BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle
All right. Today we’re talking with Raghu Bala, founder and CEO of Synergetics, about turning complex data into clear insights for smarter business decisions and faster growth.
Raghu Bala
Thanks for having me, Jason.
Jason Niedle
Thank you. All right, now I’ll do introductions here.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Neidl, founder of Tethos. We are a growth agency, and for the past 20 years, we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead generation, and conversion. If you’re looking to grow, check out tethos.com slash podcast, or feel free to drop the word growth in the comments, and I will message you. Today, I’m excited to explore tech company growth with Raghu. He’s the founder and CEO of Synergetics AI. They help businesses cut through the noise by transforming confusing data into straightforward, easy to understand insights.
so that organizations can make smarter, quicker decisions, kind of like an AI virtual assistant. And Raghu comes to the table with a cool blend of technical expertise and real-world business strategy. And I hear that you have this creative yet practical approach to solving problems. So I’m interested to see how you apply that to AI. Welcome, Raghu.
Raghu Bala
Thanks for having me, Jason.
Jason Niedle
So I’d love to offer our listeners a quick tip. Do you have a golden nugget?
Raghu Bala
Actually it’s an app that I use quite often called Genius Scan and it’s pretty smart and you know don’t need to have a scanner whenever you need to do any sort of document processing. So it’s pretty cool because you can share it over email, can share it over all kinds of other apps you can plug into. So it really is very good when you want to go fully digital and paperless.
Jason Niedle
Mmm.
I’m a huge fan of Genius Scan and I’m glad you brought that up because no one’s brought that up and it’s such a simple, easy way to avoid scanning. It cleans up your papers and it makes them straight and yeah, it’s genius. Perfect. So tell me a little bit about Synergetics.
Raghu Bala
Exactly.
So we are an agent AI company and we’ve been around for about just over 18 months and we see a movement in the future of work. Actually, I write a blog on medium and published it some time ago on the future of work where we see enterprises gravitating from just human workforces into a combination of human and digital humans. And these digital humans manifest themselves either as avatars, chatbots,
voice agents and also can be embedded within devices and so on. And so we actually have a platform that enables companies to hire and also build their own digital agents. And these digital agents can do various types of work and they can come in various forms. But I can get into that further on.
after you have more time to ask me more questions.
Jason Niedle
Yeah, well I’m interested in how that works and how, you know, I think this is something that everybody is struggling with and is going to struggle with for the next few years. So I love that you have insight and like how does a human and digital human work face, what does that look like in a few years down the line?
Raghu Bala
Yeah, so basically these digital humans are powered by AI obviously and AI itself has got two facets one is called Genitive AI which is very popular right now and then the classic AI what we call Discriminative AI. So Genitive AI is very indeterminate, Discriminative AI is determinate. the way actually I teach a course online for MIT Sloan on AI blockchain and
DeFi three different courses and in these courses what happens is You know one of the things that one has to understand about AI is it simulates your brain actually right brain is all creative left brain is more Logic oriented and so on so the classic AI is all left brain the right brain is all creative generative So that’s why it’s called generative AI. So example I say I tell people if you ask
to paint the Mona Lisa twice, probably both of them look slightly different because each time it’s a new production. That’s what generative AI uses. But anyway, coming back to your question, companies can leverage these AI agents, which are a combination of both AI plus process automation. So they can be deployed to do mundane, repetitive tasks very, very well. And then of course, some of the creative tasks can also be done through AI agents. So a simple example would be that if you have
small company and you have some bookkeeping tasks you can probably use an AI agent to automate a lot of the data entry or journal entries and so on. Now but if it’s a larger company and it’s got a whole finance department so bookkeepers, an accountant, there’s a controller, there’s a CFO in that some of these roles might be human some might be agents and so you create what is known as an agentic workflow which has humans in the loop and they all work in concert to produce
some outcome and then eventually what you’re have is agents within one company be able to talk to agents within another company. So the example I normally give is if you happen to go for a medical checkup what happens is you hand the admin person your insurance card they quickly call the insurance company and to check if your interest is still valid and then if it’s valid they ask you to come
Jason Niedle
Hmm.
Raghu Bala
in for a consultation. After the consultation, they again call the insurance company and okay, Jason had these procedures done or whatever it is, and then that’s how they get paid. So this conversation is between a provider and a payer in the insurance context. And so that function is completely manual these days. And what’s going to happen over time is both sides could be replaced by AI agents and the interaction will be faster, cheaper, and
less error prone. so this is an area of where agents in one organization will start to talk to agents in another organization. So there are three ways basically agents acting as individual contributors, agents working hand in hand with humans and agents working with agents across enterprise boundaries. So all of these are in progress right now and we have a number of customers who have started to automate various functions using AI agents.
Jason Niedle
Wow. And I see that you’re looking a little further off into the future, even in quantum computing. How, when computers are thousands of times more powerful, how does all of this, like, what does our world look like in 10 years?
Raghu Bala
Yeah, so I think what you’re have is a lot of devices which are smarter and we’ve started to see that already like the Tesla self-driving car as an example of an autonomous agent and then soon you’ll start to see these bots that are going to be in every household. I have a small side bet with my wife that every home will have a bot in their home by the year 2030 doing household things like the things we all
It’s sort hate to do. Folding your clothes, washing your clothes, to a washing machine, putting it in, then taking it out, putting it in a dryer, taking that out, folding it, putting it back into the closet, whatever it may be. It just takes up a lot of time and I have not heard one person who says they enjoy doing that. Or even ironing and all that. So an example of that would be, know, the bot would be able to assist you in that. Or with other types of cleaning or gardening or household tasks.
and
right now they’re starting off just like plasma tv started off as 10 20 000 and then now you can get one for under 1000 or less and these bots are starting out at 20 25 000 right now and soon i think you’ll get it at costco for like 500 bucks just like a vacuum cleaner it’s gonna happen it’s on its way so but anyway that’s one aspect of the future the other aspect is you’re gonna have these machines
who which are now smart and can interact with humans through voice. You might go to a vending machine and it’ll talk to you and say, okay, what do you want Jason? And then you’ll say, want a Coke. And then, you know, you’ll say, you know, can you take out payment method or just flash your iPhone or whatnot? And then it’ll dispense the Coke. And that’s the type of interaction you’re to have and no more buttons and whatnot. And so I think
a lot of things that we are accustomed to will change just slightly with the more human interface and and so on so I think I think all of that is going to happen in the very very near future but I think also the human population and and how we evolve every industrial revolution prior to this has seen this happen over and over again I mean like like the shirts you and I wear in the if you went back a hundred years maybe they were made by
seamstresses sewing it in a factory. then that gave way to machine based clothing production. And so that job of a seamstress, unless for certain hands stitched clothing, is a few premium stuff maybe, but apart from that, the mass production is through machines. And so the same way certain roles and jobs that we are accustomed to will make way and then certain new jobs will come about. Like in the first internet,
wave.
If you went back to 1994 in a time machine and ask someone what’s a webmaster and most people say I don’t know what’s a webmaster. But then that became a job for some people and the same way in the AI space you know right now there’s a job called prompt engineer so that’s not very relevant maybe two three years ago but then now it’s a role that some people play. So like this I think new roles new things will happen and people have always
evolved and I think the same thing will happen this time around.
Jason Niedle
Sure, but possibly with great disruption to the economy and to certain people’s livelihoods, right? Because when we went and transformed during the industrial revolution, all sorts of people were out of work for a generation because they couldn’t transform to the new way of working.
Raghu Bala
Yeah, so that’s actually kind of segues into some of the teaching, you know, or types of things that I do online with MIT Sloan and a company called 2U that offers MIT courses online. I’m the facilitator for the courses. And most of the participants in these courses are
actually people, there’s a set of people who want to learn about AI or blockchain or DeFi, but then the set of people who are sort of trying to make a career transition, they are trying to retool themselves. And so you’ll see over the next several years, a lot of retooling happening where people are adding new skills to their portfolio so that they are more relevant to the workforce of the future. And unfortunately for us, that’s become very attainable.
Right now all you have to do is go online. There are a lot of free courses. There a lot of paid courses There’s a lot of stuff on YouTube that you can learn for free just by watching some things so so that that retooling is Maybe in the past was much harder and now it’s actually Quite easy for someone even without spending a lot of money to get up to speed so
Jason Niedle
So speaking of replacing people, your founder and CEO, what makes you irreplaceable? What’s the heart of your role that AI can’t do?
Raghu Bala
Actually, if you ask me, want AI to do more of my work so that I can be relieved. I don’t need to do so much. But, know, CEO of a startup is, you know, the joke is CEO is not, the E is not executive, but it’s everything. So chief everything officer. you know, I have to do the books. I have to do, you know.
help with sales, help with the product marketing, product engineering, work with the engineers on my team to develop the code, know, there’s a whole bunch of things. But I’ll give you one example where actually AI came in very handy. So one day I had to do some credit card reconciliation on QuickBooks, which we use just like 14 million other businesses in America. And I said, man, this is taking too long. And because I had lot of these PDFs from different
banks and what not I had to reconcile into the books and I worked with my engineer and a couple of weeks later we had developed a QuickBooks agent where if you just upload the PDF it will strip out everything and do all of the entries by itself and what took you know many many hours maybe couple of days and this became 10 minutes worth of work
Jason Niedle
Mmm.
Raghu Bala
And that’s the type of thing I’m talking about where people want to give up that work because they don’t want to be sitting there doing this thing anyway. those are types of things that become the first sort of targets of how automation can help a person. And then the goal of AI is actually, it can be not only in the form of replacing people, but actually making them a lot more productive so that you can do more things.
Jason Niedle
Ugh.
Raghu Bala
I
a lot of small businesses can benefit a lot from AI because if you have a one or two man or a small team of people working in a company you can look much bigger. In fact you can compete with the bigger boys now that you have automation. So it should not be completely looked at as a negative but can be a big positive for a company.
Jason Niedle
you
For sure. So what’s your growth goal over the next 12 months?
Raghu Bala
The main thing is you know just like any startup we go through funding stages see series a and then onwards and scaling the business growing the revenues so our main thing is from a fundraising perspective obviously to get to series a by this year from a growth perspective is to hit certain targets in terms of revenue objectives and also in terms of usage of the product
itself and this can be measured in terms of downloads of our app and or traffic into you various parts of the system or what we measure purchases of what we call credits in the system which is how we measure how much AI is being consumed by the our customer. We purchase credits and these are exhausted as the system runs. So how many credits we sell and so on.
These are sort of the KPIs that we are using to measure and drive the buses forward this year.
Jason Niedle
More usage means more value for the customers because they’re actually getting things done, which also means ultimately more revenue, but the main thing is you know that they’re getting value if they’re actually using it.
Raghu Bala
Exactly.
Yeah, so that’s a very good point. So I’ve had multiple exits as a founder or co-founder in companies and typically my focus is on that word value and that is usually in the form of usage by end users and so on. So that ultimately will get us to revenue objectives. I’m not as worried about revenues as much as creating the value. Once you create value, revenues
will automatically come, usually they are by-product. And so that’s where I focus on. And so does the team.
Jason Niedle
So what are you doing in sales and marketing these days to let people know about you? How do people find out about you?
Raghu Bala
Yeah,
so that’s another very, very good question. So initially what we did was we took a more traditional marketing approach and we have since realized that that method may not work as well. the software companies today have moved to a different model in terms of marketing, which is you need to build communities. And so first of all, you got to sort of
segment your audience, whether it’s developers or product people or C-level executors that you’re selling to or investors. In order to get your share of voice, you’ve got to segment your audience into these different buckets and figure out where these people sort of…
hang out online. It could be on Discord, could be on Reddit, could be on Substack, could be on… Those are for like a techie crowd. And maybe some of the other groups might be on X, might be on…
LinkedIn and some might respond to email marketing and so on. So they all respond to different methods of interaction and some might respond to webinars and so on. you have to figure out which audience and which crowd, how they work, they accumulate knowledge and information and try to be in that sort of mix.
Engagement
has to happen at a very grassroots level and so I look at it as what I call bottom-up and top-down sales so bottom-up we reach these audiences through these different means and and Top-down we sell through usually at the C level or BP level and so on So I was a CTO of a local company called automotive.com for many years and a lot of vendors used to ping me But and and what happens is as a C level person you typically once you have a vendor discussion
You turn around and ask your team mates, your directors, your managers and below to say, hey have you heard about this product or this vendor or what not. And if your team has not even heard about it or doesn’t know, that tends to end the conversation there. Because then it doesn’t move forward. So if you do both bottom up and top down, what happens is whether you give freebies or trials or engage this audience.
Conversation internally they’ll say yeah. I’ve heard about this product. I actually use it I downloaded some demo blah blah blah So then what happens is the conversation becomes the top level executors feel wow my team even knows about it even I didn’t know but they know about it so this might be good so let me talk to the vendor and start to Engage them so so in order to succeed I think you know one has to go from both ends of the spectrum and so that’s what we are beginning to do and so community developments very
key before you can even sort of like go out and sell because people have to hear about you and that begins with a more know guerrilla tactic fundamental grassroots movement and that community building is what we’re starting to do while we still engage from the top down more traditional sales and marketing approach.
Jason Niedle
It makes me think two things. One of our guests was talking about MQL and SQL, but then he talked about the freemium model and how you have a product qualified lead and you know that that person is already using your product or is able to and wants to use your product to some degree. Now you just have to convert them to a paying customer. And I think that’s always an interesting way to look at it. does that work in this agentic process to have
Raghu Bala
Yes,
absolutely.
Jason Niedle
premium
elements.
Raghu Bala
Yeah, so we have a platform which consists of several tools and also when we go to customers, some of them are looking for tools and so this sort of premium and then going to a premium model works with tools. They are sort of tools that you don’t need to do much selling, they sort of sell themselves. But then when it comes to more solution development for companies, that is more of a hand
on sales process it’s not just let them sign up online and so on so when it comes to those types of things that we have in our portfolio then what happens is it doesn’t take the form of a freemium but takes a form of a POC so we have a proof of concept everyone wants you to do something and then and then prove that the thing works and then it it now gets into a more of a paid engagement so so we have done that and because we are a
product company, not a service company, we are partnered with a number of systems integrators who do the development and hand holding of the customer while we provide our platform and some services to engage the customer to kind of figure out how to solve the problem using agentic AI.
Jason Niedle
That’s great. So the other thing that was making me think is about communities. How are you building those communities? And then what’s the constraint? Like what’s stopping you from, if you could change something, what’s stopping you from moving faster?
Raghu Bala
So the second question I’ll answer quickly which is funding. It’s always a money question because the more share of voice you want you have to spend more and make more noise. But you know we want to do it such that we can do it within a budget and still get some bang for the buck. So capital and funding is the constraint as far as being faster. But then the first
part of the question is how do we engage and we are starting the process like I said we are trying to find people who are familiar with interacting with developers so a community person in the developer sense is called a developer relations engineer they call it dev rel which is a developer relations person and if you look at community building from you know we have some web 3 components in our platform so in the web 3
world, it’s slightly different and the crowd for Web3 tends to hang out in Telegram for whatever reason but they hang out in Telegram. But then they also expect certain freebies and certain ways of engagement that are very peculiar to Web3. So you have to really understand the audience, where they hang out and then give them what they want. so that’s very important. Whereas if you look at the business people, if you go higher up the chain in a company
executive and so on they tend to hang out in LinkedIn or sometimes in X and so how you engage with them also is very different so the even the how you do your promotions how you talk how you how you write is very different if you look at telegram or discord talking to developers versus talking to executives here they’ll put all kinds of emojis and all kinds of things and that’s okay in this
in
this world, but not in the LinkedIn world. I think it’s a bit more buttoned up, more serious conversation. I’ve never seen anyone approach with that, come to me with that sort of an approach because I think even the marketers know the modicum of operation is not in this sort in LinkedIn. It’s a bit different. Yeah.
Jason Niedle
Yeah, makes sense.
So is there anything in sales and marketing that’s surprised you lately? Are there tactics that you didn’t think would work and they worked or things that used to work and are failing? Like what’s interesting about getting your…
Raghu Bala
Yeah, I mean looking
I mean I to be really frank I won’t say that we have cracked the code yet We’re in the midst of doing that but I’d say What I’ve seen is Many of the old-fashioned methods don’t work Things that worked maybe 10 years ago 15 years ago 10 years ago may not work the The things that right now work is it’s like I said You really need to understand the audience and then second audience and then use the right tools
and also use the right person from your side who’s more of a community builder. And so we are in the midst of recruiting community builders, but we might end up recruiting three or four different community builders because each of these communities has got almost like a different persona. And so you need to engage them with the right type of person. In the LinkedIn community, might be a more serious…
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Raghu Bala
type of sales or marketing person, whereas in the developer relations side of things, it’s maybe more youngish, more, you know, someone who’s more familiar with coding and things like that, that the audience likes to speak to. They don’t want to talk to a non-developer. They want to talk to someone who is almost like a technical evangelist. so the skill sets vary. And so at least for software companies, this is what’s going on.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Raghu Bala
This is the same for someone else in other forms of business like retail or insurance or banking but in software this is what’s going on.
Jason Niedle
That makes sense. So it sounds like you know an enormous amount about AI. What should other tech leaders know about AI specifically as it relates to growing their companies?
Raghu Bala
I think, first of all…
AI is nothing without data. So, and it’s very, very important to understand how your company collects data, how it stores the data, and what’s relevant. Because a lot of companies who want to jump into AI, when we engage with them, we typically find we do an assessment initially. And that assessment is to almost figure out the maturity of that company in terms of people, process, and tools, and data. And so quite often,
We have come across the situation where the company has got a of goals, lot of pain points that they want to solve, but they are not collecting the data in the right way. So now without data, as many people would already know, data is the new oil and is the sort of engine behind AI. Because AI at the root of it is very statistical.
and that statistics is even from you know high school stats and so on you’ll know it’s not they’ll say statistically significant or statistically insignificant so that significance comes about from a lot of data the more data you have the more of your sort of recommendations and predictions and forecasts are can have some validity but then if you don’t have enough data then you are sort of making
certain assumptions based on very little information and that tends to have very poor results. So data collection is number one. If that problem is solved, then you can turn your attention to the other three things which is people, process, and tools. So in the case of process, you’ve got to figure out, now that the company has collected data correctly, now how does information move within the company?
But what we have found out is that lot of companies have a lot of tribal knowledge. And this tribal knowledge is buried within how that company functions and within various people in those companies. And so if you go there and ask them some question, they won’t be able to answer very objectively. They’ll say, this is how we do it here. And that’s no good for AI. AI needs things almost to be very precise.
We take this and we put it here, we modify this, we update this, we store it here, blah blah blah. It has to be broken down into very discrete steps. And so if you just say we do it here this way, that doesn’t work. So normally we force companies to give us a sort of a data flow or a kind of a flow diagram to say how data and people interact and how does it move around the company for this particular function. Could be accounting, could be sales, could be marketing, could be
So that’s the process. The process has to be clearly specified. And then it comes to people and tools. So sometimes they might have the right people, but the people might be lacking training. So you might have to retool them, retrain them. And then the tooling, they might have some antiquated technologies which need to be looked at to upgrade, to sort of work in the AI ecosystem. So that’s the sort of four steps that need to be looked at.
people, process and tools before you can do anything using AI.
Jason Niedle
I love that. It’s a great way to look at it. Times feel pretty turbulent right now. How are you seeing trends in the year or two ahead to help your growth? Like, what do you see happening and how are you navigating this chaos?
Raghu Bala
Yeah, I think in our particular realm, actually, there’s a lot of noise in the industry. And one of the things is the only way to sort of like fight noises to educate. So a lot of our sales and marketing is very educational because we have to educate the audience, the public, the customers, even our investors as to like how, you know, what are we doing and how do we differentiate ourselves from others?
case of customers they need to understand how does this thing help me and and so on so a lot of it is educational so I think that’s one of the things that we are sort of I hate to use the word combating but we have to do it that’s part of you know
path of the course in this space. As far as the turbulence in business is concerned, think like what you said, there’ll be some dislocation in the next couple of years. I think there’ll be winners and losers, companies which embrace technology as always sort of like overcome companies who have not. And my example is, you know, cannot be in Stone Age, rest of the other places are going to Space Age, so you’ve got to make the transition. You cannot be fighting smart bombs.
and stones are not working here. have to move. companies have to make that decision for themselves in terms of competitive advantage. And because if they don’t, they’ll be left behind. And we have seen many, many companies, even big companies, know, the Novelles of the world, the Blackberries of the world. Every generation has got a big company which you didn’t think will blockbuster in the retail sense.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Raghu Bala
companies that you thought will survive a long time they just disappear overnight because technology does that it hands the sort of like you know gold medal of victory to the companies who embrace technology and if you don’t embrace you’re sort of out of the game and so this is true for any business small or large and I think a lot of the executives have to start thinking okay you know what this is not a nice to have this is you know business continues
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Raghu Bala
If we don’t embrace, we might be out of business. So we have to make some steps and we urge companies to look at it very critically because it’s a seismic shift in how things are done.
Jason Niedle
I think that’s such a big point. It’s not, yeah, looking at AI is not, well, we better just kind of keep up with everybody. It’s that you’re not gonna be here in five years if you didn’t find a way to adopt it.
Raghu Bala
Yeah, exactly. That’s that serious actually.
Jason Niedle
Wow, this has been super interesting and fun and it’s nice to talk to someone who’s a virtual neighbor here. I talk to people all around the world. It’s nice that you’re in Orange County like me. Where can our audience find you online?
Raghu Bala
Also, it’s www.synagetics.ai You can reach me on LinkedIn or ragu at synergetics.ai
Jason Niedle
Synergetics.ai.
Raghu, thank you so much for being on Beyond SAS. For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Nidale, at tethos.com. That’s T-E-T-H-O-S.com, where you can grab a free report on how to grow your company, or you can reach out for a personal consultation at tethos.com slash podcast. And of course,
Leave any questions for me or for future guests or comments or feedback. We appreciate all that, especially if you got some value today. And until next time, this is Beyond SAS.
