Can films inspire a startup idea?
It did for Raj Sunder. As he watched Top Gun in a theatre, he wondered, “Which aviators are Tom Cruise wearing?”
But alas, there was no way he could know that on the spot.
He later founded Wootag, an interactive video brand. It lets consumers tap or click on elements in videos to uncover facts about them.
“Interactive content is about satisfying human curiosity,” believes Raj, CEO of Wootag and Unlead.ai. And for companies, this can mean better engagement and business.
In this chat, he encourages sellers to view their products as users too, and produce ‘snackable' content. With buyers’ personas becoming varied, he identifies three pillars of engagement.
This interview is part of G2’s Professional Spotlight series. For more content like this, subscribe to G2 Tea, a newsletter with SaaS-y news and entertainment.
What's your favorite beverage? When do you enjoy it?
I don't drink anything other than water on a regular working day.
But when I travel, say I am in a hotel or on a flight, and I want to spend the next few hours brainstorming, I go for red wine.
What was your first job?
After I completed my engineering, I landed a job as a developer at a gaming firm. It helped me develop logical thinking and problem-solving skills.
When you build a game, you don't view it from your perspective alone. You also consider the players’ and the AI’s points of view. Doing this gave me a better understanding of building a product using multiple lenses.
I also ended up playing a lot of games at the office because we were expected to be immersed in the gaming culture. This taught me that you can’t build a great product unless you’re a user of it. So, I always use the products I am building on a daily basis. I am their biggest user.
What's your favorite software in your current tech stack?
My entire organization is on Slack. We don't internally communicate via email or calls. The software has been an integral part of the stack from Day 0.
Removing Slack could affect our functioning, and we may have to spend time and resources migrating to other means of communication.
What problems at work make you want to throw your laptop out the window?
It’s about human intelligence. It’s frustrating when people don't use it. You can also call it common sense. We talk about AI, but we don't even appreciate our own intelligence and leverage it to its fullest potential.
When people don’t apply common sense during a conversation, you ask yourself why you’re even a part of it.
Could you take us through your professional journey? What have been the key milestones?
I look at my journey as orbiting. And it’s an orbit I didn’t design. Steve Jobs had said that you were placed in an orbit as the dots connected.
I didn't ask to be a game developer. I was just an engineer figuring out what to do in life. But I ended up in Mumbai, not knowing the language Hindi, which is more common there. It all felt like a simulation.
But, once I understood the logical frameworks of building a product, it felt natural to transition to the role of a product manager. Next, I faced questions like, “Who’s going to pay for the product you build? How much money can you make from it?” So, the next orbit was that of a business manager.
I was a vice president at 32 at this Indonesian company. But the idea for Wootag suddenly popped up, leading me to start it and leave everything else.
I don’t come from an entrepreneurial family, and neither did I have an understanding of venture capitalism, so I was starting from scratch. Initially, we were selling the product to marketers, and I had not worked in the marketing function before. It felt like jumping off an aircraft and building a parachute on the way down to land safely.
In life, we don’t know what the next orbit will be. This uncertainty makes life exciting.
The center of these orbits is the meaning and purpose of life. It’s difficult to put a name to this center. When you sleep peacefully and spend happy moments with your family, it’s an indication your orbit is in the right direction. There might be challenges in the form of asteroids, but you don’t stop orbiting, right?
You built a product that uses interactive content to fuel business. However, the link between such content and business outcomes is not very evident. What can companies do to strengthen this link?
The idea for Wootag came while I was watching Top Gun. I was curious about the glasses Tom Cruise was wearing, but I had no way of knowing where they came from. But, if I could interact with the on-screen experience, maybe by tapping on the screen, I would be able to know.
This tells me that although interactive content is a technical term, it’s all about human curiosity. If someone is curious about something on screen, we can give them a chance to address this curiosity through an interactive experience. Companies can use this experience and its insights to derive business value by suggesting solutions, products, and services.
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When you market a product, you want customers to take the next step by enquiring about it or taking a demonstration. Enabling specific interactive points within an advertisement and connecting them to your CRM software also helps. And you measure it all using analytics tools. This is how you strengthen the link between interactive content and business outcomes.
I regularly compare the results between interactive content and usual content. The former tends to deliver an up-to-sevenfold increase in engagement.
In the interactive content space, brands are shifting to a more user-generated approach to creating videos. How can they leverage such content to build authenticity and trust?
From a B2B perspective, I wanted to do something interesting with Unlead.ai. So, I went on my dashboard and filled in the details of a customer I was pursuing.
Unlead.ai has a functionality called Persona AI. I feed details relating to a prospect and their organization to the tool. Then, I record myself on the screen talking about my product. The tool uses this video and prospect details to produce a personalized video in which I am shown as suggesting how my product could help resolve their problems specifically.
“With the buyers’ personas becoming varied, the ability to personalize, contextualize, and be creative will become critical.”
Raj Sunder
CEO, Wootag and Unlead.ai
If I want to send this to five people in an organization, the feature will automatically add their names and generate personalized videos featuring me talking about the product.
When you watch it, you’ll feel like you’re hearing a real person talk about a product. It’ll also generate a personalized call to action (CTA), which could help build trust and credibility.
When you create such personalized videos, you show that you care for your customers and their pain points. You appear more human and less institutional. This is the key to building trust and authenticity using user-generated content.
Producing interactive content may not be feasible for companies of all sizes. There are costs relating to software, specialized roles and the time taken. How can smaller companies approach interactive content in an affordable and scalable way?
If you go to YouTube or Instagram, you’ll realize that very few videos are produced using high-grade editing software. I don’t think viewers are influenced by the equipment you use or the finishing touches you give. They care more about the message.
Earlier, producing videos could take days. It used to be an exercise in itself. Now we’re talking minutes.
“We must produce snackable content. I call this snackable value selling.”
Raj Sunder
CEO, Wootag and Unlead.ai
Even a 45-minute TV show episode on Netflix is snackable. You watch it, and you move on. This is the world we live in, so you have to give value in the form that works: a snack.
Certainly, we no longer follow only door-to-door sales strategies. How have customer engagement strategies evolved over the years?
In the film ‘The Founder’, people go door-to-door making sales. They keep calling and calling, and it’s a real hustle. This was the initial model of doing sales.
Then we had the email. Yet, knocking on the door was still there. If you got the chance to meet someone in person, you would still go for it, right?
Later, you had a combination of video calls, emails, and in-person meetings.
Today, 70-80% of the sales playbook is still based on emails. The only aspects that can make the difference, as I mentioned earlier, are personalization, contextualization and creativity using technology.
You want to engage your audience in the best way possible and talk to them in their language.
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Follow Raj Sunder on LinkedIn to learn more about audience engagement strategies.
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