Startup Interview with Tushar Jain Founder of Enthu.ai

The world is highly oriented towards providing hassle-free services and in line with that, we have various entrepreneurs who are creating unmatched solutions using AI. In our search for some innovative solutions around the same, we came across one such startup Enthu.ai. 

Enthu.ai is working towards streamlining the call QA process, improving agent performance & helping sales teams exceed quotas by using the power of conversation intelligence. We reached out to Tushar Jain, the founder of Enthu.ai to get a better understanding and his perspective on how he is all geared up in making the best use of AI for better client services along with actionable insights.

In conversation with Tushar Jain, Founder of Enthu.ai

Please share with us the idea that led to the inception of Enthu.ai?

The idea for Enthu.ai popped up while I was trying to scale my other product OnPage Champ (the product is still active and has a user base of 2000+). During the COVID lockdown, I was trying to scale up my outreach team that could call and convert the inbound leads.

Since my reps were not co-located, I had a tough time listening to their calls and coaching them. My sales team looked busy, but the output didn’t justify their time. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t QA more than 10-12% of their calls.

And because I didn’t know what was happening on the calls, I couldn’t drive them towards better outcomes. Conversation analytics looked like a promising solution to my problem.

While there were conversation analytics solutions in the market, they wanted me to commit to a minimum number of agents, that too, on an annual or semi-annual basis. Moreover, they were very vertical focussed, whereas I was looking for a more horizontal solution that could adapt to my sales function’s evolving needs.

That’s when I conceptualized the idea for Enthu.ai and launched the MVP in just 20 days.

We would love to have a walkthrough of your professional journey. Please share it with us.

I am an engineer and an MBA by education, and a marketer by profession.

Before embarking on my entrepreneurial journey, I had an opportunity to work with corporates like McKinsey & Company & HCL Tech and start-ups like Jugnoo.

In Jan 2019, I finally took the plunge into entrepreneurship, and there has been no looking back since then.

And by the way, I am also a personal finance blogger, covering topics related to everyday finance.

What approach are you following to differentiate Enthu.ai from its competitors?

Enthu.ai is a horizontal play, whereas most of our competitors are vertical plays. Conversation analytics can be leveraged across multiple business functions and we have built that fluidity in our application. Customers at Enthu.ai can use the product for multiple use cases built around the calling function, be it sales, customer success, demand generation, BPO, market research, QA, or rep coaching.

Enthu.ai as a product doesn’t hardcode a specific business function, and can therefore adapt to multiple use cases with utmost ease, without needing reconfiguration or customization.

What potential do you see in AI-enabled services? Why did you specifically choose to build conversation AI capabilities for voice-enabled industries?

AI-enabled services are the future for most of the mundane business processes. The biggest impact of AI-enabled services will be on business operations (no hours of operations limits), faster processing (reduced wait times), and fast & adaptable businesses (as per the needs of the customers).

Where do you see Enthu.ai 5 years down the line?

My vision is to democratize the Speech-To-Text (STT) technology and make it easily accessible to businesses of any size.

STT is a complex and costly technology and is therefore accessible to only a handful of companies that have the spending power. At the same time, STT technologies reduce a lot of manual dependency and labor, making the entire call QA, training, and coaching function efficient and scalable.

My mission is to make Enthu.ai as the de-facto conversation analytics product for businesses that rely heavily on calling as a major business activity.

What keeps you motivated to succeed and then how do you measure success for Enthu.ai?

The users of my product are my single source of motivation & inspiration. It’s really uplifting when our users return to tell us how much value our products are adding to their lives. That gives my team and me a kick to keep striving for being better.

I follow the same success yardstick for Enthu.ai i.e. Enthu.ai is successful if it makes the customer successful.

I know I am on the path to success when customers tell me how Enthu.ai has reduced their call QA time by almost 70%, or when Enthu.ai can detect a compliance issue way before it could snowball & get out of hands, or when Enthu.ai helps a sales team identify their winning scripts & grow closure rates by 20%.

Any new development that your users should expect from you in the coming years?

Our journey at Enthu.ai has just started. We have an extensive product roadmap in front of us. Users can expect a set of functionalities that will improve both their revenue generation as well as call efficiency & people output.

How are you keeping your team closely synced and focused in these challenging times?

Since we are a small team of 5 members, we could maintain a smooth communication flow throughout the timeframe. I think that helped us ride through these challenging times with ease.

While there were financial hardships, we ensured there was zero impact on the team. In fact, we offered an increment to our team members whose appraisals were due in this period.

I think as a leader, your actions need to speak louder than your words, and that’s what we focussed on to keep the team together.

If you weren’t here at Enthu.ai., what would you be doing differently?

I love SEO and how the entire search ranking game works.

If not Enthu.ai, I would have been spending more time to scale OnPage Champ even faster.

What piece of advice would you give to emerging entrepreneurs?

Don’t neglect sales and marketing during your early days.

No matter how good your product is, the world will never know about it unless you go and tell them.

Most of the first-time entrepreneurs get too obsessed with their product/service that they miss the entire demand generation cycle. I have made that mistake in my entrepreneurial journey and this is one area where I was super focussed on when I got started working on Enthu.ai.