Yash from Momentum (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for the show, where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches, conquering churn, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Don Bosco, founder at Bhuman .ai.
They are a powerful platform that can help you create a digital version of yourself. And we're excited to hear their story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up. Grab your headphones and get ready to dive into the world of SaaS. Hey, Don, thank you for joining in. How are you doing today?
Don Bosco (00:42)
Hey Yash, doing really great. Thank you for having me.
Yash from Momentum (00:45)
Awesome. So I want to start by understanding a little bit about you, a little bit about Bhuman if you can share a little bit about what you've been doing before you Bhuman and what is Bhuman
Don Bosco (00:55)
Sure. Yeah, I mean, you know, growing up, I was one of those kids who was, you know, always running a business, right? So ever since I was 10, 11 years old, I always had something going on, trying to find out how to make money online. And, you know, that went on into high school and then eventually, you know, into university, I realized that, well, you know, I don't want to go and work for a big bank where I was studying finance.
So I decided one day at 19th to drop out and to burn my ships at the shores, as they say, and to basically figure it out. So tried 10 different businesses, 9 failed, but the one that actually did work was a lead generation agency. So I ran that for a few years, basically reaching out to typically be Fortune 500 executives, directors, trying to get them in meetings with my clients, right? So basically doing a ton of outreach, a ton of cold email, cold LinkedIn messages, you name it.
And as I did that and no matter how good your copy was and how good your offer was, I saw that there was a trend over time where it just became less and less effective no matter what you did. And the reality for that was because people are just so saturated. So I thought, OK, I need a way to cut through the noise. And I realized, like, Yash, if we were both walking down the street here and I see you and I'm like, Yash, from Momentum, how's it going? If I can just have...
Two seconds, same time. I got something really interesting. You're gonna wanna hear this, right? And I look you in the eyes and I'm right there in front of you. You would say, okay, sure, what's up, right? But if you get an email with that exact same text, it's gonna be archived in two seconds because you don't have the time, right? And the difference in those scenarios is human connection. So that's really what I realized is that outreach is missing human connection. And so I realized that video is really, really great medium to basically scale that human connection because...
you can get a video from me where I'm saying your first name, I'm looking at you, I'm talking about momentum, maybe I'm on your site, I'm sharing my screen, and we're recreating that sense of a human connection. So I started to play with video, this is going back like four or 5 years ago now. I've realized it worked super well, but it just wasn't scalable, right? You can't sit there recording 300 videos in a day and you can't hire actors to do it, the economics just don't make sense, right? So that's when I started to think about, okay,
how can we scale this with technology? So it's going back four something years ago and that's really started me down this path of face cloning and voice cloning and essentially really human cloning as a concept.
Yash from Momentum (03:24)
And that is your attempt, that is the Bhuman .ai is it.
you, is that the problem that you are trying to solve with Bhuman?
Don Bosco (03:32)
So yeah, Bim and AI, it really tackles two problems. So the first is we have an app called AI Studio, which is all about video outreach, personalized video outreach. So if you're an e -commerce store and someone comes in your site but abandons cart, okay, boom, within one minute, send them a video message that says, Yash, how's it going? I saw you're looking at the green shirt, you didn't check out, wanted to see if you had any questions, right? Again, that's all generated, automated, but you think it was filmed just for you. And of course you can do that across a variety of industries. So.
That's really where we come from, our main product, our bread and butter. Although what has been really taking off lately is our product called Persona, which basically takes it all one step further to say, okay, you know, we know how to have async communication, meaning I send you a video later in time, one hour later, let's say you open the video, you watch it, you reply to me, okay, great, that's a successful human interaction. But how about a synchronous human interaction? So as it's...
in our call right now, we're having this conversation, right? We're having this real -time conversation. Can we recreate a human in that environment as well? So that's where Persona comes in, where we're cloning your face, your voice. You can do real -time video chats with a clone, or you can send your clone to go talk to customers for you. But we're also cloning your knowledge, what you know, some sort of sense of your personality, the kind of words that you're going to choose, even down to what kind of filler words you use. So,
you know, like I just said, you know, right? That's considered a filler word. And you look at, okay, in your natural speech, what kind of filler words do you use and how can you recreate that? So personas really are a path to emulate a human on a digital environment in all the ways possible. So, you know, it can do things like reply to emails for you, manage your inbox, of course, sit on your site, talk to literally thousands of people a day, as well as...
Yash from Momentum (05:02)
Yeah.
Don Bosco (05:25)
This is early, but we've also given it access to a browser so it can actually see things in a browser, go click around, do stuff. So you can give it a task and it'll attempt to complete it on a browser just as a human would use a computer. So I would say those are the two main products, you know, AI Studio where we started and Persona, you know, where we're headed.
Yash from Momentum (05:36)
Huh.
Wow, that's amazing. I actually saw a tweet by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn who created a digital version of himself called Reid AI. And he was just having a conversation with himself, trying to ask questions to his own digital avatar and trying to figure out whether that avatar is good enough. And he put it up on LinkedIn, saw the whole video.
about halfway down, you don't really know which one is real. And that's really interesting. So that's a very interesting direction where we're headed. Another theme that I've noticed, having interviewed a lot of SaaS founders, is that a significant part of SaaS founders, significant number of SaaS founders, were agency founders first, which is where they realized a problem statement. So they were running an agency. They were doing work for their clients.
and then identified a problem that was recurring for either their clients or themselves, and then figured out a product to sort of fix that. I think you have, you are a business developer, you come from a business development background. So talk to us a little bit about the challenges that you faced in building Bhuman, which is where you were running a lead gen agency, which is sort of into marketing / sales.
Don Bosco (07:00)
Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (07:06)
part, you yourself come from a business development background, and then building an AI product. Could you talk a little about challenges that you faced as an agency founder moving to SaaS, and also as a non -tech founder building a tech company that's also on the forefront of AI?
Don Bosco (07:22)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, first, I think it's a really great point you make. I haven't thought about that before. All the agency founders who go into the product side of the business, but it really does make a lot of sense because as an agency, you know, you are basically responsible for, I mean, look, the business, your client problems become your problems, right? And you're doing that for 20 businesses at a time. And you're doing that over the course of 5, 10 years. And you really just do gain this massive amount of experience and you see these patterns, right? So.
I think it does make a lot of sense that agency founders do move into, okay, how can I make this scalable system to solve this problem that I see every single client that I have? And certainly that was for my case as well. I would say just starting out, what's that expression? The fool is the precursor to the master, right? So you have to accept that you will be the fool, right? You will go in not knowing anything.
But the quickest way to get started is just to simply get started. Right. So, you know, in my case, you know, it just started with a ton of research. I didn't really know much, you know, a little bit about the technology side, but not that much. And you're going to have to accept that you're going to be wasting. Well, I wouldn't say wasting, but you're going to get burns when it comes to time, money, resources, just trying the wrong things, right. From simply, you know, working with the wrong developers, because you don't know what to look for when you're just starting out to.
you know, using the wrong infrastructure and the wrong languages, the wrong architecture. But I think that, you know, it's, you can very quickly learn and get a sense for the patterns, right? So like personally, I'm, I do write a little bit of code now, but not too much, certainly not anything, you know, production ready, just sort of prototyping. But still, you know, I can get a sense when I'm talking to a candidate for a new position for an engineer to say,
to understand, okay, this guy or girl really knows their stuff, right? And they're on the cutting edge or this person is kind of just clocking in the 9 to 5. They just want to paycheck, right? And you can really see the difference in code quality, for example. So you do learn just a school of hard knocks, you'll get there. One thing that, you know, if you're building a more cutting edge tech kind of company as we are, one thing I really highly recommend that I did very early on, which was great, was working with a lot of researchers.
So going into academia, which typically I'm not a big fan of, but going into academia and really, you know, one thing that's great about researchers, they're super passionate about what they're building, right? They're not necessarily in it just for making money out of it one day, right? It's really about the process for them. So they are more than happy to sit down with you for hours and, you know, pick their brain about, you know, what they're doing, the implications.
how it could be implemented, let's say. So I've talked to as many researchers, that was very important for me. And also it's a small world. So one researcher knows another who knows a professor who knows a developer, right? So it's really important also to start to build a network. But yeah, basically my number one advice is just dive in, accept that you're going to get burned, to lose some time, lose some money, but that's just part of the process.
Yash from Momentum (10:25)
So like a separate budget for that you just earmarked saying that this is my cost of learning, something to that effect. This is going to happen and that's okay. Yeah, and by the way, so researchers are some of the most patient people I have ever met. And they just...
Don Bosco (10:34)
Yeah, that's your university degree right there. That's your tuition.
Yash from Momentum (10:49)
So they sit down with you, they listen to you, they ask you the questions, they talk about the work that they are doing and this is so true that you say. The other reason, the other thing that I also want to point out is because we started Clientjoy
essentially before, like so after running an agency. So we ourselves also, we were an IT agency and then started ClientJoy, which is a SaaS product which helped agencies and freelancers grow their business and manage their clients. So it's a very similar story with us as well. Ran that for about four years. Earlier this year, we got acquired. And so that was an interesting journey as well. The other question that I want to ask you is, can you,
give us a stock of where Bhuman is today. So what size and scale, how many customers, what revenue. I mean, depending on where the companies, you may choose to share certain numbers. You may choose to share, not to share some others. But something that the listeners or people who are watching this, who can associate that this is the scale that Bhuman is.
Don Bosco (11:40)
Mm -hmm.
Sure, absolutely. I would say that we're at the stage of our journey now where we're really maturing as a platform and as a company. So we're at about 170 ,000 users on the platform to date. We've worked with enterprises from Philips to Palo Alto Networks, P &G, that sort of sphere, as well as some governments as well.
And all that to say, we're still early, of course. But I think that we're starting to get to the point where we've been through the fire when it comes to processes and when it comes to the robustness of the platform, making sure that it's really both free and very clear. And there's tons of documentation and all that good stuff. And integrations and connections. We've had.
We've been around the block, I would say. So we've gotten a lot of, we've been through a lot of hard times, right? And that's really strengthened us. But we're still early. I would say that we still haven't really hit our scale point yet. Our goal, by the way, is to clone 1 billion people by 2030. We're at a couple million now, around roughly 8 million clones. So you look at...
Yash from Momentum (12:57)
Wow.
Don Bosco (13:05)
that towards our world of 1 billion. It's a long way to go, right? So we're, I would say we're still in our infancy, although we're, we're more like a toddler now than a newborn infant that, you know, can get dropped and die really quickly. Yeah, we're also, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And we're also fortunate to have a VC back. So have some great, you know, partners on the investor side, you know,
Yash from Momentum (13:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, sure. So you So 99 more percent to go. Yeah.
Don Bosco (13:31)
for our next round soon. But yeah, we're learning to walk, but we are walking. We have started walking, you know what I mean? Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (13:37)
Nice. Nice, huh? No, that's interesting. And so one of the things that another guest said that very resonated with me was that as an organization grows, any fold, it has to sort of reinvent itself. And I'm sure going from one customer to 10, to 100, to ,1000, to 10 ,000, and currently at 170 ,000, you had to.
face different challenges, solve different problems. And can you talk a little bit about the challenges? You've already spoken about the challenges that you had when you were building out the first MVP or the first version. Can you talk a little bit about the challenges that you faced while you were scaling? It could be from a customer acquisition standpoint, could be from a technology standpoint. Give us a taste of some challenges that you faced.
Don Bosco (14:21)
Anyway.
Yeah. Well, in the early days, especially, we were fortunate enough to be a PLG company. We had just tons and tons of organic traffic. We didn't run any ads. Although I think that may have been a double -edged sword, which we can get to later. But coming back to your question, customer acquisition really wasn't the challenge. It was scaling. So all this big influx of traffic, which means not just load on servers, which these days is usually not a big issue because things
auto scale, but more like stress on processes. So we were a small team, 15 or so people, and in case something goes wrong, there's a bug or someone doesn't understand anything. And so that's going to now times that by 10 ,000 people online at the same time as it was in some points. And now think about, OK, the stress that puts on your processes and now developing new features.
why you're trying to plug holes and fix bugs. And so I think in the early days, especially it was as we were first seeing that initial growth and scale, it was really like building the product as people were using it and improving as people were using it. Cause we were never ready. You're never ready for traffic, right? You're things as you go and duct taping things and coming back later and then putting a bolt there. So we definitely had our growing pains and we've...
Yash from Momentum (15:35)
Yeah. For sure.
Don Bosco (15:43)
certainly haven't made every single customer under the sun happy in those early days because of those growing pains, but it was the fast track to making sure the platform is great as it is today and for the most part bug free and really tight. So again, it's just one of those things that it's just the fee you pay. You know what I mean? Like you can do it the slow way or the fast way, right? And we were kind of forced to do it the fast way because of all the traffic.
Yash from Momentum (16:03)
Haha.
Yeah.
Don Bosco (16:09)
But yeah, that was probably our next bigger challenge after we got the traffic was, okay, making sure that we were helping customers effectively at scale.
Yash from Momentum (16:17)
Understood. And so that's the double edged sword that you were talking about, is it? Where, yeah.
Don Bosco (16:22)
Well, actually the double edged sword is like, okay, now what's, you know, it's something we've only really realized in the past couple of months, cause we're getting all this traffic. We were going like crazy. It's like, this is great, right? This is, we couldn't ask for a better scenario. You're not paying a cent for this traffic, but now looking back, you're like, okay, well, we spent a lot of time, not only servicing that traffic, but also building features that traffic wants and wanted. But it was that intentional traffic. So just for example, right. We work in.
Yash from Momentum (16:33)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Don Bosco (16:52)
17 different industries, right? So we're kind of a very broadly focused company. We focus more on like assisting people in a function, which is like sales and marketing rather than focusing on specific industry. And so, you know, as a result, you know, we were getting people from everywhere, right? From a politician who wants to send videos to personalized videos, his voter base to an auto dealership, right? So we had to take on a very
sort of a broad approach in terms of guiding people through the process and the platform. Whereas if it would have focused on a very specific niche, let's say real estate agents or let's say e -commerce companies, right? It could have been a much more specific and guided flow, just as a small example. So that's something that we're more cognizant of now is, okay, it's not just how can we fill the platform with as much traffic as possible, but how can we fill it with the right traffic, right?
Yash from Momentum (17:47)
Yeah. Yeah. And so that brings me sort of to my next question as well. So most products that are most SaaS products that are built, they have multiple use cases for different industries. And at an early stage, a founder typically would focus on a particular niche and then just go after it, position it for them, write content for them, do a GTM activity specifically for a particular niche.
Given that you are at about 170 ,000 customers and you've been through that journey, how do you look at it in hindsight? At what point of time? I mean, it's always advisable to niche down in early stages, but then at what point of time do you change gears and say, okay.
I've hit this metric or this event has occurred with my organization and now is a good time for us to explore adjacent markets or now is a good time to pick up the second use case or the third use case or 5 more use cases. So what are your thoughts on that? If you can share a little bit on that.
Don Bosco (18:47)
Yeah, well, I would say that that's probably has been for us the the biggest challenge, I would say, because it's also one of those things that are again, it's a bit it's kind of like disguised and a good thing is a challenge, right? So disguised and all that traffic and
opportunities left and right and this agency's reaching out with they're working with this big celebrity and they want to do this video. All these distractions are coming in right and the thing is you don't realize in the beginning are these opportunities or distractions and sometimes they can be both. And so those I think like what you said is very important like there's this opportunity cost to say okay I need to let these things go so I can focus on that niche. Now where it becomes very difficult is you don't know which niche is going to be the right niche right? You can just
Yash from Momentum (19:31)
Yep.
Don Bosco (19:33)
guess and try and repeat and guess and try and repeat, right? So that's, we've been, I would say that's kind of where we are right now. We've gone through that process of, we have this big, very diversified user base and certainly we're continuing to service them and make sure they're happy. But we're in the process right now of hunting for the next like very, very targeted, specific, scalable go -to -market motion for a specific niche that is.
you know, because it's so specific, we can make the process so easy that, you know, a four -year -old can do a blindfolded, right? That's the priority and focus for us right now. And so we've explored different avenues and we've found some success in different places, but some fallbacks in other stages. So we're still figuring that part out exactly.
Yash from Momentum (20:07)
Yeah.
AI safety Don. That is something that I would love to get your thoughts on. So how, one, what is the Bhuman currently doing about making sure that it is not misused in any way, shape or form.
Don Bosco (20:36)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I would say, you know, the first thing is we set up guardrails in the platform so that if you are not the owner of a likeness, let's say face and voice, right, if you're not that person, or if that person's not easily accessible on your team, you won't be able to use that, right? So we set up these technical guardrails. So for example, like for example, for our face cloning, right, we could clone someone's face.
from any video, right, technically speaking. But in the platform, when they upload their training video for the face cloning, there's a very specific thing we need them to say at a certain amount of time, and we don't let it continue unless they follow that end to end. So as a result, like, Yash I can't just grab an interview from you and throw it in, right, because it's not following the guardrails, the artificial limitations that we set in order to make sure that that person.
Yash from Momentum (21:22)
Yeah.
Don Bosco (21:29)
knows they're doing something for face learning. They're following these instructions. So I'd say that that's the main thing and that's what's really protected us from any sort of abuse thus far. I certainly have seen people trying to get around it. But yeah, I mean, for us, putting those internal guardrails in place to prevent and dissuade bad actors has been the solution thus far. I'm sure as we grow, we'll face new challenges, but that's been our approach.
Yash from Momentum (21:32)
Got it, understood. So I cannot come into be human uploader.
Yeah? Got it. Understood. And I think a lot of these companies will sort of come together and then establish some sort of guidelines for future companies to sort of, if and when they are using AI for particular use cases, then here are certain guidelines that you might want to follow. And these could be extremely helpful. This brings me down to my last question, which is not a question for me. It is a question from.
from our previous guest, the founder of Maekersuite And the question that he's asked, and I think you're a great person to answer that is, what are the top three channels that have worked for you to acquire customers?
Don Bosco (22:32)
Yeah, yeah, so I mean, definitely number one word of mouth has been everything for us. I think when you have a really interesting new product, people just naturally want to share interesting new things, right? So that has been helpful for us. Number two has been social media. So and again, in a more organic sense, we have tried to engineer kind of social media growth, but it hasn't worked as much as just
natural organic coverage. So being featured in YouTube videos on TikTok, LinkedIn, that has been very, very helpful. And the final channel I would say is Affiliates. So we built up a very, very robust, great affiliate program. And, you know, Affiliates is one of those things where if you take care of them, they'll take care of you, you know what I mean? So that's also been a driver for us.
Yash from Momentum (23:19)
Yeah.
Correct. Awesome. And what's your question? What's the question that you are currently wrestling with that you want our next guest to answer?
Don Bosco (23:31)
Yeah, yeah. So coming back to what we spoke about earlier, you know, when you have a product that can do so much, as I'm sure every founder thinks their product can do so much, how do you know which market, which function to focus on? And I would say also as an extension to that, how much do you focus on that before you decide, okay, I should go to the next one.
Yash from Momentum (23:54)
That's a brilliant, brilliant question. I hope the next guest has an answer to that. Because this is something that in my journey, I've had to wrestle with as well as to which use case do we go after and how do we, because while you're going after a particular use case, you see opportunities in other use cases and you're sort of lured by that. And then when you try to jump ship.
Don Bosco (23:57)
Good luck answering
Yash from Momentum (24:23)
you sort of start seeing opportunities over here. And it's extremely difficult, and you're filled with doubt. But yeah, so great question. And so with that, Don, thank you for joining us for this conversation. It was a pleasure having you. And for all the people who are listening to this or watching this, if you are looking to create a digital version of yourself, you will find the link in the description of wherever you are, whether it is Google Podcasts.
Don Bosco (24:31)
Yeah.
Yash from Momentum (24:51)
or Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. You'll be able to find the link in the description. Thank you all for listening and watching. Let us know your thoughts in the comments. And Don, thanks for doing this again.
Don Bosco (25:02)
Yeah, thank you, Yash Appreciate it.
.png)
.svg){kind=small}
