How to pull off the ‘zoom-in pivot,’ and other lessons in early-stage building with Luminai’s Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran
May 18, 2023
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Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, co-founder and CEO of Luminai, discusses their unique journey in building software products, the psychology behind the sales process, and their decision to focus on building their most beloved customer feature. They also share insights on selling Lumina, their 'zoom in pivot' strategy, and the importance of efficiency for larger support teams.
Discovering customers' willingness to pay is a pivotal moment for finding product-market fit.
Participating in hackathons provided the necessary funds and resources to kickstart the Lumini startup.
Understanding customers' goals, motivations, and pain points is crucial for achieving product-market fit in various verticals.
Deep dives
Discovering the Need for Lumini
The co-founder and CEO of Lumini, Kesha Karupa-Dina Karan, shares the pivotal moment when customers showed a willingness to pay for their automation tool. This discovery led them to realize the market demand and the budget available for their product.
From Hackathons to Lumini
Kesha Karupa-Dina Karan discusses his journey from participating in hackathons to founding Lumini. He highlights how living in a hacker house and winning hackathons provided them with the necessary funds and resources to stay in Silicon Valley and kickstart their startup.
Finding Product-Market Fit
Kesha Karupa-Dina Karan explains the process of finding product-market fit for Lumini. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the customer's goals, motivations, and pain points in order to position Lumini as a solution. By focusing on repeatability and aligning the product with specific customer needs, they were able to achieve product-market fit in various verticals such as retail and healthcare.
Transforming the Refund Process with Automation
The podcast episode discusses the challenges faced by support agents when processing refunds, involving multiple systems and a cumbersome process. The speaker introduces the concept of robotic process automation (RPA) and how it can revolutionize customer service. RPA allows software to record and automate repetitive tasks, streamlining the refund process to a single click. The speaker highlights the lack of focus on customer service in the RPA industry and explains how they decided to incorporate it into their product, Digital Brain. This pivot involved rewriting the UI and creating a Chrome extension that integrates with existing systems, opening up the market for larger organizations.
Lessons Learned: Importance of Deep Customer Understanding
The second part of the episode explores the lessons learned in Lumina's journey. The speaker emphasizes the significance of spending time with early customers and understanding their needs thoroughly. By focusing on large support organizations, Lumina realized the higher ROI their solution can provide. The speaker highlights the importance of being highly commercial and selling to enterprises rather than just targeting young startups. They share the unconventional approach they took for fundraising, emphasizing personal storytelling and showcasing the founder's journey. The speaker also reflects on the value of having a team of entrepreneurial employees and the impact of their deep cultural understanding.
Todd Jackson is back on the mic to guest host another product-focused episode. This time, he chats with Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran, co-founder and CEO of Luminai, a B2B software tool that helps automate any manual process down to just one click.
Dinakaran’s personal and professional story is one that you do not want to miss. A former Rubik’s Cube champion and back-to-back Hackathon winner, Dinakaran’s foray into the world of building software products is anything but conventional. The founders stumbled on the idea for its automated “one-click” product started on accident, at a corporate hackathon.
But it’s exactly this unique worldview and introspective strategies that make Dinakaran’s advice on the path to finding product-market fit for Luminai so fascinating. Formerly called Digital Brain, Luminai is a Series A startup that’s raised nearly $20 million since its launch out of Y Combinator in 2020.
In this episode, we explore the psychology behind the sales process, why sales leaders should consider pitching straight to the CEO and Dinakaran’s decision to scrap hundreds of lines of written code to focus on building out their most beloved customer feature.
On the surface, Luminai may seem like just another B2B SaaS startup, but with nearly half the team comprising of former founders (seven of which are ex-YC founders), Luminai is a true example of how the co-founders can really make their mark on shaping their company on the path to product-market fit.
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