Pranav Ramesh - Co-Founder @ Leadpoet

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Podcast. We have Pranav Ramesh with us today. Pranav is a co-founder at LeadPoet. He's building the first full-funnel LLM. He's an ex-NASDAQ and AWS with a crazy story. So Pranav, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself.

Thank you, Charles. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, a bit more about myself. I was born in California, lived the first 3 years of my life over here. Thankfully, I visited Disneyland right before I left, so I got the best part. I then moved over from California to India where I lived my life until I was 17 years old. And I had the most influential weight loss transformation for me where I moved from 340 pounds down 180 pounds. And that kind of crafted the rest of my life and the motivations for me. So I moved over from India to the United States at 17. did my academic background there as well as all of my work up until now. A little bit about that, my academic background is computer science and data science from Columbia University. My first job was a TPM at AWS. I transitioned over from that to Barclays where I became a trader because I found tech quite repetitive and the markets and finance gave me a more dynamic environment. Then when at Barclays, I moved over to NASDAQ towards the end of my time over there because I realized that Barclays wasn't really giving me the—

Mm-hmm.

the dynamic environment that I actually wanted. I had kind of gone in with a different vision and I had something else over there. And then at NASDAQ, I ended up leading quant research for the options and derivatives division, ended up meeting my co-founder while at the firm, Gavin, and we ended up leaving to found LeadPoet. You mentioned this before, but LeadPoet is the first ever full funnel sales LLM being trained on Bittensor distributed network, which provides us with the kind compute and the trajectory data necessary to train that LLM. But I'm not going to double-click on anything there, but we can dive right in after this.

Yeah, yeah, crazy story. Let's start with the weight loss. So why did you get that weight gain in the first place and how did you pull yourself out of that hole? Because that's quite an impressive achievement.

Yeah, so the weight gain was kind of a mix of multiple different things. It was a poor school environment. Um, so I was just eating a lot to kind of deal with the stress, which was in hindsight not the best thing to do. Then the number 2 thing is I had a very extreme case of hypothyroidism, which allows you to put on weight a lot quicker. Um, it's not really an excuse. Like, there's some people that say hypothyroidism is the reason that they're fat. It contributes to it, but you can still lose that weight very easily even if you have hypothyroidism. So what actually led to that mindset shift? Um, I, I was always— I always had excuses in my head, and I had parents that always pushed me to exercise, but I really never ended up doing it. And there was one day where there was a sequence of events which completely changed my life. Um, the first thing that happened is my mom came into my room. She did something with my clothes, right? I don't even remember what it was, but she was doing something with my clothes, and then she left the room. And before she left, she gave me the most, uh, dejected glance I'd ever seen her give me. And my mom had always encouraged me to exercise, and when she looked at me that way, I felt like really uneasy. I wasn't, I wasn't feeling good about that glance. So the first thing I did, for some reason, I switched on the TV to forget about that. And the first thing that popped up on the TV was the 600-lb Life on the Discovery Channel. Maybe you've heard the show, maybe you've not, but it showed individuals of that stature, 600 lbs plus, being taken down upstairs by multiple caretakers just to use the restroom. And I realized that I was headed down that path, but it still didn't click in my head that I needed to do something. Um, the next thing that happened that day is I had a routine checkup with the doctor. My mom took me to the doctor, um, and then when my mom left the room, it was me and the doctor just, just having a conversation. And he told me, and this is putting it generously, generously, um, you are not going to live very long, um, if you continue down this path. And And then something happened in my head where like my mind, body, soul just connected and I knew that I needed to do something about this. And the very next day, this is like people talk about building up gradual habits as like a good life hack, like you do it slowly and that's the right thing to do. I need to say that's the right thing to do. But what happened with me was not that. The very next day I started swimming 3 hours every single day from doing no exercise whatsoever the day prior.

Wow.

I went from eating around 6,000 empty calories, so pizza, tacos, um, you know, you name it, all of the, the bad stuff you put in your body, to eating grilled chicken, salads. I was eating 500 to 600 calories a day. Not good, not good, right? I didn't have a nutritionist. I didn't have like a trainer or anything telling me what to do. Um, I was just like, I just need to do something, right? So I was swimming 3 hours a day. I was eating 600 calories a day. Um, it got to the point where 1 or 2 months in, I couldn't swallow my own saliva. Because that's how like hard I was. I was going to lose this weight, but for some reason, like when I woke up those days, my mindset shifted so much, and it isn't at that point right now. It was like an extreme phase of my life for three or four months where my body didn't even feel the pain. Like when I think back to that, when I was swimming that much and I was like eating so less, there was no. I didn't really feel the pain. I was just doing. I was just doing. I was just doing. And after three or four months, I lost. around 120 pounds, after 6 months 180 pounds. A lot of that was water weight. Um, I need to say that it's not all fat. Um, a lot of that is water weight. When you're that big, there is pounds and pounds of water weight that you're just going to sweat out, that you're just going to let go of when you're losing weight. But I ended up reaching the opposite end of the spectrum where I was essentially anorexic, um, and I was very, very thin. I had a bunch of loose skin. Of course, I got surgery to get rid of that. Um, but I was very, um, I was very thin, and I slowly put that muscle back up. But that's a little bit about that story, um, and, and kind of how that led me to where I'm at now, because that gave me— it gave me pride and motivation that if I was able to do that, which is probably one of the hardest things, probably the hardest thing I'll ever do, um, everything else, um, is going to be kind of simple as a result. So I have no excuse not to do it.

Man, that's crazy. How old were you when that happened?

I was 17.

Man, what a crazy story. Okay, yeah, especially the part of not feeling pain. I mean, I can relate to some, I don't know, flow states back in, back in my days or throughout this life, but to sustain that very high motivation for 2 to 3 months and to let go of your old habits of eating food and seeking that comfort, right? Have you read Goggins' books? It makes me think a lot of Goggins.

Yeah. I have read, um, God, I'm one of the biggest fans of Goggins. I have listened to him and Jocko since very early on in my life, since around 18, 19. Um, I've read both Stay Hard and Can't, uh, and Never Finish. Uh, sorry, stay, uh, I've read, uh, Never Finish and Can't Hurt Me. Sorry, um, I actually started in the opposite order. I read, um, Never Finish first and then I read Can't Hurt Me. Um, and Can't Hurt Me, I didn't actually read it, I read the, uh, I listened to the audiobook.

And that one, which is the best, which is the best, the only way to do it. Like, don't even pick up the book, just go for a run and listen to— yeah, Can't Hurt Me and Never Finish. They're well-written books, they're well narrated as well, they're authentic, they're human, right? Even if they're not like fully accurate or scientifically helpful, right? Because Goggins does a lot of Crazy shit that isn't really reproducible, but so useful, man. And yeah, such a classic, this book. Anytime I'm training for an ultra, I'll be listening to some version of it, right? Um, your career, right, Jack? You started at Amazon. Um, shortly after that, I'm guessing you're, you're in your 20s nowadays. Uh, then Barclays, you went into banking, right? And And ultimately NASDAQ. Like, how would you describe these experiences? What have you gained from these?

Yeah, so I would say AWS gave me the technical specs I really needed for the rest of my career. Barclays, interestingly enough, working on a trading floor kind of gave me a backbone, if that makes sense. 'Cause when you're on that type of like trading floor type environment, everything is very crazy. There's people shouting, it's a lot of hecticness, a lot of chaos. And when you're in AWS, Everything's very chill. You're just on a desk typing away. But on Wall Street, there's a lot more chaos and it kind of gave me the backbone to thrive in an environment like that. NASDAQ was the same way. It was a mix of AWS and Barclays where it still had those chaotic environments, but it also had a lot more technical aspects in it. And founding a company since NASDAQ has been the most interesting rollercoaster experience ever. It puts all of my other experiences, Barclays, NASDAQ, AWS, it makes them feel small in comparison because founding a company is just that much more hectic. But yeah, I wouldn't trade it for the world.

And why found your own company? Why not stay at a salaried company?

Yeah, so what I've always kind of wanted to be an entrepreneur. I've always wanted to pursue my own path, want to make an impact with the world. I didn't want to work for somebody else's vision. Especially when the vision is not something that I believed in. And not to say that NASDAQ, Barclays, or any of these other companies have a bad vision. I just didn't personally align with that. So that's kind of one part. Number 2, and this kind of has to do with my Indian upbringing, right? When you are within like an immigrant family that has followed the traditional corporate route, they expect you to kind of follow that traditional route. And it comes from a place of love. They want you to be safe. They want you to be stable. They don't want you to go through maybe what they had to go through during their upbringing. It was so hard for them to get a job, to put food on the table and so on. So it's hard to detach from that. But with me, I always knew that I didn't want to go down the corporate rat race for the rest of my life. And my parents had afforded me the ability. I had this conversation with them after my stint at Nasdaq. They had afforded me the ability through working so hard to take risks, to enjoy my life a little bit more. I would be doing them a disservice to not do that. So eventually that kind of hit me while I was at Nasdaq. I actually wish I did it earlier, but I can't have regrets about it. But I wanted to leave Nasdaq and then pursue it full-time. So that's kind of the reasoning behind why I chose that different career path.

Nowadays you run LeadPoet, so why Why launch in the buying signal space? Is that a field you were familiar with before? Why launch that? And how did you meet your co-founder?

Yeah, so both great questions. The first part, how I actually kind of learned about the space, I previously founded a company while I was working at NASDAQ as well as Barclays. The company's name was Athira. And in order to grow it, I grew it from 0 to 6,000 B2B partners purely through outbound. So sending cold emails, trying various different types of features in those cold emails using Looms and so on, LinkedIn, so on to kind of improve the amount of conversions we receive. And throughout that process, I was using companies like Apollo, ZoomInfo, ListKit to get a list of leads. And then I would spend 3 to 4 hours every single day filtering down that list of leads to the ones that would generally be interested in my company's services. That manual labor was taking up so much of my time that I could be spending on sales calls, that I could be spending on developing the product, that I decided I wanted to completely change up that space. I've also seen this within Nasdaq where I had to do a lot of enterprise sales. I had to go to events to sell our product, increase volume, talking to hedge funds, trading firms, and also within our sales team, they were running into the same manual research problem. And Buying Signals essentially alleviates that because it matches companies with genuine intent. to buy your product with you. And we want to create a product which would essentially do that seamlessly.

How did you meet your co-founder?

Yeah. Oh yeah. So the way I met my co-founder is we met at Nasdaq. We worked together for 2 years on an internal innovation proposal. So we were on separate teams. I was on the options and derivatives team. He was on the equities team. So there wasn't that much overlap between our teams generally, but we met because there was an innovation program within Nasdaq. which allows you to come up with your own ideas on maybe new markets that you wanted to expand into. And one of the ideas that me and him ended up having was total return swaps and just the swaps market in general, which is a market, just to keep things very high level, that Nasdaq wasn't really touching yet. So we came up with this idea, we worked together for 2 years, and we ended up getting it to a point where it got executive buy-in from the top management team in— at Nasdaq. And that process gave us confidence in working together. We saw that we could iterate. We saw that we could improve a product and actually pitch together as well. So we decided that, hey, we both had faced this similar problem. He was previously a GP at a hedge fund and he was sourcing LPs for that hedge fund to improve AUM. And he also dealt with the same like intent problem that I discussed earlier. So we knew that there was a common frustration that we had and we wanted to found a company around that. So we ended up founding Leapote.

Interesting. And what was Athena about?

Sorry?

Athena.ai, what was it about?

Yeah, so Athira. Athira, yes. So yes, it's always hard, it's always easy to confuse. So Athira was an ad tech company. We automated ad creation campaigns. So if you were maybe an e-commerce brand, and you wanted to create an ad campaign, right? Usually you would go to an agency to create that ad campaign for you. You would give them all of your like Meta ads login details, et cetera. What you would do with Athira is for a fraction of the price, you come to our software, you connect your Meta ads account, your X ads account, whatever ads account you want, and then you just hit create campaign. It creates all of the campaign details based on your product and your goal, and then you could just launch it directly. You don't need to have any expertise about ad campaigns. You don't need to have any like deep understanding of what to do. It uses past data to understand what would perform best for your company and then launches that campaign.

Got it. And scaled it to 6,000 users. Were these paid users? What was the business model of Athira?

Yeah, so Athira was not, it was not all paid users. Some of them were paid users. The business model was credits-based. So you could take a certain amount of credits to actually launch a campaign. And depending on the type of campaign you want to launch, for example, Meta ads would cost a little bit more than X ads, TikTok ads would cost the most and so on. You would spend a different amount of credits, but we had different, it was a SaaS tier, right? We had different tiers on the amount of credits you could buy if you want to utilize it. And some users who would just come in, they would just use the free plan, which would give them enough credits for one campaign to test it out and then they would never actually end up paying. So there was like a balance between the two.

Got it. And what was, where did you take that one? Did you just shut it down? Yeah.

So that was something that we ended up shutting down because it was not scalable. We were, we just didn't feel like it was VC scalable because the e-commerce market is not very vast and they're very stingy. They don't wanna spend a lot of money, the e-commerce market. But with the B2B market, we're targeting enterprises. Like we have Dropbox as a paying client, Pine Health, and so on, they're willing to pay a lot more money for high quality leads because say you're an Oracle, just giving an example here, and you have a $100,000 or a $1 million data center contract. If even one lead converts, that's worth so much money to you that you don't care if you're spending $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, because if one of those leads convert, you have made all of your money back and then some, right? So targeting those enterprises, those high ACV businesses is something we decided to switch Into instead of Athera, which was targeting these small, like smaller revenue businesses like e-commerce.

Interesting. And LeadPoets, you charge from $100, $500 to even a couple of thousands a month. Is it like fully SaaS, fully self-serve, or is it, is there still some agency slash consulting service in there?

It's essentially fully self-serve. It's SaaS, yeah. We do help clients, like if they ping us, of course, like, hey, I wanna get on a call, to learn how to use the platform better or learn how to define my ideal customer profile, my ICP better, we would absolutely like get on with them and help them. But for most of the matter, it's self-serve.

Okay, but on your website, like book a discovery call, right? So I can't like just try it right now and see if it's for me, no?

No, you could try it right now too. We offer both options. The book a discovery call is the one that enterprises tend to use a little bit more. Because they want the custom tier. But we have a few users that just come to us and convert by going onto the pricing page and buying there.

Okay. Okay. Got it. Interesting. Okay. So if I sign up right now, you just give me a list of qualified buyers that is better than Apollo's. Is that the value offering here?

Yeah. So it's a good question. The main value offering is intent. So With Apollo, ZoomInfo and stuff, they're not gonna give you leads that have genuine real-time intent to buy your product. Say you're selling a CRM, right? That's your product. We will find people that are on social media posting about maybe, hey, I'm currently using a certain CRM, let's say HubSpot for example. I don't like that CRM. I'm looking for a new alternative. That's an intent signal that was recently posted that make them a good match for you to reach out to because you offer a CRM that's maybe better than HubSpot in certain ways. And then you reach out to them and you connect them. So we will actually find leads with intent. So yes, that is one aspect, but we also automate outreach. So we will automate your email outreach. We will automate LinkedIn outreach. We will use that intent to craft very personalized outreach to every single one of those candidates and send it on your behalf.

Got it. And cold email as well. So Um, how— so I pay like what, $500 a month? What do I get from that? How many emails sent? How many LinkedIn outreach sent? What kind of results should I expect on a monthly basis?

Yeah, so with the $500 a month, let's just say you expect a certain amount of accounts that's on the webpage, but the specific aspect of the amount of emails sent, you could send as many emails you want. from your inbox because we aren't warming up your inboxes or providing you with the inbox. You have to come in and connect your own inbox to our account. We will just automate that via outreach. So you could send 100, 200. We will set limits of course on our end just to make sure that your deliverability isn't ruined. The probability of you going to spam, right? We will kind of like reduce that on our end, but you could override that if you want to. Same thing with LinkedIn. You connect it, you can send as many messages as you want. But of course LinkedIn has rate limiting features where if you send too many messages, you send too many connection requests, your account will get temporarily blocked. So we kind of take all of that into account and give you a recommended schedule for both of them on the amount of emails and/or LinkedIn messages you should be sending. But it's essentially unlimited to answer your question.

And how much paid clients do you have right now with that one?

Yeah, so with that one, with that one in specific, 20.

Okay. Okay. So how have you gotten these clients? Like what's your GTM process? Do you use your own platform to generate these leads?

Amazing question. So all of our clients so far have been coming inbound. So just on X, LinkedIn, us posting. We have done very little outbound so far, but we started in the last 2 weeks and we are dogfooding our own product. So we have only been using our own product to reach out to new leads, to reach out to new customers and also automate outreach via our own platform.

Okay, got it. And who's your ICP?

Yeah, so our ICP is B2B users, B2B, essentially people who sell B2B, um, with a high ACV contract value. So somebody who has maybe not a $5,000 product or a $2,000 product, but a $100,000 product, a $1 million contract that they're trying to sell. Those are our ideal clients that we try to go after, and they tend to be enterprises.

Okay, enterprises. Do you target CEOs directly or VP sales, CROs mostly?

VP of sales and CROs, usually not even CRO because they're too high at enterprises. We'll go with a VP of sales, head of sales type person. They're our ideal.

Got it, got it. Um, how can you 2x your number of clients till next month?

Yeah, um, we're already on track to do that. Um, we've already signed 2 Should— we've already signed them. They're being onboarded in a week or so. 2 more clients just from starting outbound. And that's like 2 weeks in. We already have a few more in the pipeline. We think that now that we started outbound and are dogfooding our own product, and might I say the results that we've seen from our own product in comparison to an Apollo have been incredible. Just blowing Apollo out of the water in every regard. We believe that just using our own product for outbound that way will allow us to double our users by end of October. So 40.

Interesting. And how do you sustain yourself and your founder with that? You guys are raising capital as well in terms of funding?

Yes, we are.

Okay, because yeah, 20 clients a month, like $1,000 a month, right? So Um, slowly but surely getting there. Uh, what's— what are your projections? Let's say that I'd give you a million-dollar check, like, uh, how would, uh, be the, the MRR at the very last month of next year?

Yeah, so the first thing we would do with that money, and I'll translate that to MRR, is hire a CRO. Um, we've been talking to somebody for a while. He has 20 years of enterprise experience. He's already helped us onboard and sign a few clients. And we would wanna bring him on full-time. We would wanna give him budget to hire 1 or 2 really killer sales reps, and he's very connected, so he knows those people. And then once he brings— once we bring those guys in, they will go out to enterprise, solely be focused on enterprise, and signing more clients on that end. We believe that that in and of itself, within 1.5 months, maybe 2 months to give some time for onboarding, will result in at least 10 more enterprises being signed. And enterprises can pay us a lot more than $1,000 or $2,000 a month. Some of them maybe $5,000, $10,000 a month. So that in and of itself could result in, say, $50K to $100K in additional MRR and $1 million plus in ARR.

And what's proprietary in your high buying signal data? Like what factors do you scrape that Apollo or other companies do not provide?

Yeah, so great question. We do scrape a lot of different avenues that Apollo and Zoom Info do not. We're not limited to just LinkedIn. We're not just limited to maybe news articles or Reddit or other social medias. We scrape everything in real time across the web. That's kind of the same we tell our clients, everything across the web. And how we do that, our proprietary technology and how the model improves as well, I'll also quickly touch on that. We use Bittensor as our backend. So it's a decentralized backend. where different computers or nodes around the world provide compute intelligence and trajectory data to improve our agent and our model. So instead of us doing this as a centralized lab, just ourselves providing our own compute, our own resources to train and improve our model, we have hundreds of different people across the world providing that compute, providing those resources to improve our models. So we not only don't pay that compute from our pocket. They're paying it from their pocket. They're being compensated with tokens from our network, and we're being compensated in tokens from our network as well to host this kind of competition. So we are outsourcing compute to other people. They're paying the money for training our model, and simultaneously we are receiving rewards for hosting this competition. And the rewards right now account to around $500,000 in Annual revenue run, an annual revenue run rate every year.

Pranav, thanks for coming on the show. Where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, so people could find me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is ideally the best place, and also on X Lead Poet AI.

There you go. So it's Pranav and Charles for another fun.