https://youtu.be/tleD72Lj1r0
Sharehk Shaikh, the founder of CleverX, the audience discovery platform for market and product research teams, and the co-founder of Reflow AI, a company that provides AI agents to build and run your HR tasks and workflows. We discuss about the importance of understanding customer needs and building a complete solution, the Create Familiarity Framework, the MVP fallacy and the vision for Reflow AI.
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Create Customer Familiarity with Sharekh Shaikh
Our guest is Sharekh Shaikh, the founder of CleverX, the audience discovery platform for market and product research teams, and the co-founder of Reflow AI, a company that provides AI agents to build and run your HR tasks and workflows. Sharekh, welcome to the show.
Yeah, it's a pleasure being here, Steve. Thank you for having me.
Well, it's exciting to have you because you are a tech founder, a multiple tech founder, and you've got some really cool technology up your sleeves. So tell us a little bit about your journey. What does it take to become a tech founder? How did that work out for you?
Yeah, it's been quite a long journey. You know, I was born and raised in a very small town back in India. And at that time, I had no idea I was gonna be a tech entrepreneur or build those companies, but was very lucky to have amazing parents who gave us great education. And I was also very lucky that I lived in four countries when I started my career. So I did my computer science engineering back in India from a pretty good school and was lucky to get jobs with some amazing companies across, you know, different continents.
So I worked in Dubai for many years, worked in Singapore as well, and then moved to the U.S. a few years back. But my last job before starting CleverX was working for Gartner Research, which is one of the largest technology research companies in the world, and had the opportunity to work with really smart people there. You know, understood the world of research, understood the world of how, you know, the trends in technology are shaping how we live, work, and do things in general in business. So that was a very, very fascinating experience.
And I think that was a segue for me to get into building my own company because I saw a bunch of problems in that space and we wanted to solve them. And in the last three years of the company, the company has grown like at least tenfold. It's been doing incredibly well. We have some biggest names in the world who use our platform to conduct research. Yeah, so overall it's been a long but a very exciting journey across different places and geographies and meeting hundreds of people along the way.
So it struck me that on LinkedIn the description of the company is not an audience discovery platform but the audience discovery platform. So audience discovery platform. So tell me a little bit about why you feel that this is the platform, how are you different? And what is the problem that you're solving?
Yeah, so for the audiences here on the podcast, right? I think a lot of people don't know the scale at which market research happens, especially in a country like US. So close to 50 or $55 billion is spent on just conducting online surveys, be it business to consumer or business to business. And the problem with that industry is the data is very blinded, which means that when you as a researcher, you're trying to conduct online surveys, especially in the B2B space where you're spending somewhere around $100 to $200 per successful response, you still don't have an idea who your respondent is.
And that is a very, very difficult position to be in for a researcher, be it in an enterprise or an end user or a market research company, because when your customer or your board asks you a question, how confident you are on the insights that you've achieved, the answer usually is not so great, because I really don't know who these 100 or 500 people were who participated in my survey,