Elevating Employee Experience with the AI-Powered SaaS Revolution

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I’m happy to be here as well and talk a little bit about my journey and my company. And I’m happy to be here.

Yeah, no, sounds great. Yeah. How did I get here? I, in school, had a background in business and then I was always keen in terms of finance. So, it was just something completely not related to what I’m working on right now. I think throughout that journey, I have Learned a lot about problem-solving. I think that’s the main skill set. I’ve always been interested in building different types of projects and making things happen. So, startups tend to be one of the things that I was always excited about.

And then I came across this whole opportunity, I’ll say a year ago. Then when I was working, I saw that my company had been switching towards hyperwork and everyone was struggling with connecting. And I had this conversation with a few of my friends and all of them feel the same way.

It’s just like the future of work has changed, but the modern practice has not adopted this future work new way of working. And then we’re, and then I came across my CTO. We had this conversation, and then we were just like, maybe we can build something to solve this whole, this engagement and connectivity problem between everyone and so we decided to, that’s how we decided to build light space is the all-in-one and employee experience to help. I’ll say any other company to adopt modern ways of HR process to connect with and build a relationship with one and others. Yeah.

No, that’s a great question. I think number one is that coordination between everyone’s schedule is a big pain I’ll say there’s no official way to inform one another. Oh, I’m coming to the office on Tuesday and Wednesday. Also, I think it’s all over the place in terms of this whole hyperwork policy in some, companies where I try to encourage it Hey, I want you to be in the office two days a week.

And some company is whatever you can do, whatever. And then, because of this whole lack of structure. It makes us turn chaotic. It’s okay, I’m never going to go in. It’s like I go into the office. Some negative experiences. I go to the office. It’s no one is there. And then when I’m not there, people are there.

So many things are happening. Is this how chaotic things just like making hyper work a lot harder? And that’s why you have been seeing more and more companies like, okay, whether we can have this chaotic way of working or less. Force all of them, to come back to the office, and go back to the old way of work because the old way of work has always been working.

And that’s what we have been seeing. And so, like scheduling is one big problem. And on top of it, it’s just when scheduling is not working out, out of a problem that comes with it, such as disengagement, it’s like how, if you’re consistently working remotely, how do you help be engaged and how do you build a relationship, like a deeper relationship?

That the human aspect of it, I think it does matter, and then as well as from time to time, it becomes like a task-based work. That’s great. From an efficiency standpoint, it’s okay, I log in, and I do my job. I’m on blog out. But then I think you also missing out on that whole connection is being able to make friends with your coworkers, being able to build deeper relationships, like being able to do those types of things.

And then. That is not there, it’d be under the cover, a new way of working. So that’s what, like some of the problems that we have seen, and that’s why we’re like wanting to do well, some sort of like tools to help everyone adapt towards this new way of work.

Yeah, I think almost we, in general, at light space where this process is like, we want to make everyone as lazy as possible and personalize your experience as much as you can. And that’s why we’re using AI to achieve that.

So, for example, one of the features within our platform to help with the employee experience initially is onboarding. We have a feature called Coffee Chat, so it matches you. Between one and others to just get a brief introduction. So, you can quickly make a relationship with one another.

But jumping into that call, matching you with someone like knowing that, oh, I match with Jack. That’s great. But then how do we enhance that experience to the next level? And that’s what we use AI for. So, we use AI to generate talking points, generate things that like common interests, pick up common interests between the two parties already initially to when you match with someone, you’re like, oh, these are some of the like ice breakings.

Topics that I can talk about and these are the common interests between us two and then I can talk about so to easily build up like that relationship instead of like oftentimes you either go into the meeting. You don’t know what to talk about, or you have to just, you want to do research, but you have no information to find it’s isn’t so that’s one way that we’re solving.

This is really to enhance that overall experience with different features that we have made it more automated, made it a little bit smarter. And that’s what we do.

Yeah. I think overall this space is still evolving is growing. Very fast. It’s evolving. No one has. I want to say, I want to say it’s no one has solved the problem. It’s like right now if I would ask you, it’s like how to run a hyper work successfully. No one would be like, hey, use this tool.

You’ll be successful. And that’s what our goal is to be. And what sets us apart is. All these different companies, they’re self-dressed on themselves. This hybrid work problem is in a niche, unique way. So, for example, there’s a company that a competitor of ours, they were trying to solve the hyper work problem with like just hot desk.

They were like, okay, one of the main problems that people are not. With hyperwork, you don’t know where to pick your desk. And then you want to like, we help you to allow without platform. It allows you to pick your desk. So, in a way that you’re informing people where you’re going to be when you’re working, and then that’s it.

But that’s, there’s more than that. If you think about the entire experience, there’s more than that. It’s okay, sure. But I know where you sit, but what does it give you information? I think that’s what we recognize is that this entire problem is somewhat like a bigger scope problem, like the connection problem, like the relationship building problem is going back to this whole employee experience.

And then what our platform does is we look into every single important. Employee experience aspect, and then we try to build an all-in-one service. You use light space. You can initially you will be part of the coffee chat program. We’ll do a coffee chat program to get to know one another.

And then during the coffee chat, you can have the hyper-scheduling solution to help you look at which day people are going to be in the office. So, we can build that relationship easier. And then after, everyone, creates team events to stay engaged with one another, that’s another challenge.

And we help the company to run that smoother as well as like creating communities. So, you’re there like them, I initiated your book club as sports lead, like all these types of like different ways to group people, bring people together. And we are the platform to provide that and allow that.

And there’s no, like this all you want to approach is quite new. I’ll say no one has approached this problem from this angle yet.

Yeah. I think when you talk about hybrid scheduling one thing that you may think about is it’s always that space usage is what people want. So, in general, HR and the leadership want to know two things. Are people utilizing the space properly? How often are people utilizing these resources? Like, how should we allocate these resources appropriately? And these are the questions that people will have. And if you always want data to back it up, it’s okay, it’s like, it’s not like I have a guess. That my company has 20 percent of people using the office at a time. So, what we do is we have that whenever you schedule on our platform, we have this like smart check-in system as well to make sure that you have the data, accurate data to make the high-level decision-making process.

So that’s one thing that we have helping our customer, but in general, in terms of our intelligent optimization, that feature. We, what we were doing is we’re looking into people’s availability. We’re looking into events that happen within your, teams, as well as how long have you connected, any work partners that you love, like working with together, all this information and data.

And then we make. The recommendation is, hey, you should come to the office. That’s this day because your best friend is going to be there. And then there’s an event at five o’clock afterward as well to make your purpose or going into the office a little bit more meaningful. And, that’s what we do we want to help you to realize the value.

Of being in the office and when nothing is going on, no one that you care about is at the office. Your job right now is just like furry, like solo mode, and then stay home, and be remote. It’s so that’s what we try to like self-it’s like we’re trying to gather this different type of like aspect of data to make every trip to the office is more meaningful

Yeah, a lot, quite a bit. So, when we think about it, we have been for the past six months, we’ve been adding a lot of engagement features.

So that means that like the coffee chat, the community creation, and then the, a team events recommendation dashboard, like this type of these different type of like ways to engage one and others. But we are also looking at a different way to help with, remote work, for example, as Async catch-up.

Like, how do you run like asynchronous communication a little bit smoother? Everyone these days has been looking into remote teams. And then we wanted to maybe instead of your boss every day asking. Manually on your Slack, it’d be like, hey, what are you up to today? Hey, can you give me a quick update?

Maybe you can create an AI bot to help you assist you with this. I know being able to like the AI bot will remind you, it’s Hey, can you give it a provider update on what you’re working on? And then your boss can your manager can set up that cadence. So, wherever he’s like, oh, I think that every two tries it, tries a week is great.

And then. The bot will potentially help accelerate that process. Like that’s, these are features that we have been looking to expand into. Overall, and then also we have been looking into like how to make our product more heuristic. Engagement is one side, but even when it comes out of engagement, one thing that is linked directly to it is feedback, like kudos, or recognitions.

So how do we. Merge the two experiences. So, it’s more seamless on one platform. And that’s something that we have been, we are launching in the upcoming training board.

Yeah, I think it’s every other startup. I was saying that finding elite growth like sales is the most important thing. It’s pretty much like funders. Getting dirty with the hands and just like reaching to everyone. So, I tap into people’s email inboxes to do email outreach as well as LinkedIn outreach.

I think LinkedIn outreach is a lot better compared to any other channels because people can see that you’re a credible individual. Being able to have a founder reaching out to some early customers, they felt a lot more engaging. I feel like. I want to be part of it. Like you care about me, like more personal.

So those are different ways that we have been doing and also. In addition, we try to go on like conferences quite a bit, go to networking opportunity conferences even like I have the other day I came across this community on LinkedIn is just they run these like a monthly type of coffee chat and then yeah.

And so, I just joined them and then I immediately, I made I feel like a connection with 5 to 10 more people, just like going through, I think it’s this consistently, I would say, put yourself out there and then just doing these heart outreaches is what our main strategy at the moment that is working.

Yeah, we have been, trying to like invest in our, more content, and because I know marketing strategy, everyone said it takes time. But at the same time, let’s invest today because it takes time. It’s not, you don’t want it to wait until when you have a great product. It’s okay, marketing did not kick in. I think marketing and sales go hand and hand. If you have a better website, for example, you have more content. I did my research about your platform. And I was like, when you reach out to me, I was like, okay, this guy is credible. Let’s talk to them. So, I didn’t go hand in hand. And that’s why we do have a heavier focus as well, compared to other startups in terms of content space. So, we have been doing blogs, doing white papers, and recently. Thinking about how to integrate it into like short videos. Like how do we get into the tech talks? These are like ideas.

So, we have been like really expanding the content reach in that sense. Yeah. That’s good.

I think to press less so we try to be more organic with it because I think it takes down to you wanted to wait, no one wants to talk about a small company almost.

It’s harder. It’s like the ROI in me initially is not worth it. I think there is a platform that likes to talk about it. For example, when we get a product hunt or product of the day, quite a few platforms reach out to us organically. It’s Hey, I want to feature you on this story. So, we do those.

But we, at the same time, don’t try to actively outreach to like sources. It’s Hey, can you write a piece about space? That’s not something that we are not looking into right now.

Yeah, no, we did. So, one company that came to us, they’re like around 50 employees in total. And then they were just having to decide whether they should keep their office or not. That was the question.

Yeah, it was call-Linkers. And then we, so we helped them do we provided them the service and then everyone in their platform in the workplace log register on a platform and then use it to pretty much keep a log of who is in the office that day, et cetera.

And then they did it for almost half a year. And then from there, they got lots of insights. Oh, I see that. Our team is quite distributed and then people do not like to come to the office and then initially, and then we were like, and then they were, we were making recommendations towards, hey, you can you should come to the office during these days based on different reasons.

And then they have seen improvement in it, but as a result, they still decided to shut down the office because of how expensive the cost is. Versus how often people are using it in terms of their culture. But at the same time, it’s because of our data, it’s because we provided these data to them, they were able to see the insights and then they decided to like, oh, maybe we want to be a remote company.

And then we continue the relationship with them because of that’s where we realize it’s okay, can we build something more. a Solution for both hybrid companies, remote companies, and in-person. So, it’s if you decide to shut down your office, that’s fine. We have artists are like, we help you to connect virtually more with the engagement activity.

And then that’s where we got the whole idea from, but that was also like a win it’s we help them to realize like a better financial decision and they have the data to back it up. And then they also help us to realize like, how can we. Like, how should we pivot our business a little bit and expand the service that we’re offering?

We don’t lose our customers like that in those situations.

Yeah. So, for customer retention in general, it’s still very amateur for us in terms of the stage. We’ve just been just like emails and then I just try to jump on calls and then try to retain them.

It’s Hey, how are you getting feedback from them? Working with. them and then to get some feedback and then help them solve the problems in general. But in the gen in, but overall, I think this journey has been. Doing pretty well. We started almost like when we initially had a lot of tough time selling a product when we were just offering hyper-scheduling a single and like features towards today’s when we were.

He expands a few more pain points and is more heuristic with the way that we’re approaching this problem. Everyone just is like, oh, I like it. I want to use it. And then the competition was a lot more positive. And then from there, we get almost like 20 plus companies that are like them, we’re going to onboard them with the new launch.

So, we’re launching a bunch of new features. This month, and then they will be on board to watch that batch. And then so far things have been a journey that has been growing and it was just figuring out more pain points at more value towards what we’re solving. And then the customer has been reactive, very positive towards it.

Yeah. Okay. Oh, sounds good. I have never done a rapid-fire before.

I think doing one thing for me, for a long time,

Yeah, I enjoy the creative aspect of things. I enjoy being able to work on many things. I think I. I get bored quite easily if I’m just working on one task forever type of thing.

So, I think that is one thing that I find myself getting tortured by compared to other people.

I have no problem with focusing. It’s more like I get bored and now I just don’t, I can do it, but I prefer not to.

I think I’m more both, I know it’s you contradict one another, right?

I think when the opportunity comes, I’m a lot bolder. I take on the opportunity when I see a justifiable reason to mitigate the risk pretty much. But at the same time, I do consider being very cautious about all the risks out there. But I always think about, whether is there anything that I can mitigate.

Through my experience or my knowledge. So even because without risk, there’s no reward, right? You want to do pretty much you want to do the riskiest thing for everyone else, but it’s not risky to you. So, I always look for those types of opportunities in that sense.

I think I do. I think I do overanalyze things.

What are my hidden talents? So, I think I’m good at video games.

When I was like almost I think at grade six, I started playing in these I also already played in like pretty competitively in a few games and I was like, yeah, so I, I do a lot of gaming back then.

Yeah, maybe watching I don’t know, or watching animals like animals videos like I always enjoy those. Yeah, I always like the ocean a lot. All right.

Yeah, no, all good. Yeah. Thanks a lot for the opportunity for me to share a little bit about Litespace and nice talking to you today.