Karan Chaudhry, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder and CPO of Comnplus, a company building advanced machine learning based personalization and recommendation engine focused on online digital content industry. He received his MS from Stanford University and is an active mentor and advisor at StartX, advising entrepreneurs on topics like fundraising, team building, data product management and product marketing. Prior to Comnplus, Karan was the co-founder and CEO of DropThought, a machine learning based instant feedback and text platform for voice over applications. Listen as Karan explains how DropThought was acquired last year and how he started Comnplus.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – Steve Jobs

• What CEO do you follow? – Elon Musk 
• Favorite online tool? — Asana
• Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No
• If you could let your 20-year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “Take risk. Failures are highly over-rated. It just makes us stronger”

 

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:44 – Nathan introduces Karan to the show
• 02:35 – DropThought was acquired last year
• 02:43 – DropThought is doing feedback-based analytics
• 02:58 – Karan raised a couple of rounds for DropThought
• 03:10 – DropThought was acquired by Bahwan CyberTek
• 03:22 – Karan was in the process of fundraising for DropThought when Bahwan CyberTek approached him
• 03:50 – There were other companies who want to acquire DropThought
• 04:33 – Valuation of DropThought
• 05:24 – Team size for DropThought is 15-20
• 05:35 – Comnplus is taking the machine analytic context to the content industry
• 05:50 – Companies find it difficult to recommend similar content to their customers
• 06:30 – Comnplus is only 3-4 months old
• 06:42 – TVF funded Karan $ 500,000 to start Comnplus
• • 07:09 – Comnplus is creating clusters of users with similar habits for TVF
  • 07:28 – Comnplus handles marketing and contact targeted users
  • 07:48 – Comnplus reaches out to users with customize recommendations
• 08:35 – Comnplus market is the large content providers
• 08:58 – Comnplus price point
• 09:15 – Comnplus is currently bootstrapped
• 09:50 – Comnplus has a small but qualified team
• 10:35 – Karan is willing to spend 50-70% of revenue for customer acquisition
• 11:35 – Target RPU is $ 500,000
• 12:15 – Comnplus is currently not fundraising and TVF as their only client
• 12:43 – Biggest competitors are Rich Relevance and Gravity R&D
• 13:48 – Get in touch with Karan through his email
• 15:28 – The Famous Five

 

3 Key Points:

• Find the right people and they will acquire your business.
• It’s about quality and not quantity.
• You can never “lose”.

Resources Mentioned:

• Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal  for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to quality of Toptal  developers.
• Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible.
• Freshbooks – The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
• Leadpages  – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
• Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.
• Assistant.to – The site Nathan uses to book meetings with one email.
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments.
• Drip – Nathan uses Drip’s email automation platform and visual campaign builder to build his sales funnel.
• [email protected] – Karan’s email address
• Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives