Dhaval:
This founder built an AI product to replace your entire content creation workflow, including writing, design, videos, animations, and social content. KD Deshpande is a founder of Simplified A Product. He grew from zero to a million users in one year. and has continued on that growth trajectory since then.
In this episode, we discuss how KD bootstrapped his idea for the first few months, and specifically how he grew his product using the minimum product payable framework, the term that he coined, and his product development approach using OpenAI. We also discussed how he recruited his initial founding team and his approach towards recruiting early-stage founder.
Welcome to the show, KD. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit about you and your AI product.
KD Deshpande:
Hey, thanks for having me here. I’m KD founder and CEO of simplified. Simplified is a one app for all types of content creation. It’s a modern age tool where you can do more with less. We are, as a consumer, we are consuming more content then ever it’s a Cambrian explosion of content creation and the tools, existing tools are slow, siloed, and we are fixing that. We are bringing the operational efficiency and truly simplifying the entire workflow from creation to distribution for creators like you who are putting a lot of efforts in creating content, inviting us to be on your podcast, but we want to make sure that we bring the efficiency in your workflow. In every content creator’s workflow, that modern marketers workflow, so that way you can do more with less.
Dhaval:
Tell us a little bit about your market. Who do you serve? Is it sales? Is it marketing? Is it content teams in product? What is your ideal customer segment?
KD Deshpande:
That’s a great question. if you look at like last, probably let’s take the last four years. The bar for content creation is lower that with Instagram reels, Facebook, Twitter TikTok especially, they reduce the barrier to entry for anybody can be creator, anybody can be marketers. So if you look at our traditional influencers or marketers are looking like influencers, and influencers are looking like marketers. So, anybody who creates content, Anybody who help companies, businesses, to market their product, we serve them. But primarily, we help digital marketers, digital creators online, small businesses who are focused on creating content. Because content is no longer liability, content is more seen as investment because the brand, the vicinity or the people are shifting from brand vicinity to like influencer affinity. So that’s kind of the target audience we are going after. Yeah.
Dhaval:
You mentioned something very interesting here. People are moving from brand vicinity to influencer affinity. People relate and have always related with human beings more than with brands and very interesting direction here. How does it, how does your product simplified? How does it help creators? specifically, what does it do for them? That resolves their pain points. And where what role does AI play in this?
KD Deshpande:
Yeah, so AI is really amazing, and last two years we have made tremendous progress, but we not officially saying, oh, we are doing ai. It’s part of our DNA our AI is like Gmail Smart Compose it’s there. It makes you smart, but Google never says that we are doing that by ai. So that’s what simplified ai is. What we are doing is we are bringing the best technologies off the shelf as well as we are building in-house. And you, we are humanizing those. We are humanizing to a point where That marketers sitting in Utah or a marketer running a digital agency or a creator, running creator who is, like recording their next TikTok sitting in Brazil or India. All of them can use simplified to reduce, their time for creation. And then we help them optimize their workflows. Where on simplified it’s a one app. Because if you remember, if you look at their workflow, probably your workflow, you have like probably five apps before your content gets ready. From step one app is just for recording other is for curation third is for publishing. Fourth is for analytics. With simplified, we, we are bringing all that workflow in under one umbrella. So that way you can reduce, we can reduce your cost We can save time, so that way you can spend that time doing something meaningful with your friends and family and save a lot more money for these businesses.
Dhaval:
Wow. So, that’s so true. I use five different apps for creating anything I create. There is Like a place for me to research, then there’s a place for me to curate. There is a place for me to distill. Then there is a place for me to create once I have distilled and then there’s a space for me to edit and publish. And then there is a space for me to analyze. So seven or eight different steps. And each step has its own set of tools. Yep. , and you are saying that you are aggregating all of. Stack into one capability.
KD Deshpande:
Yeah. We are aggregating more than ag aggregating this stack. We are trying to simplify your workflow. Everything you need as a creator, as a marketer in your workflow. We are bringing them making it available as a part of Simplified Stack. So you just come in today, you can come in, create your you can start with ideation. So we have ai powered like GPT3 powered Writer. You can come in, and we have done a lot of fine-tuning modeling on top of it and built a really simple user experience because see as I said, that marketer or that small business owner sitting in Utah or like other places, they don’t care about, GPT 3 three or ChatGPT or Stability or Dali-E. Wh what all things they need is like simple. Which is, which allows them to do more with less. So we have AI writer where which can help you create a lot of ideas. Then we have design editor which can turn your ideas in one, click those ideas into presentations, Gif memes, videos, we have templates. Then you can turn that, take that once that content is ready, plan for month or so you can start scheduling and start publishing on all the channels from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram your WordPress. From one place, you can just go from creation to delegation to distribution. All happens in one platform. So that’s what the problem space we are dealing with. And under the hood, we are integrating all the AI services. So that way they are integrated into your workflow. So that way while you are doing it, the things which used to take you probably two hours, 10 hours, we are trying to reduce that in minutes, using the modern age technologies and the capabilities which we have seen, the extreme revolution in last 12 to 18 months.
Dhaval: Yeah. Tell me a little bit about how is, how are you differentiating? There is a plethora. AI tools that have come out in the recent history, how are you differentiating yourself from that competition as a product owner?
KD Deshpande: Yeah. to be, to give you a fact, there are probably 85 to probably 90 AI writing tools. But all these tools are build silo and where we are thinking differently is. Our tools or our stuff is all about workflow. We are thinking that persona about, of that marketer, how that creator we are living the life of that creator ourself me I’m going recording TikTok reels, trying to live and my co-founder also going through that journey. Our designers on our team are experiencing what it takes to create content. what that life of that small business owner looks like or how the modern marketing teams are working. And the, that’s how we are fitting AI into their workflow instead of adding one more silo tool in their stack where they will need to copy paste this from, someplace to their day-to-day workflow. So that’s the big differentiator. And second is our product is meant for teams. our whole purpose is let people collaborate. And our mission is not a build a product we are building a space where people can collaborate together , do more with less, and unleash their creativity. And creativity can come in any form. It could be ideas, audio, video, all those stuff. So that’s the biggest differentiator between existing things out there and what we are building.
Dhaval: Wow. So you are starting with the workflow first mindset. You’re taking the existing behaviors existing workflows. You are bringing that into your product. And the second thing I heard is that you are creating a space for people to collaborate and work together. And those are two of your foundational differentiation compared to other siloed work tools that use ai. Yes. Tell us a little bit about your company’s State right now. Have you bootstrapped? Are you raising capital? Have you raised capital? Yeah. Give us a little bit of a history on how did you start, did you have funding? Did you raise seed round and where are you going?
KD Deshpande: Yeah, so I started this company at the start of the pandemic when I was, so my journey is, this is my third company. I’ve been in marketing in and off. I’m an engineering entrepreneur. The started my career as engineer, then became entrepreneur, sold my last company in 2015, and then worked at Uber, Facebook, and I was, at Facebook. When I joined Facebook in Feb, I was moonlighting on this idea for a few. And then I convinced that there is I’ve seen small business owners, I have seen Fortune 500 companies, and there are amazing marketing automation tools available. But when it comes to content creation, small companies don’t have resources or small business owners and big companies have resources, but it lacks efficiency. So to solve that problem at the start of pandemic, I started this company, first six months bootstrapped it, and then raised funding from like several TRAVCs in the Silicon Valley. So we are two years in business. We all, last time when we officially announced we have 1 million plus users, 1 million plus in a r r. Um, and right now we are just focused on like really happy community of paid customer. We are just focused on building this ecosystem of product and keeping up with the pace and making sure that, let’s bring that simplicity in the creation process, bring that efficiency with AI in this process.
Dhaval: Got it. So you have over a million users. Your ARR is over a million dollars and you raised seed round and you haven’t raised anything since then, are you. Are you at the point where you don’t need to raise capital for the near future, where you are just riding the wave of success you have created? Or are you getting ready for that next big expansion?
KD Deshpande: We are we are capital efficient because we are fully remote team we have like different hubs. That’s how we are capital efficient, and we are riding on the success the way we, in a short period of time. We, last year we grew from zero to 1 million plus in a short period of time. So we are continuing on that and since we are capital efficient, we don’t, I mean, as a founder and CEO you never say you are not raising. But we have enough runway to continue, on this trajectory of growth. We are on already
Dhaval: tell me a little bit about how did you manage to bootstrap yourself for the first six months? Was that off your previous successes? Big tech, savings, or was that from some other innovative method?
KD Deshpande:
Actually that’s a very interesting question that, I wish somebody asked me this earlier. It’s a combination of both. I even though I transition into product management, I still like to code. It keeps me sharp, and it I like to, I always say professional are as an engineer or as a professional knowledge workers are, we are very identical to. Players in games. we have to keep ourself up to date. So I’ve been keeping up to date. I’ve been keeping myself up to date with like new technologies, so I started coding by myself. First, I started doing a market research. I posted funny fun fact. I posted few jobs on Upwork and Fiver just to interview people saying, Hey, if you use these design tools, here is $25 gift card. I would just like to see how you design I would like to understand your processes because building design, product or creativity tool is it’s not a job of lighthearted people because, people expect, your tool to perform at certain level. So I first six months, my job was to every Friday just schedule the calls with this freelancers, designers and get on a zoom like ourself and watch them designing. And then I was coming back. I hired a couple of , engineers from my, previous jobs and we we built a prototype. So every Friday, and since then we have Friday show and Tell. So I was showing the product, they were thrashing our product left and right. We were coming back, taking that feedback, fixing those bugs, or creating our roadmap. And then next Friday, again getting for that conversation so we know that what the last time the, with the new set of users this time, so we knew that, okay, this users faced this problem. We already fixed that. So we did that, this continuous discovery. And that’s how we kind of got closer to what people are looking for. And as, as compared to my last companies or the product I have built in different places, we no longer in a phase of building minimal viable product. I think it’s a old term. We are in a phase of building minimal payable product and when we there, there is a very fundamental difference. I coined this term minimal payable product. When you say minimal viable product, all your friends say, yeah, I’ll use it, it’s good. But when you say, this is minimal payable product, they have very different cheat sheet, table stake features. They would love to see before they can make a switch. And our goal was let’s build this minimal payable product. So before we publicly released, we knew that that product is ready where somebody can switch even in the crowded market, we can make our own stand. And that’s how we are in spite of like, as you said, in spite of crowded marketing design space or like the really amazing what Canva built in this space or last decade, we’d still be able to make a market. We are building brick by brick and that DNA is still continuing in our product development, which is go up to our customers, ship every Friday show until, get more feedback, come back. I trade products fast because as startup. Moving fast and that’s your advantage. And that’s what we are doing right now.
Dhaval:
I love the culture you have created and I love the term that you just mentioned, which is minimum payable product. I think you need to talk more about it I think more entrepreneurs need to embrace this minimum payable mindset beacuse creators don’t think of the revenue side of businessmen they’re creating. And the difference between a creator and the entrepreneur is this specific thing that you brought up, which is minimum viable product versus minimum payable product. Thank you for sharing that.
KD Deshpande:
When we were, if you go 10 years back, You, the bar as a user, your bar for a product was probably low. You are still okay with like non-collaborative product which you can use that does this one thing and does it really well. But when you go in the market right now, you expect it, it to have like sign in with Google. You expect it to have some collaboration, invitation workflows. You expect it to work flawlessly and accept credit cards that’s where this minimal payable thing comes in, where you should be able to say, okay, it looks good. Here’s my card and start charging me. I don’t mind it switching from any existing product. So all fellow entrepreneurs or the builders who are building right now, my general one piece of advice is just go ask your people like, what is minimal payable product looks like in your own category? Why at what point someone will. Switch and say I’m fine switching from this X app, which I’ve been using in my day-to-day workflow to your app, and I’ll pay until you don’t have that. I don’t think it’s a good idea to put your product out. You can still do this like I treat you development until you fit that.
Dhaval:
that’s one of the most important product management lessons for early stage entrepreneurs that I just heard. We’ll. We’ll make sure that we unpack that a little more. How does this apply to enterprise product creators who are working in the in the larger space where they, they have the luxury of investments and the backings from the corporate sponsors. Where do they find this sweetspot
KD Deshpande:
I think they, they have probably, they have biggest advantage than anybody else because you have, like quarterly business reviews with your top paid customers. So usually you can get them in the room. When I was at Marketo, we used to use, used to have this quarterly business meetings with all the top 25 customers or a product council where you can go and bounce a lot of these ideas. and just , understanding the persona, understanding their workflows can give you like significant advantage in your own category. Even you are established like established product out there. And of course, like in the enterprise space, the pace of innovation is still slow. But still, if you find that those champion customer. You partner with them more frequently and see the usage? I think the, once you put things out there, tracking more, having those KPI based culture usually helps in any sort of the company which is out there. Just understanding like, okay, how can I grow business? Because when you are in a, when you’re a startup, it’s about like, can someone pay me X dollars when you are an enterprise? It’s can they, can I upsell them? Can I cross-sell them? Can. What can I do to increase my ARR or like ACV, for that customer? So mindset is different, but you have a lot of resources. You can even have like analyst to go and do these, research for you and get back, like understanding the market, what’s happening, keeping, keeping, an eye on the new technologies like, like chat GPT or stability, ai, all these new trends because. Waves don’t happen that often. And if you don’t and a AI is going to disrupt the way we do used to do business. So the companies which are not going to ride this wave, I think there will always be new players coming in and replacing the incumbents.
Dhaval:
Thank you, KD that was really valuable insight for both spectrums of PMs, right? Product creators. One, one follow up question. You brought up the new writing wave of writing, the wave of new technology let me dive there a little bit. You said that you are technical, somewhat technical. How was your decision around building on top of. ChatGPT or OpenAI, APIs how did you make those decisions? Did you build your own models? Did you fine tune the existing models from those other large language model companies? And where did you draw the line? Yeah, this is how much we are gonna use pre-baked and this is what we are gonna bake ourselves. What was that thinking process and how should others approach this decision to make a defensible product?
KD Deshpande:
I think, let me unpack this question because it is a really important question and it’s important too. So first thing is like, how did we start? So if you look at it, anybody we’ve been hearing AI is going to replace you. AI is there for the last probably 20 years or like since you started into this engineering field, but up till now probably. I would say OpenAI is probably the major breakthrough up till now. This technology was available of two big companies with lot of resources. And this probably first, first time ever it may OpenAI, made it accessible to every single developer out there without worrying. About GPU resources without worrying about like heavy lifting to training those models because these things were not easily accessible to average. Product person, average engineer, I think OpenAI did that first, that breakthrough to kudos to their team. So when we started again, we looked at the workflow. If you look at design most of the designers. And the workflow marketers want to create this amazing marketing assets. They ask designers, they brief designers, and designers go and come back with some placeholders like Laura mercier some placeholders, and then there is a back and forth. So we said, okay, what if designers have this superpower? They know the brief and they can just put into this like magical tool magic parks, and they get this. Like probably some input box or like some catch catchy taglines. Alright. Ads briefs. So we started looking into this. We looked at, some of the Stanford models, like some of the G P T models. And then eventually when we stumbled upon, or GPT GPT 3 at the beginning of when open AI was just experimenting, we did some prototype first versions were without any fine tuning, without any modeling. It did this, it did okay, but then we quickly learned that these out-of-box models are good. But it’s almost like a, I always say to, in my sales calls, AI is almost like a smartest intern in your office. They don’t know what to do, but they can do a lot more if you instruct them really let’s sync this start, sync in this start so that in turn, if you guide them, they will do really well. So we had to write that programming layer on top of it for cleaning the data fine tuning the data so that way we can, because our use case was very design marketing oriented. So when marketer is using the product or that creator is using the product. They expect some sort of language, professional tone like depending on their campaign, depending on their brand presets. So that’s where that layer on top of came in. And then we, as we matured, as we started building the ML bench strength, we started running some panel models to enhance, these things. So we, we do build versus build like a hybrid approach, right now because these companies are pouring millions of dollars to run this infrastructure. And we, what we are doing is we are what some of the things we are building in house and some of these things, we are using it off the shelf. So that way and on top we are building a lot of data cleansing, training, fine tuning, so that way we can build defensible market. And third question is, how can in , this market, how can people. Build defensible product. I think future of AI is inter personalization. I think that’s where, take that use case and personalize lot more stuff and your AI should get smarter as people use it more. I think that’s the, it’s a constant process. It’s not like you can do it like one time and you are done. it’s a constant process. You need to like refine your AI offer unique solutions specific to that particular, problem and define clear ROI. Otherwise, it can become a research project very quickly with like massive GPU bills. And you can burn through your cash reserves in no time before you can humanize or productize that use case.
Dhaval:
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. and in your specific situation you mentioned that you started off by using the existing ML models, as your initial prototype, but then you invested heavily in personalizing and fine tuning this. Where did you find the talent for this? Where should a non-technical product owner go to look for people who can help with building this fine tuned, personalized experiences for their users?
KD Deshpande:
Luckily that’s we’ve been building our product in public. We’ve been sharing a lot more details luckily a lot of good people once you build a good product and build a good culture, you attract that kind of talent. So our ML team is very organically built through references through like through communities through Twitter dms. Our last ML engineer we hired through a Twitter dm. The latest one someone who joined. We are building a remote company. So our, one of the engineer you won’t believe it he’s joining now from Morocco and specializes into ML who is joining our team to focus on all these different capabilities because some of the things. Which we are building, that, that are core to our business. We are building those in-house. So we are, we have this staff and we have a very, we acquired some of these through acquisitions as well. So we have a very strong team with the right skill set and right experience. And hopefully, I mean, not, hopefully we are in a right domain at the right time with the right team. That’s the kind of beauty of where we are right now and yeah, that’s like you, you just create good culture, put it out there. Join those communities. There are good communities around Reddit, Quora see what are the people talking on Twitter? You follow up with them, you build the relationship and then slowly you start bringing them because that talent attracts talent. So that way, you can create the culture that provides opportunities for people, and that’s simplified. We have very simple principles people are P zero that means treat others the way you want to be treated show, don’t tell. You may be like, great a scientist, but if you can’t demonstrate your skills probably you might, simplified, might not be the right place for you. So second is show and tell, keep things simple. We want to help our community. We want to help our customer. In a way that we are simplifying their workflow. So keeping it simple, the way we raise money, the way we do business, way we do partnerships, it’s all part of that, these three philosophies. So that’s how we are building, attracting, and hiring, recruiting talent.
Dhaval:
Thank you so much KD that was very helpful. And that concludes our show. I really appreciate you hopping on the call and sharing. Hard earned knowledge with the community and looking forward to have you back when you have more success stories to share with us.
KD Deshpande:
Absolutely. Thank you.
