AIMinds #032 | Jay Desai, Co-Founder at SummarAIze

About this episode

Jay is a Co-Founder at SummarAIze, an AI platform that helps creators, marketers, and entrepreneurs save time repurposing long-form audio and video content. He is also the Head of Marketing at Captivate Talent.

Jay's background is in startup marketing, having been the first marketing hire 3x times, most recently helping to grow Trend.io from 6 customers to 400 in less than a year.

Outside of building startups and marketing, Jay is a sports enthusiast and passionate about personal health and wellness.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Podcast addicts, Castbox. You can also watch this episode on YouTube.

In this episode of AI Minds, host Demetrios engages with Jay Desai, Founder of SummarAIze, exploring his transition from marketing to entrepreneurship. Jay discusses his earlier ventures and the challenges of monetization, offering insights into the lessons learned along the way.

Jay shares how SummarAIze was born from his need to simplify the process of repurposing podcast content. He details the initial development of the platform, highlighting the use of no-code tools and innovative APIs like Deepgram to create a cost-effective MVP that quickly gained market validation.

The conversation also delves into the growth of SummarAIze, from a simple tool to a robust platform with customizable templates. Jay provides personal productivity tips and wellness routines that help him manage the demands of running an AI-driven company, emphasizing the importance of strategic scheduling and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Fun Fact:

The first version of Jay Desai’s product, SummarAIze, included a simple form submission followed by a Google Doc returned to the user that contained all of their content, such as LinkedIn posts, transcripts, and summaries. This minimal functional product surprisingly attracted customers, validating the concept.

Show Notes:

00:00 Costly learning experience led to business success.

04:36 Focus on monetizing upfront and validating with little investment.

10:02 Evolving product with customizable templates and features.

12:13 Focus on paying customers, prioritize their needs.

17:02 Regular walks, biohacking diet for optimal energy.

19:33 Balancing deep work with productive meetings, prioritizing.

More Quotes from Jay Desai:

Transcript:

Demetrios:

Welcome to the AI Minds podcast. This is a podcast where we explore the companies of tomorrow being built. AI first. I am your host, as always, Demetrios. And this episode is brought to you by the number one speech to text and text to speech API on the Internet, Deepgram. It's trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders, startups and enterprises like Twilio, NASA, Citibank, and good old Spotify. We are joined today by my man Jay, the founder of SummarAIze. How you doing, Jay?

Jay Desai:

Doing well. Thanks for having me on the show. Super excited to chat today.

Demetrios:

Well, I know that you are a marketer by trade. You started summarize and have been having some awesome success. I want to get into what the product does and your inspiration behind it, but I would really love to hear a little bit about your journey before you started the product, how you got the entrepreneurial bug, per se. And I. This isn't your first rodeo, is it?

Jay Desai:

No. So I am definitely one of the people that prescribes to that idea that to have a successful business, you kind of have to go through a couple of failure tries. Yeah. So I worked on a couple of my own products with a technical co founder. And then even though those products didn't work out, I knew I wanted to build something of my own. And so when I had another opportunity to build a product, I decided to take it and work on it. And it was really just solving one of my own core problems and was able to work with that same technical co founder. And now we actually have a real business, which is really exciting to kind of work on.

Demetrios:

Well, from what I understand, you had a lot of success with one of your previous products and company, swipely. Can you explain the success? But almost like this tension that you had.

Jay Desai:

Yeah. So swipely was the first product that I really launched on my own, and it was the idea of, it was like, it was like Pinterest for b two B, essentially, so you could save your content inspiration and those kinds of things. That's something. As a marketer, I always felt like I was running into a problem with. I'd see something cool, I'd see something that people were talking about, and I wanted to, like, save that idea. And being someone that was working on my own, like LinkedIn audience as well, I had a lot of marketers in my network, and so I kind of figured like, hey, I have the entrepreneurial bug. I want to build this product, and I also have potentially the audience to sell to. It's like, let's try this out and see how it goes.

Jay Desai:

And it was a really big learning experience for me. So that time when I built the product, I spent thousands and thousands of dollars of my own money to work on it, and was able to build up, get a bunch of signups, tens of thousands of users to the product, which was really exciting to see, especially working on my own product. But one of the hardest things that I found was figuring out how to monetize the product. That was my biggest challenge. And unfortunately, I was not successful in that venture in that sense. But it taught me a lot of lessons. It taught me about how to go to market a little bit better, how to monetize earlier, how to potentially test an idea and validate an idea without having to spend as much money. And those are some of the core lessons that I took into working on summarize, and I think is a big reason why the business is successful right now, is because I was able to take some of those lessons from failing in this other try.

Demetrios:

So when you created summarize, was part of the criteria of your next act something that you had a clear definition of how to monetize from day one?

Jay Desai:

Yeah. So I knew I wanted to monetize from day one. There was a few things that I think were really important.

Demetrios:

Yeah, tell me about what those things were.

Jay Desai:

Yeah. When I put together this, like, new venture, one was I wanted to be able to monetize up front. I think one of the hardest things for any, like, first time founder is to be able to, like, put a price tag on something and be able to potentially charge, like a high amount and things like that, because you kind of get nervous, like, will will people buy this? Will people pay for this? Will I be able to do that? Should I just try and get as many people, like, aware of this as possible? But I think it's really important to monetize up front, especially if you're going to be bootstrapping, which we are. So, like, that was one thing that was really important for me. The second thing that was really important for me was figuring out how to validate with the least amount of money spent. So for swipely, like I said, when I worked on it and built that, I spent tens of thousands of dollars of my own money on building the product. This time, we only spent $300 to create a functioning MVP with no and low code tools to really validate the idea and see if people were willing to pay for it.

Demetrios:

So you built the first version with no and low code tools. Can you break that down. How did you go about it?

Jay Desai:

Yeah, so actually Deepgram was like pretty instrumental in that. So, you know, we use, we not only take, so we repurpose long form audio and video content into other like text based assets and clips and things like that. And so basically what we did is, you know, we were, I was able to hack together some APIs and things like that with some existing AI models to put together the content assets that we needed to. And we've since evolved past that. And we have, like, I have a technical co founder that knows how to leverage AI and knows a lot more about large language learning models than I do. So we have a more robust product. But I mean, the first version was basically just hack together APIs to put it together.

Demetrios:

Now, talk to me about the product inspiration. How did you zone into this space and know that you wanted to create it?

Jay Desai:

So I'm a big believer in that if you're able to be your customers or your product's first customer, that you might be onto something really good. So I'm a big believer that you should be trying to figure out and find products from solving your own problems. And so that was a big inspiration for summarized. I've hosted a podcast before. I've been on podcasts before, I've done consulting for podcasts before, and a lot of the work that I've done actually is repurposing podcasts. So once you have that podcast recording, turning it into getting summaries from it, turning it into social content, getting it on your website, pulling out quotes, pulling out insights, all of those kinds of things. And I always say that the podcasts, like any sort of podcast work I've done, it was always my favorite job at the beginning because it was new, it was exciting. I get excited when I work on new things, and then it quickly became my least favorite job in most cases, because the work after was very repetitive.

Jay Desai:

The conversations were great, so awesome to get to meet with some amazing people and learn from amazing people. But doing the repurposing tasks was something, it was robotic, it felt like, and I was like, I don't want to be doing this. I was spending, you know, one to 2 hours a week on each of these episodes and doing the same thing. And it was really the least favorite task that I look forward to every week. And so I was like, there's got to be a better way to do this. And that was right around the cusp of AI really becoming popular. And so that's kind of what motivated me to figure out and kind of work together and hack together. My own solution for myself.

Demetrios:

So that was the seed that was planted. And then how has the product been evolving over these last couple of years?

Jay Desai:

Yeah, so the way that we've kind of, so the product is totally different than, I think, what we started. And one thing I didn't mention in terms of like how we hacked it together, the first version of the product, which actually got, I was shocked that it got customers. And like, I, I think that just told me like, how little you might need to potentially actually validate a monetized idea. The first version of the product was literally you had a form you'd fill out, you'd put in your file in the form, you'd submit it, and then five to ten minutes later you'd get a Google Doc back with all of your content assets, like your LinkedIn posts, your transcript, your emails, your summaries, all of that stuff. We've evolved a lot since then. We actually have a full product. There's a login. There wasn't a login when there was the form in Google Docs version, but you can log into the product now.

Jay Desai:

And the way that we've evolved is we've added a lot more templates that people can build, people can even customize and create their own assets. We've been able to put in features as well into the product that helps get the content closer to that person's voice and own writing style. We've put together, people can create their own brand essentially within the product and kind of use that. So that way summarize, when it's creating content assets, it's sounding more like you, it's talking more like you, it's writing more like you would do. We've added like video clips, lots of different, lots of different features, and bells and whistles and we've, we've redesigned the product a couple of times now. You know, my, I have a background in marketing, my co founder, his background is full stack engineering, but he's not a product designer. So we were able to get a product designer and kind of clean a lot of those things up. And, you know, now we've seen a lot of growth, in terms of people signing up, people converting into business.

Jay Desai:

Actually, this, this month that we're talking in right now has been our highest revenue month so far, which is really exciting. And we're talking about bringing in a developer as well to kind of like work on things. So yeah, things are continuing to evolve and we're just working and figuring out more ways that we can add value to our customers.

Demetrios:

And how do you go about knowing which features to add? Is it? I imagine there's a little bit of intuition there because you know what you like and you are, as you said, one of your own best customers. You dog food the product. But then when you talk to customers, I always envision the product manager's job to be so confusing because you're probably getting pulled in a million different ways. One customer wants this, another customer says, no, that's not important. I really want that. And how do you weigh out all of these different asks?

Jay Desai:

Yeah, I think so. The first thing we really try and focus on, number one priority, is, like, what do our paying customers want more of? So we have, like, the way our product works is you can sign up for a trial. The first upload is basically free to test out the product and see if you like it. And then if you decide to move forward, you know, you'll either do a subscription or we also have to do just like, deep gram. We also have a pay as you go model. And from that, from our paying customers, those are the ones that we really try and stay super close to. And if we see that there's a lot of high volume and uploading, we'll go out and ask, like, hey, like, what else do you want to see in this product? What else can we build for you? You know, we'll still get lots of requests through our live chat and stuff like that from any type of user. And so the big thing that we do in terms of prioritization, prioritize the highest paying customers first.

Jay Desai:

Prioritize the total customer base. And then we look at maybe requests from other people that have kind of come in and just kind of, like, use that with a mix, like you said, use it with a mix of gut, essentially. So I've worked on podcasts for, like, four or five years. At this point, I kind of know what features are pretty necessary and helpful to help either save time or deliver more value from the existing product. And that's kind of what we use to kind of figure out. And then we also stay really close to the ground with what else is going on in the market, first of all, with what's available through some of the providers that we integrate with. And then the second thing is figuring out what our competitors are working on as well. Because I think since we started, when we started, there weren't really many players in the space.

Jay Desai:

We were pretty much, I think, second one to market and now there's a lot more competitors. So just kind of like understanding and seeing where everyone else is going and figuring out where we can kind of carve out our own niche, which I think is, is really important. You know, we don't want to be just another copy of another product or someone else have a copy exactly, of our product. We need to have a unique set of features, a unique set of value, props that we can offer, so that way, we are able to convince people to convert and use our product more.

Demetrios:

So, at the risk of derailing this whole conversation, I want to take it in a different direction because you dropped a little Easter egg before we hit record on how you've been able to keep your personal energy up high, and you've been figuring out some tips and tricks on what works best for you. Can you explain that a little bit more? Because as a founder, I imagine youre constantly getting bombarded with fires that you have to deal with, and it's easy to get a little bit burnt out. So what are you doing?

Jay Desai:

Yeah, there's a few things that I do, and I feel like I've gotten a little bit better at this. And I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna come here and say, like, I figured out, like, the best playbook and, yeah, the perfect answer or anything like that. So, like, the caveat is, this works for me. Maybe it works for someone else, maybe it doesn't. a few things that I do, I really like to. First of all, I focus on trying to get through all of my deep work tasks. Like, things that, you know, I really need to carve out and spend a lot of energy on. In the morning, that's something that's really important to me.

Jay Desai:

I will also make sure and try and work really off my energy peaks. And you can kind of, like, there's stuff on this, too. Like, that's available to, like, research, which I personally prescribe to, which is, like, you know, your energy really comes in peaks and waves. And, like, if you're able to work at some of those peaks, like, you can be extremely productive. And when you're on the bottom of those. Those waves, like, taking a break, like, honestly, like, you don't need to be, you don't need to be at your computer for, like, 1214 hours straight to make meaningful progress. It's really like, hey, how can I juice out the hours that are really, that are really my highest energy, my highest productivity, those kinds of things? I'm also a really big advocate of having a healthy ish lifestyle, I would say. So I try and make sure and go to the gym every day.

Jay Desai:

I try and go for a walk when I can. I found those things to really help to get rid of a lot of stress and clear my mind a little bit. And then I've also gotten recently into just a little bit of, like, personal biohacking, like, even in terms of my diet and stuff like that, like, what I eat and when I eat it, like, you know, I'm not a big fan of, like, trying to have a super heavy meal, like, at lunch or things like that because I find that I usually end up getting a little bit tired after that. So figuring out ways to kind of, like, manage what I'm consuming, how I'm being physically active, how I'm working off of my energy peaks, those things have been really, really helpful for me. And I think it helps to provide the maximum amount of energy that I can get. And anytime I can find something that potentially, like, naturally that I feel can help and boost my energy, my focus, I'm all for giving it a try, because ultimately, the more high peaks I can create, the more I can get done.

Demetrios:

Do you notice how many of the high peaks you have per day? And you've totally inspired me. I'm going to take my next call walking just to set that right now. But how many peaks do you generally have in a day?

Jay Desai:

Yeah, I would say so the morning, once I got my morning coffee in, there's definitely a big one over there. Usually about mid to late afternoon. For me, that's around two to 04:00 p.m. i feel like another big rush of energy. And then usually, like, evenings, late night, too, I can gather up another big energy burst as well. And so between that time, what I try and do is I do try and take breaks, maybe, and that might be like, hey, I'm trying to take a break at 01:00 or something because I know that my energy's not going to be high enough. And that's a good opportunity to do something else where I don't really necessarily need to do, like, as much critical thinking. And it's more of just, like, things that I can do that are doing functions versus, like, me having to think through how to, how to put this together.

Jay Desai:

So, like, things like, you know, write it, creative writing tasks or, like, brainstorming or, like, anything else that's, like, deep work related. Like, some of those tasks just don't work at some of those times for me. And so, like, figuring, like, even like, meetings are great to, like, plug in during those times because, like, I know, like, I've gotta be there and I can show up and, you know, I can. I can talk through things, but I don't necessarily have to be at my highest level of energy on every single meeting to be able to get through stuff. So, yeah, that's been really big for me is, like, I also try and be really protective of my calendar because I find for me personally, and like I said, I don't think it's the case for everyone. For me personally, when I have, like, three or four meetings in a day, by the time I get to the end of that, like, I feel just, like, mentally drained. I don't know if it's like having to be on the. In front of the camera for so long or, like, talking or what it is, but, yeah.

Jay Desai:

So any of those things that I can try and figure out and kind of manage and control and kind of create my own schedule, I find that I'm able to work a lot better in that sense.

Demetrios:

Excellent. Well, Jay, thank you so much for coming on here and chatting with me. This has been a blast, man.

Jay Desai:

Yeah, thanks for having me. Super fun conversation, and we got to talk about a lot, a lot of things that sometimes I don't get to talk about as much in other podcasts.

Demetrios:

Excellent.