The Achieve Podcast - Gigi Kizhakkechethipuzha (ImpelHub)

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, and we're excited to have Gigi J.K., who is the founder of Impel Hub. Gigi, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Jesse. Appreciate that.

So our audience can get to know you. Give us a quick backstory of your business. What do you do and how did it all get started?

I always love to tell the story. So after 20+ years in corporate and I got the entrepreneurial itch, you know, when I was much younger and you can picture me, let's say you and I met about 10+ years back. I am the guy who is trying to run 4 to 5 startups at the same time in Philadelphia, right? And foolishly, I think I learned my lessons. And then along the journey, many— after one of the main lessons I learned, marketing is the most important thing in, in any startups. And ideas, product build, sales, everything else comes second or tertiary. And then I, I happened to acquire one company, Votina. I grew that into an e-commerce engineering company, and we are, you know, we are one of the greatest story creators in e-commerce build, especially the B2B. And my clients like Amazon, Sony, Staples, world's largest democratic government will tell you that, will attest to that, and a number of 2,000+ small to medium-sized businesses will tell you that. But still, I depend— the growth was dependent upon, uh, referrals and platforms giving us leads. And we competed with the greatest of the greatest digital marketing agencies, right? And then after around 2 years back, after trying many avenues that I know, hiring digital marketers around the globe, I decided that, uh, I'm not getting the answers that I want to hear, which is, which is I want to hear the logical, rational reasons why something fails or succeed. I never got that. So about 2 years back, I sat down and I started figuring out, I decided to figure out the growth strategies for any business differently than a marketer would do. And, and, and I didn't know— I did not know much about marketing at that time. I threw myself in the ring of marketers in LinkedIn. I started growing my network, start getting to know many marketers, follow them, start absorbing like a sponge. Then based on the learnings, I created a hypothesis, I created an equation, I solved the equation of growth. So come January 2025, I have no UI, no app. I have set up process and a Google Sheet as my, uh, out— the UI. I start offering this to my clients in Latina, and one by one everyone start giving me a 5-star testimonial video of the experience I'm walking them through. And along the lines, I met this person, Ruth Stevens, She teaches marketing to marketers worldwide. And when my product was— I still at that time, I didn't have any UI still. I showed my process, I showed my output to Ruth. And Ruth, next week or so, Ruth wrote us about us in, in MarkTech as one of the 13 must-try tools to try for marketers. So then that journey continued today. I have a number of clients and about— we have a 99.99 5-star success rate. Everyone, every client we take on, uh, they love it. They give us 5-star testimonials. So what it is today, Impact Hub, is an expert-led AI-enabled growth strategy platform which figures out a custom, ultra-custom playbook based on the world's best practices from, uh, big league consulting firms. And we can do this in less than 10 days, and the client is spending about 4 to 6 hours of their time. We have clients coming back to us. We have founders who has done one study, they are coming back to us for their next round of business, the next venture. So we are growing cautiously, learning, and still product is evolving. Today we have a UI, we have an app and a UI. And so we can look at it, you know, there are a couple of lenses that we can look at this platform we are building. So as you know, AI is democratizing the execution, right? And it is shrinking every day, the execution is shrinking. So what is being left is strategy. And very interestingly, most of the conversation about growth is, hinges, is around execution. There are very, from a relatively speaking, I would say 10% of the conversation is about, about the real strategy. About 95, 90% of the conversation is about execution. So we focus on that, on that 10%, which is the most important part. And what we are doing, we are creating a set of processes, a, a disciplined methodology, a framework to figure out the precise growth strategy for any business. Using AI, we shrink it, and using human expertise, we elevate the quality of the output. And we— it is guided by the big league consulting playbooks and growth strategies.

Well, congratulations on the, on the growth and the success. How big is your team today?

About 23, 25 people.

Okay.

And we work on— and I have multiple— that's just not one. I own multiple brands, multiple— I'm involved in multiple startups. So that team manages and executes all of it.

Okay, so you got multiple things going on. You're kind of a serial entrepreneur, not your first rodeo. You've been doing this for a while. Talk to me a little bit how the business has changed from when you started it versus to what it looks like today.

So we started, as I mentioned, it is a— I didn't have— I had a goal what needs to be built, right? And I have no way of— I didn't know how to get there, and I didn't know what the architecture going to be, didn't know what the solution going to be. But I wanted to know, I wanted to build something that's going to tell me the week-by-week execution plan of to grow any business. That was my goal. Then I want— I formed a hypothesis. Work forward from the hyper-situation, etc. Then I started experimenting with the clients, telling them that, you know, I am new, I am not a growth marketer, I am not a growth strategist, I'm not a marketer. I still say that I'm not a sales guy, I don't know anything about revops, but you and I, Mr. Client, you and I can speak on some logical and rational basis, right, about the growth. And I can And then, so that was that. Then along the lines, along the timeline, and I built the UI. And today I have a partnership, she's 30 years in marketing, and I have a couple of national sales force. I have independent partners that is introducing our products and services to clients. So we are running a partner-led growth, and we are in communication with multiple agencies. Some of them are pilot testing it, CROs. We are working with a couple of CROs. So we are growing and the product is being still in the growth phase. We are building, we are building the product, providing the value, understanding the clients. And it's a very dynamic environment right now and we are in the right spot. As you know, if you look at the space, you can see that some of the well-known names in the industry just started talking about the need for a system for growth. Guess what? We already have it.

Obviously you're using AI inside of your platform and a lot of what you're doing today. Tell me a little bit more around how you're using AI on a practical level in your organization.

Yeah, so as I mentioned, it is not a platform you press a button, answer a bunch of questions, and here comes your strategy. It is not a platform like that. We use AI to research and figure out, uh, research and figure out the information that we need to figure out to understand what the client is, their competition is, their customer is. I am at a 50,000-foot level, right? Their objectives, their constraints, their PESTLE factors, and all of that. We use AI to research, and then we use AI to validate and rank and score those. So it is like what we have is a Lego architecture. If you think about a Lego, you know, the final Lego piece is the playbook. Then underneath it, there are next size of Lego pieces. Then underneath, there are other Lego pieces that makes up the next second level and third level and fourth level. So we use AI to build these Lego pieces. Then we use human expertise and experience to make sure what AI is giving us, the results AI is giving us, is correct and fitting to the context that we are building for the client.

As you try to scale over the last year and a half, I mean, I guess again, you have multiple businesses here, but what are some of the constraints that you keep seeing as you try to grow?

The change, the rate of change, the rate of change. You know, I used to say that marketing is hard because you are always, you know, marketing and growth is something like you are standing on a ground that is moving so fast and you are, you're, you are you're targeting, uh, you're more— and then at the same time, you are hitting it. You're targeting a moving target, right? That is— that was my definition of marketing. Today, that acceleration of where you stand, the, the speed at which your target moves, it is growing every day. It is moving fast, even faster. So that creates— there are so many things to do There is only 18 hours a day, right? At the same time, what is happening is that, you know, a person can work on a couple projects at the same time if they have this— if you have the right framework and tools to do it, right? So it's a very dynamic environment that we live in today. That itself creates a lot of challenges.

So yeah, I mean, the rate of AI, the evolution, the world we're in right now, right? You're saying it's moving so fast that it actually becomes a constraint a little bit for you in helping or in trying to move forward, right? Because it feels like the target's moving all the time. Is that kind of what I heard?

Yeah, the target is moving and the ground you stand on is also moving.

That is also true. Yeah. Looking forward a little bit, talk to me about the next stage of growth. What are you most excited about?

The— we are building no tech tool. What we are building is an operating system for growth. ImpulseHub, just a part of it, right? So all the tools and technology, there are 3 or 4 that we have. Everything is coming together, becoming an operating system for your revenue growth, and that I'm excited about. Then We have a blueprint. So right now where we are focused is on the top line growth of my, of my clients' revenue and customer acquisition and the customer happiness. Those are the customer happiness, customer happiness, the happiness of the customer's customer, right? So those are the three angles: top line revenue, top line customer acquisition for our clients, then customer clients' customers' happiness. Those are three angles that we have. We are building products and services around these three concepts. What we are excited about, we already identified set of processes and potential tools and methodologies to, to look, start looking into the profit of the business. How do you start helping the customers with the bottom line? Using the same methodology, similar methodologies and tools that we have built for the top line. So we already— I'm waiting to get a little more, uh, handle on what we are doing, a few more clients, then we'll be focusing on the, the bottom line aspect. And that, at that point, we become a total solution service provider, be an end-to-end solution service provider, a growth service provider that can touch all the three aspects of growth of a business. That's customer, profit, and revenue.

Talk to me about your journey a little bit, some of the wins and the mistakes, some of the lessons that stand out along the, along the way here. What lessons were, or what advice would you give to entrepreneurs?

Yeah, uh, ideas. I'm going back to the old saying, Ideas are dime a dozen, right? Ideas are dime a dozen. And if you have common sense, you can execute. But how to figure out— and that's not because I'm saying that— I'm saying that not as an advertisement for ImpulseHub, but really, especially in the age of AI, the strategy becomes your most important edge. Right? Yeah. How you go to war without the finite, fine-tuned— without the— without— how do you go to a war battle without a fine-tuned strategy? How can you do that? You can't. And your business is no different. That's one. Second, the skill set. The skill set, knowledge, it's there while you are on a deep fast diminishing scale. And what really matters is your passion, your curiosity, somewhat your creativity, the, the fire in the belly you have. That makes all the difference. You can learn anything today. I couldn't say that in 6 months back or 1 year back. You can learn anything. You could be skillful in anything today, almost anything today, but you have to have that passion and curiosity. So focus on that.

Thank you so much for sharing your story and insights with us today. Really enjoyed the conversation. I'd love to just keep chatting. You're a fun person to talk to, and I know you Uh, we're wrapping up the episode here. For those listening, if you want to learn more about Impel Hub, you can visit impelhub.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 with other entrepreneurs who'd also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode. Of the Achieve Podcast.