The Achieve Podcast - Arvind Sarin (Copper Digital)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner. I'll be your host today. We're excited to have Arvind Saren, Chairman and CEO of Copper Digital, with us today. Arvind, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today.

Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Uh, Armin, so the audience can get to know you a little bit better, give us a quick backstory on your business. What do you do? How did it all get started?

Fantastic. Yeah, so we're— I use— I like to call it the TurboTax for OASIS documentation, and it's a very niche field in home health. And home health is when an elderly person gets admitted to an acute facility and they need care at home. Then home health providers would send nurses to do the admissions and then do the skilled nursing visits and different therapies and all of that stuff. So we enable them by utilizing AI and scribing tools and different logics to get that documentation done, which normally takes a couple of hours. But with our platform, you could get done in less than 20 minutes. And a little bit more about me. I grew up in India and came here about 21 years ago. I am, I live in Dallas now. I went to UT to get my master's in business administration. I also have another master's in electrical engineering. Initially, I was a software developer and then decided to go on my own after, you know, working for another startup. And that's when the journey started initially with mobile. We did that for 4 years, then cloud transformation and then digital transformation. And then while I was doing my own podcast, I discovered that healthcare, you know, was such a fantastic field. You could have such a huge impact. And that's when I was like, we gotta get into healthcare and solve a lot of these problems and make access available for everybody. And so this is our act one where we're utilizing AI to do documentation. There's many more things that we want to do that, you know, we have a, I have a team that continues to talk to the customers and come up with ideas for creating better patient outcomes, for increased reimbursements for even the providers, and then also making the lives of the clinicians a lot easier.

So when did you start Copper Digital?

2010. So it's been 16 years.

16 years. Tell me about that journey. How has the business changed from when you started it what it is today?

Oh my God, it has changed many times over the last 16 years. I still remember when I started my—

I mean, we were more—

everyone was talking mobile because mobile was just becoming super popular. And, um, we had, you know, anyone who would come in and want to develop a mobile application, we would try to understand their requirements and give them a way to sort of be an entrepreneur with a mobile application. And then that was initially what we were doing for the first couple of years. And then we discovered that there were a lot of enterprise problems that mobile could solve.

So we moved to working as a mobile developer for a lot of the enterprise companies. So we worked with Cisco, Visa, Verizon, US Army, Department of Homeland Security. We actually did the SiriusXM application as well. And that journey was amazing, but very soon we discovered that our customers wanted more than just a mobile application. So we expanded to do more cloud transformation, kind of just took the advantage of understanding where the market was going. And that's how we continued to sort of slightly tweak the business as we continued on. I remember we also, you know, came up with the forward deployed engineer model at that time where Barclays. We had, you know, a dozen engineers that were deployed to do the work for them. And then around, you know, 2018 or so, it was more on digital transformation. And we did that for 4 years as well, where we had a lot of different engagements where we could do automation and RPA and, you know, just help customers get rid of the very mundane, tedious, boring tasks and have you know, the automation take it over. However, now, like in the last 3 years since, you know, ChatGPT came out and everybody discovered it and there were actual use cases that it could solve problems, we were like, whoa. So early on we were like, wow, this means there's tons of opportunity. But then we were soon discovered that, you know, it's very important to get very niche and focused when there's a brand new technology that has so much potential. To disrupt everything. So now I feel like from a project-based company becoming a platform and really having a product where we could scale beyond having to add engineers is really fantastic.

Let's talk a little bit about AI. Obviously there's a lot of buzz around AI automation. Sounds like you're using it, you've built it into your tool. How are you using AI in your business to help your business grow as well?

Oh my God. So AI has absolutely changed everything in our business. Like, in fact, for me personally as well, I'm spending 6 to 8 hours every day just on exploring different LLMs and just really getting into very deep understanding of the different LLMs. So, you know, from Gemini to Claude. Claude's, you know, my favorite for most tasks. And then I also use Groq. I use, of course, started with ChatGPT and the deep research is good over there as well. Claude Code has made a lot of the tasks, you know, just super simple. What used to take us maybe weeks and months is now getting done in hours. And this would be from like devices, like I have a device, Plot, that records everything, all the conversations. If I go talk to a customer, go to a trade show, it's just recording. So what I do is I feed it to my AI and it creates very good summary for me. Action items, but I took it another notch and I created a second brain. I call it Memex that has 3 different layers that continues to ingest my emails and continues to take my voice notes and then has a much better context. I'm also using OpenClaw. So that made a lot of noise in late January. And, you know, funny story, it actually, miss— got misconfigured. And sometimes you have to, you know, sort of take the leap. But it started replying to my homeowners association WhatsApp group. You know, there was a homeless person and it was like, oh my God, we should look at both perspectives and empathize. And maybe that person needs something. And, you know, after a while they had to sort of kick me out temporarily from the group because it just won't shut up. And I wasn't monitoring it at that time. But yeah, I have a Mac mini that's running at my office. I'm not at the office right now. I'm traveling. And yeah, but in everything, it is helping me personally. And then across the board in the company as well. I got a bunch of meetings. We're, you know, gonna be starting to raise some capital to expand. So a lot of the emails to the healthcare VCs were sent by, you know, just writing a few prompts and of course giving it good context and all of that.

So it did the research, created the list, sent out emails.

And yeah, I mean, I ask it all sorts of tasks from, I like to call it, my focus this year is product, productivity, and production. Production like video production, what we're doing now.

So I have a podcast as well where in fact it creates those animated videos.

I don't know if you're familiar with ReMotion, but That's also something that we use a lot.

And for patient education, like educating patients on fall risk, it creates the entire video and it's able to also analyze the population data to then give you the right types of topics for videos as well. So, I mean, I can go on and on, but AI has completely changed my life. In fact, I was jet-setting around the world you know, a little bit burnt out with working so hard. And then after this, I am— I've just got this new energy to really spend 16, 17 hours because in 12 months everything's going to change and we're going to be looking at a very different world.

It's exciting and scary at the same time, right? It is. It is. So congrats on all the growth and the implementing AI in a very meaningful way in your business. Let's talk about sales and marketing for a minute and your outreach efforts. Where are you seeing traction? What's working for you right now?

Well, let me answer that question by telling you over the last decade, obviously there have been different strategies that we've had to use. Like one of the strategies would work for let's say a year or two, and then we would have to continue to come up with new strategies, and then that would work for a while, and that would have its peak, and it would die down. In the current context, we're not really looking to add a lot of customers right away because we're continuing to work with just a handful of home health agencies and doing pilots with them and improving our product. But once we get to that stage where we feel more confident, of course, in healthcare, it's very important that You know, we have human in the loop as well, of course, for all the charting that we do. But at the same time, there are certain things that we want to ensure that would give us that exponential growth. So right now, you know, there are not a lot of AI-based or even other strategies that we're using to get more customers. But I could tell you in the past, you know, from email marketing to paid ads to, you know, creating content that builds that community. I mean, we've really tried it all, and all of that has helped, and a lot of it we could attribute to— I mean, even, I think, email marketing. I had a very, you know, sort of famous internally in the company email where I would reach out to potential clients and say, I live, breathe, eat mobile, you know, would love to hop on a phone call and discuss how we may be able to help you. And that got so much traction. And then, you know, there were other tricks and we came up with some frameworks and stuff.

Um, and yeah, overall, like sales has continued to evolve depending on where our focus is and what kind of clients we want to get. It's very different for enterprise clients. It's very different for when you're launching a product that may be more fitting for startups.

Talk to me about some of the constraints that you're seeing as you try to scale— time, people, systems, capital. Where, where are you seeing the constraints?

That's a good question. I think I asked this question myself as well, like when I'm preparing for my discussions with potential investors and VCs. I'm like, all right, what's going to change if we had $10 million in our bank account to like, what would I do differently? I mean, I've got two great clinical advisors. We're able to pay for them. I've got half a dozen solid full-time engineers and then a few that are contractors. I've got, you know, a nice marketing team and a few contractors on video editing. I think that is a good team because I feel like sometimes, and in the past we've had that, When you have too much capital just sitting, it just— you tend to find more and more areas to spend it to, and you stop prioritizing, and, you know, you lose a little bit of your focus. So by design, I would like it to take its own time, and then when, you know, there is that opportunity where we need to then turn the knob and grow exponentially, that's when I think it'll be the right time for us to raise capital. But it's also that the market has changed a lot in terms of the way that now capital raise, you know, is working is you— it's a very long-term relationship. It's 5 to 10 years that you're going to be with that VC or, you know, private equity person. So you really want to be dating, you know, a lot of, VCs initially and have conversations and really try to, you know, understand their perspective about the market and stay in touch sort of every month, 2 months, do a call with them and show them progress. So then eventually when it comes time to, you know, when you actually are ready to scale, then it's just the writing on the wall and they're all like, okay, well, how do we need to do this? Let's go forward. So that's on the capital side. On, you know, finding good people, especially, you know, who are not so skeptical about AI, because we do see that sometimes if someone's very set in the way they've done development for the last 20 years, there could be some resistance that could come from there about, oh, come on, we're not going to vibe code and 'What about reviewing all the code and how are you going to fix it?' All that is true, but then there are still ways where you can change the way development is done by having a lot of the code written by these amazing tools that we have now, Cloud Code, Cursurf, Insurf, we use all of them, mostly Cloud Code.

But we can definitely come up with ways where Engineers are reviewing the code and they're really understanding it and, you know, get, get yourself to 20, 30x of productivity. And, you know, again, I'm not even exaggerating there that the productivity really has become 20, 30x easy for, for this. So, I mean, hiring was a little bit of challenge, like finding like-minded people who take a lot of pride in their work and want to achieve that mastery. and also who are interested in the healthcare field because we want people that are really driven and see meaning and purpose in this and not just there for the next paycheck. And I'm very happy that the team that we've built now, we've had some challenges in finding more people, but after the last round of hiring, I think, I mean, I've got a solid team because, I mean, the new way of building amazing companies that are growing very fast I hear everywhere is like having a reasonable, you know, reasonable team, like even 7 to 10 people. I think that's plenty for achieving even a billion-dollar revenue now with all the tools that you have access to. So that's why, you know, we're about 15 people and some contractors, and I think that's solid. So hiring, not so much. I mean, other than that, like, marketing and getting the word out in a proper way, that might become a little bit of an area where we would need to focus on, like have high quality onboarding because now the moat more than anything else is how you engage with the customers and how they feel about your product and how you make them feel when you're onboarding them. Because even though we may have the most amazing documentation AI with 3,000+ clinical rules that can do all these things for you, in 6 months everybody else is going to have it too. So building software is really not a moat. And that's why we're focusing on building those amazing relationships with the customers and retaining the ones we have and giving them an experience with onboarding and other, you know, engagement that they can really remember and refer other partners.

Marvin, sounds like you've been at this for a while. Clearly, you know what you're doing here. You've built— sounds like you built an amazing team. What are you most excited about in the next stage of growth?

I think we, like I mentioned, this is our Act 1, and we really wanted to pick a narrow field and a problem that was so rampant that even if we have the software not fully developed, people are, you know, open to having those pilots done and they are more forgiving, you know, when we're going out there and showing them the product and the capabilities of it. So I think that has really been serving us well right now. And, you know, that's what we're going to continue to focus on. I'm always excited about the next release that we have. Like right now we're building this one very specific thing in our product. And, you know, like I mentioned, my focus is product, productivity, and production. So product, I'm always super excited about because we have every 2 weeks, so, you know, new release coming out, and we're in fact releasing stuff on a daily basis. So I'm getting on the dev and watching the demo, hopping on with some of our engineers and brainstorming ideas. So that is the most exciting thing and my number one priority. Secondly, on productivity, like OpenClaw and exploring new tools. And, you know, there's Matt Wolfe, who's— and many other amazing creators who I follow and see what is the latest AI news and how other people are utilizing AI to increase productivity. And I try to then, you know, take the transcript of that video and have my OpenClaw sort of learn that in my context and have that built as a skill. So that's been like super exciting. I've spent several sleepless nights just continuing to work on that. And then production too. I'm always excited to talk to people and, you know, get advice from them. If someone, you know, would watch one of these videos or other podcasts, you know, often we get some comments and sometimes critical, but then sometimes those are the ones that actually help you improve yourself and your products. So So it's all 3 of those buckets are really exciting for me. And, you know, number 1, like I said, product and then productivity and then production videos.

Let's look back at your journey over the last 16 years. Talk to me about some of the wins and maybe some of the mistakes. What lessons are standing out to you?

Oh, yeah.

So we've definitely made a lot of mistakes and we've had our fair share of wins that we've celebrated. Gotten super excited. So early on, I just had an idea of what entrepreneurship is and what building a company looks like. And I was like, "All right, let's go, go, go." And, you know, like initially when we started, we had this office in Dallas and then I was like, "All right, well, we're doing so good and we've got a handful of customers. Why don't we expand and go to Silicon Valley?" And next thing you know, I was on a plane with, you know, two of my best people and we were starting a new office in Santa Clara at that time. And then next thing you know, we got a great partnership in Baltimore, and that's our government office. So, you know, expanding too quickly was a mistake that we made, and we learned our lessons, and we shut those down and then focused back on this. And that was back in 2011, so long time ago. But we continued, you know, down that path and, you know, pivoted and evolved. But then even I feel like in 2021, we were like, okay, I made that same mistake by saying that we're going to be global and we're going to have partnerships in, you know, Dubai because I see such a huge scope there. And, you know, we tried to expand to even Australia. And I feel like none of that worked because, I mean, they were remote salespeople, didn't really, you know, have a good way to for me to even communicate value to them, let alone them communicating to the end clients. Then also, I guess, like, initially we needed to stay as a services business to really make a lot of the mistakes and learn and not have that risk of ruins. Because when you're committed to a product, I mean, you know, a lot of times it will not work, and if it doesn't work, then you just die. So I feel like one good thing that we did was that initially doing a lot of projects and being sort of an agency, like a tech agency, we were able to accumulate great experience and money as well so that we could have enough resources to sustain us, like, through the pandemic. And like, you know, even after that, as there's so much disruption, I know, like, companies that are continuing to be project-based are getting their you know, lunch taken away by other smaller companies or, you know, just Ronnie in garage is able to compete. And it's very difficult to maintain sort of those barriers to entry for other players and the cost.

I mean, even the customers with these coding tools available for project-based business, you know, they were starting to come to us in even 2024 instead of those half a million dollar projects.

It was like, hey, we've already built, you know, laid the foundation, but we don't know how to make it work.

Can you make it?

Can you fix it for $50,000? And that's when I knew that the market's changing a lot as well. And we had to do a super hard pivot and see.

So I think those are some of the lessons.

I mean, one thing I'm really proud of is that along the way in the 16 years of our journey, we've made a lot of friends. I mean, I've had some amazing people on the board, amazing people who've been in the executive team and engineers, and we call them all Copper Champions.

And wherever they are, some of them at, you know, amazing companies and great roles, and they always, you know, are in touch and they reach back out and, you know, we compare notes. So it's been really good to treat people with respect even when you're letting them go. And sometimes you do have to let them go.

I mean, I had to even last year because, I mean, we had plenty of people that we didn't need and I had to really like let go a lot of people. And when you do it with respect and if you're authentic and honest with them, it goes a long way and they're your friends forever.

Last question for you, Arvin. Uh, final thoughts, advice that you give to other leaders or other entrepreneurs or who are on a similar journey?

Well, The advice at this time I would give is like, oh my God, we're witnessing such a huge disruption and change.

So whatever it is that you think is a priority, like you need to just get all hands on deck and put in all the time in researching and laying out your plans and paying attention to all the new tools and using them every single day. Like at least, you know, 4 to 5 hours of being on LLMs and trying out different things. Whatever it is that you do for your regular business, just go out and try it out and watch other people use it. Follow them on YouTube, follow them, you know, do calls, get mentors. If you're not already like utilizing AI almost all the time, you better find other friends who are and get inspired inspired from them or have those virtual friends. I think that's the advice I would give because this—

we're living through history being made.

There has never been in the entire history a time like this. And that's why, you know, this tokenization of our worlds is going to really change, you know, all the businesses and disrupt everybody. So this is the time. If the next 2 years you are out in the woods or not paying attention, you could lose your business or you could, you know, not be the ones who are getting ahead and getting benefited from a lot of the disruption that's happening.

Well, I love the energy, Arvind. I appreciate the stories and the insights that you shared today. It's fantastic. For those listening, if you want to learn more about Copper Digital and what Arvind is building, go visit copperdigital.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share it with other entrepreneurs who also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.