Building AI Companies with Akshay Bansal

Last Updated on November 16, 2020

Wired For Youth is supported by readers. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This does not affect who we choose to review or what we recommend. Learn more

About Akshay Bansal

Akshay Bansal, an Author, Entrepreneur and an Inventor, credited with chemical engineering and MBA. After finishing his college , Akshay started his research on technology, economics, business, politics and society, nectar of which he gave in his book ‘The Innovation Age.’, He founded a company with first product Heuro – The Social Learning Super App, with a vision to transform the world in to more intellectual society, Heuro app ranked 76th in App Store in June 2019, He then moved in to Artificial Intelligence and started products like Ambit – Content marketing automation, Estate A.I – Technical drawing automation and Animation Automation to help the professionals by automating their mundane work.

About Heuro Platform Pvt Ltd

Heuro is the machine learning research and Development Company, we the team of researchers focuses primarily on Artificial Intelligence to develop the visionary products and help consumers and business.
Some of the products we have developed are Heuro – The Social Learning Super App, Ambit – Content Marketing Automation, Animation Automation – Create motion capturing file by your own motion video, Estate A.I Create 2D, 3D plans with speech or text.
some of the ventures: visionsingularity.com, ambit-ai.in, heuroapp.com

Why did you start the company?
I have a huge passion for artificial Intelligence, during my research for my book , I discover the potential of A.I and the fourth industrial revolution and wanted to be the part of this revolution ever since.

Contents

How Did You Get Your First Several Customers Or Users? How Many Users Or Customers Do You Have Now?

How Does Your Company Grow And Acquire New Customers?

We focus on content marketing, community building and growth hacking techniques to grow and acquire new customers.

What Actionable Tips And Tricks Do You Have For New Founders Who Are Looking To Get Their First Thousand Users Or Dollars?

First time founders are too emotional for their product that they want to promote it via as many channels as they can and its a mistake to not to have a focus and create and marketing or business plan first, here are my few tips which will help new founder to get the first thousand users or dollars:

1) Product that sell itself: In today’s hyper competitive world, where even the entrepreneurship is in red ocean, the stand out design thinking based product will give you more users initially, if you can solve the user’s problem better then your competition then you can save lots of marketing dollars in the first place and improve the product on the way to be the state of art in business.

2) Product evangelists: There are always people out there who wants to try new products and if they like the products they do the word of mouth marketing, now your job is to find these people, you can find them in different communities like Reddit, Quora, Social media groups etc.

3) Content Marketing: Building and maintaining the community via content marketing will get you the initial users as well as help you to promote your brand, content marketing is the long term investment and even the best way to market any product or service.

4) Growth hacking: You can add different growth hacking techniques within your product or in the process which will help you get users automatically, with user analytics you can refine your growth hacking strategy.

What Is Something You’ve Learned That Would Not Be Obvious To Somebody Who Hasn’t Worked In Your Space Before?

I am working in A.I space and the most important lesson i learned is to do the A.I development with agile and modular principles, here is why:
1) Less dependencies: If your product architecture will have a modular structure then any bug in any part of architecture won’t affect much to the whole system and the bug can easily be fixed.
2) Architecture improvement: As A.I is still in exploratory phase, every day new researches published, so with modular architecture you can replace any part of the system with new technique and give better solution to your users.
3) Exploring different industries: Developing different modules and then integrate them for a holistic solution, can also help in creating different solutions as well by aligning these different modules to create a new product suitable for a different market only.

What’s The Craziest Thing That’s Happened To You (Good Or Bad) On Your Founder Journey?

Tinker vs. Tinder: I have many interesting stories from my journey, but I like to share an interesting one happened when I was in ideation phase, I choose my brand name ‘Tinker’ and registered it as trademark in India, but soon after Tinker got published in government trademark journal, I got the legal notice from the company ‘Tinder’, it was very restless situation back then because I loved the name and it was resonating with my vision of creativity, but I choose not to pursue with ‘Tinker’ and chose to serve my higher vision instead and read the whole dictionary and choose the name Heuro, which is derived from the word ‘Heuristic’ means self learn and I got the better name.

The lesson I learned, you will always be getting issues in business but how you see it and resolve it and even using the situation for your advantage is what separate an Entrepreneur from a business person.

What Are Your Favorite Books?

Every leader is a reader this is indeed a fact, especially in today’s business ecosystem, where only the change is inevitable because of which an average CEO reads 10-30 books per month to keep on the right track,
For me reading is a life changing habit and as an entrepreneur and not living in one of the startup hubs, the only gateway for me to learn about the latest trends are books, podcasts and lectures, apart from knowledge books I want to recommend some books which has changed my mindset towards life and business:

1) Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail
2) Traction by by Gabriel Weinberg
3) Rich dad poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki
4) Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab
5) Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
6) The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
7) Grit by Angela Duckworth
8) Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance