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Fascinating conversations with founders, leaders, and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
Kyle (00:01.47)
All right. Welcome to another episode of Product by Design. I am Kyle Evans and this week we have another awesome guest with us, Vikram Chalanna. Vikram, welcome to the podcast.
Vikram Chalana (00:12.53)
Hey, thank you, Kyle. It's great to be here.
Kyle (00:15.066)
Awesome. Well, I'm very excited to have you with us and excited to talk to you. Let me do a very brief introduction for you, Vikram. And then you can tell us a little bit more about yourself. But Vikram is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Pictory, an AI video creation tool for content marketers, which we're going to talk a lot more about. But before we do that, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Vikram Chalana (00:39.63)
Awesome, myself. I'm 30 years in Seattle. I've been here a long time, grew up in India. And the first question people ask me being a techie in Seattle is, do you work for Microsoft or Amazon? And I have never worked at those companies. I did grad school here at University of Washington and then worked at a few companies in the area. And
And then found myself attracted to entrepreneurship and did a startup before this. Grew that to about from one person or two people in our garage to about 350 employees. And if it finally exited that in 2018 and then have been running Pictories since 2019, and we were doing AI before chat GPT.
Kyle (01:37.002)
Awesome. Well, I'm excited to dive into that because I think you've touched on a couple of things that will be very interesting to talk about. You know, start building a startup, AI before the AI boom, and then what is it like now? And I want to touch on all of those things. But before we do that, you know, what are some of the things that you like to do outside of work or outside of the office?
Vikram Chalana (02:03.414)
Yeah, when I'm not building startups, I love hiking and climbing mountains. And that's one of the nice things about Seattle is lots of outdoor recreation. So if I'm not in the water kayaking, I'm in the mountain hiking or skiing in the winter. And yeah, it's an outdoor type of town. And that's what I love to do.
I recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, which is the highest peak in Africa, about 19,000 feet. So that was my big adventure for this year.
Kyle (02:43.134)
Wow, that's incredible. What was that experience like? Has that been something you've wanted to do for a long time and what was it like doing that?
Vikram Chalana (02:51.742)
Yeah, I wanted to do it for at least 10 years. The first time I went to Africa, we actually did a safari and we drove by Kilimanjaro and I saw that mountain and it's like, it's a freestanding, there's no range there. So you wanna, I kind of wanted to do it. And they said, there's no snow, so you don't have to do technical climbs, you don't have to be roped up, there's no glacier crevasses and all that stuff. So.
So it's been at least 10 years on my wishlist, so I was able to do it. And it was about a eight day total trip and about six days going up and one and a half day coming down. And the last day is brutal, the one where you summit and you start at 15,000 feet and go up to 19,000. And even though we acclimatized throughout the
they hike, it was still brutal, altitude issues. And just you're exhausted and just like, you can see the peak, but you can't get there. It's still a few hours away. So I was relating it to all kinds of startup building experiences that I've had and mountain climbing, they have so many similarities. And I was able to make some lessons and draw some.
connections between those two things.
Kyle (04:23.338)
Wow, well, that's incredible. And I'm sure it was an amazing experience and something that was probably, kind of like you're saying, especially difficult, living at relatively close to sea level and then summiting up to almost 20,000 feet, that's gotta be such a difficult experience, but also just an incredible one. So do you have plans for the next big thing or was this kind of like the major?
the major climbing adventure that you wanted to do.
Vikram Chalana (04:56.458)
It's still been too soon. It's only been about six weeks since we did it. So I'm still like recovering and trying to figure out what the next one is. But that was a big one. We have a huge mountain nearby, Mount Rainier, and I've always wanted to go up there. So that'll happen sometime.
Kyle (05:14.946)
Great. Awesome. Well, that's awesome. I absolutely love it. So I want to dive into some of the things that you alluded to as you were talking a little bit about your background. And maybe we can dive into that a little bit more. And you can tell us a little bit more about your journey. You mentioned a startup that you built from no employees or two employees in a garage.
up to 350 employees. Maybe tell us a little bit about that. What was that experience like building a new company from the ground up and eventually exiting in 2018 like you mentioned?
Vikram Chalana (05:56.634)
Yeah, that was my first entrepreneurship journey. So it was interesting because the kids were very young and most people like, you know, you think there's certain ages which are great for building a company. You think 20s is awesome. And perhaps 50s is great because, you know, like you're free of the family obligations and stuff. But
But I started it in my 30s and it was, the kids were little and.
It was a lot of work. It was a lot of money that went into this. We bootstrapped the company for the first seven years, did not raise any outside capital. And as an entrepreneur, one of the things you do is you try and mitigate your risks in the process as opposed to, like people think entrepreneurship is risk taking. Risk is there everywhere in life. So you're just trying to figure out how you mitigate those various risks.
And the mitigation early on for me was, you know, okay, this was a side hustle. Like I had a job, I would continue to do that, even though I'd invested a bunch of money in the startup, we just kept building the product and then we started getting some traction and we started getting some cashflow and then decided, okay, now is the time to dive in full time. And that's my biggest advice to any entrepreneur or any product. I mean, just, just focus. I think that.
Because as soon as it jumped in full time, the business just exploded. It boomed. So you have to really spend time on it. You have to focus on things that you're trying to do. And that journey was interesting. It was pre-cloud. It was pre, you know, it was still CDs we used to deliver to our customers. And
Vikram Chalana (08:00.766)
And we were doing product-led motions before there was a term for it. So 20 years ago, we had a product-led growth company, which today you hear about Zepierre and a lot of these companies that are great examples of product-led growth. And we were doing that in an enterprise software world. So our product was something that connected SAP with Microsoft. And...
Most SAP customers are large companies. They're, you know, the Fortune 2000s of the world. And we had a free trial. People would download the free trial. They would try to connect to SAP. We had all the security things figured out. So, and day one, within the first couple of hours, they were able to connect to SAP, push their Excel data into SAP, pull stuff out from SAP to Excel.
And they get the aha moment within a few hours. And then because this was SAP, they didn't like, people were expecting to spend a lot of money on products like that. So we would get five figures PO within a week sometimes of a trial. And then there was a beautiful land and expand motion where basically once they would be using this product in production,
their colleagues would see it and they would say, hey, I want this too, this is very cool. You got your productivity has suddenly increased and now I want it too. So we would start with one department, like say finance and HR would buy it and supply chain would buy it. And so it was a beautiful like expansion revenue built into the product. So it was a very nice business you could build by bootstrapping it because
because of how quick the time to value was. And it was data management, there wasn't AI in there, but then we started adding AI later on to kind of how we make the, how we figure out what processes to automate, what jobs we can help people do, give their reports. And then over time, we did take some VC money. We were getting a lot of inbound VC calls. And by the way,
Vikram Chalana (10:27.214)
for anybody trying to raise money, the best time to raise money is when you don't need it. And when you have inbound VC calls, because then you just like, you have your pick of choice of who to talk to. So it was, we were getting a lot of inbound interest. We finally went with a company called Summit Partners, and they invested in us. And then we grew that.
After they invested, we grew 10x from that point and finally had a nice exit for everyone, for the founders, for the team, for the employees, for the investors. Everyone had a good outcome.
Kyle (11:08.79)
That's really, really interesting. And I want to, I want to dive into a couple of points because, you know, normally when we think about, you know, B2B software, and especially enterprise software, we don't think about product led, you know, because it's the kind of thing where you think about large sales teams and, you know, having to go in and, and do a lot of discussions and demoing and that sort of thing. So how did you go about, you know, discovering this, this problem and then really being able to...
you'll go with a more product led type strategy in this more B2B enterprise software environment and then really start to get traction, you know, being able to demonstrate that value rather than having to go in and, you know, have sales teams demonstrate, you know, here's how we can connect your, your SAP to, to Microsoft and, you know, get your, your data flowing in and do all of these sorts of things.
Vikram Chalana (12:05.466)
Yeah, so regardless of the kind of company you're building, I think one of the lessons I learned, and anybody I meet who's a budding entrepreneur, I tell them the first few sales, you have to do it yourself as a founder. There's no shortcut to that. Because you have to learn what the objections are, you have to learn whether your value proposition resonates, you have to learn the problem.
but the customer spacing and the solution that you're providing and whether there's a match there. And so. So,
Now, we had a simple product that was largely a desktop-based product. It didn't need server configurations. It didn't need any of that stuff. And, but today with the cloud, a lot of that is also abstracted because you can just have your servers in the cloud and you can have a browser-based product. So it's a very similar motion that is possible today. But...
I feel like product-led was a choice we made early on because none of us, none of the founders were salespeople. So we're like, okay, we wanted to build something that we could, that customers could try. And if they found value, they'd just buy it. And that try before you buy motion was very important as opposed to, you know, there's an installation process. Now it's not possible for all kinds of products.
But for certain types of products, again, that's built into the design. It's built into the product that you're trying to sell. And it worked out very well for us. And initially, we were doing the sales ourselves. Because still, in enterprises, you still need, people still expect you to talk to somebody. It's not fully automated as in a consumer SaaS.
Vikram Chalana (14:07.954)
small business SaaS or a consumer SaaS application. So it's much easier, fully automated motions without any sales reps are possible. But if they're gonna spend five figures or six figures on buying a piece of software, they wanna make sure they're able to have a conversation with people. But initial sales should be founder led, then you can eventually build a sales team.
But our initial sales were all inside sales and they were all marketing driven. So it was like, you know, we had a lead funnel that, you know, people were trying. So that free trial created the leads that the salespeople were calling out to. We were not doing a lot of outbound selling and prospecting, at least in the early days.
Kyle (15:00.13)
Okay. That's really, really interesting. Now, you mentioned, obviously, being able to exit and moving into what is now Pictory, your new company. Now, I'm interested in, after you've moved from your first company into what you're doing now, what was the impetus for that? What was the problem that you saw?
that caused you to build what it is that you're doing now.
Vikram Chalana (15:36.47)
Yeah.
So one problem that I saw, and I'm sure you can correlate to it, a lot of the listeners can correlate with that problem is.
We saw content shift in the last 10 years. We've seen, there was a lot of blogs, a lot of text content 10 years ago. In fact, I remember doing the 2008, 2009, we had a recession there. And I remember doing a white paper at WinShuttle called Doing More With Less in IT. And...
And it was like a 10 page white paper. We advertised this like come get a free white paper. And as if people would charge, others were charging for white papers, but content was like text content was king. And we got so much business from that one white paper that is just like it made our, we were able to kind of get through that recession because of some of these text marketing activities. But since then, since 2010,
just the content types have exploded, right? You had text, then you started getting images, then you started getting videos, and you can see that, right? That transition from Twitter to Instagram to TikTok in the social media world. Not that Twitter's gone away or Instagram has gone away, but it's like video has just taken over everything, right? All the new media is now video. And we saw that shift in the marketing, in content marketing, in...
Vikram Chalana (17:15.474)
in what customers were asking for and what our team was asking for, right? So everybody wanted videos and we had a team of 350 people and only one video person. We had only one video person in the entire team. She was in marketing and everybody would be lining up to hers. Like, I want marketing, I want a sales video or the product video, I want an HR video, I want, you know, I was CTO, so I was like, I want some...
that thought leadership video and stuff. And it was hard, the video tools still, and even today, like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro are the go-to tools that people use. And they're hard for normal people to use. I tried to pick it up and I had a heck of a time. I was like, this is hard. I tried Camtasia. Camtasia was easier, but it was pretty limited in what it could do as well.
So I was like, there has to be a better way to do this. And we saw what Canva was doing with disrupting design and making design easy for anyone. And that was a huge role model for me when we started is like, we wanna build Canva for video. That's the story we started out with. But we wanna do one better because we wanted to add a lot of AI into this because.
AI was just starting to kind of, you know, these NLP, natural language processing algorithms, were starting to get better. It was still pre-GBT, but there were some models that Google had come out with, BERT and all that. That were really good, and we were starting to use those models to summarize text, to extract interesting messages from your blogs and stuff, and then helping convert that to videos. And so that's kind of how we...
how we were seeing it is just this big rise of video and democratization of design a la Canova and the rise of AI. And we just kind of happened to find ourselves in these three big trends.
Kyle (19:35.038)
I think that's really interesting because you talk about, I think, these major things coming together in a way that I think really hits home for probably a lot of us either doing a lot of these things in content creation or doing anything related to design where it has some of these tools, whether we're using Canva, which is...
is an incredibly popular one or other design tools, or just the users of social media. So tell us a little bit about what is it that, you know, Pictory does. So you see this need, this problem in some of the things that you're doing and kind of this convolution of, or kind of this coming together of all of these different things that are happening in...
in the business that you're running and in the market. And so, what do you do with that?
Vikram Chalana (20:39.434)
Yeah, that's a great question, Kyle. I think so. We first identified that one of the problems that, in my target market, I identified was gonna be marketers in businesses. So we talked to a lot of marketers. We had hundreds of conversations with marketers, but one of the things they consistently told us was,
you know, repurposing of my existing content. I'm sitting on a lot of content that I've already created, these white papers and blogs and stuff. I don't wanna create new content. If you can repurpose my existing content into different forms, that would be a great help or a good product that you could build. So that was the mission we kind of went on is like, okay.
We are going to take your existing blog post or perhaps a story that you've already written on your website and try to convert that to a video. Or we can take your existing recorded content like a podcast or a webinar. A lot of marketers do webinars. Take that and use that to create something meaningful. So
So for example, you're going to use this podcast to create shorts and post that on YouTube, shorts and TikTok and perhaps Instagram. And we want to provide that same ability to marketers with webinars, with other recordings that they have. They do a lot of testimonials and case studies and their CEO gives a talk, which could be 40 minutes long, that they want to bring up into.
cut a cut up into shorts and share that on Slack or even to the external world. And that's kind of what, one of the core use cases for Pictory is taking these longer videos and we have AI that helps automatically identify what some of the most interesting bits are and then tries to find the clips automatically. Or it can provide you with one summary. So you can say, okay, I have the 40 minute.
Vikram Chalana (22:53.974)
webinar, I want to create a two-minute trailer of that webinar. And so we can create a two-minute summary that, again, then you can post on different internal or external channels. So that's one use case. The use case that we started out with, which is the most popular for us, is script to video. So you give it a piece of text, and that text could be something like your website copy.
or it could be a summary of a blog that you've written. And so it could be like say 10, 20 sentences. And then we take that and we have a huge library of stock videos and stock images that we've licensed from places like Getty and Chatterstock and the like. And we can then find some of the best matching visuals to tell that story.
and we stitch them all together. We can add subtitles, you can add narration using machine voices if you want, or you can add your own narration if you want. Add music and put it all together in the form of a video that tells the story of that, that tells that story in a video form now. So it was text before, now you have a video which has narration as well as the visual component.
Kyle (24:20.918)
Right. So I'm interested, you know, obviously, you know, this is a, you know, Pictory, you're very focused on marketers, marketing, you know, this idea of how to both reuse some of the content, create some new content. You know, where do you see, you know, Pictory specifically going more broadly? Like, are there other areas that you see applications of this for?
Maybe not just marketing, but in other areas or other fields or other target customers that are either using it in different use cases or that you see down the line, this could be really useful for other people in other ways.
Vikram Chalana (25:07.518)
Yeah, I mean, we already have, so we have 25,000 customers in all different areas. Marketing is a big area for us, but we have customers who are teachers, course creators, they use it for helping edit courses or create course units from text to video, or creating summary of their course recordings.
If you have units that are, again, 40 minutes long, you create two minute trailers of that unit that they can use to attract new people to the course or just provide the students with something, something that, a ClipNotes version of the material they recorded. So that's one audience is trainers and course creators.
Another audience for us has been internal communications. So I mentioned like, you know, HR and even product management. I mean, everybody needs to communicate something to other team members and videos are gonna be the next communication medium. And having an easy way to create videos is gonna be super useful.
We also have some salespeople who use our product. So in selling, you can create video sales letters using this and attach those letters to email. And when you send videos in an email, it has a higher open rate, a higher watch rate, more attention grab. So that's a related area to marketing. But so yeah, so there's a bunch of different use cases, but those are the most common ones.
training, internal communications and sales.
Kyle (27:03.794)
I can definitely see that. And I'm interested even expanding that out a little bit. Where do you see just video creation going more generally? Now that we have some of these tools really starting to take shape, especially with AI generation and creation, the ability to not just create content from text, but be able to edit and generate in a variety of different ways.
And bringing together the fact that it's just such a medium that so many people are using now. What is the next phase of this? Obviously, we've talked about in sales and marketing and product and internal communications, speaking very broadly and generally, where do you see this technology taking us down the road? Are there other areas that you see this really starting to
expand into or turn into in the future.
Vikram Chalana (28:05.078)
Yeah, people in broadcast media and in Hollywood, I mean, they're all looking at this kind of stuff. The Hollywood writer's strike that we saw is related to the use of AI because they feel afraid of their jobs. And so some of that, we will definitely be seeing it. Our focus is not...
that area, I mean, there are other companies that are focused in movie production and helping bring AI to movies and to broadcast media. We've been focused on more helping business people make videos. But we've also seen, like in our use cases, we've seen a lot of students for their homeworks use this. We've seen a lot of YouTube creators.
use this to help create videos. We have this concept we call faceless videos because you basically don't have to appear in front of the camera. So these are because with stock visuals, you can create these faceless videos, which can tell a compelling story. And so it can make a lot of people into YouTubers. And you can imagine that. So we've had a lot of people who are in that wanna be YouTubers and...
they want to create channels. Of course, the consumer applications of social media, posting like TikTok and all that stuff, that's always there. But that's, TikTok has really good tools for that. And so that's not something we're trying to get after. We're trying to go after making professionals, any professional, not just a design professional or a designer, making any professional into a video storyteller because...
That's what the future holds is videos.
Kyle (30:09.373)
Yeah, I definitely agree. And I'm interested as you've, you mentioned kind of coming into,
AI technology and really working with this pre-Chat GPT and pre a lot of this, a lot of the acceleration that we've seen more recently. What has it been like working kind of pre a lot of the NLP and GPT that's happening right now? And then what has it been like with an AI
product as all of this acceleration has been happening. Walk us through like, what has that experience been like?
Vikram Chalana (31:00.67)
Yeah, I can easily describe victory before chat GPD and after chat GPD. And before that, it's
Yes, AI was known. It was helping us with making the videos and stuff. And we had a pretty nice growth clip in 2022. We grew like 10% month over month, almost 15% month over month. We were growing. We were going along nicely. And then ChatGPT came out. And then some of our customers created these videos. And we hadn't integrated with ChatGPT at all.
But some of our customers created these videos that showed they can use ChatGPD to create the script, then put the script into Pictory, and then Pictory converted that to a video. And they were like, some of those videos that they created went viral, and our growth just boomed since then. So since that time,
since ChatGPD came out. We've grown like 8x in the last nine months or so. And it's been largely driven by that use case of, hey, use ChatGPD and victory together. So now we're trying to combine, we're trying to build some of the functionality that generative AI provides into the product. And we're gonna launch it in this next.
couple of months, we have many different things coming up in this. So like this video summarization example that I gave you that you can take a long form video and create clips. Before ChatGPT, it was using the old NLP models, BERT, and so on. And it was OK. And then we started using the Generated AI models, the GPT4 models, and the performance just.
Vikram Chalana (33:08.17)
skyrocketed. It's so good now. It picks out the right pieces from the transcript and it'll just pick out the right parts of the video. It's created a lot of, not only from pull for us, but we've been able to incorporate some of the technology into our product and make a better offering for our customers.
Kyle (33:35.042)
That's awesome. As you've seen this exponential growth or significant growth, and as we've seen the acceleration of AI and AI tools, there's obviously a significant positive side and a lot of great things that can happen with it. But also there's potential concerns and a lot of things like...
What are some of the things that you're most excited about with it? And then are there areas that you're also concerned or hesitant about, some of the potential drawbacks of a lot of these tools or maybe not even the tools, but just the potential of either misuse or problems that could arise with a lot of this new technology that's happening so rapidly.
Vikram Chalana (34:23.574)
Yeah, I'll start with the problem first and then I'll talk about what I'm excited about. I think the problems are pretty obvious now like with the deep fakes and potentially, like you can't tell whether somebody said something or not because it could have been faked on their, I mean, I've seen some of the voice cloning technologies we're gonna have some, add some in our product as well, but we're gonna try to be responsible about it.
But the voice cloning is scary because it can really fake what people were talking about and what they actually said versus what was shown in social media. So the capacity for misinformation has grown tremendously. And that's kind of the worrisome thing about this. I mean, we already were seeing a big polarization in our country. So it's not new. But...
But with AI, it feels like some of those capabilities have been supercharged. And now you can see a lot more. You're going to see a lot more next year in the elections. So hopefully, as consumers, we're going to start being more discerning about when we see a piece of media to question whether it's fake or authentic. But at the same time, like,
The capacity to identify problems is what causes humans to solve those problems. So human ingenuity is all about first identifying the problems and then solving it. So what I'm excited about is that people are gonna come up with great solutions to this stuff. Auto-tagging of deep fakes, auto-tagging of voice clones, that kind of stuff.
The thing that I'm really excited about, and I use it personally, I know several of my team members use it personally, I mean, just the productivity gains you can get from using GPD-like technologies. Whether it's in writing emails, whether it's in crafting websites, whether it's in crafting...
Vikram Chalana (36:40.598)
messages to your sales app or filling out government forms. I've seen some of the use cases where people are using it to fill out. I mean, there's some fantastic use cases that people are coming up with. I saw one where they were trying to use generated AI for log analysis. Logs are so, there's so much data in web logs and any of these logs and people are still trying to like do search and replace and find the.
And so there's like, so there's a lot of potential here for.
Vikram Chalana (37:18.25)
for productivity improvements and people always worry about productivity improvements might lead to job losses but I don't think so. I think like it just raises everybody, it raises all boats and we're just going to have a more productive society as a whole.
Kyle (37:39.81)
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. That there's a lot of those issues and potential issues that we'll have to work through, but it also offers so much potential for so many opportunities going forward that as long as we're working through all of those, that there's just, there's going to be probably exponential opportunity for growth for everybody as long as we do it right. So I'm excited as well.
I'm interested going back a little bit too, in the idea of finding product market fit. You know, obviously you've achieved that with what you're working on right now with PICTORY. But you know, going back to some of the early time, as you've identified this problem and as you've, you know, that, hey, video is an important thing and you being able to create
this new kind of content or be able to generate it or edit easily. Like this is something that we need. As you were going through some of the early stages and talking to marketers and doing that sort of thing, how did you really go about, once you had something, had this idea and maybe had an early product, really understanding that yes, this is something that's viable, that we've got the right thing. And now we've got customers that...
are going to do this? Like how did you finally bridge that gap and understand that you had the right product market fit?
Vikram Chalana (39:14.23)
Yeah, that's a really good question. And product market fit is probably one of the hardest things while building a startup, right? Trying to find the right market for your product and making sure your product is fit for the right market. So we knew the problem. So we had been able to validate the problem talking to a lot of marketers, right? So now we said, okay, let's build something to try and see if this will solve their problem. So we...
We built something, it took us about eight, nine months to build. We didn't raise money, so we were just trying to, again, self-fund this and build it. And we built something, we went back to the people we talked to in the first place, and we said, okay, here's a product, what do you think? And they were all polite enough to not...
like sneered at that, but we didn't get a single check from those conversations, right? So nobody bought, none of the initial people we showed to bought. And then drilling into it further, and we kept iterating, we kept improving, but it still didn't click with that audience. So in fact, I would say we spend a year trying to iterate, improve the product for that audience, because they had told us in the early days that...
if you had this, we would buy it. But I didn't get a single click. So I mean, and it was very disheartening, by the way, like, you know, you've been there, you've been an entrepreneur before, and you come into this like thinking, hey, I have some experience, I have some credibility, and I've built something that I think I heard what you're talking about, but it didn't work. So...
Vikram Chalana (41:11.142)
Then we realized a few different things in this for the people we were targeting at that point. The product just wasn't ready yet, even after like a year and a half of tweaking. Because the form and fit and function of videos that large company marketers expect, is like the quality expectation was much higher than what our product was producing. So that was one. We knew that so the product wasn't
right fit for that market. But we figured, you know, there probably is a market where this will fit. And that's where we discovered, like we went down market. We said, okay, what if we started trying to pitch this to creators, individual creators and small business owners and really small agencies and stuff like that. And took the same product, but targeted at a different market.
And we got a huge traction with them. So that was kind of my lesson in there is, what they tell you doesn't mean anything until they put a credit card or write a check to you. But sometimes you can't, your same product might be ready for another market and adjacent market that you... Because what we needed was we needed a lot of...
We needed users who would use it and tell us what were the problem as opposed to building it in the lab. Because that's the other thing I discovered is that good products never get built in the lab. You have to get a lot of users to help. You have to co-create things together with your customers.
And that's kind of, once we, once that happened, so once we found like we went in 2021 summer, we went from like 50 customers to 5,000 customers just by kind of tweaking that and finding the right market. And then we really like the product improved significantly after that and we really found the right use cases. And I like my goal still is to go back to those marketers and sell to them. But
Vikram Chalana (43:27.526)
I still have a little bit of, I need to do a few more improvements to this before we can go back to the enterprise marketers. So, yeah.
Kyle (43:37.226)
I think that's really, really great. And the idea of it has to be both the right product and the right market. And you had the product and it wasn't necessarily the right market fit. And so finding the right market where it was the right fit and putting those together. And then, like you said, getting actual users and going through multiple iterations. And then eventually it might fit into
that initial market, but that wasn't the right place for it at the time. And so really being able to test it with actual users in a market where it fit much better, I think it's such good advice because you can spend lots of time really trying to force it into where you initially think it's going to go. And that's just not where you're going to get traction or not the right place and you have to move.
and find the right market or the right people who are willing to, like you said, they're willing to pay for what you've done. Yeah, absolutely. I'm interested, you mentioned earlier, being able to take, you bootstrapped and self-funded a lot of what you had done. What advice would you have for entrepreneurs or people taking VC?
Vikram Chalana (44:39.822)
for the same product.
Kyle (45:01.562)
money at some point in their entrepreneur journey. Obviously, different companies take it at different times, but obviously, being able to choose when you take it and having the option of taking it when you don't need it, but being able to take some funding at a point and really scale up your company. What advice would you give to founders when they are looking at taking outside funding?
Vikram Chalana (45:30.794)
Yeah, sometimes it's not a choice. Sometimes you have to because not everybody is in the same financial situation as I was fortunate to be. So there is one point though, I think there's two mistakes that entrepreneurs make. One is they spend a lot of time early on trying to get funding before they have any traction. Like if I...
So eventually we did raise money for Pictory, but it was after we found that product market fit. Right, so then we went to the VC, then I had a much better story. And the before and after conversations were day and night. So when we were struggling to find that product market fit, it was, I was getting a lot of nos, and then when we had that, I got a term sheet within a day.
So it's that kind of a difference. So that's one mistake that, you know, so I think if you can hustle and just try to figure out how you can show attraction early on and then have the VC conversation, much better story, that's one. The second thing that I feel a lot of people make mistakes on is,
See, they celebrate fundraising, but fundraising is actually, you're actually taking a big, a loan at a huge interest rate from these investors, right? So what you should celebrate is sales and customers paying you money rather than raising money. So and then people end up.
overvaluing or celebrating the fact that, hey, I was able to raise money at a huge valuation. Because that's another problem when the valuation is too high, then you're setting up, I mean, your business has to live up to that valuation. Your revenue has to grow to that valuation. And so don't overvalue your company. If you have to dilute yourself more, let...
Vikram Chalana (47:48.246)
let that be, but the goal is not really to use the VC money but customer money as soon as possible and use that to grow your business. So those are my pieces of advice from VC funding perspective. And in this business I have, I mean, we did raise VC seed round much sooner than I did in my previous company because
Once we had the traction, we felt like, okay, now we need to accelerate the growth. And this market is very different. There's a lot more competitors, there's a lot more players. So we need to kind of grow fast and capture the market.
Kyle (48:32.222)
Yeah, I think that that's absolutely excellent advice that it really is about the traction. Kind of like you said, it all comes down to what you're doing as a company, the traction that you're getting, and the sales and growth that you're driving. The raising of the capital should be more of the lagging indicator of that. It follows that as you're doing it, you're raising money in order to accelerate that.
that the thing to celebrate isn't necessarily that you've raised capital or taken out a loan or whatever it is that follows as you've grown a business or as you've gotten traction in the market. And that's really the thing to celebrate is that you are growing and developing a business and those things are kind of coming along to help accelerate it and not the other way around. It's not you've.
Hey, we've raised a series B. That's the thing we're celebrating. It's no, we've, we are growing and the, you know, we're, we've brought in funding and that is, you know, what is helping to accelerate, but the thing that we care about is the traction that we're getting, the customers that we have, the sales and all of those other things. I think that that's super, super great advice and the thing really just stay focused on.
Vikram Chalana (49:50.39)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Revenue. Revenue is it.
Kyle (49:53.394)
Yeah. That's great. Well, we've touched on a lot of things. I think this has been absolutely great. And you've given a lot of really great advice. Do you have any other advice that you would want to share with anybody who is thinking about starting a company, founding a company, or getting into developing any products, especially any new AI products?
Vikram Chalana (50:20.694)
Yeah, with AI, what I'm finding is there's so much available to you in terms of APIs and stuff. You don't have to train models anymore. I mean, unless that's kind of the business you're building. But see if you can leverage existing APIs, existing models. Fine tune GPT. It works really well.
You can, if you have some proprietary data, which is really important actually having that data story and proprietary data story is important. If you have some proprietary data that you can train a fine tune a GPD model on, that's a really good way to jumpstart a business. And it's really, these days it's become quick and easy to build AI companies. So I think...
Yeah, leveraging existing things as far as possible. And speed is the key. I think that's my other key piece of advice, is just you have to move fast. One of our core values is expeditiousness. And just like everything has to be fast because the market conditions are changing so quickly. And it's possible now with cloud and with APIs. And it's really easy to build products at a fast clip.
Kyle (51:41.322)
Yeah, that's absolutely, absolutely true. Awesome. Well, Vikram, this has been an amazing conversation. I've got two kind of wrap up questions that we like to do as we kind of wrap up our conversation. So first off, and these don't have to be product or business related, but they can be if you'd like them to, but have you read or watched or listened to anything that you found interesting recently that you'd like to share?
Vikram Chalana (52:12.206)
Yes, actually there's a, it's a classic book and I had my entire team read it. Uh, and, uh, it's called Crossing the Chasm, uh, by Jeffrey Moore. And for product leaders, for startup leaders, it's, it's awesome, especially if you're building a B2B product. Uh, they have such good advice on how to build products. How.
startups can get caught in a chasm between an early market and in the early majority, and how you can use intense focus on certain beachheads to help cross that chasm. So that's been one of my recent readings, at least from the business side. And on...
Um.
Vikram Chalana (53:14.626)
On the personal side, there's a woman, she comes on This American Life, or she used to be part of This American Life, Stephanie Foo. Stephanie Foo has written a book about trauma and about complex PTSD that she encountered as a result of childhood abuse. And I just like that book is, I cannot, it's impacting me so much. Not that I was exposed to any trauma, but...
The way she has written it and the way she's described her own trauma and how she took charge of her life and tried to solve it has been amazing. So Stephanie Foo is the author and it's an unbelievable book about just self-healing.
Kyle (54:05.546)
That's great. We'll have to have to look at that one. I haven't read that one, but definitely have read Crossing the Chasm and could not recommend that one more highly. That's a great one as well. And we'll put the links for both of that, both of those in the show notes. And so final question is, have you used any products recently, physical or digital, that you are enjoying and would like to recommend?
Vikram Chalana (54:41.006)
I, it's not a recent use, but there was one product that, and it's kind of a geeky one, but the first time I used TurboTax, I was blown away. I was blown away by the experience, by how easy it was and how...
how it just guided me through my taxes. Because taxes you always associate with negative feelings and you never want to do tax returns. But TurboTax, the first time I used it, it just, like I was blown away by user experience and kind of what a good product could be for something like taxes. And that's been one that I really.
I really enjoyed using it.
Kyle (55:37.436)
Yeah, the only thing better would be not having to do it at all, right? As if it was just...
Vikram Chalana (55:41.622)
Yeah, exactly. But these days that's gotten quite good because it automatically pulls things from various places and stuff.
Kyle (55:52.498)
Yeah. Okay. Well, those are some awesome recommendations and we'll put the links in the show notes as well. Vikram, this has been, again, an amazing conversation. Where can people go to find out more about you, about your businesses, anything that you're working on?
Vikram Chalana (56:09.162)
Yeah, so pictory.ai is the link to our product page. And I will put a discount code on the show notes if people wanna get a victory for their own use and the link of pictory.ai with the tracking.
in the discount. I will share that with you, Kyle. And for my contact information, LinkedIn is the great place. That's where I hang out. So just reach out to me on LinkedIn, Vikram Chalana, and you'll find me.
Kyle (56:49.018)
Okay, awesome. Well, we will put the links to both of those in the show notes so you can connect with Vikram and you can check out Pictory and see what that is and sign up with the discount code as well. So definitely check that out. So Vikram again, appreciate all of your insights. This has been an amazing conversation, an amazing discussion about so many different things. Really appreciate all of your insight.
Vikram Chalana (57:13.346)
Great, thank you, Kyle. It was a pleasure, it was really good.
Kyle (57:16.842)
It was. And thank you everyone for listening. We'll talk again next time.