EP 35 – I Consider Myself a Funnel Scientist – Kinner Sacchdev – co-Founder and CEO at Knorish

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:09
Hi, this is Michael Waitze. And welcome back to India GameChanger, if you smile at me like that I’m gonna laugh. Anyway, today we are joined by Kinner Sacchdev, a co-Founder and the CEO at Knorish. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. How are you doing?

Kinner Sacchdev 0:25
I am doing really well. Michael, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Michael Waitze 0:32
It is my pleasure completely. Before we jump into the main part of this conversation, can our listeners get a little bit of your background from you for context?

Kinner Sacchdev 0:42
Definitely. So I am a serial entrepreneur, a builder. I love technology. I like to call myself a philomath and a technophile. Heavy words, but those are the two words that really define me. People usually give their background with their education background, but I think these two words are who I am. A philomath is someone who loves learning and constant growth. technophile is somebody who loves technology and the ability to impact the world with the use of technology. Being a serial entrepreneur I ran my earlier companies in the domain of technology consulting and nourish is the venture that I lead right now as the CEO and co founder.

Michael Waitze 1:28
So I’m going to jump in and say, I love this idea of not identifying yourself from where you went to school. I really do and what you studied, because in a way, the older you get, the less it matters, and if it’s going to be meaningless is the wrong word. But if it has less meaning, and depth, as you get older, well, then let’s just get away from it as soon as possible. Because the idea of identifying yourself as a final math is a way of saying to people, I’ve learned a lot already. But there’s so much more left to learn. And in life in a way that’s so much more important. No,

Kinner Sacchdev 1:58
absolutely. But I think you have a really valid point that it’s not that important to identify with the degrees, but they do shape you. They do, I did go to one of the top schools in the UK to study my master’s in industrial and commercial biotechnology worked as a scientist. But when I defined myself, and this is such an interesting question, you know, if you introduce yourself, I mean, the impact or the connection that we will build with someone rarely is dependent on what we studied. Yeah. But it’s more about what we like to do right now and who we are as a person. So that’s where the introduction.

Michael Waitze 2:34
Yeah. And I kind of learned this when I started working in Japan back in 1990. You know, a lot of the people used to say to me, Oh, he’s American, or he’s from the United States, or he was born in California. And I would always say to them, Look, I don’t want to identify with anything except with me, I just want to be Michael. And if that’s okay with you, then that’s okay with me. Because otherwise, you’re put in this box, this defined box already, and it’s hard to get out of, but if you start outside, then it’s much easier to define yourself for other people. And it’s less likely that they’re going to think of you as x as opposed to a through z. Is that fair?

Kinner Sacchdev 3:08
Yes, absolutely. I think you’re spot on there. And Japanese are well respected for this way of thinking. And I think there’s so many things in Japan, that’s that’s a conversation for another day, another podcast, but for mentioning

Michael Waitze 3:22
that, maybe. And it’s funny, because I had this experience yesterday where I was sitting in a hotel, and I was waiting for somebody else to do another meeting. And I think you’ll appreciate this, but there were three ladies there. And they were talking about me in Japanese. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen. It was so great. Because we’re sitting in this like little confined space. And they’re like, Look at this guy over there. He’s doing this thing. He’s doing that thing, whatever it was, they don’t know that I speak Japanese. But again, this gets back to the way like how they look and define you. So I just responded to them in with the exact words that I just said to you, but in Japanese. So usually you’re the host tonight I just said like don’t want you to speak about me that way. And they were just like,

Kinner Sacchdev 4:00
oh, whoa, you’re really good with your Japanese though.

Michael Waitze 4:03
Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s not bad. But again, I wanted to engage them in a way in the same way that I wanted to engage you I wanted to change the way that they defined me and then make them think about the way they defined themselves as well because I think this is really really important in the context of the rest of our conversation No

Kinner Sacchdev 4:23
absolutely not. I think it is but you know, I hearing Your Japanese is this one thing that I’ll mention here again that go for I have a deep connection with Japan, Tommy and I worked with Rocky some you know the late Prime Minister was no longer with us but it’s our directly with his team building better relations with Indian educational institutions and the Japanese ones spend a bit of time in Tokyo love Japanese but could never get a hang of learning it’s the Kanji is with so many and it just wasn’t an easy language to master. But you know, really appreciate new kind of Being able to speak so well, I mean, I can identify the native accent that you have.

Michael Waitze 5:05
But can we can we talk about this also in the context of what you do to this idea? And I want people to understand this as well, where are you based?

Kinner Sacchdev 5:14
I am based out of Krakow, in the National Capital region of India. It’s part of the suburbs of Delhi. Okay,

Michael Waitze 5:23
interesting. Here’s the thing that a lot of people tell me about India. And I want your perspective on this, that if you go 100 miles in one direction, or 200 miles in the other direction, or 400 kilometers in another direction, that you end up with different languages, different dialects, different food, and in a way different subcultures. Is that a fair characterization? You think?

Kinner Sacchdev 5:43
It absolutely is, I think it’s not fair to call in India, just a country from the traditional perspective of how we are accustomed to look at countries go ahead. It’s almost a continent, it’s almost a continent, with, it’s like Africa, you know, Africa is, is a continent with so many different countries with languages, cultures, dances, food, everything’s so different. It’s so beautiful. India is almost like that. And I was at a Russian Embassy dinner a couple of days ago. And you know, there was a group of 40 Russian delegates learning about India, how to do better business and stuff like that. And, you know, this conversation came up that they were generalizing things based on what they were reading in the newspaper, or what few people were talking about Zack, and I wanted to highlight exactly in the same way that you know, it’s super impossible to generalize India because of disparity, the range in almost everything, you know, from economic capabilities, the income capacities to food, language, everything.

Michael Waitze 6:48
How do we get more people to know about this? Right, Africa, again, a continent with one point, something I don’t know, if it’s two or four, we can argue about that to India, the same thing, Africa 51 countries, India has its own sort of geographical setup as well. And all of its different, what’s the best way to get people to understand not just what’s happening there, but what the people on a day to day basis are doing?

Kinner Sacchdev 7:14
Great question, Michael. I’ll keep it to what I feel right. I think it’s not just about India, this topic is so close to my heart, what you just mentioned, I think the ability to synthesize data, without putting biases on it is an important ability and a skill for anyone living anywhere now. Yeah. Let me just elaborate on that. And I think you have to put India in the same context. You know, if people say that Indians are dark in complexion, you know, or, or let’s say people in Delhi, and this is a common thing in India, people of Delhi are not honest statements like these, and you, you encounter them everywhere, they, they kind of give you a certain disability in dealing with people from that certain part or handling that data set or statistics in the right way. So I would say that, don’t try to put it in any basket, the the, if you are an entrepreneur, and you want to do business within you want to understand, can I do business within India? I’m start learning about businesses in India, but don’t try and make any generalization or learning about the country itself. And, you know, so it should be contextually sharp. Yeah, why do you want to learn this piece of data or want to form this image? Are you trying to move to a certain city in India that go deep into the culture and the living conditions in that city, because if there was, let’s say, a criminal case, in the news, in one part of the country, and that Mars, your decision to move to another part of India, then you are not taking the right decision. Because, you know, being such a big country, it’s like that, but let me also turn this on its head by saying that I can’t take those generalizations. Even in the United Kingdom, you know, I did my Master’s there. And I was studying in the Northeast of England, a lot of people told me it’s unsafe, you know, there is racial discrimination, you you’re gonna have terrible time, you know, the very few Indians that and I learned this over the years that I think, any kind of data generalization for any part of the world, any country, any city, even, you know, within Newcastle upon Tyne, where I lived in, you know, did my masters, I could not make these statements, you know, I’ll have to go and make it about that particular lane, maybe even about the lane, it won’t be entirely true, while possibly have to, you know, go deeper into data analysts. So I’m sorry for such a longish answer, but this is something I really feel deeply about. I want

Michael Waitze 9:41
to share this with you as well, because this is something I was actually really lucky to learn not to know. But to learn when I was, I want to say 14 or 15 years old when I was in 10th grade. I was taking a class and I was a psychology class and my psychology teacher said to us, Don’t generalize from your own experience. and I could never stop thinking about this, right? So Person A is like this, but that may just define them. It doesn’t define whatever group with with which they’re associated. And I constantly think about this. But here’s the other thing too. Five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you and I would not have had the opportunity to speak like this, because there was no way we could have the right distribution, nor have the right equipment to be able to have this conversation. And frankly, there would have been no way for us to know each other. How does that work in the context of what you’re building?

Kinner Sacchdev 10:36
Wow, I would like to take the angle of my own liking and an understanding of the world and the way I like to live as a human being, I personally believe, with the constant evolution of humans, with the advent of technology, and whatever we see in any domain, like, if you’re a doctor, things are changing faster than ever, you know, the information about the human body, the way you can improve the living conditions treat the body, everything changes. And so is true for almost every profession. So what we need to do in such a case, where, where the speed of, everything’s changes, so fast and rapid, is that you can only stay relevant if you’re constantly learning and evolving yourself. Nourish as a word, you know, the platform that we thought of means nourish your life, your being with knowledge. So we combined two words, knowledge and nourishment, right. So that’s how, and we wanted the.com, of course, the.com, for everything that exists been taken. So that’s where we came up with the word. And if you look at the logo, it’s it’s a, it’s a skull, with wings on it, the whole idea is, that’s how you grow wigs on your mind, if you can zoom knowledge and constantly evolve, right? So that’s the, that’s the entire concept of knowledge, we could see that the real stakeholders, the owners of knowledge, in any domain are individuals, not possibly in the teaching profession. You know, somebody who’s doing really well in mathematics might not be the guy who’s actually teaching at a university or a school, or somebody who’s a Yoga expert, or a dance expert, they might not be teaching that to the world. Now, the whole concept of nourishes if we could give the power of off the entire internet, the entire ability to build a connection between people who want that kind of knowledge about what you have an expertise in. And it could go directly to them while you make a business around it, or a side hustle around it. So that’s what knowledge is centered around. That’s, that’s the idea.

Michael Waitze 12:43
So here’s the follow on to that is that having these individual people who have knowledge and want to be able to share that knowledge and allow other people to nourish that knowledge is great. I and a lot of people say that the biggest problem for a startup is funding and cashflow, and money management. And I would submit to you and I’m curious about your opinion on this, that the biggest problem for any new business is not the money per se, right? Because I started this thing, and I’m sure you started your business as well with kind of zero, right? You just have to start and get going. The biggest problem is discovery. How do people even know I’m doing this? Or am I just do I just exist in a vacuum? Because that’s what it feels like when you first start a business. It’s just you and maybe your co founder in a room somewhere saying, Okay, let’s start this thing. How do you get the rest of the world to know though is super important? And and we can argue back and forth about oh, that thing went viral? But no one’s an overnight success. Nobody, I don’t care who you are. I don’t care how big a star you are. It doesn’t happen overnight. But then how do you get people to discover you? This is the big question for me.

Kinner Sacchdev 13:50
So there are two sides to this. Before I kind of go directly and explain those sides, let me tell you the backstory of how I understood, please the importance of what you just asked me, I realized when I was running my last company, which was a consulting venture, we had about 20 people on our team, we were doing half a million kind of revenue, which is decent in this part of the world, half a million dollars. But I realized that we had hit a ceiling, we could not grow any further. Okay, if we want it to we’ll have to work harder, do things that, you know, we really didn’t think were possible unless we were able to give like a part of our lives to the business like you know, covered the ground between the work life balance and you know, sacrifice something. So I realized and learned when I started knowledge that the most important stability for an individual as an entrepreneur. And I believe for everybody almost in any kind of a business is the ability to build a funnel. The word funnel here means your channel between your prospective customer and Do you, everything happens in that journey is part of a funnel, okay. And if in the old world language, if I wanted to put it, it will be your ability to market and sell. And I’m combining these two, I’m not just saying your ability to do marketing or your ability to sell the word funnel, or the method of building a funnel combines these two, it gets the world gets your hand in front of the people, and then gets them to buy from you. And I think that’s the most important ability that everybody needs to learn. For any business, there are multiple ways to build funnels. And to just get to the point of your question that how do you as a as a business, like how knowledge are my creators, people who build content or build their businesses using our platform? How do they market? I think for both of us, the answer is to constantly evolve in terms of how we build our funnels, experiment with new funnels, improve the ones that we’ve already got.

Michael Waitze 15:53
So can you give me an example of how this would work? Right, because if I think about, if I think about a funnel itself, right, I mean, I learned about a funnel when I was a four year old, and my mother said, Please take this liquid and put it through the funnel. So it goes into this thing, and it doesn’t spill around the outside. I mean, if you really think about what a funnel is, right? It’s a thing with a big opening on the top and a really small opening at the bottom. And you want to be able to control what happens at the bottom of that funnel, because that’s how you can assure that it’s going to go into the bottle or the cup or the glass into which you want to put it. So can we get a couple of like real life examples about how this works out pouring something in? And actually even deciding beforehand? What do I pour into the funnel? How big should that funnel be? What should the output be, if that makes sense?

Kinner Sacchdev 16:36
Definitely. At 98 is the year when a guy called Elmo us coined the word, right, he understood that every business needs one, right? So and you’re so right, it’s like that, that device that where you pour the liquid in, it goes in. But let me tell you a better example of a funnel before I go in and, you know, explain it further. So think about a restaurant, you know, like a takeover joint or something somewhere. Now, if they’ve just opened the steak of a joint in a small city, and if they want more people to come and buy food from them, you know, and maybe they’ve stopped sandwiches inside the store as well inside the restaurant, they could build a funnel by district computing flyers, that’s one type of funnel. In the old world, they’ll get higher a few university graduates interns, send them to maybe where people hang out, you know, on a busy street or outside the university or wherever they believe people could come in 1000, people are going to look at the flyers out of 1000, maybe 20 will walk into the store, right? Because almost 500 are not going to even possibly just read it deeply, they’ll just throw the flyer on the first line, they’ll decide they don’t want to eat any sandwiches or want to explore any new restaurants. And that’s why the word funnel to begin with you wanting to target 1000 people, the top of the funnel is 1000 that you hit with your flyers. Bottom is just about 20 that walk into the store. Now out of those 20, you can still consider maybe only 15 are going to buy the sandwiches in the other five will come in and say you know what I like eating Chinese. So that’s where the, you know, the entire effect or the definition of the funnel comes in. That’s why it’s the same device, putting large amounts of liquid on the top to capture traffic and then converting a few you know, that’s that’s where the example comes from.

Michael Waitze 18:34
So I get the sense that you didn’t choose the number of 1000 nor the number 20 accidentally. Right. And I’ve been and I’m curious about your perspective on this. The longer I do business, the more I realized I figured that kind of every conversion rate, because that’s what you’re talking about is conversion rates, right? It’s somewhere between conversion rates. I’m going to talk I’m going to say somewhere between two and two and a half percent and like 20 over 1000. If my math is right, it’s 2%. Exactly. Is this the same in your experience? Or did you just pull that number out of thin air?

Kinner Sacchdev 19:05
No, it is it is. It’s an average number that you can expect most of the common products that you see around you, right. But let’s say if we wanted to go super niche, like let’s say, if I was selling a pen that could write in seven colors. Yeah. And I wanted to sell it for a price that’s like way out of the market pricing. And then we look looking at maybe a very different number of conversion, maybe a lower conversion rate, right. Unless our targeting by targeting I mean, if I could find a way to put writing lovers or people who like to collect instruments of writing, you know, and I could only talk to those 1000 Then maybe I can take it much higher, but it’s a science. It’s almost I like to call myself a funnel scientist and it gets so frustrating at times, you know, my wife and my team members. I sometimes somebody was trying to do Eat, again in his life right in the team. And I said, You got to build this funnel, right? And he was like, come on. I mean, you can’t use the funnel here, the word funnel can’t apply here. And I was like, it is a funnel, I mean, you’re going to, you know, find or list 15 prospects, and then maybe go out on a date with 123, right? I mean, it is a funnel at the end of the day. And that’s how the journey of that’s how the journey of life starts. I mean, a single sperm goes and finds an egg, right? That’s how the genesis of life happened. But before the single sperm is there, there are 1000s. And then this single one is the one that gets successful. Everything in life is a funnel. And I know it’s going too far. But I really believe

Michael Waitze 20:45
that so I was just thinking like one of my one of my bosses used to say, like, you know, if to marry the first person you dance with, and the whole idea there is, are you creating a funnel that’s big enough to understand who is most compatible with you for what’s meant to be the rest of your life? We can argue about that later. But the point is that, actually, everything is a funnel. But the other the flip side of that is everything’s that conversion rate. And I think if you’re not thinking about that properly, then you’re probably not going to run a decent size business, because it means you completely misunderstand. And I love how you said this earlier. Like, if I could find a way, which is my second choice already, for the title of this episode. The real one is I consider myself a funnel scientist, because I think that has to be the the title of this episode. How does technology help you find that way? Do you know what I mean to target the right people? Because I think that’s got to be key to building the right funnel and then getting the right conversion rate to come out of that funnel so that your business can actually grow properly. Because that’s what you’re doing. Right? I mean, this is what nurses I think trying to accomplish is building the tech to allow me to find the right people, or most of the right people, and then drilling down into getting them to pop out the bottom end of the funnel. So they actually convert is that fair?

Kinner Sacchdev 21:57
Let me yes, it’s, it’s it’s some…

Michael Waitze 22:00
But tell me where I’m wrong. I’m not always right. Yeah.

Kinner Sacchdev 22:03
Yeah, no, this right. But let me just elaborate this a little bit loose. The whole point of nourish is that when I look at people, the first problem that they face is they don’t even know the concept of follow, really, and you will be surprised, you will be surprised, or almost every second or third entrepreneur is is trying to figure out how to market right. I mean, only, I think the numbers would be much different. If we were to really look at data, I think it’s going to be a very small percentage that really understands that the right funnels need to be built if you want to crack, even fundraising getting to customers. So the first problem we want to address is we want to introduce people to the most customer friendly, the UI UX, everything helps there to give you a solution, which will tell you if you are this, if you teach mathematics, or you are a culinary expert, this is the kind of funnel you should be building. So the step by step to build that funnel, and every part of the journey like to build a funnel, you’re going to need to write your content, you know, you will need to build the right landing page, or have the right kind of advertisement all the social post if you’re trying to grow it organically. So we try and solve every piece of this funnel problem for them. But they have to build the funnel. And they have to find out what traffic source is going to be the best one for that. Because we let people build white labeled academies by white labeled academies or white label platforms. I mean, if you were launching something, you put it in your name. So I don’t have a marketplace. Amazon offers you a follow up to sell your product. Shopify says, Build Your Own funnel, use everything that you need to build that, you know, on my infrastructure. Right. So that’s the distinction there we are like the Shopify. So what’s the

Michael Waitze 23:50
reason why you don’t have your own academies? I can answer it for myself. But I’m curious what your thought processes on this that one of the biggest problems with Amazon, and Shopify doesn’t do this. I’m gonna put it in quotes yet. One of the biggest problems with Amazon is if they see something successful happening, they’ll just white label their product and run you out of business. It doesn’t sound like that’s something you’re even remotely interested in doing. Shopify, on the other hand, doesn’t do that. They want this really vibrant community of sellers on there, have ecommerce providers and ecommerce sellers on their platform. And they are indifferent about selling anything at all. Like I wonder sometimes why there’s not a Spotify marketplace, I mean, Shopify marketplace, but they’ve just made this kind of value judgment of we’d rather build a place where you can build a store and not compete with you. Are you having the same thought process?

Kinner Sacchdev 24:38
I have. I personally believe I think it’s really important to have both Amazon and Shopify in the game. Okay. I’ll tell you why. I tell me I classify sellers especially the content sellers and knowledge sellers, you know, people who are in the business of knowledge commerce, the big difference between Shopify and our target audience or people who use is that you Shopify, people are using it to sell goods, merchandise, physical products, right? On knowledge. And like I explained the word you sell knowledge, you’re basically monetizing your knowledge. And I really think why it is important for people to understand the four stages have different creators and the world changes from a seller to a creator, right? Because it’s Shopify, you can plainly call everybody on Shopify, opening a Shopify store as a seller. Here, it’s called a creator, because you will create your content. The stage zero and stage one creators are people who are still trying to figure out what is it going to be the channel, the way to build the means to get past 100 customers or first 500 customers, that’s the big challenge they’re going after. It’s the same problem for Shopify as well. But your content creator has a big task in front of them that they can’t do drop shipping or buy something from somewhere else and resell somewhere else. They have to be the creator of the product. They are the switches their knowledge, they are the thing yesterday, they are the product, right? You’re absolutely right in saying that no, when they are the thing, they need an easy access to market to just crack their first 100 or 500. So I’m just going to be honest here that Amazon in the seller’s world does that bit right, when you’re just starting out with your product and trying to figure out a product market fit? or understanding does anyone actually want what I’m selling? An Amazon just helps you get over that piece quickly. But any smart seller on Amazon understands that they need to own a Shopify store, because that’s how they own up the audience. That’s how they will cross sell, trip, sell down sell. And there are so many other things where you build a community of people who buy again and again from right, you need a Shopify store for that.

Michael Waitze 26:53
Let’s say somebody feels like they have some knowledge that has value. And they want to sell that knowledge, right? They want to create their own academy. But I want to create the podcast Academy. So what are the steps that I have to go through to do that? Because I feel like I’m super good at that. Right? I feel like I can teach people. But how do I do that using Norrish?

Kinner Sacchdev 27:15
Sure. So the first thing you’ve got to figure out in there, there are steps to do this, that there are six or seven steps, the first thing you’ve got to do is figure out a micro niche. Now you already have that now, you if you were to go and say something very generic, like I’m a, I’m a fitness instructor, you’re going to compete heads on with everybody else who’s saying the exact same thing. But let’s say you said, I’m a fitness instructor for under 60, or like people above the age of 60. Now you build an easy, sharp entry point for yourself, right? So you figured that out, you need to be crystal clear on that. And you should love the domain, because you have to create a lot of content in and around it, right buy in, I mean, you’ll have to put in some meat for people to be able to learn from you. And then around it means that you will have to constantly create good social media post advertisements, or whatever the method of you reaching out to the traffic in your funnel, how will you build the traffic and traffic is going to be based on the content that you’ll be able to put out there. So I think these two are the two most important starting points. And then I think everything kind of takes care of itself from there on because the platform gives the UI or knowledge where it asks you as a first thing now, if you figured out what the niche is, go and announce your first either a webinar, so you can go live on the day one and or decide today that you know what I want to launch a webinar funnel. And when you will be doing that webinar, let’s say it’s a month later, right? That’s the time your content will automatically be created, because you’re doing it in a good production quality, and you’re recording this. So you can start selling the tickets to the webinar as the step one, and then have everything after that recorded at the time of the webinar or in a studio. I mean, it’s completely up to you. That’s all of that can be figured out. The next step would be for you to be able to figure out how do I drive traffic to this now, like I have a content piece. So you’re teaching podcasts or how to create podcasts. Maybe you have a video, a webinar or a small booklet, creating content is the easy bit and the platform lets you do that you’ve figured out because I can see you’re already good at that. To drive traffic, you will have just dive on to some channels where your audiences hang out. And I think that’s, to me is the most important thing. You have to figure out that if you’re teaching people who want to create podcasts or entrepreneurs or let’s say they are people who are in the media business, you’ll have to figure out about forums, social media groups, on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever they exist, and then try and find a way to get your messages across them. We have so recently announced an AI integration that we are building on top of DaVinci three model in, you know in the Nordic model builder, so you could Ask the AI writer social post about me announcing my podcasting course. But that message that AI is going to help you write will have to go to the right target audience. And you’ll have to define decide on that, and find a way to reach out to them.

Michael Waitze 30:14
So this brings up a really important sort of conundrum for me. If everybody has access to artificial intelligence services, right, if everybody has access to the Da Vinci model, and can ask the artificial intelligence to build content for them, how does then one differentiate the content that they’re generating? If everybody has access to the same source of content generation, right, because if you look at the way, these models create content, they’re so powerful, and they’re so fast, and they save so much time and energy. And yet, at the end of the day, if my prompt is similar to your prompt, and we’re doing it the same way, the output could be the same. Now there are ways to make it different. But how does that work?

Kinner Sacchdev 31:04
AI is like a collaborator or an assistant, it’s not, you would never depend on writing an important piece of email on your assistant, if it’s if your funding depended on it, you know, or let’s say your major communication with the, with your next collaborator dependent on it. And that’s how you’ll have to treat AI. It can give you ideas, it can do a lot of research prompts, or the recipes that you ask questions around, are the key to getting the best answer the way we use. And the way we have a building this model, or we built it within our platform is we give you a sample of 20 prompts that you could design and evolve based on your need case, right? Let’s say you’re doing a social media post announcing your course on time management, or podcasting, there are about 20 different ways that you could ask the AI to design this social media post. And I think the entire ability for you to differentiate your content from somebody else is in that prompt. In my prompts. I also bake in my thoughts. So let’s say I’m doing a post on. Like, I’ll give you an example for from two weeks ago, I did a post on LinkedIn on how my team member team members went for an ice skating, you know, let’s say outing for a day, and how this was one of the best team building activities that we could have planned. So when we were when I was writing first with a few photographs, I actually gave the rough ideas sketch of what I believe, was the real strength of this exercise. And then I asked the model to improve on it and give me a few more thoughts around it. It gave me seven parts because I asked it for seven, I picked two of those, and again asked it, you know, improve these based on this outlook. Like if I’m thinking of inspiring people. So the more you talk to it, the better it gets, right and look at it, it’s completely original, because the ice skating trip was my trip, like I went there, I already could see three, four or five benefits of doing this, you know, the ability for people to have that aha moment that, you know, we were, we were stumbling on ice a minute or two. And 90 minutes later, we would lighting. So this in itself is such a great lesson. And I told the AI to write me something around that right. And, and the problem is get better if you learn this. And I think it’s a super essential skill going forward. It’s just like, I think this is the key to us collaborating with AI, you know, in a good way.

Michael Waitze 33:36
But how do you think the knowledge of technology differentiates people from people that don’t understand how to use it? Right, and we can talk about me personally. So I’ve been using tech for 30 something years, but there are plenty of people with whom I interact in that are my age that have no idea they wouldn’t even know how to use their own cell phone. Right? How important is it for people become technologically literate and not just AI literate, but technologically literate at its core? Are those people going to get left behind? Because they’ll never understand how to use all these new tools? Yes.

Kinner Sacchdev 34:07
No, it’s so it’s a great question a lot about it. And I’ll quote and I’ll quote an experience from my time at the University in UK, I was working as a scientist and we would just do lab mates. Okay, me and a Chinese friend Vung Tau. You know, I still fondly remember him. We keep talking. And I could see the difference in our approaches to technology in that time, and which gives me an insight into answering your question. So we were part of a laboratory with like, amazing equipment around robotics and molecular biology. You know, they were robots that could do things for you. My hobby, and my take on everything that was around us was I wanted to go to the next machine on day three, day five and Vung Tau would hold me and say no, let’s just master this single technique for neck For months, and then we will try the next one. There’s nothing wrong in both of these approaches, right? But let me tell you, what prompted me to do that was my curiosity. And a thought at the back of my mind that I think understanding this new machine gives me powers just like that Iron Man suit, you know, you put more and more powers into it. The more I knew, the more I experimented with these new machines and these new technologies, the more things I could enable into. So this, I think, is the code to anyone learning more about technology, if you’re talking to someone who doesn’t understand it, they’ll have to look at it as a power. Every time you learn a new piece of technology, you figure out a new gadget, you add capacity capability to your own human frame. And key is not being intimidated by it, but instead being playful and curious about what is the power that it gives you. I think that’s where most of the people kind of fall through. And I blame our education, traditional education systems a lot for it, because you know, failure is punished. And I think it just the older the education system, I think the education systems been the new curriculums and educational frameworks have been trying to improve this, they’ve been trying to reward failure or telling people that, okay, you’ve just found a new way of not doing this. But I think that’s what blocks a lot of people from the older generations to experiment with new stuff, because they know they’re gonna fail 345 times, you know, and that’s, that’s what stops it.

Michael Waitze 36:35
So I think everybody should live using the scientific method, which says, come up with a hypothesis, experiment, fail, iterate, and just keep doing this over and over again. And that means that failure should not be punished, but should be celebrated in the right way. The right in other words, constantly failing is not necessarily a great thing. But failure into learning is really the only way to properly learn. If you were at the original origin of becoming like a medical doctor, which even back when it was first invented. I don’t even know when that would be. But if you were just like 20 years into that, you’d have to think about how do I use these skills properly, of being able to open up a human body and understand all the functionality inside of them? And then what are the values that I attached to those skills that I have? And then how should I properly use those skills. And I’m thinking about this because I met two people, Laura Ludvig and Yash, Dawson, who run this thing called museum for values, and you just made me think about this. We’re only kind of 20 or 30 years into this idea that everybody has access to all this technology. And if you think about everybody having access to being a doctor being able to do surgery, you’d have to have some rules around it. One of the things that they introduced to me was, what is the Hippocratic oath for these technological powers that you just talked about? Right? Because everybody has them? And should we have you know what the Hippocratic Oath is? Right? So my brother’s a neurosurgeon, operates on people’s spines operates on people’s brains, but when you’re in there, you can’t just do whatever you want, you have to operate in a way that’s beneficial to the patient, right? Should Do we need these type of values and ethics around the way we use technology as well. You know what I mean?

Kinner Sacchdev 38:22
Well, I have a really boring answer for this. And I don’t know if you’re gonna like it, but the way my mind thinks, and I have, I call it the circle of influence. You know, Stephen R. Covey, in his famous book, Seven Habits spoke about it. So the Circle of Influence defines and focuses your thoughts around things that you can change, and you need to have an intervention. And you know, I personally, I have a lot of thoughts around this, but the way I operate in my life, a lot of people come and ask me, What do you think about the pollution? In Delhi? Right. So I just tell them that it’s not a problem I’m focusing my mind towards right now. And honestly, it’s it gets that focus that I, I don’t read newspapers, you know, I have the ability to focus on a certain type of a research in a domain and go a mile deep. Yeah. Why? Because I’m not cluttering my mind with things that I don’t want to be a part of. So I tell them a lot of times that, you know, it’s a policymakers game. I don’t give a lot of thought, what should be the framework? And I think the best that I will be able to tell you there is that I think, the problem in front of us right now. You know, there’s so many pieces of technology that we need to figure out. I’m also cognizant of the of the bad side of what you just said when the frameworks lack which also are societal frameworks like India, my prediction is going to be one of the largest cybercrime affected country in the coming few years. And I have solid reasons to back that up. But again, I haven’t gone deep into it, and it’s the other side of what you just asked because there are not good frameworks available around, you know, how people are going to be utilizing or what are the boundaries. But I think the way I operate in the, the role that I have to play in this is that if I’m given a car, I, as a scientist as a hacker of funnels, and as an entrepreneur, my job is to find the best way to make the best car that gives you the best mileage gets you faster to your destination without any accidents and keeps getting better. And I think that’s the problem I like to focus on.

Michael Waitze 40:30
Okay, I think that’s the best way to end this. Kinner Sacchdev, a co-Founder and the CEO of Knorish. That was awesome. We not only have to have you back, but I’d love to have a couple of the creators on your platform come and talk to us so we can understand how they’re using it and get a better understanding of that on a granular level. Is that cool?

Kinner Sacchdev 40:48
No, absolutely, absolutely. So I would love to do that. I mean, there are so many interesting creators in almost 600 domains, you know, so people who are teaching space science to how do you make money rocket satellites, to somebody who can bake food. There’s almost everything on the platform. So we’d love to do that.

Michael Waitze 41:13
Thank you again for doing that.

Kinner Sacchdev 41:15
Wonderful.

 

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