How an IT Services Startup Wants to Disrupt Itself in the AI Era: Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about this process of brainstorming about what you were going to focus on in the next company. What was the process with coming up with where you were going to place your bet?

Sanjay Jupudi: There was a quality assurance company that was hiring people to test applications. If you need testing services, I have 10 people and they’ll manually write all the test cases. When Agile started, a lot of clients were saying, “Testing function is slowing us down. Our people are developing code and then we have to wait three weeks for the testing to be complete.”

What they did was they wrote code to test code. Once the user story is developed, all the testers get together and they start testing in the waterfall way. After that, the code goes into production. You’re losing time and there’s a lot of frustration. It’s an inefficient process. There is potential to release faster >>>

How an IT Services Startup Wants to Disrupt Itself in the AI Era: Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli (Part 1)

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AI will disrupt outsourcing services companies in a very big way. We talk to Sanjay on how he plans to prepare.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the very beginning of your personal journey. Tell me where you’re from, where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background. Since this is a co-founder story, it would be great if you could also bring a little bit of Prasanna’s story.

Sanjay Jupudi: I’m from India.

Sramana Mitra: What part of India? >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The bulk of the business is this one-time fee to buy the chart that you’re providing.

Nick Shaw: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What do the 26 coaches do then?

Nick Shaw: They do more detailed one-on-one coaching.

Sramana Mitra: There is a subscription business that is more detailed one-on-one coaching.

Nick Shaw: Yes. There are three tiers. The first tier is about $20 where you can buy our ebooks. You read it and you can do things >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Do you feel comfortable talking a bit about what it cost to get this kind of endorsement? How do you evaluate which influencer relationships should you take on versus not?

Nick Shaw: Something really important is making sure it’s a good match in terms of our brand. We’ve done some experiments. We’ve worked with some influencers that have a ton of followers. We just don’t get much in return. What we found was maybe their followers don’t match up with our brand. We have a lot of Ph.D.’s and registered dieticians.

A lot of times, some of these influencers’ followers demographics just don’t match up with that. We’ve seen that there’s not a lot of return in cases >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to customer acquisition. You said you have 85,000 people in your Facebook group. How did you get to these kinds of numbers?

Nick Shaw: Our number one strategy is social media. That was pretty evident early on. Being in the health and fitness industry, it’s very visual-oriented. People want specific results. They want to look a certain way. If you can get people results, people post and talk about how well the program works. We repost and spotlight on certain clients. People see that and it just takes off. It just snowballs and has an exponential growth.

We have almost 330,000 followers on our main Instagram account. Instagram is the perfect medium for what we do because >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you’ve created more of a content business.

Nick Shaw: Yes. I would say we’re in the education business. We give people the education on what they need to eat, when, and how much.

Sramana Mitra: An online learning kind of program. What’s the form factor of how you distribute this?

Nick Shaw: Early on, it was all Excel files. We recently changed it to PDF format. It was originally all on email. We’ve since changed. Now it’s all downloadable right on our website. A person orders, and within a few minutes, they’re able to get their files. It’s right in their account.  >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn about how many clients could each coach service?

Nick Shaw: A lot of it depends on the coach. All of our coaches were either in school or professors. Currently, we have over 25 coaches – 20 of them have Ph.D.’s, seven are registered dieticians and one is a family physician. This isn’t necessarily their full-time job. How many clients they can take on varies a little bit. Some may want to keep it relatively small. A good rough number to cap it at is probably a hundred at any given time. That would be an outlier. The average is 40 to 50.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that is strategic in how you have scaled this business besides figuring out a reliable way to pair the customers with coaches who can then customize their training routine for this $100 to $150 per month price point?

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Bootstrapping a Virtual Company to 5 Million Plus: Nick Shaw, CEO of Renaissance Periodization (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to that moment in 2012 when you started RP. What did you start with? Was there an app or was it straight away online consultation?

Nick Shaw: It was just me and my buddy. We were already working with clients online and in-person. It was this idea of, “Let’s join forces.” There was no funding. It was just him and me founding it. We didn’t really have these great visions that would take off and grow into something a lot bigger. It has become that now. It was just one of those things where he and I loved health and fitness.

We would work with our close friends and family. We would do a good job with them. We would just work off referrals. That’s how it all got started. >>>