If you're doing something new, then it's important to share knowledge, not just basically put the brand out but educate the audience.
Media 7: Can you provide an overview of your career path and the key milestones that have shaped your journey to becoming the CEO of Spintly?
Rohin Parkar: Yes sure, I’ve been in the industry for about 20 plus years. I started working in 2002. I started my career in India with Bhabha Atomic Research Center as a scientist working in the field of particle accelerators. I have also worked with Tata Infotech in India. Later on, I moved to USA in 2005 where I started working with Motorola then Nokia, followed by Broadcom in California. My area of work has been RF Engineering and wireless technology development.
I have always been trying to learn something new, which was always the goal. I have never settled for one job for too long. I always moved across cities, across countries, and across jobs, which was how I got to travel a lot. I think that's what allowed me to take risks throughout my life and those are my major milestones - putting yourself in a new environment, new set of people, and being able to thrive and succeed in that new environment. That brought me to a position to take a bigger risk of starting a company and then I have reached a point where today I am a successful founder of a company.
M7: Please brief us about the work portfolio of Spintly’s Smart Access.
RP: We are in the space of access control, I am sure you have used access control at your office, like a badge or card where you just swipe it on the reader. We basically digitize your badge, move it into your smartphone or your smart watch so you can just tap your phone on the reader on the door and get in. So if you look at the contemporary times, there are about 10 billion doors across the world and if every door has a key or a card, which is being used and that can get eliminated and moved into the phone, it's a huge opportunity. So even cars are going keyless where you don't have the key - it is going to move and be on your phone. That is what we essentially offer for businesses, eliminating keys, badges and everything, and then being able to give them more data on how their property is getting used, being able to give visitors access to be able to enter the building at specific times. Basically, we offer ease of access control for businesses.
M7: What are the key benefits of implementing mobile and cloud-based access control for a company's security infrastructure?
RP: If you analyze a large organization with 10 or 20 locations worldwide or within the country, you'll typically find that badges are issued to all employees. However, in the case of a rapidly growing company, which may be hiring hundreds of new people every month or year, the process of issuing physical badges becomes a major headache for the administrative staff. Moreover, these badges are not entirely secure as individuals may share them and unauthorized copies can be made.
If you simply search on Google for how to clone an RFID badge, you'll discover a device that can easily accomplish this task. Therefore, by issuing these plastic cards, you are actually compromising security. This is where our solution comes in - we transfer the badges onto your phone. A phone is the most secure device, already protected by your biometrics, such as your facial recognition. By moving the badge into your phone, you automatically benefit from biometric security without the need for third-party devices like fingerprint scanners or additional face recognition systems. This level of security is the key advantage.
Organizations can save a significant amount in operational costs, enhance building security, and users enjoy the flexibility and convenience of not having to carry or collect physical badges. They can simply use their phones to enter and exit the premises.
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For a technology-focused company, conveying the message in a simple yet technically comprehensive manner presents a challenge.
M7: How do you envision the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the networking industry, and what potential benefits can they bring to your organization's network management and optimization?
RP: The key aspect is predicting the future by effectively utilizing data within our IoT-enabled system. We gather extensive data from buildings and locations where people utilize the facilities. Once this data is acquired, we can forecast what the future may hold. This is where AI and ML play a significant role.
If we consider our business, we initially focused on access control. Our primary emphasis lies in smart buildings, leveraging wireless mesh technology to enable millions of sensors throughout the premises. Our plan entails deploying additional sensors, such as motion sensors and temperature sensors, to gather even more data from buildings. By utilizing this data, we can optimize energy consumption within the buildings. Achieving this requires the implementation of AI to process the substantial amount of data that will be generated.
M7: When it comes to your go-to-market strategy, could you please share your future goals regarding the regions and markets you are aiming to penetrate? Additionally, what are the most common hurdles you face in your marketing strategy that you believe could be overcome swiftly and would have the greatest impact on your sales funnel?
RP: In our roadmap for growth, we initially launched in India in 2019 and experienced growth in the country for approximately two years, from 2020 to 2021. Subsequently, we expanded to the US market in 2022. Our primary focus moving forward is to continue growing in India, while also targeting the US market, which represents a new growth opportunity for us. We have been on this journey for about eight months now and the US market offers immense potential for adoption as it is the fastest growing market when it comes to embracing new technologies.
Additionally, we have plans to expand into Europe, Southeast Asia, and other regions. It is worth mentioning that we are already present in the Middle East, specifically in the UAE, and do not intend to expand further in that region. Our global expansion strategy revolves around geographical reach and product diversification. Currently, our main focus is on access control, but our long-term vision is centered around smart buildings, leveraging the capabilities of our IoT platform.
As with any startup that is only four or four and a half years old, one of the hurdles we face is building trust in our brand among larger customers. There is often skepticism about our startup status and the reliability of our platform. Therefore, we consistently strive to prove ourselves. Branding and marketing present significant challenges for us, and we allocate considerable resources in those areas to establish our brand identity as we continue to grow our business.
M7: When it comes to custom content creation for your marketing campaigns, what are the most significant challenges or difficulties you have encountered? Furthermore, what steps do you believe can be taken to overcome these difficulties and establish an improved content creation strategy?
RP: For a technology-focused company, conveying the message in a simple yet technically comprehensive manner presents a challenge. Marketers, who are not well-versed in technology, struggle to grasp the intricacies of what we do, why we do it, and consequently, our content lacks depth. This is particularly true within the specialized realm of access control.
To effectively compare our advancements with older systems, one must first comprehend the workings of the previous systems and then grasp the new technology to articulate it coherently. Content creation becomes problematic as the individual responsible for writing lacks expertise in the subject matter. They are unable to do justice to explaining the superiority of wireless access control systems over traditional ones. The lack of field-specific knowledge poses a significant hurdle in our content creation process.
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To effectively compare our advancements with older systems, one must first comprehend the workings of the previous systems and then grasp the new technology to articulate it coherently.
M7: What are the main challenges you have encountered in terms of content syndication? Do you believe that content syndication continues to hold value in the market? What are your overall thoughts and predictions regarding the future of content syndication?
RP: It's very important that you are actively putting out content on the right outlets. If it's technology, then technology-related outlets and also taking a thought leadership approach, especially if you're doing something new, then it's important to share knowledge, not just basically put the brand out but educate the audience, that is very important and truly trying to educate. And if you really focus on educating their audience, then they will believe in your brand because you are giving them value and knowledge.
M7: Could you describe the most significant funding round your company has raised so far? What factors contributed to its success, and how did you leverage that funding to further your company's goals?
RP: We have raised about $2 million total so far and we have already generated more than $2 million in revenue as a company. We have grown globally - last round we raised was about $1.5 million last year. We have investors in Silicon Valley and India who have invested in us. We used the funds to scale our business by investing in Sales and marketing. We also invested in R&D and product development activities. We are now raising our next large round of funding, which would be our largest round so far.
M7: In terms of online advertising, what are the main drawbacks or challenges you have encountered? In your opinion, what strategies or approaches should be adopted for B2B advertising to achieve optimal results?
RP: I think for B2B, outlets like Facebook and Instagram are not very suitable. We do use them, we use a lot of LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is probably one of the best online tool because again this is more like thought leadership and you have the right audience with all businesses and their key leadership people are on LinkedIn. So if you have a large network, it becomes more credible when you write about stuff on LinkedIn it's already looked up as credible content.
Blogging I think is a big way of spreading knowledge about what you do, writing blogs on your website and also on LinkedIn and engaging on groups online, like LinkedIn groups in our industry, or it's access control groups. We have a lot of global leaders who are part of access control groups, and we talk about it and we share our thoughts on the future of access control. I think those are good ways of doing online marketing.
Obviously, we also run Google ads and other things that is purely from lead generation point of view, but I think for the long term, if you want to get benefits, it's all about knowledge-sharing, thought leadership, and helping others to understand the ecosystem and industry and what's latest happening in the industry.
M7: What strategies are being implemented to address the increasing demand for bandwidth and network capacity, particularly with the rise of data-intensive applications, video streaming, and IoT devices?
RP: We are aware that 5G deployment is already underway, which increases bandwidth and reduces data latency. As we move towards 6G, data communication in networks will further improve. Different technologies cater to various use cases. For instance, when it comes to video streaming, ample bandwidth is necessary between the cloud and end devices.
However, the rise of edge computing addresses these challenges. With edge computing, decisions can be made within the network at the gateway device located on the premises. This device may employ AI algorithms to detect events such as suspicious activities. For instance, if there are two individuals attempting to break into a door, can cameras identify the break-in just by analyzing the footage? Such decisions need to be made at the network's edge, facilitated by AI.
The focus is not solely on speed, but also on data-driven decision-making. Can we afford to wait for someone to review the video and then confirm a break-in, or can the camera itself detect the intrusion? Speed is not the only factor; it involves leveraging data to make prompt and highly confident decisions. These decisions involve various devices, not just cameras. Temperature sensors, motion sensors, and access control devices all contribute to the decision-making process. Therefore, it is a combination of technologies, rather than relying on a single one.
M7: Lastly, how do you measure the impact and success of your thought leadership initiatives? What metrics or indicators do you use?
RP: One of the measures would be how many people follow you on your content? So for example, on LinkedIn if you can start building a bigger LinkedIn and then start writing content and then people comment on that content and have a fruitful conversation - that becomes a good metric of thought leadership. You start getting invites for events to speak about what you do, share knowledge about what you do or become part of panel discussions. Recently I got invited to a panel discussion in New York, which is specific on access control. I think those are some of the measures you can use, but you don't really do it for those outcomes. You do it for being able to share knowledge. That should be the real goal actually, because you just want to share that with the world, with everyone what you're doing, and it's for your company.
You're trying to spread the word so that people know what you are building at your company. And that really helps you grow your business because if you look at any company like look at Bill Gates versus Microsoft. Who has more followers? Does Bill Gates have more followers? Or Microsoft as a business account has more followers? The answer is Bill Gates has more followers. So people see the person who is brand a company more than just the company. Elon Musk is more known than Tesla as a company. You can take many other examples. So it's very important that you as a person become well-known or are known as a thought leader and the company automatically benefits out of that thought leadership.