KD Deshpande is the Founder & CEO at Simplified He is the entrepreneurial product leader who founded two SaaS companies, built teams & products from grounds up, raised venture capital, and successfully sold the business through an M&A exit. Marketo acquired his last company Vessel.io. In today's episode, KD talks about how he bootstrapped his idea for the first few months and grew his product using the minimum product payable framework, which is the term that he coined, and his product development approach using OpenAI. KD also shared valuable insights on how enterprise product creators can find the sweet spot in their products and how they can leverage AI to create personalized and defensible products. KD also shared some tips on how to attract and hire the right talent for your team. Tune in to learn more about Simplified's approach to create personalized and defensible products, and some tips on how to attract and hire the right talent for your team.



Where to find KD Deshpande: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/koustubhadeshpande


Where to find Dhaval:


• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DhavalBhatt

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dhaval.bhatt/ 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhavalbhatt 

Transcript:-
Dhaval:
This founder built an AI product to replace your entire content creation workflow, including writing, design, videos, animations, and social content. KD Deshpande is a founder of Simplified A Product. He grew from zero to a million users in one year. and has continued on that growth trajectory since then.

In this episode, we discuss how KD bootstrapped his idea for the first few months, and specifically how he grew his product using the minimum product payable framework, the term that he coined, and his product development approach using OpenAI. We also discussed how he recruited his initial founding team and his approach towards recruiting early-stage founder.

Welcome to the show, KD. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell us a little bit about you and your AI product.

KD Deshpande:
Hey, thanks for having me here. I'm KD founder and CEO of simplified. Simplified is a one app for all types of content creation. It's a modern age tool where you can do more with less. We are, as a consumer, we are consuming more content then ever it's a Cambrian explosion of content creation and the tools, existing tools are slow, siloed, and we are fixing that. We are bringing the operational efficiency and truly simplifying the entire workflow from creation to distribution for creators like you who are putting a lot of efforts in creating content, inviting us to be on your podcast, but we want to make sure that we bring the efficiency in your workflow. In every content creator's workflow, that modern marketers workflow, so that way you can do more with less.

Dhaval:
Tell us a little bit about your market. Who do you serve? Is it sales? Is it marketing? Is it content teams in product? What is your ideal customer segment?

KD Deshpande:
That's a great question. if you look at like last, probably let's take the last four years. The bar for content creation is lower that with Instagram reels, Facebook, Twitter TikTok especially, they reduce the barrier to entry for anybody can be creator, anybody can be marketers. So if you look at our traditional influencers or marketers are looking like influencers, and influencers are looking like marketers. So, anybody who creates content, Anybody who help companies, businesses, to market their product, we serve them. But primarily, we help digital marketers, digital creators online, small businesses who are focused on creating content. Because content is no longer liability, content is more seen as investment because the brand, the vicinity or the people are shifting from brand vicinity to like influencer affinity. So that's kind of the target audience we are going after. Yeah.

Dhaval:
You mentioned something very interesting here. People are moving from brand vicinity to influencer affinity. People relate and have always related with human beings more than with brands and very interesting direction here. How does it, how does your product simplified? How does it help creators? specifically, what does it do for them? That resolves their pain points. And where what role does AI play in this?

KD Deshpande:
Yeah, so AI is really amazing, and last two years we have made tremendous progress, but we not officially saying, oh, we are doing ai. It's part of our DNA our AI is like Gmail Smart Compose it's there. It makes you smart, but Google never says that we are doing that by ai. So that's what simplified ai is. What we are doing is we are bringing the best technologies off the shelf as well as we are building in-house. And you, we are humanizing those. We are humanizing to a point where That marketers sitting in Utah or a marketer running a digital agency or a creator, running creator who is, like recording their next TikTok sitting in Brazil or India. All of them can use simplified to reduce, their time for creation. And then we help them optimize their workflows. Where on simplified it's a one app. Because if you remember, if you look at their workflow, probably your workflow, you have like probably five apps before your content gets ready. From step one app is just for recording other is for curation third is for publishing. Fourth is for analytics. With simplified, we, we are bringing all that workflow in under one umbrella. So that way you can reduce, we can reduce your cost We can save time, so that way you can spend that time doing something meaningful with your friends and family and save a lot more money for these businesses.

Dhaval:
Wow. So, that's so true. I use five different apps for creating anything I create. There is Like a place for me to research, then there's a place for me to curate. There is a place for me to distill. Then there is a place for me to create once I have distilled and then there's a space for me to edit and publish. And then there is a space for me to analyze. So seven or eight different steps. And each step has its own set of tools. Yep. , and you are saying that you are aggregating all of. Stack into one capability.

KD Deshpande:
Yeah. We are aggregating more than ag aggregating this stack. We are trying to simplify your workflow. Everything you need as a creator, as a marketer in your workflow. We are bringing them making it available as a part of Simplified Stack. So you just come in today, you can come in, create your you can start with ideation. So we have ai powered like GPT3 powered Writer. You can come in, and we have done a lot of fine-tuning modeling on top of it and built a really simple user experience because see as I said, that marketer or that small business owner sitting in Utah or like other places, they don't care about, GPT 3 three or ChatGPT or Stability or Dali-E. Wh what all things they need is like simple. Which is, which allows them to do more with less. So we have AI writer where which can help you create a lot of ideas. Then we have design editor which can turn your ideas in one, click those ideas into presentations, Gif memes, videos, we have templates. Then you can turn that, take that once that content is ready, plan for month or so you can start scheduling and start publishing on all the channels from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram your WordPress. From one place, you can just go from creation to delegation to distribution. All happens in one platform. So that's what the problem space we are dealing with. And under the hood, we are integrating all the AI services. So that way they are integrated into your workflow. So that way while you are doing it, the things which used to take you probably two hours, 10 hours, we are trying to reduce that in minutes, using the modern age technologies and the capabilities which we have seen, the extreme revolution in last 12 to 18 months.

Dhaval: Yeah. Tell me a little bit about how is, how are you differentiating? There is a plethora. AI tools that have come out in the recent history, how are you differentiating yourself from that competition as a product owner?

KD Deshpande: Yeah. to be, to give you a fact, there are probably 85 to probably 90 AI writing tools. But all these tools are build silo and where we are thinking differently is. Our tools or our stuff is all about workflow. We are thinking that persona about, of that marketer, how that creator we are living the life of that creator ourself me I'm going recording TikTok reels, trying to live and my co-founder also going through that journey. Our designers on our team are experiencing what it takes to create content. what that life of that small business owner looks like or how the modern marketing teams are working. And the, that's how we are fitting AI into their workflow instead of adding one more silo tool in their stack where they will need to copy paste this from, someplace to their day-to-day workflow. So that's the big differentiator. And second is our product is meant for teams. our whole purpose is let people collaborate. And our mission i