#094 TechSee | If I Can See It, I Can Solve It

Show Notes

As amazing as modern technology can be, it doesn’t always work the way we want it to work. Sometimes your home Internet goes out or your new coffee machine isn’t cooperating. In those instances, calling customer support or having a technician visit isn’t always a smooth process either. Luckily, TechSee is revolutionizing how people receive customer support for their devices. For customers, technicians, and service providers, the entire process is simplified by TechSee’s solutions to reduce the time and money it takes to provide customer service solutions. On his recent appearance on the Midstage Startup Momentum Podcast, TechSee co-founder and CEO Eitan Cohen spoke to Roland Siebelink about how TechSee’s products are helping and the success they’ve achieved thus far.

• How TechSee developed its product offering.

• The importance of having a vision and not losing faith in it.

• Why TechSee’s indirect distribution strategy is rare among startups.

• How TechSee finds and brings value to its partners.

• What it takes to get customers involved in the process.

Transcript

Eitan Cohen:
Every time a customer calls, you have your super-skilled agents flying blind. And when you fly blind, you run into a wall. If you could have seen it, you could have solved it.

Intro/Outro:
Welcome to the Midstage Startup Momentum podcast. Each week, we interview up-and-coming founders of some of the fastest-growing mid-stage startups across the world. Your host is Roland Siebelink, who will share some of his own experience helping startups scale from 10 to 1000 people in a few years. Here is Roland.

Roland Siebelink:
Hello and welcome to the MidStage Startup Momentum podcast. My name is Roland Sibelink, and I am a coach and ally for all the fast-growing scale-ups in the whole world. 

Today, we are talking to one of the most amazing founders in the world. His name is Eitan Cohen, and he's the founder and CEO of Techsee. Joining us from New York City. Hello, Eitan, how are you?

Eitan Cohen:
Hello, Ronald. Thank you for inviting me over to your amazing podcast. I would love to be with you tonight and answer any questions you may have about what we do, how we do, and how we're doing it.

Roland Siebelink:
Those are the best podcast guests ever, the ones that want to spend the night with me and want to answer all my questions. I would love to do that. That is great, Eitan. Always the first question - just as an introduction for our audience - what does Techsee do? Who do you help in the world? And what impact are you making?

Eitan Cohen:
What Techsee is doing, in very simple words, is bringing satisfaction to customer service. And when you think about customer service, every time you need to call or interact with your service provider or your brand, it's always a challenge. You need to find which touch point you want to use, whether I'm going to call, I'm going to text, or I'm going to email. And then you need to wait, and in the best case, whatever you want to get resolved, in many cases, it's not. You either have to call again or wait for a technician. 

And what Techsee does is transform this experience by a very simple concept that Techsee brought to the table, which translates to visual AI technology. And it allows any organization to

get themselves over the customer's shoulder and be able to see what the customers see when they call - basically see their products at the end of the customer and be able to show the customer, to guide them, on how to use it or answer any question. 

The way we are doing that - we are doing it either by helping live agents in the contact center to help the customers. We're also doing it in a self-service manner, where you don't need the live agents; it's agentic AI that can help you. And we're also helping with the field technicians when they come on-site to help them resolve those issues. And the idea behind it is to create an impact for us as consumers. 

First of all, you want to be happy with what you purchase - very simple ask. Many times - and you can see in the statistics - there is a lot of product returns. There is a lot of churn. Why? Because you didn't get what you expected. It doesn't mean that the product is not working. It means that what you expected wasn't there. And this is where Techsee creates a very big impact by introducing visual into the conversation, into the interaction. 

If I can see it, I can solve it. This is one element of it. But think about also the poor people in the contact center, who have to solve the same problems over and over every day. We bring them satisfaction as well. How do we do that? Because once they are able to see, they do their job much better, and with less frustration, because they don't have to try and explain to you what they mean when they told you to do something and you don't have to be frustrated at them and yell at them that you've done it; they don't understand what they're talking about. 

Roland Siebelink:
And is it text chats, or is it the AI agent talking to you?

Eitan Cohen:
No, it's a video. It's a video where the AI agent is an icon that speaks to you. But then you see through your camera what it's looking at. And in looking at your machine, it understands what type of machine you have exactly. And it can now do AR to guide you. “Put an arrow here, press this button to open it. Now fill in the motion.” And it's all visual. It's not like text. You don't have to type anything. You speak to it. 

Roland Siebelink:
It's almost like those screen-sharing experiences with tech support, but for your whole world.

Eitan Cohen:
It's surfing your physical environment with you and guiding you with AR. Now, if you wanted to speak with a person, it's the same experience. Now I'm an agent, I'm Joe in the contact center, and I'm saying, “Hey, Roland, thank you for reaching out. Let me send you a text message so I can see what you see.” And in the background, Sophie whispered to the agent: “Ask him these questions. Tell him to do that.”

The impact, as I said, for the customer, it's great to see that translate into loyalty. It translates into more business because now I want to buy more parts from you. I won’t to return your product. Maybe I'll buy the next version. 

For the employee in the contact center, it's less frustration, which means higher retention. The contact center industry is notorious for a high attrition rate, which is a high cost of training, high cost of holding onto people, because a skilled workforce is also a big problem. But more than anything, in this day of age where cost is very important, it allows you to balance your costs with customer satisfaction because there is a dramatic impact on cost. 

We have shown across industries, over 20% reduction in truck rolls in those industries like telecommunication, manufacturing, home security, and smart home, where you have to roll a truck in order to be able to solve an issue. We reduced that by 20% on average. We have some customers that we got to 40-50%. 

And we work with the greatest brands in the world. We are fortunate to be partners with Verizon, AT&T, Frontier, many of the leading telecommunication companies in the US, as well as in Europe, companies like Vodafone, like Orange.

Techsee is at the center of the home, working with all the tech companies that provide technology to your home and with the service providers that rely on devices to be connected in order to give you this connectivity. You're talking about modem routers, mesh Wi-Fi, smart speakers, alarm systems, EV charging, all of this has a very high requirement for visual capabilities in order to provide a streamlined service.

Roland Siebelink:
Eitan, you said you had so much traction with telecom companies to start. How did you persuade the first one to try out your solution, and how did you scale that further?

Eitan Cohen:
That's a really interesting story because when I started Techsee with my partner Amir, I was already retired. I had three exits, and I'm like, “I'm going just to enjoy time with family and travel around the world and everything.” And I found myself in the meantime, helping my mother-in-law, my parents, driving all the time because they were calling me, “My Internet is not working. My printer is not printing.” 

Think about your mother. You're trying to help her by asking her what does she mean when she said it's not working? Very difficult to understand because they simply say it's not working. I don't know why.

After doing it too many times, I said, “Well, there’s got to be a solution, and the LogMeIn, TeamViewer, those remote screen solutions are not cutting it. I had this idea.

Roland Siebelink:
Tell me, Eitan, honestly, were you just tired of retirement or were you tired of helping out your mother-in-law?

Eitan Cohen:
The latter. I said, I'm going to solve it. It just cost me too much to do that. What I did, I put together a PowerPoint deck. I had the product mocks that I wanted, the experience that I want in my head. The idea was that everybody has a smartphone, the smartphone has a camera. If I could see what she's talking about, and then I just have to do a very simple thing - being able to draw an arrow on her screen and tell her, push this button or click here. 

I did screenshots. I went to three telecommunication companies because in telecommunication, we all know, the first thing to break is the Internet every time. And this is a major call driver and major dissatisfaction. I had this vision of Superman flying into a wall because their eyes were blinded. I was saying: “This is what your agents are doing. Every time a customer calls, you have your super-skilled agents flying blind.” 

And when you fly blind, you run into a wall, which means long calls, frustrated customers, truck rolls that you don't need to do, all the things that you incur because you can't see. If you could have seen it, you could have solved it. This was the “A-ha” moment for those customers. I saw them and they say, “Can we do a beta?” I said, “Sure.” Three months later, I came with the prototype, and the rest is history. 

Roland Siebelink:
What can you share about how successful you've been in terms of a range of how many customers you have. I don't need specific numbers. But are you in a range of one to five or five to 20 or something like that? And ARR too, if you want to share a range, that would be helpful so that people can see how far you have come.

Eitan Cohen:
What I can share is that we have close to 1,000 customers on our platform. We are in 53 countries, 23 languages. Listen, visual is universal. We are all visual creatures. 

And that's why we experienced fast growth, and we're doing high double digits. And this is revenue, and this is great for us. We've been profitable for a while, and we enjoy every moment because we are all customers of our technology.

Roland Siebelink:
When you say you are already profitable, does that mean you are not interested in raising venture capital?

Eitan Cohen:
Well, you can see that OpenAI, as successful as they are, they are always raising money. But they are raising money because they feel like they can grow more. We always balance between, do we need to take more money because we want to accelerate growth or are we okay with the rate that we are growing? We never say no to money, but we are privileged that we don't need money for our current growth and current success.

Roland Siebelink:
Okay, that's excellent. And you mentioned in the pre-conversation that you already have about 150 people in the company. That's amazing. That's bigger than many of the other people that I've interviewed on this podcast. Great for you. 

Can you tell us a little bit how that is divided up between different streams in the business? How many people are on products and engineering? How many people are on sales and marketing? How many people are on the post-sales, customer success? To some degree, what ballpark numbers can you share with us?

Eitan Cohen:
We invest a lot in technology. About 50% of our workforce is in R&D and product. 

Roland Siebelink:
Tell me a little bit more, Eitan, about those 75 engineering-product people. That has grown a lot from the first days, I'm sure. Many tech companies say there's a point where you start reaching this paralysis in engineering, when the team grows too large and it's not that clear anymore what you want to prioritize. Have you experienced some of these growing pains? And if so, what have you done about it? What has helped to overcome it?

Eitan Cohen:
In our journey, it's been interesting to see that in the first three years, we were having increasing productivity out of engineering. And after three, four years, we reached a plateau where we said, “Okay, we have a legacy product. Everything that was developed, we have to make it better, but we don't need to grow because we need to see the market with our product.” 

In 2022, when ChatGPT exploded, we saw the other hike, and since then, we’re steadily growing because we bring more and more products to market. And the productivity is much higher. Last year, we released two new products. This year, we're going to release two new products. And this is in partnership with our customers. My philosophy is don't invent problems. There are enough in the world already. Just find out what they are and solve them.

Roland Siebelink:
The close customer relationships help a lot, right?

Eitan Cohen:
Yes. We invest a lot in a true partnership with our customers, and we build solutions for them. And then we take it to the rest of the industry.

Roland Siebelink:
Okay, very good. The other half is going to be split between sales and marketing, probably substantial customer support as well, and then some finance, overhead, and maybe legal resources. How much is in sales, would you say? Pure sales?

Eitan Cohen:
The interesting thing for us is that sales is about 20% of the company. But we have partners. We have a very strong partner ecosystem. Salesforce is a strategic partner for us and also an investor. We have Accenture as a strategic partner. Then Capgemini and a very long list of partners that we see value in going together to market. Our real scale comes from partners, not from our employees. Every partner manager enables 100 customers. And that's how you grow much beyond what you can do organically without adding costs, so you can stay profitable.

Roland Siebelink:
Why do you think it's so rare that startups employ an indirect distribution strategy? In theory, you could scale a lot faster by using partners as opposed to building up your own direct sales force.

Eitan Cohen:
When you look at most of the startups, most of the founders, this is the first time for them. Your first time, you learn a lot, and partners come way down the road. My co-founding team was all ex-CEOs. We all had been there, done that. And we knew exactly how we wanted to build it. That's why we started with the partner. It's not trivial because it requires a lot of things to work efficiently with partners. 

Think about it, your product needs to have not just the value for the customer, but it has to have the value for the partner. What is the added value? You have to build tools for them. You have to enable them. You have to do a lot of things that, for many companies, this comess after they build their internal muscle. We knew how we wanted to do it, so we built in parallel our internal muscles and our partner muscles from day one. 

Roland Siebelink:
I'm guessing also one of the difficult things that you hinted at, Eitan, is that you have to know exactly what you build and what your marketing in order to get partners interested. If you're constantly changing your vision and what you're building, like many founders are, then you don't have the stability to get big partners involved.

Eitan Cohen:
Exactly. To get a partner involved takes years. Literally, years. You have to have a compass. You have a vision that sticks, that you don't change every day. And you have to build toward a vision. You have to understand that you can’t change your vision. Day one, day two vision is something that will always be your end goal. You may never reach it fully, but it's fine. As long as you make constant steps. 

We started simply with a manual tool for agents to see what the customers see. By learning from those millions of interactions of agents using our tool, being able to help, we developed AI models that now can be provisioned and help those agents to solve things faster. Think about an average contact center, 50% of the workforce changes every year, every year. You have AI now to train them, to make it faster, to be onboarded and be productive for the organization much faster. 

Roland Siebelink:
Eitan, you already gave some indication about how big you already are, but how big are you going to be? Let's say seven years down the road, what is the dream outcome for Techsee?

Eitan Cohen:

We want Techsee - and this is vision day one - we call it Techsee in every device. Literally, what we mean is that we want Techsee to be the eyes of any application. In order to make applications smart, it has to have vision. If it doesn't have vision, it's handicapped. Why? Because you have to type. It doesn't understand it. It's not intelligent. I can't understand how some organizations are still running without having this as a standard part of their interactions with tools, with customers, and with their products, because the information embedded in every visual is endless. You can't describe it with words. 

And that's what we bring to the table. And we want every device, we want to be the digital twin of that device, which means you point your phone and it talks with your device. It's connected to your device. It's connected knowledge in the cloud with the eyes to provide you with a hyper-personalized experience with your purchase, so you're satisfied. And if you are satisfied, whoever sold you that is also satisfied because you didn't call them, you didn't cost them money, and maybe you're going to buy more.

Roland Siebelink:
That's excellent. Eitan, last question is always, you've been around the block a few times, but I'm sure that you also have younger founders, less experienced founders reaching out to you sometimes for advice. What is the most common advice you would give founders, something you learned over the years, and that you think can help younger, newer founders do a better job faster?

Eitan Cohen:
I think the thing that makes a lot of companies fail because the founder loses faith at some point on their vision. You started something that you really believe in, don't leave it, don't forget it. Being in a startup is a roller coaster. It's ups and downs all the time. And when you are down, you don't know how you're gonna get up again, but you're gonna get up. If you believe, you'll make it up.

And if you understand that, you don't give up hope, no matter what, you will prevail. And if you prevail, it means you grow and you'll find your way. Your core instinct for starting the company, assuming you get the first few customers, there's no reason why you can't grow those first customers to thousands of customers. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be very difficult. Sometimes the stress level and the emotional swing are very high. But find the strength and carry on. Don't give up.

Roland Siebelink:
Excellent. I've loved having you on the podcast. Eitan Cohen, the founder and CEO of Techsee. That's T-E-C-H-S-E-E. Eitan, where can people go who want to learn more about your company, maybe want to try out your product? What website should they go to, and what should they download?

Eitan Cohen:
Techsee.com, and see for themselves. The website should speak the Techsee language.

Roland Siebelink:
I love that. And that's also a great example of delegating to folks; somebody's running the website, that should speak it for itself. I love it. 

Thank you so much, Eitan. This was an amazing interview. We really appreciate you joining us from New York City. And for the listeners, we will be back next week with a new episode. Thank you, everyone, for listening.

Intro/Outro:
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