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.
Karan@Comnplus.com – Karan’s email address
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

EP 471: He Just Exited, Now Landds $500k Customer for New Content AI Business ComnPlus with CEO Karan Chaudhry

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