Competitive Intelligence Automation | Pere Codina from Kompyte

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Pere Codina 0:00
We solve with machine learning and artificial intelligence what anyone else is solving a skill with you.

Alexander Ferguson 0:12
Welcome, everyone to UpTech Report UpTech Report is sponsored by TeraLeap. Learn how to leverage the power of video at teraleap.io. I’m excited today for our guests, who’s joining us is Pere Codina, based in Austin, Texas, CEO of Kompyte welcome Pere. Now your product is a competitor analysis software. Is that a good way to explain how would you say it?

Pere Codina 0:32
We’re calling competitive intelligence automation,

Alexander Ferguson 0:35
okay, so it’s really about automation, which I love technology is powerful. So if anyone’s in product marketing, or sales enablement, or another business leader that’s basically wanting to track everything their competitor is doing or making their changes their website, their product, their campaigns, this could be a tool, they want to check that out. Now, on your site, you state automate the mundane, repetitive tasks associated with competitive research. Here’s what problem did you set out to solve that has an MA, How’s it changed over time?

Pere Codina 1:06
Right. So, you know, the problem kinda like starts with a market reality, which is landscapes are getting more and more product with more and more players. And that has a consequence, it means that it takes a lot of time to stay up to date on what’s happening in your competitive landscape. So we, you know, we notice that for a normal company that has like 10, to 20 players in there, in the landscape, we’re talking about 60 to 100 hours of manual work every week, if you want to know everything that’s happening, right? Obviously, companies don’t have the time. So they end up you know, doing partial analysis, or, you know, tracking just a bunch of these guys. And, and this, and that the ultimate result is that, you know, they’re self bribes and people that has the position the company, they don’t have all the intelligence available to be properly. So that’s kind of like the problem we solve. And we solved it by, you know, eliminating this money or component and fully automating the competitive analysis.

Alexander Ferguson 1:59
Everyone loves saving time, that’s kind of a nice thing, especially anything that is mundane. And that’s where technology can shine. So curious, have we dive a little bit deeper around the technology itself? Tell me more? How does it work? And how is it different than anything else

Pere Codina 2:14
out there? Right, so the thing here is, what makes it different is that we, we solve with machine learning and artificial intelligence, what you know, anyone else is solving a skill with humans, right? You know, there are solutions that may have like some, you know, level of software, but they still require a lot of my work, we almost eliminate this human component from the equation, right? And the way we do it is, you know, we have a bunch of colors, they go out there, and, and they check everything that’s happening, right? On your competitive landscape. What are these guys doing, especially when it comes to like, you know, messaging positioning, but products, pricing, anything that that is available, they’re out there to, you know, to keep track off. And then we use a set of machine learning algorithms that are able to understand what is going on? And by understanding what is going on what is happening, what is this company actually doing, we can do a bunch of like, operations, like filtering out the noise, classifying this intelligence, organizing it and curated with machine learning, right. And, and, and, you know, it’s still not, let’s say, 100%, but it’s so close, that 60 hours of manual work is just one hour. So now you can keep track of like, you know, 10s of companies and it just gonna take a few minutes of your day and either need to hire an external analyst, or you then need to rely or allocate a lot of resources internally in your company, it’s, you know, it’s once everything is set up, which takes, you know, a little a very little amount of time to set up, because it’s also automated. Once everything is up and running, it’s only a few minutes, and this is something that you know, you’re gonna enjoy from from week one or week two.

Alexander Ferguson 3:55
That’s why I’m really fascinated with the use case of AI machine learning when it comes to business use cases, because it’s okay if it only gets you 80% there because it still saves you 80% of the time. Versus and consumers it’s like you want it to work 100% of time otherwise you get annoyed Yeah. Now does all this information come into effectively into a dashboard? Is that how it’s saving your time cuz then you can just look at the dashboard of the top stats what’s Yeah, it’s like

Pere Codina 4:21
a SAS it just SAS platform is software, where basically what you have like is a section where you have like, you know, a curated list of insights that are relevant, right. And this is what we build at the beginning, you know, customers build their own setup, and what they do is like, you know, they can build they can say I want to be you know, I want to have a special filter here for anything changing on pricing and messaging or anything like that features and integrations right. And then we also have like, you know, this this marketing automation, where you can like program your own automations and say, you know, this happens and do this or do that. So, the part is the combination of automation with machine learning or Yeah, the results of the AI, what helps even like a streamline, you know, the building of the reports, we also have the reporting part where you can create the report, right. And the combination of the CLI is like, okay, when the AI that takes attention by saying that this person is doing this change contains this was related to these things, or, or it’s been tagged by the machine learning system with this and that, please update this report, or please send it to me so that I can check it out. So ultimately, you know, wanted setup if you got a product marketer or someone like in charge of doing competitive analysis in the company, or when you need to, there’s like login, look at the last updates, see if anything report needs to be updated. You go check the report, and you added the messaging and the positioning, which is what product market? I’m sorry, for, right?

Alexander Ferguson 5:48
Can you share any use cases of case studies of clients that are using right now?

Pere Codina 5:52
Yeah, I mean, there’s a list of like, case studies in the Atlantic pages in our website, one that I like to mention is the reason why it’s like a new customer that’s been using combat for like, I think it’s like three months or four months. Now, when we did the first quarterly business review, they say, Listen, this quarter, we have noticed a 9% increase in our conversion rates, again, turn on our competitors, and we want all the deals stolen competitor, and it happened the first quarter. So like, you know, we were talking to normally when you start doing software, or like, you know, working with mid market companies and so on the first weeks and months could be like, kinda like for the setup. In this case, I was like, so quick, that there was a Windows on window, right? And, and, and, and the reporter is like, hey, we want all of us to the main competitor, because, you know, we were able to build this battle car so quickly and keep them up to date. And, and we want all the bills, and it was not like this before, right? Pair, I

Alexander Ferguson 6:51
appreciate that case study to help understand a one use case your business model is effectively to a monthly subscription, a yearly subscription.

Unknown Speaker 7:00
It’s normally a yearly subscription. Yeah, based on number of seats, it’s based on,

Pere Codina 7:07
you know, it’s based on multiple factors. One first one is like the number of competitors, but you know, we’re talking about 10s of competitors in, in every in every packet, right? So it’s, you know, a standard package, it’s gonna let you track at least 30 or 60 companies, right? Because I was wondering, what’s

Alexander Ferguson 7:25
the best kind of size of company that, so anyone would say, oh, I want to use this, unless they’re really tracking a good number of people, right?

Pere Codina 7:35
There is a minimum, we’re normally I mean, you know, the moment you, you have like, five competitors in your landscape, that starts to be a lot of manual work, right? So you can start leveraging Intel, the more players are in your competitive landscape. And, you know, talking about competitors, we will have a bunch of companies that are also tracking not only competitors, but also partners, or anyone else in the competitive landscape they want to be aware of, or, you know, potential new competitors, or companies overlapping. And, you know, they started tracking 10 companies, and then suddenly, they look at, you know, speak to them and look at how are things going? And they say, like, yeah, we’re tracking 45 companies now. And I’d like, okay, cool. Interesting, right? So everyone wants to know, what’s happening out there? So yeah, you know, we were very indulgent, that I’m gonna have competitors. And then, you know, it also includes, like, you know, when am I certain amount of users and depending on if it’s like, product marketers, and or, like Sales Users or consumers of intelligence? And also, you know, there are different layers based on watching quality in every layer, and, you know, what pieces of information are, you’re actually collecting from, from your, from your competitors. Right. So what are the different channels that you are tracking?

Alexander Ferguson 8:46
Here’s a question I think is a good one to answer is, can you even help them find other competitors that didn’t know existed?

Pere Codina 8:54
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, that depends on the package, we, one of the first package we released a long time ago was a search marketing package where basically, you know, we will track, you know, what’s happening with keywords, and, and who is showing up organically and, you know, but if anything, and on top of these, we already have a database of like, you know, hundreds of 1000s of companies, millions of web pages, that we are tracking, and, and we can suggest your competitors based on this, this method, all these elements, if they have a website that looks like your website, we will report to do if they are being positioned, or they are like, you know, what, they’re being organically ranked, or, or, or someone’s talking about them. And it’s, we believe that’s kind of like related, we’re also going to be your competitor.

Alexander Ferguson 9:39
What’s the most exciting feature that you guys have released recently, or working on releasing that you’d want? Yeah, yeah, I

Pere Codina 9:47
think, you know, the first one is, you know, this shift in this in this machine learning algorithm, that’s great. Like the moment you see what machine learning can do and what you can do. It’s like, How is this possible right, would take me years to go All these data, and the fact that this is analyzing websites, like almost like a human would do it, at least for for what we wanted to do. But it’s crazy, right? sighs like, okay, so this is affecting anything that’s happening out there and it’s actually curating. And it’s like, yeah, it’s happening. And that was that moment was like, Okay, that’s great. Another one is like all the combination like the automation, yeah, if you still generate a lot of noise, it is, it is almost impossible to automate, right? Because you’re gonna end up sending false positives, sending fake alerts for things that are not relevant. But the moment that you can use machine learning to report only once relevant, then you can start automating right, and this combination, this is, you know, just working right?

Alexander Ferguson 10:43
What do you think they should be thinking about right now, when it comes to competitive analysis?

Pere Codina 10:47
First one is not a good time competitive, and that will be a problem. You know, that. That’s just how it is. And, you know, the more destruction and technology are there, the more companies you have to keep track off? Fortunately, there is technology to help you out there. Right. And, and, you know, I think the most important thing is, these guys are excellent at finding out how to win the competitors, right. And if they have all the data, inputs, and they have all the information they need to have, they are very good positioning against them, right, and protecting against competitors and making their products shine, right? And being unique. So all what I would tell them is like, hey, automate everything else, let robots do the legwork for you. And focus on what matters, which is making your product unique and making it different and making getting special for your, for your customers. Right. And they are excellent at doing this. This is actually, you know, what they like spending time on? And yeah, time is limited.

Alexander Ferguson 11:51
It’s an interesting point. For one who does software for competitor analysis, like focus on what you do? Well, yeah, it’s good to know what they’re doing. But that’s

Pere Codina 12:00
the only way to be number one is like know, what, number two and number three are doing all the time, right? And if number two or number three, that was like 10 years ago, now, that is number 10. Number 20. There is a lot of players in in a landscape. So you know, if you want to, let’s say if you’re not effectively position against the sky, you against all these guys. And, and and differentiate from them, you have to know what’s happening out there, right? Otherwise, you may be thinking you’re different and you’re not that different. And you know, it isn’t that balance anyway.

Alexander Ferguson 12:32
But is it a balance of knowing what they are doing and not and and also being able to create a plan or realize what are your Yeah,

Pere Codina 12:41
like these guys are extremely busy guys, they have a lot of things on their plate competitive analysis is a part of what they have to go they have to do a lot of work that talk to customers, they have to look at the industries they have to talk to the product guys collaborate within roadmaps enable sales, there is a lot of tasks that no product marketers have to do. And and they are various teams are not very large teams, right? So what what I think is like, Okay, why do you need the product marketer in your company, right? To win, you need them to win the position against competitors to position to send the message to the wall, right? Okay. So let them send the message to the wall, and we get the robots arise.

Alexander Ferguson 13:23
Love it speaking of of the fact that they product marketing has to do so many different things. Are there any other integrations or future integrations, you’re looking to do API connections to other platforms and automation tools?

Pere Codina 13:35
Right, so we already integrate a collection of tools or and solutions. So we know we integrate Salesforce, we integrate HubSpot, we have an embedded solution that integrates in a lot of places. So you can actually, you know, have a report of combine set of reports and combine any of combined anywhere, and you’re gonna we can also, we’re already integrating slack. We’re integrating Microsoft Teams Drive, Google Drive and a bunch of like other tools we’re working on on an API for the for the future, although this is something that, you know, we’re still not, it’s not the main priority for now. And we’re definitely working on an API. So far, we have like a good list of integrations, I think, you know, the main, we integrate with the majority of the tools that our customers already using.

Alexander Ferguson 14:25
If you had to share anything about what your five year plan, where do you see the company in five years, and you’re the most excited about?

Pere Codina 14:33
Right? So, you know, two things here. First thing is like we believe this because nobody, this is a new category. It’s like when you know, kinda like a new market, something very new. We believe this is going to explode. The reason why this is gonna explore this, because it’s not that they’re going to be less companies in the wall, right? So companies are going to be are going to be more and more companies and munchkins are going to go portada right. So the and the second thing is because it works, it is clear that companies that are automating competitive intelligence and Battle cards. And, and you know, combining these two alliances and actually winning more deals in the complex than not doing right. And based on this, you know, we believe that this is going to be a great category, very large market. And we are, you know, better positioned or we’re perfectly positioned to lead this category. So we believe we’re going to be

Alexander Ferguson 15:24
when you started comp I was it six, seven years ago?

Pere Codina 15:28
Uh, yeah, like, not that nice, like five years ago, five, five years

Alexander Ferguson 15:31
ago. Gotcha. Yeah. What’s one thing you would wish you’d known five years ago?

Pere Codina 15:38
Oh, I mean, you know, we have a, like a very standard store, or like in Santa Clara, like a very particular study, which is like we started in Spain, in Barcelona, Spain. And I think the first the Alberta we should have known then is target the US. Yeah, it’s a until we started started in the US, and then you know, our life change. And, you know, we probably didn’t know enough about, you know, how to create categories and so on. We didn’t even thought it was going to be like a new category. At that time. We just pointed the problem. And there was no solution for this problem, right. And then suddenly, we realize that, you know, our first customers were in the US, and this is how we end up here.

Alexander Ferguson 16:21
Well, for those that want to hear more about Pere’s story, stick around for part two of our interview where we’re gonna dive into a bit deeper Thank you, though so much for paying for sharing. Where are you guys are headed and this fascinating space that is so crucial for Product Marketing. Appreciate it, man. That concludes the audio version of this episode. To see the original and more visit our UpTech Report YouTube channel. If you know a tech company, we should interview you can nominate them at UpTech report.com. Or if you just prefer to listen, make sure you subscribe to this series on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcasting app.