010: Creating a B2B Uber service for Developers with Anand Kulkarni

Background on Anand Kulkarni:

Anand Kulkarni was previously co-founder and Chief Scientist of LeadGenius, a Y Combinator, Sierra Ventures, and Lumia Capital-backed startup using human computation and deep learning to automate account-based marketing (ABM). LeadGenius has raised over $20M in venture funding and developed best-in-class marketing automation technology used by Fortune 500 customers like Google, eBay, and Box. In conjunction with nonprofits like the World Bank, LeadGenius generates fairly-paid digital employment for over 500 individuals in 40 countries.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

[0:55] Crowdbotics is a development on demand start-up that provides software developers.
[1:12] Anand runs the company for 6 months.
[1:19] Before Crowdbotics, he ran a company named Lead Genius for 6 years.
[1:33] Currently living in Berkeley California.
[1:40] Started the business almost by accident.
[2:00] While taking his PhD, he got interested with Amazon Mechanical Turk.
[2:19] Realized that Amazon Mechanical Turk was not offering a good service so he started his business to compete with the company.
[2:24] He started the company with his 3 classmates from graduate class he was in.
[2:33] Got people from slums and villages to do the actual work.
[4:07] Lead Genius – uses technology to empower unemployed and underemployed people all over the world.
[4:50] The company has 750 people working there today.
[6:46] They charge on a subscription bases.
[6:58] Their customers pay between $2,000 – $100,000 per month depending on the size of the customer.
[7:19] They hire people with low cost labor because they want to create jobs as a social impact mission of the company.
[7:37] “The human work force was the secret weapon that let us give high quality, high accuracy data.”
[11:00] “Crowdbotics is like an Uber service for developers.”
[11:26] The company is now serving customers who are from big tech teams and solo entrepreneurs.
[12:33] He felt that Lead Genius is in good hands so he ventured to make a new company.
[13:17] In the early days of starting Lead Genius, they almost ran out of capital.
[15:10] “If you want to maximize your success, go with the solution as opposed to hiring somebody.”
[15:44] To minimize cost, they will hire multiple people to work on active projects.
[17:16] Unlike Lead Genius which they started with investors, Crowdbotics is entirely bootstrap.
[20:05] He always make sure that they have at least 10% growth each week.
[20:45] He works with business coach Hamilton Chan every once in 2 weeks.
[23:11] “I think it’s extremely important to find a little bit of personal time in your life to make the business successful.”
[24:45] It’s important to have a CRM like Salesforce and marketing stack such as HubSpot, MailChimp and Slack.
[25:30] “The best (business) advice I could give is, stick with it!”

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? I like Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – it's about hubris and the search for meaning, but read another way it's a nice parable about science in society. From a business perspective, I recommend High Output Management by Intel founder Andy Grove. It introduces the basics of managing other people, including 1-1s and other common practices, and even explains why the process of software production should be predictable.
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? A Prime subscription. At Crowdbotics, we've been impressed with what some our hardware customers have built using Crowdbotics and Amazon-ordered Raspberry Pi kits. You can build your own touch-screen-powered handheld computer.
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? We use Crowdbotics itself to build a lot of our code, so it's probably our favorite. Tensorflow has made it surprisingly easy to work with very powerful neural networks; we use it and love it. Slack, Github and Trello, our core integrations, are probably our next three. Slack is especially interesting as it allows much of the power that was once relegated to the command line to live inside your conversation interface. We do a fair amount of technical work integrating with Slack.
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? We're always interested in spreading the word further about Crowdbotics, especially to founders looking to build new products. A lot of founders have yet to discover how easy Crowdbotics makes it to build impressive technology. That's changing, especially since we've seen a number of successful founders building their technology products entirely on Crowdbotics from the ground up.