata: Arjun Rai – powered by Happy Scribe

Have a huge appetite for success. Be hungry because if you get content very easily, you want to push yourself to the limits and even go beyond the limits and actually see how far you can go, because then you know how far you can go truly. Surround yourself with people who have scars, not physically, but we can show for themselves that they understand what it’s like to be in the trenches. I find it hilarious when we’re talking to investment firms and the associate or the partner or the analyst has never built a company in their life. That conversation ends immediately. And I tell them to their face, quit your job and go build a company and don’t talk to a founder that’s building a company until you’ve done exactly that. Found a company.

Boss Uncaged is a bi-weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners as they become uncaged Trailblazers, Unconventional Thinkers, Untethered Trendsetters and Unstoppable Tycoons. We always hear about overnight success stories, never knowing that it took 20 years to become a reality. Our host S. A. Grant conducts narrative accounts through the voices and stories behind uncaged bosses in each episode, guest from a wide range of backgrounds sharing diverse business insights. Learn how to release your primal success through words of wisdom from inspirational entrepreneurs and industry experts as they depict who they are, how they juggle their work life with family life, their successful habits, business expertise, tools and tips of their trade release. The Uncaged Boss Beast in you welcome our host S. A. Grant.

welcome, welcome, welcome back to Boss Uncaged podcast. On today’s show, we have Arjun Rai right now. This guy is not the average CEO or executive. The way we came to be in the same place at the same time was I was sending his customer support, a random ticket about something. And then he followed up with an answer. So that by itself kind of caught me off guard. And I was like, hello, this is like CEO, the founder of the company that’s responding. So I did a little research, looked into his background, and I said, you know, what the hell do I have to lose? Let me reach out to this guy and see if I can get them on the show. And sure as hell he accepted it. And here he is, man. I mean, so why don’t you give our guests a little bit of who you are?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for inviting me. It’s always a pleasure to be on the podcast and be able to not only talk about your background, but find out how you can help. Other entrepreneurs are just like you, founders, small business owners, and how what I am about to share will add value to your life. So I’m definitely looking forward to making sure that that’s true. My background started very young. I would say I started my first endeavour into the entrepreneurial journey back when I was 16, 17 within that network, then subsequently came to New York, end up convincing the dean of the university I went to to give me one year enough Fulbright and scholarships and grants to cover the first year. And then he ended up giving me more for the next two years as well. But while running that, I had to obviously pay the bills. I was living off nine hundred fiftynine hundred dollars a month in that budget. So I ended up watching an agency that focus on social media marketing and by way of that, being a small business, working with clients in Europe and even here in New York, quickly figured out that collaborating with other individuals is not streamlined or intuitive or creative at all. And so I started raising about a little under one hundred K to build out an MVP from some very notable angel investors here in New York, including the first investors and Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and whatnot, and then quickly raised another nine hundred or so by the end of my senior year. So in total, about a million. And what we were building is essentially, if you can imagine my project, that combined with Ironmen, where you can actually navigate and see people who are working on your project, page them together. You can swap files to people, people into projects, very intuitive visual software, almost like moving chess pieces on a board. Unfortunately, you are too early for our for our own good. We were expecting touch screens would become bigger and cheaper, which they did two years after we ran out of cash. And so that was one of my first experience with a failure and learning from building a venture backed company, things you should be focusing on versus not how do you build a streamlined engineering team versus not building a product and MVP and getting out the door on the customer’s hands versus trying to nit pick the all the fine details and trying to perfect everything until you actually get out the door. So I learned a lot within a couple of months of that, I decided to focus on another pain in the as for gastrique. That was social media marketing. Social media marketing was not intuitive, not creative at all, like much like that on product management side. And we were looking at tools which were, you know, obviously we have a lot of respect for some of these tools like HootSuite and I can see and share my screen. HootSuite, we know the founder, tremendous amount of respect for them, but it’s very noncreative. It’s very much like our project. And it doesn’t really give you the data science of artificial intelligence that let you know. Was it a copy that’s doing really well for you? Is it the emojis, the images, the spacing? As you know, the images are very important when you’re posting Instagram. None of that data is given to you, but it’s affordable. If you’re running a coffee shop and you want to compete with the Starbucks of the world, this is all we can afford. But now, when you take a look at tools which are obviously a little bit more capable, like Radian6, which is now marketing clever, you then get more data, you get a lot more sentiment analysis. But now you feel like you need to take this information and then become a better marketer. And by the way, this is a modern tool. Doesn’t have a schedule for you, it doesn’t execute for you. It doesn’t help you create the content or curate the content. And one hundred thousand dollar price point, some of the competitors are at fifty thousand dollars or thirty thousand dollars. You and I would never pay for something like this. So what we wanted to build and we can go ahead and give a demo as well, is something that is a lot more intuitive and a lot more simpler and color driven and has a lot of data science. So anyway, that was my background and where we are today.

Got it. So I mean, you’re going into HelloWoofy and just kind of give the audience a little bit more detail of HelloWoofy and what the functionality of it is and how they can use it today to help them move forward.

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, content is king. At the end of the day, if you’re not writing content, you’re missing out. And the only thing that’s holding you back. Is one your time and B, your time and C the amount of money you want to spend on creating content within the time you have, the fourth thing is D you don’t have the means to figure out based on data what will actually do really well or not do so well. If you’re making a trade in the stock market, you’re probably looking at historic 52-week lows and highs and metrics on the company, the balance sheet, some of that. How do you do that with content? Well, that’s kind of where we’re coming in is, for example, if I’m creating content, I say I love you. Obviously we love you. But if I went, I love coffee, I can go ahead and type that in. And you can see that I was autocomplete in the words and symptoms for me. Then I can see the emojis that will work well with what I typed in so far. Of course, these are the Emoji that tend to do really well with the images that are already chosen and the words I’ve chosen already. And the reason why we do that and the focus on that is because Adobe several months ago, under a year ago, actually came out with a report that said emojis tend to drive double digit uplifts and engagement. And we’re not talking 11 or 12 percent. We’re talking in the twenties and the fifties, uplifts and engagement in email. We’re seeing over one hundred twenty percent uplift and open race when you use the right emoji. Now, there is a law of diminishing return and you want to be careful with not having too many bells and whistles. But the fact of the matter is there are three thousand emojis. How do you actually figure out which ones are the most relevant to what you’re typing? In fact, one step further, we are now looking based on the blips you see on screen, which emojis are actually doing really well in terms of popularity, which ones are being used in real time. And you can see at the top the ones on the top left are being used in real time based on the books themselves. And so now you can go ahead and say, oh, I actually like that. I like this emoji and I good face that in and use that immediately. Or if you want to do it the old school way and go through the entire keyboard and do that as well. But I’ll tell you right now there are three thousand emojis. You do not want to do this for all that thousand posts you want to come up with and under we. And of course, based on that, if you click the purple bulb, you’ll then see recommendations for images which are copyright free that you can use for the purposes of posting this image with. And you can be sure that you won’t get in trouble because of copyright. Most businesses, they think they can Google image everything. They can find images online and take the image. But you don’t realize that the majority of the images are actually copyrighted and you cannot do that in our case. We’ll give you suggestions for free copyright, free images and soon premium content as well. I’m here to give you a fully optimized post and you’re ready to go. And if you speak another language, great, you can go ahead and translate this into any other language as well. For example, I speak French formating if you’re there. And the general look of it,

I mean, it’s definitely interesting. I guess another question is a little bit more about how did you even start? I mean, you said you started off as a kid. I mean, were your parents involved in coding and development? Were they entrepreneurs? I mean, how did you actually dive into this space?

Definitely. My mom was entrepreneurial. She just passed away a couple of months ago, just prior to our launch of the company product. But I would say she was definitely very entrepreneurial. She was after my dad from the get go to apply to whatever program she had. He had to to get to the US. I immigrated when I was four or five years old with with my mom. And my dad had come in just a month before that. I definitely think that she had a great eye for design to decorate the apartment of our house very, very well. And I always learn about taste and making sure that things look good, things you do things with passion and you do things with an immense attention to detail. I do over that. On my dad’s side is an engineer. He is a software developer today. He does more architecture and project management stuff. But, you know, the combine it was very interesting. You were moving around every six months because of my dad’s job and the fact that he had a green card and then eventually we got us citizenship. But the point of the matter is we were almost nomads and we kind of had to figure things out. The typical immigrant family and try to figure things out and make it into the US. For me, I kind of took that mentality and tried to make it in New York and everything I’ve done, building products, raising capital, all that has been basically there’s not enough. There’s you can go back, you can only move forward. And the hustle and the grind is real when you’re when you’re building something with very little capital. In some cases, no capital have to negotiate. You got to make people believe to do things for you for free or deferred costs. It definitely takes a lot.

Yeah. I mean, I’m definitely sorry to hear about your mom, but it seems like she influenced you a lot from growing up to get you to where you are currently right now. It was going to be a true statement.

Yeah. And she actually launched a care company of her own, did not want me to do my first company. And she thought it was definitely I should focus on school, I should get my MBA, I should get married at thirty and do whatever I need to have for all that. But we always clashed on that point. I was always like, I need to do this now. And I was you know, I was very much influenced by a lot of. Entrepreneurs on a show called The Big Idea, with Donny Deutch no longer around, but that was definitely one of my first shows that inspired me of First the Shark. Tank Sharks has been around for well over a decade now.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. So, I mean, we always hear about the 20 years it takes for somebody to become a success story. And it seems like it’s an overnight success. And, you know, you just said you pretty much just launched HelloWoofy. That’s pretty much an automated platform to help social media and to help delivery of content. How long did it take you to get to the point to where you actually established a launch and you might go into a little bit of raising capital? And that’s one of the best things. Most entrepreneurs, they don’t really comprehend how to do an equity raise.

Yeah, and talk about raising capital. We’re actually raising capital right now on Republic, which is an equity crowdfunding element of means is that anyone, not just accredited investors, can use the new regulatory changes in raising capital to their advantage. That means that you can invest as low as 100 bucks on your income. Anyone can do it. We’ve been able to raise about one hundred eighty eighty one thousand a year over that. We’re also going to be on a TV show in two days called The Drapers Nice, which is the Draper family, Tim Draper, the billionaire investor. So it’s been interesting. Initially I was able to raise capital from a fund called 15. 17 were founded by individuals who ran the Field Foundation. And the Thiel Foundation came after me, obviously, to join when I was 19. Unfortunately, we spoke three weeks later when it was my birthday or I think two days after my birthday and I was 20, I was disqualified. But one of the partners followed me and we stayed in touch over the years and seven years later at the up, investing in my company when they left to build their own venture capital firm. And then one thing led to the other, raised a little bit more capital from an accelerator, and then ended up having to pivot a little bit to let go of my co-founder. I have to let go of our CTO about a year and a half ago and pretty much start from scratch. The product, the team, the culture, everything, the business plan, all of it have to be staffed. And we only had twelve thousand dollars left in the bank. So it’s interesting how with twelve thousand I was somehow able to figure out, get a full time job. All the capital from all the salary into the company, maxed out my credit cards, maxed out my savings and get to the point where we’re about to do we’re projecting ninety thousand dollars by the end of next month since launching in December.

That’s nice. I mean, that’s definitely I wouldn’t say a rags to riches, but it’s a reality that can happen to any entrepreneur if they knuckle down and put the time into it. So looking from entrepreneur standpoint, if I wanted to start a random plug in, I wanted to start some kind of software. I mean, what kind of equity looking to put into that? I mean, how much do you really need to start something like that from the ground up?

I mean, for a plug in or a simple app, I would say allocate at least ten thousand, two thousand, three thousand for the MVP, a few more thousand dollars for the legal side of things, a couple of thousand one hundred dollars for the marketing side, graphic design, copywriting, getting the website up and running and then you want a little back question at the end. So I would say you can get five grand. You’re good to go. And you probably want to be more efficient to get to the 10K mark, but that’s just your MVP. You want to put that out there as soon as possible. And I mean that literally the second after it’s done and it’s good enough, put it out on the market, get people to use it, get feedback, use something like Zendesk to get all the ticketing information, get all the feedback in a very structured way, and then use that to then raise capital off, because then you have two things. You have a product and you have traction, which means investors are looking to see how people are using it. And if they can invest capital into basically if you add fuel to the flight and they can see that and you have metrics to show that you can then raise capital hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions depending on your product at the market, you’re going up. So the first thing I would say is get on a year, get on and off work, find those people internationally and start talking and come up with a brief, come up with the features you want. If you’re not technical, draw it out. Sketched out in illustrator, try to be as detailed as possible, almost like you’re building a house, defined the room, defined the door, and find the nuts and bolts that are going into that door. Define everything so that the developer doesn’t have to wonder how you want this because they don’t know what you want. They only see the blueprint. So build the blueprint immediately.

I mean, that’s definitely some great insight. I mean, just just by by the way, you’re defining it. And that’s the next question I was going to have for you is I work with a lot of outsourcers, right? I have outsourcers from everywhere from US base all the way over to Africa, China and everything else in between. So the fact that you said to use these people, I think it is a great Segway to understanding what kind of services should someone look for? I mean, are we looking for application developer or are we looking for a program? I mean, what what are we looking for? Let’s say I’m brand new. I have no idea. I have this concept. I worked with some. Trying to figure out my next steps, and I have no clue of what even this person’s title would be or how I even search for.

Yeah, so one of the things I always believe in is having the right kind of people around you to cover your weaknesses, you know, your strengths. But most people ignore their weaknesses, which is not a good thing. So if you’re not technically adept in terms of speaking the language and whatnot, first of all, you should probably take an introductory course. They’re a bunch of free ones. If you’re a woman, it’s even better because a lot of schools will actually give you deferred position to actually do an entire course and you have to pay for it until you get a job or raise capital or whatnot, which is really good for empowering women to get into work into the technology field. But once you do that, once you surround the people, you find yourself with the right people. Ask them for a job description of what they use when they start to get those people on your advisory board, give them some equity, promised them some equity if you have a form legally itself. But you want to make sure that those people are giving you mentorship and advice and that they’re good people who have incentives aligned with yours, that once you know exactly where to put the walls, when you know exactly where to put the windows, because they’re obviously telling you based on their experience, then you can go ahead and take that drawing or mockup or sketch and rendering and put it on a four and fiver and start finding people you’re talking about plug in. You probably are talking about WordPress plugin, which will require a developer. You’ll probably want someone with WordPress plugin experience that can obviously has experience putting plug ins into the WordPress store. You’re talking about an Apple an Apple application. You probably want someone who has iOS developer experience specifically in SWIFT, which is a programming language. If you’re looking for an Android developer, you probably want someone to experience and Android SDK experience all of these platforms when you start typing and they kind of give you nudges to figure out what you need as well. So surround yourself with the right people and they’ll teach you.

Got you. I mean, that’s that’s definitely a beautiful tidbit. A little bit back on your personal side. I mean, I think like you’re younger than 30 years old where you’ve got all these things going on, you’re building equity, you’re building the company. There’s not one company is multiple companies, multiple facets. How do you juggle that in your personal in your family life?

Yeah, it’s incredible. I’m definitely a workaholic and of as soon as six thirty-seven o’clock, sometimes a multiple times a night. And I’m talking to my developers who are based in Ukraine and India and Pakistan to try and make sure that they’re, they have no questions or they’re on task and get a product out the door as soon as possible. So definitely, definitely I’m a workaholic. I should probably be working on my sleep habits. But when it comes to the personal side, I definitely have a girlfriend that is very patient and very supportive, incredibly supportive. I actually put in a few thousand dollars when we needed to meet payroll and she was very incredibly supportive as well throughout the entire history of the company. Major. And we live together and we balcatta Thursday nights to be our date nights. So I try to make sure that I encroach upon that. There have been moments where, like I, I do need a decline call and she was very supportive of that, but usually will stay away from Thursday evening, which is today, Thursday evening client calls. But you will find me on a client. Call me every other evening on the weekends, mornings. I have an investor call the Saturday at nine o’clock in the morning for an hour and a half. So you have to use calendars and you have to use tools like Kalanithi that can set up automatically your schedules. I mean, I think I sense accounting for this as well. You have to automate so every aspect of communications, because if you don’t have good communications and you don’t have that scheduling, that’s when you have issues. And we’re not talking about just scheduling issues. You have relationship issues because if you don’t communicate properly, if you don’t schedule properly and you’re not showing up on time or things of that nature, you’re kind of holding yourself back from doing really well in business and in your personal life. So actually, it’s ever since we met in terms of my girlfriend, I every date was on the calendar. I sent her a calendar in my state and she sent me for the second date. And we kept at it because she’s an incredible technical recruiter and for startups. And she needed that as well because she works pretty much around the clock as well. Juggling, you got to use tools. You got to use technology to get technology to take away the grunt work. I mean, this is a social media platform that takes a government that works fine technology to take away the company in other regards so that you can focus on what you’re good at.

Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely the funny thing is I think currently right now what’s going on in the world, I think a lot of people are starting to not just feed into that, but they’re starting to take action on that. And I think people like us has been on and media has been in marketing that’s been kind of behind the scenes touching and feeling. And in this space for so long, we’ve been preaching it. And now it’s everyone’s reality by force. And it kind of gives them an opportunity to kind of learn a lot faster than it took us to kind of learn. We were doing and still struggling to market and build and develop, and now in today’s world is completely different.

Yep, absolutely. Anyway where you thought you would be in five years, you’re going to have to be there tomorrow. In fact, if you’re not going to be there tomorrow, you should have been there last week. Do not hesitate. Invest, invest now. Live the long term game. Rancourt on all sides. You know, if you don’t have the capital, get it on credit. Obviously, talk to your financial adviser. I’m not giving you financial advice here, but invest now and find the means to get ahead of your competitor, the person who hesitates and the person who thinks that they can get the wait until all this is over is several months behind. Because think about it, some of the best companies historically have always been built in a downturn.

Always

we’re seeing their revenue increases right now because we were we were catering to small businesses working from home businesses, freelancers, coaches, Facebook group admins, many of whom are affiliates. We were catering to them anyways. And now everyone is working remotely. Everyone’s an online business and they are not kind of getting forced into that. And so we’re actually doing more validated now than ever before.

I would think it’s safe to assume that your equity raise is going to be pretty solid at this point in time because the world needs you probably more now than ever and going into the space that there are competitors. But I think you have a really core niche that kind of gives it a different look and a different feel and a younger set of eyes on it, right?

Yeah. And I was going to say, you know, just to your point on the freelancers and finding resources, I mean, we built the site roughly between three to five thousand dollars, of course, is three to four thousand dollars. That includes video editing, graphics, copywriting customization, adding different plug ins, all the backend stuff, all the analytics, all of the minor changes on the backend as well. It would have cost you well over fifty thousand dollars in New York or in L.A. where we’re even in the UK. You have to take advantage of these tools, freelancers.com, fiver up work, or there are people who are hungry to work with you and they would really want to work with you because you’re working on maybe something in a very cutting edge. Get let them in, show them what you’re working on. Don’t worry about NDAs and all of that. BBS’s, especially for the investor, do have to present an idea that is a sure shot way of ending that conversation immediately, because at the end of the day, it’s all about execution. If you can out execute someone else, you are better than millions of other people who are not even getting started with the first step.

Yeah, I mean, I think being that that you’re so young is just it gives me an opportunity to kind of let people know that, you know, I always say it doesn’t matter if you’re 16 or if you’re sixty five and you’re retiring once you get it and that awakening moment happens and it becomes a reality and you know what you’re doing and you’re affectivity, then the sky’s the limit at that point in time. And for some people, it happens in their fifties. Some people it happens like your kids. So you happen when you were eight. Right. So the reality is, is once that happens, you have to own it and run with it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t stick it under the rug, face the reality of it and run towards it.

And I would even argue is the sky’s the limit anymore. If you take a look at what else.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

France is doing I mean, I’m a huge sci fi nerd and Star Trek or Trekkie. It’s so inspiring. I mean, from a very young age. I grew up on Star Trek. You know, I try to surround yourself with people. I will also tell you surround yourself with the right content, whether that’s the news you read or the news you shouldn’t be reading or the shows you’re watching on the shows you shouldn’t be watching. Inspiration can come from multiple ways. We were my girlfriend. I was watching a movie yesterday called Good Deeds, and it was about someone who was successful following their dreams. And the in the first half, they were not following their dreams, but eventually they did. And it movies like that will inspire you to pursue happiness. Fiftieth time last night, again, it inspires me every single time. It brings tears to my eyes every single time. Surround yourself with the right resources. And that could be from nine in all aspects of your life.

Yeah, I mean, beautiful inside. Beautiful inside. Next question. I’m thinking about asking you it and it’s like, you know, it’s funny because like, you know, when you do a podcast, you have all these questions and it’s like every time you say something like, it takes me down. This been on another fork and I’m trying to get what was the next question? Should I and which one should to act later. So I just have to keep a mental note. All the questions that I want to actually before for this episode is done, another personal one is like, what’s your morning habits? And you said earlier, sometimes you wake up a six, six thirty-seven o’clock, you wake up essentially pretty early. But what is your morning routines look like once you wake up? What’s the first five or six things that you do every morning?

I want to say I have breakfast and eat and make coffee or whatnot. But actually the first thing I do, as soon as I get out of the bed, I just jump on a call. As soon as I do it, you know, I’m in my bed. I might be in my pajamas or in my boxers. It doesn’t matter. You know, the first priority is getting to the client, getting their questions answered, getting on the call with the development team, the product team, the graphic designer, making sure that they have everything they need to be successful for the day. Once that’s done, then I go into the kitchen, make a little bit of breakfast for myself and my girlfreind. Make coffee and take care of myself. You’re probably be doing it the other way around, but the found founders work, obviously, at least the ones who really want to get somewhere is that you really have to for a couple of years, just be away from everyone else. Just focus on your business. And that’s the first priority, or at least the second priority. Then once it’s stabilized and once it’s on its way up into the trajectory of success, then you can take a little bit of a step back. But right now, it’s because to me and so the first thing I do is, is jump on a call and make sure that my people or my customers, potential customers have what they need to make sure that they’re successful.

I mean, it’s interesting you say that. I mean, I think we’re living a similar life. I mean, the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning, potentially go right to my phone and check all my notifications to see what’s been fired off, you know, who’s responding back to a task that I put out and trying to see, OK, do I have any new positive feedback on social media? And I want to respond really quickly. And so I’m definitely with you. I mean, you’ve got the early bird, gets the worm. I mean, definitely this is one of those opportunities for you to kind of get up, get things done in that first 30 minutes. You can get a lot done without being interrupted. So,

yeah. And the same here with me. You know, all the strike notifications of orders coming in, all the Zendesk tickets that are coming in for people as well. It’s a priority being our customers, our priority. But I have, you know, my entire phone screen packed with that as we go.

So, I mean, you’re a big automation guy. I mean, are you moving into the space of Alexa Google Dot? I mean, are you getting into that realm of voice commands?

I’m not sure I see your Amazon echo turn on. So in the platform itself, we do have voice recognition and you can actually talk to the platform and say, create a campaign for me, navigate me to the library or go to home and things of that nature. And that’s really going into a future that you can see on our product page where we want to be the one stop shop for all your marketing needs. If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you can start seeing mockups of different approaches to the product itself.

Where you have this is on Hellowoofy.com. Right. And just to make sure it’s all little, Hellowoofy.com And you just click on product, you can start seeing that you actually want to be that one stop shop, not just for social media marketing, but all kinds of marketing and asset management, whether it’s graphic design or the brief from a client or you’re doing paid advertising or paid marketing or you’re doing billboard advertising, whatever that may be. We want it to be super intuitive and and super data driven artificial intelligence. So you’re going to see on the bottom right. If you click on it, it’ll actually allow you to ask questions and give you some things you can ask.

What do you see yourself in 20 years from now?

My 10 year goal is to build a school like Hogwarts, upstate New York, that will allow people who are kids or kind of growing up in a similar way as I did, which was very much rebellious, very much want to get a head start early on and very much are driven or design driven. I want to give them an ecosystem where they can actually flourish, they can work on ideas, they can get their education that they need. I would pay for that. And as soon as they come out of anything that is considered IP or something that could turn into a startup, I would be the first check and allow them to get off to the races with obviously the consent of their parents and allow them to start building companies. Even if they fail, it’ll be a lot more educational and the experience itself will go further than anything they could do, just going to classes. So that’s my 10 year goal 20, 30 years ago, probably somewhere something to do with space. I’m very fascinated by, I think, what happened in the what are known as the Forty Niners, the huge, massive gold rush to California. It kind of explains why California and Silicon Valley became the hotbed of people who really took risks and set the foundation for the entire ecosystem, for tech and innovation and things of that nature. And that’s because, you know, people just took a leap of faith, took the risk, and they just ventured out there in their start doing whatever they had to to make ends meet. Now, the people who became successful weren’t the ones who were looking for gold. That was the ones who were selling the picks and the axes and the struggles and all of that stuff. That’s commodities to all the people who are rushing it. But that was entrepreneurship one on one back then. I think the same thing is going to happen on the moon. I think the same thing is going to happen across our solar system because it’s just too expensive to take resources from Earth and ship them to orbit. We have to find resources in orbit or on other planets with no atmosphere or very little atmosphere in order to make anything viable and as a at least a solar system flourishing specialization.

Just to break that apart in the first ten year part, it’s another guy that I interviewed on a show before this one, and his name was Mark, and he’s a director of a STEM school. And I asked him a similar question I’m asking you. And one of his goals was pretty much create a school based upon how much would it cost. So he went to investors and he was just like, OK, so how much would it cost to create the school? Would it cost to. Million would have cost. Five million would have cost three million, and he’s pretty much outlined the entire infrastructure for the schools based upon these different breaking points of capital to be raised. So he has a ten million dollar equity raise of what that would look like if you built the school. He has a five million. What would that look like? I think you two guys are probably on the same spectrum as far as developing a school. I mean, if you want to, I can definitely give him your contact and contact. I would love you. I think you guys want the same space. And like you said, you never know. I mean, ten years from now, the reality of STEM schools are taking it to another, especially after this year. I think people are going to have a bigger appreciation for STEM schools than they ever had before.

Yeah, I mean, I think we can do for the next generation or even the current generation is incredibly important because think about it, the country’s GDP and ability to innovate or in general the economy, people are very short sighted and they think in the next two or three years or maybe the yourself, we can do things now and have a positive set up left. But when you talk about the next generation taking over as senators taking over as House of Representatives and as president, where do you think they’re going to come from if they were born 30 years ago, 40 years ago in some cases? Right. So what were you doing as a society, as a civilization four years ago to set that person up, to be able to do the things that they need to do four years later? It’s a very long term strategy.

Definitely. Definitely. And about your 20 year I mean, going into space and obviously I think we share this as well to really begin to see if, you know, whether we’re talking about Star Trek, Star Wars, that’s is going to be the yin and yang. Right. And the fact that you’re thinking that far ahead. And just for our views on Stan, I don’t think it’s really that far ahead. I mean, if you were saying this back in the 70s, it would have been kind of questionable to be like, I don’t know, I’d another 30, 40 years. But I think in our lifetime we may potentially be able to see at least the dawn of what life in space would look like with us.

Yeah, yeah. I used to say I don’t know if I give this example already, but I’m very inspired by Elon Musk and people ask me that. From a competitive standpoint, how do you compare your product with your competitors? And I always say you ask a question to Elon Musk, the Tesla, he’ll tell you Chevy is not a competitor or Ford is not a competitor. He is building a categorically new product. We are building a categorically new product from the ground up. The focus on his site, his focus is on energy and of the availability or the openness of energy access, whether it’s batteries with the homes side of things, the solar panels side of things on the car side of things, us, we’re focused on the data science and making sure that is accessible to every small business owner that wants to compete with the Fortune 500 marketing team that has unlimited marketing budget. And he’s going to tell you, yes, we may be in the same region. They have four wheels and a steering wheel, but they’re not really a competitor. They’re unique and built from the ground up. Chevy will obviously say they have four wheels and a steering wheel of their Tesla is a competitor. That’s only because they’re trying to be competitive. The best they came up with was the Chevy Volt, which is kind of like a have not a really great product to compete with a Tesla.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s funny that you bring it up. I mean, there’s always the comparison that people always think about Amazon, Amazon, Amazon to sell books. And I’m like, look at Amazon’s platform right now. I mean, they started off with books, but you never thought they would dive into delivery services. You never thought they went into groceries. You never thought they would dive into movies. And they have their hands and all of them, I mean, even eight of us. That’s a major thing that you never would have even thought that Amazon would even have their foothold in. And they’re running the clouds.

And I’m so glad you mentioned that, because one of the things that we’ve been focusing on is building. So you saw the autocomplete service, which, again, for your viewers, if I’m typing in, for example, I love you, I love you, which, of course, you love you. And the smell of a coffee. There you go. It’s autocomplete there. But then we decided, why do we take this information or this capability is an API and build it as an API. That is autocomplete as a service for other companies. So now imagine AOL or Yahoo! Or any email provider, even the little ones who are white label and be able to give you the same or create competitive capabilities, I would say better than Gmail. Smart Campose being able to use a autocomplete to complete your forms, your notes, your newsletters and things of that nature. And so we just deployed a Google Chrome extension, but soon in a couple of months you’d be able to type or other autocomplete anything on the Internet. So think family to point out what that means is Remley will autocomplete autocratic when you type. But that’s based on your biases, your experience, your level of education, your tone, things of that nature. But we’re not giving you by the end of the year over half a billion data points to be able to programmatically get suggestions of the next best order. And on top of that, the best emojis that will most likely drive uplift and engagement or engagement more than if you just have text.

So if I’m going to use. I mean, another expertise that could potentially run into is, I guess, transcription. Right, so we’re recording audio. And when you’re recording something versus writing something is two different things. Right. So if you’re recording it and is transcribing it, then you could potentially have the A.I. rewrite what you said verbally and transcribe it in the correct fashion that you wanted to moving forward.

I’m so glad you said that. We’re I have not announced this anywhere, but we will actually be supporting audio and video upload to give you recommendations based on that as well. So right now, if you like the article and has an article, it can be Adobe.com, S.V., an article on their blog or your blog or whatnot. If you place it in here, what you’ll notice immediately is that the artificial intelligence this is reading the article behind the scenes and giving a, quote, recommendations based off the article itself. These hashtags are being recommended based on what it found in the article itself. But soon, very soon, in a couple of months, you’ll be able to see audio and video transcriptions if you upload a YouTube link or whatnot, will quickly analyze it for you and give you recommendations based on the transcription as well.

Yes, definitely. So just to recap, caught up in some of our viewers is going to be audio only. So what he just did, essentially, he took a link from a blog post and he put it into creating a new post on helloWoofy. And just by doing that, then I went out to the blog post, read everything in that blog post, and came back with, quote, suggestions and came back with emojis and other things that they suggest you should add before you make the post, which is a beautiful thing that a lot of times you’re trying to figure out what should I post? I got three different articles and I need just one part from this article. And you sneak this one quote from here. So essentially, this gives you an opportunity to kind of source information really quickly, make it a hundred percent original and set it up to post whenever you want.

Or you can do that into your library and have it saved for another time. But the point of the matter is that you should be focusing on storytelling, on your ability to be creative, and that is how you should be judged in the world of advertising, in the world of marketing, in the world of business in general and business, you should not be judged on how much you can do, how many words you can type words to someone else that has a team of one hundred people working for them or people working for them. You should be judged on your ability to output great content. Oh, and I didn’t mention this. We’re putting it on steroids and in about two weeks we’re going to be allowing you to do this, which is auto completing entire articles, blog posts, word, you know, white papers and whatnot. It could be thousands of words will allow you to autocomplete that and reduce the grant work by 20 percent at least, and give you a emoji recommendations and things in nature that’s going to open up a whole new world of long form content marketing, which is coming back, is definitely taking off.

Yeah, I mean, it is your opportunity. I mean, I could see somebody using this to develop books as well, too. I mean, if you do exactly 20 articles, these articles is three thousand words and you times that by, you know, the number then you can easily have an e-book overnight.

Yep. Your top 10 your way through. Of course you don’t want to type the entire book using the engine. If you want to add your own tone, you want to add your own DNA into the text of self. But this is a system this is very much about existing and

definitely it’s a great tool. So I mean, speaking of tools, I mean, what to do you use that you would not be able to run your business without today?

Oh my God, Kalanithi. All of our schedules are done on our website through Kalanithi, you know, automatically sending up email notifications or email invites with the right hangout set up automatically every single day, pretty much packed with plan calls or investor call and things of that nature. Obviously we use our own product and we take a look at our calendar and use it pretty extensively. In terms of the last you can see, we’ve been promoting our crowdfunding campaign where people can invest in the company for as long as a hundred dollars. And so we’ve been talking about the benefits of doing that. We also, I would say, use zoom. All of you use something called trading cards for all our content for the podcast or the show called Content Messers. I also want to say we use Facebook groups in a very unique way to actually talk to our customers, whereas anyone who is on your on your audience can join our Facebook group and talk to us directly about what is working, what isn’t working, what features should be added. It’s our own private community. Obviously, passionate individuals were telling us what they want and we build it for them. Facebook, Facebook groups have been very helpful as well. Of course, I have the right to strike directly on my phone at the Zendesk app, directly on my phone as well. As soon as I get tickets, I get the notification here. I respond immediately since I get a sale or sale comes through, I get a notification here as well. WordPress is really great and commerce is really great for getting all of your financial back and transactions done. There are, of course, different hacks we can talk about perhaps another time, but I’m making sure that you are using a tool like WordPress to build out your business. Don’t do anything custom entirely from around. WordPress is standalone, it’s out of the box and has the plugins it has with commerce to get your business off the road. I would say we spend maybe a couple hundred dollars on the landing page for the lifetime deal and we’re giving the product literally away for forty nine bucks for a lifetime. We spend a couple hundred dollars and we’ve made well over twenty two, twenty three thousand dollars on that. And that was because it was a WordPress page plugin for available. We have to do very little in customization and we were off to the races.

Nice. Nice.

I’m sure I’m forgetting some tools and I’m that of that nature. But we can probably do another section just on tools.

Oh yeah. I mean, I’m sure you probably like a little you know, everybody that is in this space probably has like a little notepad or a little document or an app somewhere that they just keep adding to the list. Adding to the Q.

Yeah. Just like an upgrade for managing your communications as well.

Got it. Got it. So what final words of wisdom do you have for anybody following in your footsteps? Coming up, as an entrepreneur and a business owner and a founder, what would you say to them?

Have a huge appetite for success. Be hungry, because if you get content very easily, you want to push yourself to the limits and even go beyond the limits and actually see how far you can go, because then you know how far you can go to really surround yourself with people who have scars, not physically, but actually can show for themselves that they understand what it’s like to be in the trenches. I find it hilarious when we’re talking to investment firms and the associate or the partner or the analyst has never built a company in their life. That conversation ends immediately. And I tell them to their face, quit your job and go build a company and don’t talk to a founder that’s building a company until you’ve done exactly that found a company. It’s like the conversation you can expect between a developer and a non developer. The non-developer has an that spend an hour learning about coding, taking an introductory free course to look at a book, understanding how the architecture you were not respecting the art of the other individual people. So do that. Make sure you do that for yourself. And I think those are some examples of words of wisdom that would give to people who are looking to build a company. It’s a 24/7 hustle. You sleep, of course, but it’s a fight for someone else. Whether you’re sleeping and you’re thinking about in your brain, you’re fresh up in the morning. You have to know exactly where you’re going to do ABC, have everything scheduled and organize. Otherwise, the worst thing is when you’re not organized, you’re wasting time. It’s not only grunt work when you’re spinning your wheels and someone else is getting ahead, you want to get ahead?

Yeah, I mean, that’s definitely some solid words of advice. I don’t think anybody, whether they want to be an entrepreneur, whether they’re running a small business, I think just the fruits of your labor, of what you’re executing today, they can kind of see where they can possibly be if they just stick to it. What is your most significant achievement today?

Finding a person that I can say is my girlfriend that puts up with me, but most importantly has a similar background and can understand she’s been in the trenches of her life and trying to make it as well and now making it as a successful recruiter, technical recruiter. I would say that is one of my success on a personal level, professional level, getting a company off the ground that has nearly died. I’ve lost count how many times, but now we are on our way to the I guess, the promised land, if you will, or on our way up the sale sign. On the technology side. On the customer side. On the investment side, it was all worth it. But there were definitely moments where the average person would have given up, which is fine because there’s a reason why the one percent exists. What the 10 percent is, what five percent exists as a reason for that nature just has a way of self-correcting every couple of every so often, whether that’s economical. And we’re not talking people who have inherited wealth, we’re talking about who have worked there a astore gastrique off to get there. And so there’s always a natural way to do that. So I think my company and I think on a personal level, my girlfriend as well, and we’re both we’re all trying to make it in New York. We live in a great place right now, but we’re all just trying to find the next big thing, the next person we want to help. We actually just give away almost one hundred licenses for free to restaurants, gyms, hotels, our partnership with Atsumi partner program. You want to be in a position to give away product and your success as well. Once you’ve achieved success, share a little bit of it with other people who are looking for it as well and desperately use your help. So in that spirit of that, if you need help, if you want to reach out, arjun@hellowoofy.com We’ll get you to me. And of course, I’m sure you’re open to mentoring people as well. Reach out, make the ask if that’s the only way you can get ahead.

I mean, yeah, I mean we wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t ask you and didn’t accept. Right. And I mean I think we’re living examples of that pure fact of the fear. And I think that that’s one of the things that a lot of people, they get that fear and they swallow and it’s like, should I? And they start stuttering and they start second guessing themselves. And I’m just like the time it took you to do that, just do it. And then the results are going to happen if you just commit to it.

Yes.

This is one of my bonus questions for you, right. I mean, out of these five particular words and I’m going to say to you, which one would you say is your top three? Right. Passion, vision, belief, fearlessness and perseverance,

vision. Someone once said, I can’t remember, is that this vision is a dream with a plant. And a dream is just a dream you may or may not ever go after it, but a vision is a dream with a plan. In that with respect to, you know, it kind of where you want to go, you have somewhat of a blueprint, you have some degree stuff, you know, a wire frames and user flows. But that’s on the product side or on how you want to build the business and things of that nature. But if you have that, that dream world has a much higher chance of becoming a reality. If you just have a dream, that’s all is going to be is a dream, but a vision as a dream with a plan. The other things are important, too. But you want to know what you’re doing and where you’re going before you can put passion behind it or you can put perseverance behind it or any of the other words you mentioned, which are all important. But a vision is definitely. Definitely. And then the first Steve Jobs to connect the dots. Looking back, once your plan is going to change, you’re going to have new influences coming in. You’re going to have to pivot. You’re going to have to control your strategies for that plan. You can look back and say that made sense, that change made sense, then make sense of the moment. That makes sense looking back,

wow was definitely a powerful viewpoint and powerful statement. Well, final bonus question for you. And I always like asking this question because I know that every single person that I would ask essentially would have a different answer or is there to have the same person. Their reason why I would be completely different. So if you could spend twenty four hours in one day with anybody dead or alive, uninterrupted, who would it be?

And what I would really want to talk to Tesla, Nikola Tesla. He was one of the most fascinating futuristic people. And, you know, unfortunately in society then freedom. Well, civilization. And understand how far ahead he was. And I don’t want to say we’re similar, but, you know, with my last company, we were building products that were way too ahead of their time. You know, we’re building product right now that is definitely ahead of our all of our so-called competitors and whatnot. Everything he was doing from global energy, electricity or the air to the inventions of the conspiracy. I love conspiracy theories of his inventions. Being taken out of national interest is just a lot of interesting stories that come out of his biography in his life. And he was very perseverant. He did not care about other what other people thought he’d know. He designed his own things and he had a lot of competition. I mean, Edison gave him a lot of competition, but he followed his own path and he made things work no matter what. He was definitely from the future. Yeah, I think we’re a better society civilization because of his inventions.

He’s definitely a time traveler for sure. I think him and Einstein definitely kind of they have reincarnated ourselves a couple of times. Right.

And the funny thing is we’re all from the New Jersey New York area. Albert Einstein, Princeton Edison had his own shop set up in New Jersey as well. And Nikola Tesla, I mean, his final days were in New York.

So it’s crazy, man, for it to be such a small city as far as a square footage footprint. Yeah, it’s a major apartment. Major. So, I mean, where could people find you? I mean, I think you gave somebody your email address earlier, but I mean, what’s your Facebook, Instagram, your website.

Yeah, I the first thing I would say is go to our website and on the bottom you can see our email or other. My email is right here. You can email us, arjun@hellowoofy.com And with all of our socials, we’ll get you to me as well. You can click on any of them and send us a message there. Or just Google me, Argin Rai rai and you’ll find all my website, all my email, all my contact information there. We really make it easy for you to be able to reach out to us.

Got got it. Well, I definitely appreciate you taking the time. I mean, it was you know, we got the call twice this week. So, I mean, the fact that you took essentially a couple of hours out of your busy schedule, I definitely appreciate and I think you gave our viewers a hell of a viewpoint and the things to look forward to coming from you and coming from your company moving forward.

I want to say thank you for your time for putting up with this. I hope the interview was helpful and your audience will get something out of it. But most importantly, make sure that you reach out, make the ask and start now. Don’t wait. Start now, because this is the time and this is when it’s really matter in the long term

that a man who I definitely appreciate it at the end of most of my podcast, what I usually do is kind of like do like I after like a five minute after where you as the interviewee becomes the interviewer. So if you have any questions that you want to ask me, persay, then I’ll just kind of respond and answer them. So I don’t know if you have anything, but

yeah. And this is actually going off. But I do my show and I ask questions like what is your favorite emoji? So obviously we’re tracking emoji usage across the world in real time. If you had to choose from these emojis, which one would be your favorite?

I’m looking for the one that I love the most I’m looking for right now would be the exploding head. And that’s always the one that I like to use or the thought with the finger coming to his eyes for sure. Those are those are usually biggest ones that I like. I’ll use like in my post in general. And if I’m doing ads, obviously the finger pointing. Right. You want to give people directions on what you want to click on and what’s the most important thing versus using bullet points.

So was your mentor or someone you look you look up to for inspiration?

Man, it’s when I look back at life, I mean, so many different ones. I think Einstein is definitely somebody that I look to as far as being an inspiration just because of his hurdles that he has overcome. And I always try to get people to understand, like this guy was doing what he was doing during the World War and he was Jewish. So I want you to think about that. He was going against the grain. On top of that, he was being ridiculed. On top of that, as a kid, he was looked at as like a dumb dog because he was just way above and beyond everybody else. So just looking like you talking about Tesla, that’s the way I look at einstine

favorite song or book.

Favorite song. I would think my favorite song video was its turn down for what? Yeah, and just that video. I mean, the entire song is the same lyrics over and over again. But if you look like you say it’s telling a story and you see that story with the guy on the rooftop and he’s infected with something and you’re not sure what he’s infected with. Right. And then he kind of breaks through the floor and then he’s half thing and then they break through the floor and it just keeps compounding and keep compounding. But it really is the message behind that is just whatever positive messages you have, you have to deliver it. And it’s not about holding in, is about spreading it. And that’s the way I look at that video. And every time I see it and I hear it, that’s what I feel for me.

It’s the Empire State of Mind with by herself. And I always I always get tears in my eyes. Because that’s been the story of my entire life. Well, those are just some of the questions I usually ask on my show. But again, thank you so much for your time. And it was a pleasure talking to you. And again, hopefully this will help at least one person out there.

Oh, yeah. I don’t think this will be the end of our relationship. I mean, I think definitely I could give you some insight of things that as I’m using your software and I mean, you yourself have a period of time right now to just kind of give you insights of how to use it and kind of just keep working back and forth in any way. I could help you guys move forward in that space. I’m all for it.

Yeah. Awesome.

All right, man. I appreciate it, man. Have a good one.

You too. Bye

bye.

thanks for tuning in to another episode of Boss UnCaged. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming a Trailblazer at this podcast. Helped you please email me about it. Submit additional questions. You would love to hear me ask our guests and or drop me your thoughts at asksagrant.com post comments, share it, subscribe and remember, to become a Boss Uncaged, you have to release your inner Beast. S. A. Grant signing off.

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