Nicole Laino
Hello, and welcome to the limitless entrepreneur podcast. I’m your host, Nicole Laino. And I’m here today with a special guest, a startup founder, a champion for the underdog. And I’m very excited to have to have this gentleman on because I think this listener audience is very much the solopreneur very much the underdog very much, probably you’re the only person who believes in what you do. And sometimes we go we’d like there’s a solution out there, there’s a software solution, and it costs so much money that it’s out of our reach, or it feels that way or it stretches us and I love that you’ve tailored this software that he’s tailored this software to the underdog to the small guy, the little guy to give him a chance so really, really powerful technology and being able to leverage that and and for not just the big the big wigs. So Arjun right is my guest today. He is the CEO for for smart marketing for underdogs. Hello Wolfie is his company. So welcome. Arjun, welcome to the podcast. Tell the listeners a little bit about you. What did I miss in that little wrap up?

Arjun Rai
No, that’s great. And thanks so much. Hey, Ron, this is Arjun like, I like to say Argentina without the Tina, founder and CEO at Hello, Wolfie. And yeah, absolutely. Well, you’re right. It’s it’s smart marketing for underdogs, as people just like you and me the the individuals who run small businesses, startups, freelancers, coaches, podcasters, you name it, and we, you know, can’t afford expensive marketing solutions, and especially solutions that don’t have any sense of intelligence baked into them. And so we set out to build a company, you know, 15 months, we launched 15 months ago, actually publicly. And we’ve grown 22,000%. Last year, we were you know, helping nearly 10,000 small businesses all over the world, and very, very blessed to call many of them investors in the company. We can talk about equity crowdfunding, but it has really allowed us to not only build a company for the underdog, but ask them to be investors and own a piece of us as well.

Nicole Laino
Yeah, and it’s awesome what you do, because you are really, and what I love about this is particularly for the solopreneur, social media, blogging, all of that can feel very personal. And the truth is, is that the data tells a story, but sometimes we’re a little bit too close to it for at our hearts, to really think with our heads and your software in particular, dives into what I’m going to use the buzzword that’s gonna get everybody’s head spinning is hashtags, and keywords. And just all of these things that do drive engagement do drive the algorithm, but they leave a lot of people, particularly on the lower rungs of the entrepreneurial ladder stuck. Yeah, well, I have a lot of success. They talk about this being kind of like a stymieing thing. But can you tell us about how your how how Hello woofie works?

Arjun Rai
Well, it’s exactly that, you know, people know that they have to optimize for the right words and the in the right hashtags. But another category that gets overlooked a lot of the time is the whole idea of using the perfect combination of emojis. You know, most people tend to use the same 12 emojis that they’ve been using over and over again, it’s in the recent tab on their emoji keyboard, the same vegetables, the same finger gestures, this may seem smiley faces, but what most people don’t know is that Unicode, which is the authority on anything techspace they have nearly 1000 emojis that you know, officially endorsed, and there’s a huge part of the keyboard that is not being, you know, not being even looked at and emojis statistically, according to Adobe’s Trend Report, which came out in July of 2019. It literally chat says that emojis drive 2030 70% uplift in engagement, some cases, and depending on the use case, but we have no idea which ones do the best. And if you haven’t actually mapped out the English language mapped out the emoji language and the hashtag language. So we actually filed a patent around the ability to combine those three forms of languages. We do believe that hashtag has its own language and Modi’s have their own language. And of course, the spoken language in English is another language. But how do they meld together in real time in terms of recommendations is a is a is a piece of technology that we’ve been able to develop. And so the pitch is simple. You know, as soon as you start typing up posts inside Hello, Wolfie, unlike any of our competitors, it automatically starts suggesting content for you starts recommending hashtags for you. If you throw a link to an article, which we do recommend you do in terms of driving traffic back to your blog. It’ll read the article give you quotes from the article as well. So you’d have to sit there and wonder, Oh, should I type the title of the article again? Or should I have an insight an excerpt from the article and then finds royalty free images for you so like, basically an agency in your pocket for five or six bucks a month? We start with social we then realize that blogging to my earlier point is so critical during especially during the pandemic when people are searching for, you know, the next best coffee shop or the next you know, retail store or whatnot in goo Google, you better be indexing and you better be, you know, coming up in search results. So if you don’t have a blog, there’s no chance unless your homepage is really well optimized. So we started automating blog posts to medium to WordPress and soon Shopify. And the one of the other things, and we realized very quickly is that smart speakers, you know, all of these devices, I’m holding up the echo.or, the echo show, which has a touchscreen built right into it. There are nearly half a billion devices, Amazon Alexa devices all over the world. But for you and me as an underdog, we’d have to spend 510, maybe $50,000 in developing an app, because all these devices use, you know, it’s just very similar to an apple app store. They have their own apps and skills, which are another way of saying an app. And that costs so much that only the Netflix’s and the Hulu’s. And the IMBD of the world can broadcast. So we start working with Amazon Alexa team in the last couple of months, in the last six to nine months, actually, we’ve developed a scheduler that not only creates a white label skill for you under your name with your branding, but now you can broadcast video, audio text or audio content directly to the consumer directly to your customer. So this this podcast that we’re doing, you could put a two minute you know, trailer of this in someone’s you know, in briefing on their television screen or the echo show, and then have a link going to your website so you can drive traffic back as well. So wait,

Nicole Laino
is that practically speaking is that when I have an echo show on my, on my counter in my kitchen? And it’s giving me these what seems like random stuff. But it is somewhat tailored to me. I get recipes, I get videos of news articles and all different things. Are you saying that is where this can be sending the information to exactly have your content and that is really powerful. Yeah,

Arjun Rai
you can go to any speaker right the second at the time with this interview and say, Alexa, download the Hello Wi Fi skill. And you’ll see all of our briefings that I scheduled in Hela wolfies platform on desktop. And and those briefings disappear every seven days. But all those briefings have, you know, a video content component and one of those briefings as a link because I want to drive people back to our website, either on a fire TV or fire stick or an echo show. But if you have the Echo Dot, which is just a speaker, doesn’t matter, the length doesn’t matter. You just hear the video playing because it just takes out the audio.

Nicole Laino
That is amazing. Because that’s the i There are things that just because I’m like cutting cucumbers or something, I will watch something that I wouldn’t necessarily take the time to watch if I were sitting at my desk if I was rolling on my phone. But because there’s a limited amount like it is an underused feature. Oh yeah. I actually didn’t realize how my husband is a is a developer. And he’s obsessed with the the smart home distribution because he was just like, he’s like, that’s the future.

Arjun Rai
I’ve got 11 Alexa devices in my home and everything is connected to a smart plug.

Nicole Laino
Yeah, same same. We just talked to everything. We go on vacation and we’re like talking to nothing. Nothing’s happening. We’re like turn on the lights. And

Arjun Rai
oh my god, don’t you feel like it’s someone’s missing from your life. I’m like, I need to take one of my devices with me.

Nicole Laino
I do I like I asked her for the weather. I asked her what time it is I asked her for all sorts of things. She is my She is truly my assistant. But But I I love this and I everything that you’re describing is so powerful, I still can’t believe the price, I still can’t believe how affordable you make this. And it goes to that to you know, really speaks to your mission, that you’re not just it’s not just lip service, you are really putting this out there for the little guy and allowing people to, you know, if someone downloads the limitless entrepreneur podcast app, every episode, I suppose I could be sending to the echo.

Arjun Rai
Absolutely, you can literally sign up and go grab the SMB tear, and it’ll it’ll, it’ll send the skill to Amazon, they’ll review it, the whole process is automated. You don’t need to know any code. Unfortunately, if you didn’t have Hello wilfy, you would need to know coding, you would need to know how to put an infrastructure together, you would have to know where to put the videos and then schedule them in the first week taking care of all of that. And that’s the beauty of it is is helping people now, because whatever the next big thing is, we’ll automate that. One of the things that we’re looking into, and I may have mentioned this earlier, is direct mail. And as soon as the pandemic is over, you know, we’re realizing that people are going to start craving the things that they took for granted. And so now you can schedule. A smart speaker posts will appear next Friday, a social campaign to run for the next week promoting, you know, the event up to Friday, you can have a blog post come out, you know, on a Wednesday and on a Wednesday just before the event and direct mail a postcard with the graphics which maybe the same graphics that you scheduled in advance in digital, you can have that printed automatically and appear in your customers mailbox in time for the campaign to go off on Friday. But it’s a very interesting approach that we’re taking and obviously we have to make money so we make Money on the subscription side. But on the back end, the first party data, the after we removed the personally identifiable information, it just exponentially makes our algorithms better and better. So from a spiritual standpoint, because I’m very spiritual, almost like a collective consciousness, the more people that join, the better the recommendation everyone’s gets. And it’s almost like a collective consciousness where the better input the more input, the better outcome for everyone.

Nicole Laino
I love that because I mean, this this podcast is very spiritually focused, and what what role does that play in in your business? You being the CEO of this company, I certainly see it with your mission, but how does it How does it guide you personally,

Arjun Rai
it influences our algorithms, it influences our roadmap, it influences our design, you know, the fact that we have a mascot that is a Maltese that I grew up with, actually, my dad’s dog is right behind the door. It’s a three year old Maltese. It influences how that is how we put the design together, the user interface and pretty much impacts everything. And I guess the kind of the audience is resonating with that as well. 65% of our audience 60 65% Are women between the ages of 50 and 65. And, and it’s interesting because they tend to be the best decision makers, they produce the best content, they tend to be usually in the PR role in the marketing roles. So our audience is kind of speaking to us in terms of where we’re going and we’re listening to them.

Nicole Laino
That’s beautiful. I I just I really love where you come from, and again, just that centered place. And what what platforms do you currently integrate with? Yeah, that’s

Arjun Rai
a great question. So all the major ones Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tik Tok, Google My Business. We’re looking to integrate with Pinterest very soon as well. We’ve kind of made our own integrations like I mentioned the Amazon smart speaker scheduler is of sorts and integration. On the blogging side we have Shopify on the way we’ve already integrated with medium and any wordpress blog through WordPress plugin. So if you want it I mean as soon as anyone Okay, someone’s signed up to be have lights for people who can’t see what I’m talking about. We have lights behind me that shine green for revenue and yellow for newsletters. Signups are people who are signing up for our platforms. We celebrate our customers

Nicole Laino
things.

Arjun Rai
Yeah, yeah.

Nicole Laino
And just back to the emoji thing a little bit back to the back to the the AI powerhouse that’s behind this this engine? What exactly so what people can take away from this is that the emojis there, there are words and keywords attached to the emojis, which is as simple as what we see when we hover over an emoji and it gives us kind of a you know, it says hugs.

Arjun Rai
Yeah, so it’s a little bit more than that, because that’s keyword based. And Apple does a great job in that keyboard. So if you type in heart, and it’ll give you a heart, if you’re typing, it gives you a tree, but almost like teaching a kid about you know what is contextual, right, so let’s take a living room, for example, a table goes well with a chair, which goes well with plates will go well with spoons, in a dictionary or on a keyboard example, none of those things would ever be near each other, right? You have to be very contextual, you have to be a little bit more than more than you know, you know, one word for one word and definition. And so we’ve taken four different approaches to giving those recommendations to you in real time. So and then once we take those four different approaches, we’re also then seeing how the three different languages are cross, you know, cross pollinating, and you know, converging with one another, because there’s autocomplete technology has been around for a very long time, but autocomplete with hashtags and emojis and also looking at images has is a very different approach.

Nicole Laino
And when so I’m just thinking about about how this works. Are you taking into consideration is the AI taking into consideration the user’s account, the amount of engagement, they typically get their number of followers, all of that where it’s tailored specifically to them and their account for that particular platform?

Arjun Rai
Yeah, so it’s gonna go back to kind of my background, which is, you know, I definitely believe in Eastern medicine and holistic healing and things like that. And it takes a very different granular approach versus Western medicine that tends to be one size fits all. So in our case, we could we could have done exactly what our competitors did, which is show you the likes, comments and reshares. And that’s it. The what we’re looking at is from a holistic, holistic standpoint, what is the sentiment of each of the words you use? What is the sentiment of each of the emojis, the hashtags, even the images, what’s in the image, and then taking that data to then figure out how many likes you got and reshares and comments and then you know, kind of predicting what you should be saying the next time around. So if we see that you typically, a typical post for you that does really well has two verbs and three nouns and five adjectives and those kinds of emojis and the sentiment will start giving you those recommendations and next time around and kind of learning from that on the back end. So that technology is coming out this summer, it’s where we’re heading with our analytics. And it’s Oh, it’s already on our roadmap.

Nicole Laino
And what type of growth do people see when they start using Hello Luffy? Like, what is the difference practically to the US from the users perspective from the creation, and then also just the, you know, the overall engagement that they’re getting.

Arjun Rai
So engagement definitely does go up because of the fact that you can craft a message not just haphazardly come up with it, because you feel the pressure of posting something. The other thing is you can because you can save all the continent to a library, which constantly gets optimized for you. And suggesting it’s showing you how similar they are continents, so you don’t duplicate yourself. Accidentally, it actually allows you to kind of be a little bit more aware of your overall strategy, or you know, versus just taking a look at an Excel sheet, and just haphazardly coming up with content. So from a, it allows you to be more proactive as well, with your content marketing strategy, it gives you better engagement overall, because you are crafting the messages on a you know, optimizing every nuance of it. You know, that’s and if you want to learn more, obviously, if you see what our customers are seeing, we have a Facebook group called Content masters, I don’t understand why none of our competitors do. But we actually listen to our own company, our own customers in the group. And they can say, The Good, the Bad, the dirty, whatever it is. And we take that feedback very seriously. We love critiques at the end of the day, and it really does help hone in on the roadmap, and possibly are able to raise capital from the same group through equity crowdfunding.

Nicole Laino
Yeah, Facebook groups are just their user experience. Yep. Focus groups that that, you know, if you’re not taking advantage of that, and same thing, like host a clubhouse room and month or something and talk to your users. Yep. That’s, that’s such a smart thing. And again, goes to, you know, like you walk in the walk,

Arjun Rai
yeah. And we automate that we actually automate our own Facebook group, we do about one to two clubhouse sessions every week. And that allows us to stay very close with our with our customer.

Nicole Laino
That’s awesome. That is great. Because there’s no better feedback than what the user is experiencing is not necessarily that everything that they asked for gets built, because sometimes it doesn’t serve the greater good. But it does give you a glimpse into how they’re using software, what is working, what’s not, and can make this easier, and how can we make this you know, a great platform for everybody? So kudos for going there. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for being here. I know that I know that everybody’s going to want to check this out, they’re going to want to get into that Facebook group. And download Hello will be because I certainly am. Because it really does sound like it’s that missing piece for a lot of people who maybe get stuck on getting it right, or get really really frustrated that their engagement is low and they don’t know what to do to fix it. So taking that step to have some you know, you’re you’re battling an algorithm so get an algorithm to don’t try to do that as a person.

Arjun Rai
Right? Yeah, no, and you definitely need your your free furry friends right in real life. They’re They’re your best friends and in digital marketing that’s why we built Ella Wolfie is just like your best friend. He teaches you when how what? In all the nuances you need to know of posting. And I love it. That’s our goal.

Nicole Laino
Awesome. Well, where can they stay in touch with you? Where can they where can they hear more about the software? And aren’t you?

Arjun Rai
Yes, great question. Hello, wolfie.com H e h e l l o w ofy.com is the place to go. And as far as you know, reaching out to us is concerned you can just email me Arjun, AR J un@hello.com. And tell me about your story. Tell me about your small business story. What are some of the features you’re you would you would wish you you know, someone would build for you when it came to digital marketing because you know, most likely will build it for you. But our mission is to build the biggest company on the on the planet helping the smallest and, you know, take keep an eye out for our future equity crowdfunding campaigns, you know, anyone can invest as low as $100 into the company and own a piece of it. And I think that’s no better way to build loyalty with your customer as a result of that,

Nicole Laino
for sure. Grassroots campaigning for sure. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing the software and just You’re obviously such a wealth of knowledge about it. I think you explained it really well. And you’ve I think people will be running to get it because it sounds super powerful.

Arjun Rai
Virtual hugs,

Nicole Laino
Virtual hugs. And for you listener if you made it all the way to the end of this conversation, we are grateful for you. We are thankful that you stayed with us to the end and wanted to be part of this with us. We thank you for that. And I’m going to end this show like I ended the show’s telling you that you that you are only limited by the limitations that you accept. And when you stop accepting those limitations. That is when you become limitless. We will see you on the next episode.