Heuro: ‘Pivot till your succeed’
By: Dan Stein
Tags: Founder Interviews, Startup Life, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Startup

Interview with Akshay Bansal, CEO of Heuro

Interview with Akshay Bansal, CEO of Heuro

Tell us about your business. What do you do?

Heuro is the machine learning research and Development Company, we the team of researchers focuses primarily on Artificial Intelligence to develop the visionary products and help consumers and business. Our vision is to enable A.I economy for the future of abundance by democratizing A.I technology for every business.

Some of the products we have developed are Heuro — The Social Learning Super App, Ambit — Content Marketing Automation, Animation Automation — Create motion capturing file by your own motion video, Estate A.I Create 2D, 3D plans with speech or text.

What is your startup’s origin story?

When I was researching for my book, The Innovation Age, I realized that fourth industrial revolution will fundamentally change the society at every front, so I decided to participate in this industrial revolution and that’s why I started with a knowledge management app Heuro in 2018, the app ranked 76th in App store in 2018 itself, As R & D is at our core we moved into artificial intelligence and develop A.I solutions for different industries and since then we are building A.I products for business and end users.

Had you been involved in the industry before this startup? What is your background?

I am an Author, Entrepreneur and an Inventor, credited with chemical engineering and MBA. After finishing my college, I started my research on technology, economics, business, politics and society, nectar of which i gave in my book ‘The Innovation Age.’, I founded the company with first product Heuro — The Social Learning Super App, with a vision to transform the world in to more intellectual society, Heuro app ranked 76th in App Store in June 2019, I then moved in to Artificial Intelligence and started products like Ambit — Content marketing automation, Estate A.I — Technical drawing automation and Animation Automation to help the professionals by automating their mundane work.

What’s unique about your company? What are the key differentiators between you and other players?

The uniqueness comes down to the mindset of the founders, we at Heuro thinks that Artificial Intelligence will be the operating system of all the industries, so whatever A.I solution we develop, we build in a way that we can use these solutions for other industries as well, while completely focusing on the industry or problem in hands, so its like developing the solution via design thinking with customer or client in center and simultaneously build technologies which can be use for various other industries.

So we are the technology as well as core industry company, compare together players who either focus on one pole of the ecosystem technology vs problem/solution.

Take us through a day in your life. What does the typical day look like?

My day starts at 5:30 AM, with a prayer and then plug into the audio book related to self help and then I do the task which requires up-most focus and creativity, then by 8 AM I do the workout which is different every day workouts like HIT, sprint, weight training, combat training etc, then by 9 AM I do a small meditation session, by 10 i starts my work.

Work timing: 10 AM — 7 PM I start my work which includes, calling to people, meetings, researching etc.

After 7 — I meet my friends and have some idea sharing and relaxing time Then at 9 PM I read a business or tech related book.

What has been the most challenging part of growing your company?

Hiring and maintaining the best industry talent is what we think was the most challenging part; Team is the most essential part of the company.

I read in the book ‘Creativity Inc’, you give the best idea to a bad team and they will ruin the idea but even you give bad idea to the best team and they will make the idea successful, I completely agree with the statement and that’s why completely focus on hiring the people who are passionate about learning and resonate with our vision at most.

What has been your best marketing channel? What are some channels you are looking to explore next?

Content marketing/blogging and social media specially LinkedIn has been the best marketing channels so far for us and the reason is because of the age of social media community building via content gives the best ROI for example through content, you are directly connected to your audience, helps you to build community which further helps in getting new leads, maintain the existing customers and gives a compounding effect to your brand and that’s why every company must also function as the media company, We are also exploring influencer marketing, growth hacking, social media ads.

What apps do you use that you would recommend to others?

We use the following apps for our different business cases for example:

Marketing and promotion: we use social media, and apps like Facebook ads and pages

Communication: we use Whatsapp, Skype and Slack

OKR, brainstorming and idea book: we use Google doc, sheet

Hiring and recruiting: we use Google forms and Linkedin

Code Management: Github

Knowledge Management: we use Heuro.

Do you have a book, podcast, or Youtube channel you would recommend to other Entrepreneurs?

Every leader is a reader this is indeed a fact, especially in today’s business ecosystem, where only the change is inevitable because of which an average CEO reads 10–30 books per month to keep on the right track, For me reading is a life changing habit and as an entrepreneur and not living in one of the startup hubs, the only gateway for me to learn about the latest trends are books, podcasts and lectures, apart from knowledge books I want to recommend some books which has changed my mindset towards life and business:

Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail Traction by by Gabriel Weinberg Rich dad poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz Grit by Angela Duckworth Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

If you could go back in time to the day you founded your company, what advice would you give yourself?

I would definitely tell myself that your customer and their problem is what you need to focus on a lot rather than your idea alone and try to defend your idea.

For any startup, achieving the product market fit is the most important thing and don’t fall in the trap of trending technologies or your idea biases rather spend time with your core users as much as you can and discuss your idea with them and if possible develop a MVP to test your hypothesis.

Entrepreneurship is all about evolution and there is nothing like perfection in today’s accelerating business world, coming up with new solutions, validating them early and develop business around it is what modern entrepreneurship is all about.

What’s something you’ve learned from building your business that someone else can learn from?

In the age of industry 4.0, the best way to start is by learning about the exponential technologies then start with the customer problem, create ideas, develop tech stack, then focus on validating the idea to the product market fit and then scale it to the exponential business model.