REVENUE DRIVEN FOR OUR CLIENTS
$500 million and countingJoin Harshit Gupta, Director of Business Analysis at Wytlabs, as he chats with Sid Chaudhary, the founder and CEO of Intempt, in this engaging episode of Wytpod. Sid shares his journey from Adobe to creating Intempt, an all-in-one growth OS that revolutionizes lifecycle marketing by integrating real-time customer data with advanced AI-powered tools. Discover how Intempt simplifies marketing and sales automation, making it accessible and effective for small and medium businesses. Sid also discusses the core principles driving his leadership and the innovative AI models that set Intempt apart from the competition. Don’t miss this insightful conversation on the future of marketing technology!
Intempt combines real-time customer data with marketing and sales automation tools for modern GTM teams.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Wytpod. My name is Harshit, and I’m the Director of Business Analysis at Wytlabs. We are a digital agency specializing in SaaS and e-commerce SEO. I’ve got Sid with me today, the founder and CEO at Intempt. Now, it’s an all-in-one growth OS that combines real-time customer data with marketing and sales automation tools to maximize engagement for modern GTM teams. A big welcome to you, Sid. So happy to have you with me.
Thanks, Harshit. Happy to be here.
Great. Let’s start with what really inspired you said to start Intent. How has your journey shaped the company’s vision and mission?
Yeah, sure. I’ve been in the marketing, more tech space for almost all of my career. Prior to starting in 10, I was in Adobe. I was involved in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, building in the marketing tools. I saw a real opportunity in the SMB space. That’s when you where I saw the opportunity. Market is massive. There are a lot of point tools. But when you really sit down with an e-commerce marketer or a marketer and you ask them, What are they What are they doing to optimize customer value? The answer almost always is that they’re using a set of disconnected tooling to do their job. They’re using an algorithm tool, they’re using an experimentation tool, they’re using a presentation tool, they’re using a journey tool. When you ask them about, See, that’s been largely the gamut of the enterprise. They’ve got data silos on these four tools that I mentioned. That’s the reality that I saw ubiquitously in this space, despite having a massive fragmentation of tooling and market. That really led to the inspiration really was around three specific vectors. The first was, can we create an all-in-one, easy-to-use practical tool that allows a customer to maximize their lifetime value?
So acquire, retain, and monetize their customers efficiently. Can we create that all-in-one tool? That was the first one with a CDP foundation. And then, like I said, the analytics tool, the experimentation tool, personalization, and the journey tools, all working smoothly on top of the CDP with no data science. That was the first question we asked, Can we do that? The second question we asked is, Hey, can you use AI in very practical and specific ways for e-commerce marketers and SaaS marketers to make money. Can we bait that? Then the third question we asked was, can we do the first two at a price point that doesn’t negatively impact their margins to the point where it’s not worth it. And to invest in any such a Martech stack for the SMD. When you ask these three questions, can you build an all-in-one tool? Can you power it so they don’t have to do as much manual work? And the third thing is, can you bundle it all at a price point where it’d be a no-brainer to buy it and deploy it? If you can answer yes to those three questions, I think you’ve got remarkable company and product on your hands.
We set out to say yes to all of those three questions. Here we are today and then to then be able to be able to prove it.
Now, can you elaborate on your guiding principles and how they influence your leadership style and decision-making process?
Now, it’s a good question. I’m going to pick you on guiding principles. It’s not a bit cliché when you live it. It’s not so much of a cliché. We really put our people first. We’ve invested in building out this platform over several years, and we’ve not sacrificed some revenue. As a founder, you have to protect companies and people and teams from short-term commercial pressure. We really put our people first. Really proud to say that because building a platform like this is a multi-earn endeavor, and you have to build it with a team that stays consistent and committed over a long period of time. Our first guiding principle has been to really not just hire the best, but to coach. To coach and over long periods of time, our people and our team to be able to understand the core opinion automated product principles that we operate with. Then gel and like each other, as simple as that, to be able to work consistently for long periods of time. I think people first had been a big deal to me. Then, of course, the product. We think product is everything. If you don’t have something in this highly competitive, fragmented Martech ecosystem, if you don’t have something that’s just a remarkable product, I’m talking about something like Notion coming into the crowded wiki space or Figma coming into the crowded design space.
I’m talking product dedication of that caliber. If you don’t have that, you’re wasting the industry time. I think it’s been about people, it’s been about product. But now with early access, we’re really going to kick off the third axis principles, or I think guiding principles, you called it, which is the customer. Can we really fulfill on this promise that I mentioned before, which is all in one AI-powered? At a price point that we’re talking an e-commerce company that makes 1 million to five million in GMB. We’re talking small e-commerce companies. Can they afford to spend the time and the money on this type of tool? The answer has to be yes. I think the third asset is being very customer-centric.
Got you. What are the core USPs that you would say the platform has? Because there are tons of your competitors out there. What differentiates Intent from these competitors?
I’ll talk about the first one and the third one briefly, and I think folks can pick up on it quite quickly if you look at our Intent. Com. The first one, like I said, is all in one. Today, when you want to buy a full, what I call a full customer lifecycle marketing stack, you end up buying an analytics tools, a customer journey tool, an experimentation platform, and some a personalization tool. You’re going to go to at least two or three companies to do that today. Then you’re going to integrate these tools and their data mix. I think you can… I’ll that there. The third thing is pricing. If you’re talking to a and you’re getting into price points of even 5K a month for Martech tooling, this hasn’t pencil for a lot of e-commerce and SaaS companies, particularly the ones that are early stages of their growth. We boiled it down to an all-in-one platform, and we boiled it down to, we start out with a platform and some hundred bucks a month. It’s a ridiculous price point for the data processing technology we offer and the machine learning technology we offer. Those are two things.
Now, the third thing I’ll talk about, which is AI, and I’ll give you a little bit more detail on this. We built four foundational models in the AI space. For e-commerce companies, we built a recently frequency monetary-based model. We built an likelihood model, what we call a propensity to purchase model. That’s on the e-commerce side. On the SaaS side, we built a fit and activity model so that it actually understands your ITP from a fit and also from an engagement on an activity perspective to understand how to store them in terms of either your need to conversion or from an expansion. The fourth model that we built for, again, more towards the SaaS space is a model we call let the best action. You can understand that some people feel these have companies. It’s complex to understand exactly what type of communication that particular user needs because they’ve got various activities on their free plans, they’ve various activities on their paid plans, and you really need to… It’s not just as simple as, Hey, here’s an upsell offer, you need to go buy the next product. Sometimes they might need to learn more about the tools, sometimes they might need support, sometimes they might need to understand, they might want to expand, but they might need to have a salesperson reach out instead of a DAO, instead of LDA.
We built next step to action. Really, I think the AI models that are specifically we’re tuning out to e-commerce companies and SaaS companies, and then the third vector is mobile apps as well. This really, in my opinion, the first two weren’t enough, which I actually think they are. It’s a real practical choice. It’s all in one at a great price point. We’ll make many founders and marketers say, Yeah, this is the way you want to go. But if that’s not enough, the AI models really, I think, seal the deal. Okay.
Now, can you please shed some more light on how exactly Intempt simplifies the lifecycle marketing for its users?
Yeah, that’s not a good question. I’ll answer it briefly, and then we can always answer to this, we can be here all day. But quite simply, if you just step back and look at things simply, what marketers are used to doing today is in order to do customer lifecycle marketing effectively, they do manual segmentation. They look at your behavior, they look at your down graphics, they look at your formographics, if they’re looking at it, they’re looking at an account, and they’ll do roughly manual segmentation, so rules with the tons of hands on. That’s what they’ll do today. Then they’ll do a series of campaigns that will be maxed to upwards of 10 to 50 to 100 segments, in many cases, what we’ve seen in these customer lifecycle programs. Now, there’s definitely a place for manual segmentation, don’t get me wrong, and it’s very effective in many cases. The marketer absolutely should use their information. I’m not a believer in AI taking over and the marketer switching off. But like I said, these four foundational models that we’ve built, which is the next best action, our likelihood model, our fit and activity model, and the recency/recenting monetary models, these dramatically reduce the amount of manual segmentation that you have to do.
Now, when you reduce the amount of manual segmentation you have to do, you automatically make this entire process a lot more approachable for the average marketer because they don’t have to think through tons and tons of data attributes, they don’t have to think tons and tons of rules, and they don’t have to keep hunting, infecting, and getting that stuff to change every few weeks. That is the fundamental innovation behind making this process simpler. And apart from that, just being able to, it’s almost magical, just being able to go from doing a customer journey to looking at the analytics on it, to running a full stack test or experimentation, just being able to do that in a few clicks on the same platform is honestly life-changing for most marketers because they’d have to take segments from one system like a CDP, export them into another system, then go run a A/B test, take those results, and extrapolate them into another system that does fertilization. No one has time, frankly. I think these are some of the fundamentals behind these are the ugly problem that we’ve solved in this space, so that it’s just a delightful process.
Now, Sid, what are some of the key features of the platform? Because I’m asking this because you launched back in 2017, if I’m not wrong. It’s been quite a journey now, right? Which specific features have received the most positive feedback from your community?
Yeah. We’re going to give you a bit of history on the company. We actually had under the same brand, we actually had two dramatically different products and platforms over time. We started the company on a much simpler mission and vision because we just wanted to build a better web personalization platform at the time. We built that platform, we grew it, and we sunset that platform because it didn’t reflect where our ambitions ended up being in three to five years of building that company and that platform. We actually thought that it. We actually closed down that product and that platform. Then we restarted the company on this new platform with a much broader and I would say more impactful mission that I outlined here. We had our first run, let’s just say, for the first half of the company’s life, we had a first run with the first product, and now we spent the last several years building this platform and pushing it to early access. That’s the history. In terms of features, the feedback that we’ve been building with a set of e-commerce and staff companies and a few mobile apps pretty closely. The feedback that we’ve got is there’s too many features in a lot of these tools.
Like I said, we were not so much focused on building features. What we’re focused very squarely on is, like I said, provide me an all-in-one set of tools on a robust enterprise-grade customer data platform that doesn’t go out and try to sell itself as a customer data platform to the enterprise. That’s what the fundamental that we’ve built on. Then, like I said, if you want to talk about in terms of the features, the AI models that we’ve built, really, I see us building more and more domain-specific, like I said, e-commerce or very much iOS apps in a particular vertical or SaaS, PLG SaaS, for example, continuing to build domain-specific, TVP-oriented AI models that make the entire process simpler. That’s where I see the majority of features being added over the next five years.
Got you. How do you foresee the role of AI evolving in the marketing industry over the next few years? Where exactly you see the trend shifting to?
Yeah, this is another fantastic question. I think I’ll talk about it not in terms of AI overall, but I’ll talk about it in in terms of I have expertise in which is customer data platforms and how I see them interacting with LLMs, really. Which is I think if this code is cracked, I think it’ll be a fundamental unlock for the space. Basically, the large language models, as we all know, they lack very an endogamous context in terms of the context that they lack when it sees a big opportunity in the context that CDPs have. So CDPs today, they understand all the warehouses, warehouses, the CDPs, what they understand is yours and years of customer behavior. When you ask, where I see the biggest unlock being is if I go and ask an LLM, Hey, what’s Harchard going to buy or be interested in with Nike tomorrow? An LLM should be able to answer question with a lot more color than just the CDP was. Now, what exactly is that color? It may be how to share Nike in San Francisco, where he lives, maybe how should Nike approach market with what he wants next. Then the TDP might know what partnership is likely to buy.
I think this marriage of what a CDP knows, what an LLM is good at, which is being able to generate a language prediction I think marrying these two things together in creative ways is a massive unlaw, I would say. How exactly? I don’t think we’re really in the first innings of figuring it out. But I think this is a big opportunity for the entire industry. For CDP, the major CDP providers, we all know who they are. Then the major LLM providers, and they’re not the same people. How do we make that marriage happen? I think it’s a big opportunity.
Talking about how exactly you generate business for your own company, what are the main customer acquisition sources for you, the lead generation sources for you?
Like I said, today, We’re an early access, and my network has been the primary feature for that. That’s really the way we’ve gotten business. You can talk about LinkedIn from that perspective, but really it’s founder-led. Telling you a little bit in the chat we were I’m having offline is I think I don’t understand the opportunity in SEO anymore. It probably is, we aren’t one. But what I do think that there seems to be a natural way to market is like this, to be able to talk about the company with other industry leaders like yourself. I think that’s one opportunity that perhaps you can question how that scales, but I think that’s an opportunity. The second is, like I was saying, it’s being able to collaborate with influencers or folks that have large audiences that truly understand, at least in our case, the concept of life cycle marketing, the concept of acquisition, conversion, retention in an efficient manner. The folks that really understand that, being able to have them talk about us in their newsletters, in their video streams, LinkedIn Live. I think these are seemingly where my heads are. But yeah, I’m sure there’s going to be opportunities in more than traditional channels such as Advin FTO, but we’re certainly looking at more about partnerships, more of a referral perspective, partnership from an agency perspective.
We have a lot of agencies that are eager to collaborate on improving their tool chain that they use. Then, like I said, perhaps the branding opportunity or the PR opportunity lies in the market. But by that, I mean collaborating, having podcasts with industry folks like yourself. The truth is, I think acquisition marketing is changing so fast. I I don’t think anyone has a master on this, but this is where my head’s at.
When you say that, say, for example, collaborating with the agency is one of the strategies that you follow. Is it like some affiliate that you offer or what’s your take? What specific program you need to get from agencies?
I don’t think of agencies actually from an affiliate perspective, really from a referral perspective. We’re talking to an agency, and by the way, right now, the company is very focused on direct customers. But we had an agency approach out in New York through an introduction that was made from one of the advisors in the company. They’re straightforward conversion rate optimization agency. Sometimes they call themselves the Lifecycle Marketing Agency. Agency, but most of the time, they don’t. They just want to use tooling on their customers, like an agency account. I also learned I’m not really… I mostly understand direct go-to-market. I don’t really understand agency go-to-market very well, but I I’m in a, what’s it called, a CEO club with Pete Caputa from Databox World. And he understands agencies. I go to market around agencies. He understands that inside out. So I’m in a Friday mastermind with a bunch of agency folks more than him. So he’s orchestrated a flywheel around agency go-to-market that’s pretty. So I think of agency definitely as a channel, but purely as a channel to perhaps to resell, but also just a little bit.
Got you. Now, if you could give one piece of advice to marketers looking to leverage AI and data in their strategies, what would be?
Yeah, so one piece of advice from marketer. Honestly, that sounds super boring. But listen, don’t get lost in AI models and don’t run too fast. Make sure that you’ve got your data properly identified and deduplicated across the various sources that you deal with. I know this sounds boring, but the tool leg in terms of it can significantly speed up this process significantly. But even if it’s not in terms of you’re dealing with a warehouse, you’re dealing with three or four task tools, really think about how are you going to get your data screen and sort it. Make sure you look at it yourself and make sure it’s good for segmentation if you’re doing manual. It’s good for AI models if you’re pumping it into an AI model, because I I can’t tell you the number of marketing databases I’ve looked at, and 8 times out of 10 data. It’s definitely not where it needs to be in order to do precise marketing. Focus on your data. In today’s market, it does not take a lot of time or money to get your data straight. So do it. Brilliant.
You said we’re coming to an end, and I would love to have a quick rapid fire with you. Are you ready for that? Sure, I’ll If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice at the start of your career, what would it be?
At the start of my career? Yeah. Okay. If you want to be an entrepreneur, figure out your unknown unknowns. Start that process as soon as you can in your career because they will limit you like nothing else. If you got an unknown, I don’t go and try to have as few of them as possible and as early as possible.
That does prevent. If you would use only one social media platform for the rest of your life, which would it be?
Oh, my God, that’s a tough one. I would use a video platform at this point. It would either be LinkedIn video or YouTube or Instagram, but video on these levels.
Okay. What’s the most bizarre marketing tactic you have ever seen work successfully?
Hey, I’ll tell you in the words of David Kancel or Dave Cahart, do things that don’t scale. These guys were very early on podcast, and then I’m out of attribution. They had casual attribution they had, casual attribution or what Chris Welfare calls dark social. The amount of the attribution they had on people signing up for growth from the podcast was remarkable. I would say some things that don’t scale, marketers hate it, but entrepreneurs, who are marketers love That.
Habit holds you back the most.
What habit?
Holds you back the most.
Wow, that’s a super good question. I will say that you can be bolder, take more risks, and go more and more for broke. I would say that, I don’t know if this is going to be a politically correct way of putting it, but the more of these middle-class values that you have, around being careful of taking risk, and they’re more in the business of entrepreneurship. In the business of entrepreneurship, in the business of life, maybe it needs to be a lot easier, I’d say. But in the business of entrepreneurship, there’s a lot of bad habits. So more risk, more go for broke, and Whether you succeed or fail, you will be happy.
That’s brilliant. We’re going to do a very last question. What’s your last Google search?
My God, it was with you, man. Why we don’t? That was not what we should.
Thank you so much. All right, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time here with me. Sharing your experiences about the company, your wisdom here. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.
No, thank you. Thank you for collaborating. It’s been a pleasure.
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