"Being a dev is like being a wizard who can solve a problem” | Prajwal, Co-Founder, Clueso

[00:01:22] Introduction to Clueso: Use cases in SaaS product marketing and customer education

[00:05:19] Prajwal’s Academic Journey: Graduating with a  9.3 CGPA 

[00:12:38] The Pandemic Hits: Impact on campus life and transitioning to remote learning

[00:13:58] Their First Startup: The origin story of DeskLamp 

[00:16:58] Growth of DeskLamp: Inside IITM campus and beyond

[00:19:57] Graduation and Career Decision: Prajwal’s career decision point

[00:22:05] Decision to be an Entrepreneur: Co-Founder dynamics and doing things that you love

[00:26:55] Y Combinator Acceptance: Application and interview process; lessons learnt

[00:33:08] The Entrepreneur Challenge: Getting people to pay $5 for their product

[00:36:19] Pivot Hell: Shuffling between new product ideas

[00:38:53] Solving a Problem: How Clueso came into being

[00:40:20] From Giga User to Clueso: Branding strategy and logo design process

[00:42:45] Addressing the Feature Adoption Challenge: Using Clueso to build its feature videos

[00:44:37] Addressing Expansion Challenges: Leveraging multilingual SaaS solutions and AI

[00:49:20] Research to 13X Growth: Prajwal’s IIT Madras journey 

[00:50:20] Creating a Successful SaaS Product: Be obsessed with your customer

[00:51:39] Future Plans: What do the next 5 years look like for Clueso?

[00:53:20] The Founding Team: How do you pick the right co-founders?

[00:54:58] Office Culture: Enjoy what you are doing and who you are doing it with

[00:57:57] Work Life Balance: How does Prajwal relax?

[01:00:00] Building a Distinctive Brand Identity: All about positioning it to specific customers

[01:02:22] IIT Madras Ecosystem: How does it benefit entrepreneurs specifically?

[01:04:19] Nirmaan: What is a pre-incubation cell?

[01:07:31] Wrap: Co-Founder personalities and dynamics

[00:05:11] IIT Madras

[00:27:11] Prajwal and his co-founders were working on DeskLamp out of Nirmaan after his graduation.

[01:06:04] CFI (Centre for Innovation)’s blueprint was Amrut’s M Tech project

[01:06:54] Students think IIT is a stepping stone to institutions like Stanford

[00:08:47] Prajwal was working with Professor Anil Prabhakar on his Quantum Computing Research.

[00:17:44] Professor Rupesh Nasre was one of the first people to try out DeskLamp and send the team a long email with feedback on the product. 

[00:19:30] Prajwal’s co-founders Akash Anand and Neel Balar were Prajwal’s juniors and graduated a year after he did.

[00:01:22] Clueso is the product created by Prajwal and his co-founders. It is an AI video editor to make your videos look more professional.

[00:20:04] Prajwal did an internship with Adobe during his third year at IIT Madras.

[00:26:27] Prajwal and his co-founders applied to Y Combinator for investment for the DeskLamp product

[00:36:48] Engineers from Google and Meta were part of Prajwal’s cohort at Y Combinator who were also looking to startup with their own ideas

[00:44:17] F7 Ventures is a group of ex-Facebook employees who have started a fund and invested in Clueso

[01:00:20] Prajwal and his team take a lot of inspiration from Canva for building their brand identity

[01:01:12] Postman and BrowserStack are some of the other new SaaS products to come out of India

[01:05:07] Nirmaan has a partnership with AWS. AWS supports Nirmaan initiatives by providing cloud infrastructure, tools, and resources, particularly for its online learning programs and skill development initiatives.

[01:06:52] Many students want to come to IIT because they think it will be a stepping stone to companies like Microsoft. 

[00:15:08] Call of Duty is a 2003 first-person shooter game developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision.

[00:41:33] The name Clueso was inspired by Detective Clouseau from the Pink Panther movies 

[00:46:00] Amrut quotes the line “I am not going to give away my shot” from Hamilton

[00:59:09] Prajwal is a comic book nerd and is a fan of the MCU movie franchise

[00:08:21] Quantum Computing is a new approach to calculation that utilizes principles of quantum mechanics to solve complex problems faster than classical computers.

[00:11:13] Young Research Fellow (YRF) is a program at IIT Madras to encourage highly motivated undergraduate students at IIT Madras to embrace the ongoing scientific research activity in the campus.

[00:26:27] Y Combinator is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm.

[00:37:51] Founder Market Fit refers to the alignment between a founder's skills, experience, passion, and network with the market they are trying to create a product for.