The following interview is a conversation we had with Shariq Siddiqui, Co-founder and CEO of Veeve, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $10 Million Raised to Power the Future of Shopper Engagement.
Shariq Siddiqui
Absolutely excited to be here.
Brett
Yeah. So to kick things off, could we.
Shariq Siddiqui
Just start with a quick summary of.
Brett
Who you are and a bit more about your background?
Shariq Siddiqui
Absolutely. So I guess I’ll start way back when I was born and raised in Pakistan, I decided to come to the US to do my bachelor’s. And the funny story behind that is I come from a humble background, but I happened to be going to a really good school where all the rich kids were going. And so when it was time for graduation, a lot of my friends were just going to the US and going into different universities. And I was kind of just in this mode of like, what am I going to do with my life? Because I don’t think my family can afford us education. Anyway, I decided to just apply to a couple of colleges and universities, hoping that I can get some scholarship and then find my way to the US.
Shariq Siddiqui
Luckily, I got a full scholarship to study at a university called Luther College. And so I moved to the US and started my basically higher education here. I was in Luther for a couple of months and before I realized that I’m running out of cash and I needed a job. So I started doing hustling all sorts of things, like just basically making websites or doing all sorts of stuff in it lab. One thing led to another, which I got a job as an intern at Citibank, where I started doing my Internship. That led me to moving to New York City, where I finished my college. And right after finishing up college, I kind of applied in different places. Just because as life of an immigrant, you’re kind of thinking about what’s next.
Shariq Siddiqui
Once you finish your higher education, you need jobs to stay in the US. So it’s kind of like you go from student visa to work visa. And so I was desperate to get a job. So a group of my friends, we all applied at Goldman Sachs because back in New York City, Goldman Sachs was regarded as the highest, still is to a certain extent, until tech companies took over. But we basically started the journey there. Group of four people. We all applied and luck had it, which is that all three of my friends got a job at Goldman Sachs. But I was rejected. And I was so heartbroken with that incident that I kind of wasn’t sure where things are going to go for me. I kind of had a moment of realization that I’m not good enough. I need to do something different.
Shariq Siddiqui
And that was a very low point where I was really trying to figure out what am I going to do? And I could see my friends flourishing within a couple of months within their Goldman Sachs job. So I decided to take a different route. I decided, hey, I want to kind of create an app. This is right around the time when Steve Jobs announced that he’s going to be opening up the App Store. I pounced on that opportunity. I decided to make an app. Think of this as like a really early version of Yelp. It’ll provide all sorts of information about New York City. And so I built that app somehow. Wall Street Journal covered that. And it got Michael Bloomberg, who used to be the mayor of New York City. He got his attention. He asked me to come over.
Shariq Siddiqui
He really liked the app. He funded the app. And then literally 1718 months later, it got acquired by BFW. So that was like really the starting of my career in the US, in the corporate world. From there on, I ended up at Amazon, where I spent almost a decade building various products and services. And then really towards the end of 2018, 2019, I decided to leave Amazon to do this startup.
Brett
Take us back to that plane ride when you were leaving Pakistan and flying to the United States for the first time to go to school. What was going through your head on that plane ride?
Shariq Siddiqui
So Allah, to say the least. But think about it this way, that my parents were very concerned. I was 18 years old. I think I was 17 years old back then. And my dad had this conversation with me that I know, I understand that all your friends are going and they can afford college education in the US, but you cannot. So you really need to find a way to do this on your own. And I said, I’ll just figure it out. I really would like to go. I guess that was the time when I was just infatuated with Hollywood. And I remember watching Beverly Hills nine or two, 10 back in the days, and it was a young kid, 16, 1516 year old kid, who was just infatuated with Hollywood, the lifestyle, the United States.
Shariq Siddiqui
And so I was just hell bent on figuring something out and getting out and figuring things out on my own. And so my dad, he basically said that you will literally be on your own, but you can always come back. And so what he did is, on my way to the airport, he handed me $700 cash, and he said, this is the only money that I can give you. And from there on, you’re going to be on your own. And I took that money, and I kind of knew that this $700, which is when I hear other stories, that’s a lot more than other people who have come and built a life here in this country. And basically, from that point onwards, I knew that this is going to be a sink or swim situation for me.
Shariq Siddiqui
So at any point, whenever I felt like I was going to give up, I kind of reminded myself that this was my own decision. I need to make it happen. And so at all points in life, there’s been highs and lows, a lot more lows. I’ve lived a very tough life, lived, done all sorts of jobs. But I figured it out. One of my best experiences, been working as a server in New York City. I started in a very cafe like place, but then I eventually ended up in a really high end restaurant where it was a club and only Hollywood members would come in. So I had the pleasure of working and serving some of the hop knobs of Hollywood. So that trained me a lot in terms of how to communicate with people, how to sell things right.
Shariq Siddiqui
So one of the things that I was doing there was trying to basically sell food items, but also what type of wine would go really well in the restaurant industry. Most restaurants make a lot of money selling wines just because they have such high margins as compared to actual food. So there was a lot of focus on that in that restaurant. And so they trained me how to sell wines, how to sell french bold dough versus an italian wine. And so that got me really got exposure to, outside of academics, outside of technical things, to how to deal with people, how to deal with really nice people, but at the same time, how to deal with people who can be extremely rude to you.
Shariq Siddiqui
So that kind of character building, I feel like, was such an important aspect of me as growing up in the US. And I really think a lot of people would credit know you should just go out of school and go and get a really good job, which I agree, but sometimes you never know how the universe is playing things for you. And so for me, one of my best jobs was working in that restaurant where they taught me how to sell things. And today I use those skills for something completely different.
Brett
Wow, what an amazing journey. And I’m sure that’s really had a major impact on you as you started building companies and have had to overcome those challenges and struggles and the pain of company building. So that’s amazing.
Shariq Siddiqui
Thank you.
Brett
Now, I’d love to switch gears here a little bit and let’s dive a bit deeper into a few questions that we like to ask just so we can really better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. So first question there is what Founder or CEO do you admire the most.
Shariq Siddiqui
And what do you admire about them? Sure. Yeah, I think there’s a long list of people that I admire, and obviously there are some very obvious CEOs and founders out there. I think as a Founder and CEO myself, one of the founders that I have personally admired or have grown to admire a lot more than some others is Satya. Satya Nadella from Microsoft. Now obviously he was not a Founder, but he is the CEO. And a job of CEO is incredibly difficult and incredibly lonely. People think of the job of CEO as like you’re on top, but it’s extremely lonely up on the top and you’re kind of like responsible for when everything goes bad, but at the same time when things go well, you want to make sure that you’re giving credit to the entire team effort, the company as well.
Shariq Siddiqui
So I think why really like Satya is because number one, he is a right, like if you think about Microsoft, and I happen to be in Seattle during the highs of Amazon, highs and highs of Amazon. So we could really see from the other side in Redmond, Washington, where Microsoft was not necessarily doing that well until Satya stepped in. And his vision, his cultural transformation. And I think overall, like the move into the companies from the software focus to AI focus, cloud computing, mixed reality, Microsoft has really become a leader in these areas. And that credit goes to Satya’s vision. When you think about just even the financial performance of Microsoft, it has done wonders. And so I think his commitment to be customer focused, visionary, there has been a cultural transformation within Microsoft.
Shariq Siddiqui
I know a lot of people who work at Microsoft, who work for decades at Microsoft and they would talk about how things have shifted. So it’s hard to find leaders like this who are very well rounded. When you listen to him, you think about, he’s talking about the vision, but he’s also talking about how he’s transforming industries but keeping an eye on the price, on the financial performance of Microsoft and other than that, commitment, the social responsibility commitment as well. So I really admire him. One thing that sets him apart compared to a lot of other ceos and founders is humility. I find him very humble person in general, but when you’re the CEO of Microsoft, Hubris would kick in so many different ways. But his focus or his investment in OpenAI is a really good testimony of how he understood that.
Shariq Siddiqui
Microsoft is really good at a lot of different things, but there are some more up and coming new startups that can potentially do better. And so his ability to foresee that OpenAI could be a force to reckon with and potentially a force to reckon with. Google shows his ability to see far out in the future and put his money in the right places. So really admire what he’s done for the company and in general where Microsoft is leading the AI space overall.
Brett
What was his quote that he had recently about making Google dance or something along those lines? I read something like that and thought it was just such a great line.
Shariq Siddiqui
Yeah, I don’t know, but I think I understand how he’s approaching this and he’s definitely bringing AI or because the word AI gets tossed around so much in so many different places. But I think the drastic changes that are coming to the overall suite of cloud services that Microsoft offers, Copilot being one of them, the office products have started to we as a company, we are primarily on Google suite of products, but we’re starting to realize how even things like Microsoft, Office, PowerPoint, Word, they’re starting to gain some real intelligence. So amazing moves of what he’s doing right now. So I think there are a lot of board members within Google who might be a little uncomfortable about some of the moves that Microsoft is making right now. Yeah.
Brett
Which is good for us consumers though, I think, right. I think we win when these companies start to compete. It’ll be good for us.
Shariq Siddiqui
Absolutely. I also think while the big companies are winning, there is definitely a need for the smaller ones. Right. So you want new entrants to come in and basically keep the big guys on their toes. So win for everyone.
Brett
Totally agree. Now let’s talk about books. Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you as a Founder and really just you as a person?
Shariq Siddiqui
That’s a tricky one because I obviously have two sites to me, one is obviously like my personal life, my family life, as a husband, as a father, and the lessons that I have as an immigrant coming to the US. So one of the books that I really enjoyed and kind of read it at a very early age was this book called Kite Runner. And I think the author is Khalid Husseini. And he’s basically just depicting a story about a young boy who is living in Afghanistan and the trials and tribulations as a child living in that environment where he’s got friendships and betrayals, his relationship with his father. There is this ethnic tension going on, and then overall, the historical events that are happening within Afghanistan.
Shariq Siddiqui
So it kind of gives you a full view of as a human being, you’re going through so many different emotions and how do you capture them. And so the book is just beautifully written and kind of like hits a nerve for me, which is the different sides of the trials and tribulation he goes through from being a kid to a grown up. So that book has a lot of interesting lessons for me and for any individual outside of that. I think one of the books that I just recently read, it’s called the startup nation. It’s about Israel and why Israel is so different than pretty much any other country out there. And I thought I was pretty fascinated by reading that book around the culture. And the book is more about how Israel became the startup nation. Right.
Shariq Siddiqui
I was really fascinated by what makes Israel so impressive when it comes to building new technology, when it comes to being on the forefront in agriculture and defense and medical equipment. So the book really just talks about it in multiple different ways with examples of how they were willing to take a leap of faith in their own people, willing to work with the world to make Israel a ground for testing new things. And so they really played to their disadvantages in a way, and turned them into advantages. So one example is, because they’re so small, they said, this is a perfect test bed for anybody to do anything. I think those type of lessons for me is like, whenever you have a disadvantage, how do you turn that disadvantage into an advantage?
Shariq Siddiqui
It is a remarkable ability for anybody to possess or to learn, right. So I think I’ve done this myself in my own personal, very small capacity. But it’s like whenever you’re down, whenever you’re disappointed, whenever you’re heartbroken, how do you harness that energy into something positive, into something that can have an impact, personal impact, society impact, any kind of impact. So I think that book talks about this concept called Chutzpah. And to summarize this, it’s basically questioning the status quo and not letting people just do things just because this is how it’s done, then you can apply that at nation level, you can apply that at a company level, and you can apply that at an individual level as well. So I think those are the things.
Shariq Siddiqui
Those are the values that I would love to install within my own company, where somebody who comes right out of college should question everything that we’re doing right. So there shouldn’t be like, just because somebody told me, my vp of engineering told me to do this, so I’m doing it. So I really love the idea of question everything, challenge everything. Just because there are people who are at a higher level, more experienced, doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily right. So I think that book is a must read for people who are trying to come up with ways on how to use what the outside world might see as a disadvantage. But how do you view that as a glass half full and turn it to your own advantage?
Brett
Yeah, startup Nation is such a great book. I read that in 2016 when I was just starting my PR firm, and no joke, I read it and I flew to Israel about two weeks later, and I built a list of every company in Israel or every startup in Israel and emailed them. Subject line, come to Israel, want to meet? And I ended up meeting with, like 20 something founders. They were very open to some random guy from California just flying out and closed some deals and had a great time. And it’s just such a fascinating culture and a fascinating country. And what they are doing in terms of tech is just wild. And all the big companies that are coming out of there, it’s really impressive.
Shariq Siddiqui
Absolutely. Yeah. I’m so impressed by what they’re doing, and they’re kind of like leader in so many different spaces at this point. And coming from the Silicon Valley and seeing how things are going in the US, I think us in so many different ways is lagging behind. I’ve never been to Israel, but I’m sure they’re very high tech. You fly out to China, you go to Shanghai, you go to Beijing, and you see things are rapidly evolving. They’re very high tech. Same for South Korea. So I think us is lagging behind in certain things, but I think the beauty of the US is it can attract the best talent and gives you a platform to do whatever you want. And that’s why I admire this country for so many reasons. Yeah, absolutely.
Brett
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Shariq Siddiqui
Sure. Yeah. And Brett, I would love to kind of give you a little bit of background here as well. So how the journey actually started. So towards the last couple of years at Amazon, there was a lot of focus around this new product called Amazon Go. I wasn’t part of the team, but I was part of the beta testing. So they were dog fooding this product with internal employees. I was fascinated by this concept that Amazon was building, which is Amazon go. Effectively, for people who do not know what Amazon go is, it’s essentially a physical store. Think of it like a 711 or a convenience store where you enter by scanning your mobile phone, a QR code on your Amazon app. So as soon as you walk in, we know who you are, or Amazon knows who you are.
Shariq Siddiqui
And so at that point, using cameras mounted on the ceiling, you can be tracked and they can watch what you’re adding to your basket or adding to grabbing items from the aisles. And then instead of going out to a cash register and paying, you just simply walk out. They actually trademarked the term just walk out. I was fascinated when this concept was internally being tested, but as a product guy, it was built several different products at Amazon. One thing that consistently bothered me with Amazon Go was scale. Right? So when Amazon does things, they’re basically looking at from a couple of different angles. Right. Number one is like, is there an opportunity to build a new product? If that’s the case, then can we turn that product into a business?
Shariq Siddiqui
And if you can turn that product into a business, can you turn it into an enterprise solution? Right. So when you’re thinking about it from that lens, I couldn’t wrap my head around how Amazon gold can be scaled into a full on enterprise solution. So primarily because of the return on investment. Right. It’s a very expensive proposition. So I thought of a different approach and I thought, wouldn’t it better if you just basically put these cameras on a shopping cart? Why a shopping cart? Because when you walk into any grocery stores or any large format stores, shopping cart is like the first thing you grab. So if you can just turn that into an IoT device, you could potentially achieve a similar end outcome, which is just walk out, but without having to having that capital expenditure to retrofit stores.
Shariq Siddiqui
So that’s where the journey started. As a previous entrepreneur working at Amazon, I constantly was just interested in new ideas, exploring ways where I can figure out a new product and then potentially even leave Amazon and do my own thing. But I would always struggle with when is the right time to leave. And working at Amazon for that long, it’s really hard. You have a really cushy job. You’re making enough money for you to just be content with everything. But it wasn’t for me about the money. It was for me. It was know, these are my golden years and I want to do something different. So that led me, know, leaving Amazon, that’s right around the time when I also got married. And so I left Amazon to build beef. And really the genesis was like, can we basically build a smart cart?
Shariq Siddiqui
That’s how the journey started in 2019. This was my first time building a hardware product, so I was really new to that. A lot of people told me that I shouldn’t get into hardware, and I can name 15,000 reasons why that’s the right thing to say. But I can also name 15,000 reasons why this could be strategically extremely valuable for you as a company as well. But just right before leaving Amazon, there were sleepless nights where I was, know, if I don’t do it, somebody else will. And so that got me the courage to leave Amazon, start this company, and in a year’s time, we launched our first product, very half baked, put it in a store, got customer feedback, and the journey started from there. And we ended up launching in some of the biggest stores, raising money and expanding the company.
Shariq Siddiqui
And now we’re looking for international expansion. Happy to dive deeper into the journey more.
Brett
So can you just talk me through what it’s like as a consumer? So let’s say I walk into the store, I have the cart. What’s happening?
Shariq Siddiqui
Yeah. So you walk in and you see these screens snapped onto shopping carts, and it just basically says you can find deals and promotions on it. And as soon as you say, let’s get started, you enter your phone number. If we know who you are through your loyalty with that retailer, then we can pull up all the coupons that you’ve clipped on your mobile app, or we can pull up your shopping list there. After that, as you place items in the cart, it’ll automatically recognize those items and create a running total. There is a ten inch touch screen that will kind of show you the journey that you’re taking, which aisle you’re in, and it’ll constantly just basically make recommendations and show you the best deals and promoted products on the screen.
Shariq Siddiqui
So the cart has the capability, using computer vision, to recognize the products that are going inside the cart. But more interestingly, it can also scan the aisles. So by scanning the aisles, it knows that you’re in the pets aisle, you’re in the beauty aisle, you’re in the chips aisle. Based on that, we can show deals near you, and that’s what allows customers to find the best deals, clip coupons, and make the average basket size bigger. When you’re done shopping, you just hit the checkout button. There is a payment reader built into the device. You just tap to pay or insert your card. As soon as you do that, there is an led light on the device that turns blue, which means the customer has paid and everything’s good, and you just simply walk out of the door.
Shariq Siddiqui
That’s a technology we built, and that was the core product offering. And since then, we’ve basically evolved into a couple of different products outside of the core, just walk out tech.
Brett
And is fraud an issue at all? I don’t know if that’s even the right word for this, but maybe theft. Are there concerns that people would maybe put something expensive under the car? Would it be detected then because it wouldn’t go through the sensors? Is that a general concern that you guys have at all?
Shariq Siddiqui
Yeah. So one thing that I’ve learned in almost five years of doing startups, but in general is like, there are opinions and then there is data. Right. And so this is a really tough conversation to have with retailers as well. So the term that’s used in the retail world is shrink, which is loss from theft. And so the way I kind of approach this problem is that you have to make some assumptions, and those assumptions are something like this. 95%, people who are walking into a grocery store are not trying to steal. Maybe a 5% or a percentage of that 5% are trying to actively steal, and there are small percentage of people who just didn’t know how to do certain things.
Shariq Siddiqui
So what you want as a product guy, and I’m a product guy at heart, so as a product person, you want to separate those two things out, which is like, let’s not build a rigid system that punishes the other 95%. So you want to build it the opposite way, where if you know, kind of applying the 80 20 rule here, then if 80% of your customers are not trying to steal, then don’t build a very rigid system. So that’s exactly what we did, which is that when our computer vision algorithms detect any kind of anomaly, then what we do is we send that video clip to an store employee. Store employees are given an employee tablet, and they can watch what the customer did inside the cart.
Shariq Siddiqui
So what we can do is we basically send a clip to the employee to see what’s happening. At that point, the employee can mark an item as audit, or they can just clear that audit. That’s how we do loss prevention. But there are so many different ways that people that we can do loss prevention. One, the best way to do loss prevention is asking the customers to identify themselves. Once they identify themselves, the chances of them trying to steal becomes drastically lower. And so that’s what most retailers are doing, which is like asking customers to log into the cart. And once you’re logged in, then you kind of have a history of how they’ve done. So kind of what works in multiple different ways. But honestly, people don’t steal as much.
Shariq Siddiqui
And think about it this way, would you rather steal from a regular session, from a regular shopping cart, or would you steal from a cart that has cameras on it?
Brett
Yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, it makes sense. I’m sure that deters someone if they’re thinking about stealing, probably don’t go to that place that has these cards.
Shariq Siddiqui
Exactly. Yeah. So people who are trying to steal, they want to remain anonymous. Right. So if you think about cars, most auto theft or thieves who are trying to steal cars, they avoid Tesla because of the number of cameras on it. So they’re trying to not go after a car that is significantly more intelligent than regular cars.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And this is added on to an existing shopping cart, is that correct? So it’s not entirely new cart.
Shariq Siddiqui
Yeah. So that actually brings kind of like the journey that we’ve gone through. So initially, we actually built a cart from the ground up. Why we did that, because what we learned is that almost 40% of transactions that happen in a grocery store, there’s at least one item that is done by weight. Right? So you’re pricing that item by weight. So think of your deli items, think of your produce, like bananas, apples, oranges. So what we wanted to do was provide retailers a complete solution where the built in scales are allowing customers to just complete their entire transaction within that card. A couple of things happened both at a micro level as well as macro level. At a macro level, Covid happened.
Shariq Siddiqui
And what Covid did is they jacked up the prices of raw material, which means that all these scale cards that were building, the cost of those cards almost went up three x. And as a startup, you have to pass on that cost back to the retailers. But the retailers weren’t willing to pay so much for these cards. So we evolved in two different ways. One is we figured out how to basically take an existing shopping cart and embed a wing scale in that. So that allowed us to reduce our cost by almost 90%. So today the carts that we’re building is like almost 10% the cost of the carts that were building back in 2020. And at the same time we created a new module. And think of this as very simple product, which is android tablet like screen.
Shariq Siddiqui
It has a massive processor and multiple cameras on it, so it can be snapped onto any shopping cart. So when you think about use cases like Sam’s Club, Costco, Home Depot, Voss, Target stores that don’t necessarily sell products by weight, for those, we basically started showcasing the new product and started gaining a lot of traction, primarily because these are much cheaper to produce. And so we can pass on those savings back to the retailers as well. So that has been the evolution of Veeve and at the same time we’ve also evolved into other products, other services that we can offer.
Shariq Siddiqui
So we’re no more a smart card company, but we’re kind of providing retail intelligence, giving retailers the ability to think of their stores like an ecommerce website where you have click stream data of who came to this website, how much time they spent on the home screen, what did they click on, what items did they add to cart, what items did they removed from cart and how much was their total checkout. All of that information is today available to clickstream. Google Analytics is another way people think about this, but where’s the Google Analytics for brick and mortar stores? And so that’s kind of like the evolution of beave, which is like we started leveraging computer vision to understand consumer behavior, started to understand your aisle traffic, the pattern at 08:00 a.m. Versus at 09:00 a.m.
Shariq Siddiqui
And by having cameras on this device, we can also scan the aisles so we can offer like out of stock inventory management as solutions. So we started just keep on building new products and services. And since we already had an in to most of these retailers, they were just delighted to just enable new services on top of the device that we.
Brett
Provide them in looking through the website and I saw a press release with Albertsons, and I’m from Southern California, so I love Albertsons. But how did you go about landing these logos and closing these deals with these massive grocers? I’m sure that’s not an easy sales cycle. It’s selling hardware, it’s selling emerging technology. So what was that sales process like?
Shariq Siddiqui
And what do you think you got.
Brett
Right to get these big organizations to give you a shot?
Shariq Siddiqui
Oh, man, you’re touching a really touchy topic here. But it’s a combination of a few things. One is you want to have a really good product or a product that people look at and they’re like, wow, that is actually solving. Not just kind of like, the way I think about products is like, I don’t want to build one trick pony, because one trick pony products is that somebody can come in and immediately offer a cheaper solution to a retailer or to any industry, and then you’re kind of, like, left in a really bad place. So I kind of think about products as like, how do we create an ecosystem? How do we create the stickiness factor? I’ll get more to. But how do you sell it?
Shariq Siddiqui
Because you don’t want to sell the vision to retailers because they don’t really care about your company’s vision. They care about their company’s vision. They care about their financials. They care about their customers. Right. So you want to position your product in a way that actually addresses their needs rather than your own vision around it. So, number one, I think you want to build a really good product. Number two, you need to have a good network so your network can come from the people you know in the retail space. LinkedIn becomes a really good friend in that case. And then when you’re raising money, one of the first things that I would ask the vcs, because usually it’s the other way, which is like vcs just asking you questions.
Shariq Siddiqui
But I would encourage a lot of the founders, which is ask these vcs, other than money, what are they bringing to the table? Right. And so I think for us, it was really important that we can build technical expertise in house. We can bring the best computer vision scientists, we can hire those people. But what we really need is access through retailers. And so that became a pretty important. So I purposely went after vcs who have previously invested in other retail startups and who’ve gained some traction and what their relationships are, or with retailers who have their VCRm going to them directly because that makes it an easy path to the Albertsons, the Krogers, the Walmarts of the world. So that was one way. But the bigger the retailer is, the longer the sales cycle is, the more people, the more stakeholders there.
Shariq Siddiqui
So identifying who is the buyer for your product becomes so critical.
Brett
Right.
Shariq Siddiqui
And I still think our strategy has evolved, and then we’ll continue to evolve, because sometimes the buyer is the store operations. Sometimes the buyer is the chief digital officer. Sometimes the buyer is the chief data officer who’s looking for data. So you really need to understand when you’re going into a company and doing the due diligence to understand who is the right buyer. And whoever you think is the right buyer may not be the right buyer. So you’re going to be knocking multiple doors within the same corporations to kind of figure out who is the right fit. Where do I pitch? And so I would literally have multiple different versions of our pitch deck for the same company, but depending on who I was talking to, right. Because I don’t need to tell them what I’ve built.
Shariq Siddiqui
I need to tell them how I will solve their problem, not their counterparts problem. That is the key.
Brett
Right.
Shariq Siddiqui
To understand that. And so for that, you need to have a really good pulse in the domain that you are operating in and also being able to do research on them, like the articles that they posted, the medium or the LinkedIn, so you can understand what are these people passionate about. So I’ll give you an example. I’m not going to quote any names, but there was a leader from a very large corporation who was basically coming in, c level executive, after spending years building their pharmacy in their pharmacy department.
Shariq Siddiqui
And so I kind of changed few things about a product and said that, hey, we can make it so simple that when you enter and you check in on the cart, if you have a pharmacy order, we can send that information to the store pharmacy that this person is now in the store, and now you can digitally communicate with them. So whenever your medicines are ready for pickup, just send a notification on the cart and they’ll come and pick it up. So he was really excited about that, right. And that’s how we got in. So it’s really trying to understand how do you identify who your buyer is within an organization? And the bigger the organization is, the more complex this process can be, and it’s painfully long.
Shariq Siddiqui
I want to talk about for the benefit of this audience, which is like, how do you take an extremely complex product and then simplify it so that your messaging becomes so much easier? For somebody where your sales cycles become shorter, one of the challenges that we experience ourselves is what we’re effectively selling is a point of sale terminal on wheels. And so when you think about the amount of different aspects of a point of sale terminal, to just give you a very simple example, a point of sale terminal can accept your phone number or your email address, so they know how to grant those reward points or clip those coupons for you.
Shariq Siddiqui
So you need to have a loyalty integration in your, you know, if you’re working with Kroger or Albertson’s or Costco or Walmart, you need to have access to those APIs or to their system. So you need to integrate with loyalty, same as you need to integrate with the catalog. What are the items that are in the store? You need to integrate with pricing engine. So pricing is usually dynamic. So we’re going to give you access to APIs that you need to integrate with their payment solution, you need to integrate with their inventory. So POS is very complex set of different services that are running under the hood.
Shariq Siddiqui
And so in order for us to gain traction with any type of a retailer, so if you think about retailers in a spectrum of the top tier retailers, to mid tier, to the end tail, all of these retailers have different needs, different desires, different systems. And so in order to integrate with all of them, it is extremely difficult, especially if you have a team of 30 engineers who are already in the middle of deployments and keeping parts live, it becomes a very daunting task. On a business side, the sales cycles are extremely long. So one thing that were able to successfully do was late in 2021. We identified that we need to do something about our sales cycle, right? How do we make our sales cycle go from like six to nine month long to six weeks or even shorter than that?
Shariq Siddiqui
So we change. And so the term in the industry is the wedge. How do you create a wedge product? And basically the core definition of a wedge product is that it is not your actual product, it is a subset of your product, which is so simple, which is so easy to understand. And you see the benefit, the ROI, immediately when you’re the buyer on the other side. So if you’re a retailer and you’re looking for technology, there are not just the process of evaluating a technology, there is a process of the internal bureaucracy, the politics that’s going on between the marketing team and the product team and the technology team. And so when you try to balance all those things out, we would hear answers like, well, it’s really interesting product. Let me think about it. Let me talk to my tech team.
Shariq Siddiqui
Let me discuss this with my store operations. And then there was just a radio silence and were just trying to, we’re scratching our heads, which is like, we’ve built such an amazing product. But what is preventing these people from taking advantage of this technology? Because this is something, know, Amazon or Instacart is offering. So we’re giving them something, a level playing field when it comes to Amazon or instacart. And then we understood the challenges isn’t that this product is not a good fit. The challenges is like, how do you get all the stakeholders involved in this for this to happen? So this usually happens at top down, which is the CEO or the CTO making a decision, and then it’s top down. But we wanted to just eliminate all of this and create a wedge product.
Shariq Siddiqui
So what we ended up doing is we decided that let’s figure out a solution where we do not have to integrate with the retailers POS systems. And that kind of opened up a lot of different opportunities by eliminating the need to do POS integration. The sales cycles just got shorter. Right. But the first question they would ask is like, well, how would you do it if you don’t know? We would show them how we do it. And then wheels would start turning in their head, which is like, oh, wow, okay, if these guys can do this, then I don’t even need to talk to my tech team because the tech team is not involved in this discussion.
Shariq Siddiqui
And if these guys are saying that these carts or these devices are fully autonomous, which means that store operations, other than having these units deployed on every cart, the store operations isn’t really doing anything. But they’re getting so much in return that makes their conversation with their counterparts a lot easier. So what became really valuable to us was to simplify our pitch, simplify the product, and create that wedge product, which requires almost no integration with the retailers. Right. And giving them an offer which is like a 30 day risk free trial, you can sign up for this contract after you’ve seen the first 30 days of result and the data we’re going to show you. So that made it a lot more palatable for retailers to say that, well, there is no harm.
Shariq Siddiqui
So we tried to move from a hardware centric product to hardware as an enabler to a SaaS offering that changed things for us in a drastic way. And we’re certainly hoping that it’ll continue to do so, even in a more positive way.
Brett
That’s amazing. And I know we only have about two minutes left here, and I want to give you a chance to answer the final question. So, to wrap things up, let’s zoom out into the future. So, three to five years from today, what’s that high level vision? What are you trying to think?
Shariq Siddiqui
You know, for beef, we consider computer vision as the nucleus of our company. And so we want to basically do what I mentioned earlier, which is like providing intelligence to retail partners. Right. And that intelligence can come from strength detection, that intelligence can come from how your customers move around the store. What are the most profitable aisles? So the device that we’ve built is effectively, you can think of this as like the Google Streetcar with cameras. So it’s scanning everything. And so the vision that I have is like, when you have the ability to have eyes, these cameras that are basically recording in cart sessions, in aisle sessions, what’s on the shelf, you can digitize all of these things.
Shariq Siddiqui
And so tomorrow, how this gets played out in AR and a VR environment, there’s a huge opportunity that we would have access to that we can build on top of it, but primarily seeing, keeping the focus on what’s the value add for the retailer. Right. How are we improving their margins? How are we improving their customer experience, the shopper experiences? And what is our product doing to bring back store traffic to these retailers? So vision being that, how do you build a platform that retailers think of it as the retail operating system, where they can plug and play into these microservices so that they can deploy other hardware, they can deploy cameras, and then they can kind of monitor how their stores are performing by just basically having access to a dashboard across multiple different retailers.
Brett
Wow. Amazing. I love it. We are up on time or over time here, so we’re going to have to wrap before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey, as you continue to build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Shariq Siddiqui
I would highly encourage. I’m very active on LinkedIn, my LinkedIn, and I can leave my LinkedIn profile with you as well. That’s primarily where I do most of my professional. Other than that, on our website, be IO, that’s where we provide all sorts of updates. Any new deployments? We’re going to be making some announcements as we go. International expansion. So that will be a great place for people to see the journey for.
Brett
Be amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share lessons about what you’re building and to really talk about your approach to bringing this amazing technology to market. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, and I know our audience is going to as well. So thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Shariq Siddiqui
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you.
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