>> GARRY TAN: There's nothing like just picking up the phone
and helping a user all the way. One on One.
That's what helped mega startup Superhuman.
Today we're talking to the founders of Cohere.
Their software will let you do exactly that kind
of onboarding helping users directly,
but in an even more awesome way right there inside the web
browser so you don't even have to set it up by phone or zoom.
It's the kind of thing every startup with high lifetime
value absolutely needs a way to push
retention and conversion.
If you nail retention and conversion you can
have a billion dollar startup.
There are literally startups today that might
be watching this right now.
That couldn't happen but now can because Cohere exists.
This video in this startup could help
you so much that it makes you. Let's get into it.
- Yunyu, Rahul, thank you so much
for coming on the YouTube channel.
It's a really, just a pleasure to sit down with you.
You're working on something that's really going to
change the way people build products actually
and have them work for their customers.
You know, off the bat.
I wanted to start off with,
what is Cohere.
- Thank you Garry.
Thanks for having us.
Cohere is the easiest way to onboard and support your users.
So if you'll log into the to your dashboard
you can see every single user live on your website.
And if you see anyone in need of help
you can just jump in,
take a call in one click
no set up required on either side.
- We've tried to make Cohere feel
like you're standing right beside your users,
like in the same room.
So everything is super fast and instantaneous
and there's no setup required on either end.
So if you've ever had to support, you know,
some user, maybe it's your mom over the phone
and you're going around back and forth
on screen share asking them, you know,
what page are you on?
So you can see what they see on the other end
We prevent that from happening entirely
because you can see what they're doing in real time
interact with what their screen is on.
And you no longer have to verbally describe how
to navigate your user interface or try to,
fish out what they're seeing in their app.
Basically what you'd have to do previously
is pick up the phone and literally by,
try to guess at what someone is doing.
And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,
and you're lucky to even get someone on the phone at times
- Exactly.
And having no screen share
or phone makes it even worse
because now companies are forced to get
on zoom or Google meets,
which makes it even harder to get on calls
to people when they need help.
- I mean, it sounds
like the best way to actually understand it.
Just, watch a demo.
-If you have your phone next to you and I hope you do
we'd like you to open a link.
I'm now going to request access to your phone,
on my end of dashboard.
I see what you're doing already.
So if I click this button on my side
Garry's going to get a prompt.
It says, Rahul is requesting permission
to control this web page.
And Garry, can you please go ahead and click accept access?
Awesome.
So now I'm controlling various screen live
so I can actually show him around.
He sees my cursor.
I can show him how to do different workflows
within my service, within my web app.
So I'm currently maybe helping Garry selecting
and deleting some users inside his, inside his account.
I remember running my own startup and sometimes
there were flows that were somewhat complicated
and I found myself trying to type out instructions
in an email and hoping that the user might actually do it
or in very extreme cases if the user
was really famous or really important for us,
I would actually pick up the phone
and walk them through something like
a custom domain set up for their blog
or something like that.
And I just wished I had this back
when I was running Posterous
because then I wouldn't have to do any of this.
who is Cohere in your mind sort of best for
- So there's two groups of people
that really works well for
and one of them is, like you said,
if you're a founder or starting off
and you're finding your first users
you'd like to give an outstanding, you know,
customer experience and truly understand
their workflows and fix issues as they happen
in cases of review.
So a bunch of people tell us
they use it as a command center for their application.
Like the user open their TV and they get a live feed
of what's going on with their app,
what users are doing
what they're struggling through, et cetera.
And secondly, a bunch of our customers have told us
that they've saved a lot of deals, you know,
recovered, lost revenue because
the information on the Cohere dashboards
always live instantaneous actionable.
- The second group of people that Cohere really
resonates well with is people who spend a lot of time
in their day supporting or onboarding customers.
So if you're spending a lot of times
screen-sharing people have told us
they saved 15 minutes every single call.
Because they can completely
get rid of their screen share stop.
So you're no longer scheduling a zoom meeting with them
and then asking them to share their screen
and maybe the apps aren't even installed
or maybe their mobile phone, they can't do these workflows
on the phone because you have to screen share.
So if you're helping someone with an issue
a lot of the time, it is just getting context.
So questions like, what screen are you on?
What problem are you looking at?
What error are you seeing?
All of these go away when you have Cohere
because you're just seeing instantly
what they're looking at.
You can get that context instantly
versus asking several questions all those other minutes
Cohere really helps you prevent
these back and forth conversations.
Like click that button here.
And no, not that one, the actual,
the green one on the top right.
And just lets you take control
of their screen and walk them
through just like you're sitting right next to them.
- Silicon Valley is quite obsessed for instance
with the extreme onboard of Superhuman and with Cohere
it sounds like what you get to do is another level of
you know, even better experience for onboarding
or for customer support than even what you might get
in that sort of extreme Superhuman onboard.
- That's right.
I was lucky enough to be part of the Superhuman team
a couple of years ago as an intern
back when they were just a team of 15 people.
So I got to sit up, sit next to the onboarding softwares
going through these 30 minute calls.
And I would see people iterating on these calls
and trying to make these experiences better.
But it always came down, came down to one point
which is you're verbally tell the customer what to do.
So you're always telling them now do X,
and now do Y.
And instead Cohere and let's you show and not just tell
- What do you do?
You know, there have been platforms that, you know
sort of are meant for customer success
or to be able to see what your users are doing.
What do you do that other people who have attempted this
they don't do.
- So firstly Cohere is live and actionable.
There's a lot of Analytics platforms out there.
There's a lot of Session Replay platforms out there.
But the problem is whenever you go on those dashboards
the data is always almost too late.
So your user has probably left the site.
The error has already happened.
The churn has already happened.
Maybe you've lost some revenue.
You can always fix those issues
and prevent them from happening again.
But with Cohere because the data is live.
You can just jump in and fix it
before the user turns or leaves their website.
Secondly, Cohere a lot to keep your Stack.
So a lot of companies use a lot of tooling
around customer success and support
and you don't have to rip out your entire Stack
just to be able to use Cohere.
Cohere plays along really well with phone calls
or zoom or Zendesk or Intercom with Salesforce or Slack.
we've built those integrations to all these tools.
So no matter what channel the users come in with
you can always jump in jump on
Cohere and start helping them out.
- Another thing is often times we work with customers
in slightly more sensitive industries, like,
their executive support agents to help them
with sensitive business information
or information that might, they might not necessarily want
that many people to access to.
And we've spent a lot of time thinking about security.
And the, one of the ways that Cohere works,
we'll elaborate
on this later is it lets you Block out items selectively.
Which can protect end user privacy,
say you're helping someone on a payroll
and you want the support agent to be able to see what
what screen the users on, but not necessarily
be able to view like individual security numbers.
We allow the agent to do that.
You can, you, as the application developer
can only let people see what they need to see.
And there's also flexible permissions for, you know
to request and control what you can click on
what you can, are able to interact with
on the customer site.
And we've taken this thing super seriously
as an early-stage startup.
And a bunch of our customers especially
the larger folks have all sorts of compliance requirements
that you just can't be satisfied with the full screen share
or some of these other platforms.
And we've gone ahead and gotten the you know,
SOC 2 Type 1 Certification relatively early,
I think for startups.
just to ensure, communicate
our dedication to security and privacy.
- It's basically secure by default
because you know the way you actually do this is
at the DOM Level instead of at the Pixel-level.
Everyone else sort of does it at the Pixel-level.
And then if you do that,
then are you really going to do
OCR on the pixels to make sure that there's no PII?
And then even to do that like this third party
has to actually have access to the PII.
So, you know, I like that.
That's actually one of the most technically challenging
and difficult things to do right.
The thing that you figured out like DOM Level
sync and control also enables the number one thing
that enterprises actually care about
which is no personally identifiable information
leaking all over the place.
Like, everyone's always wanted to do exactly what you do,
but without the DOM Level control
you wouldn't be able to do it securely and privately.
- We also support a lot of user level features
to prevent, to protect our users's end-users.
Obviously with a tool like Cohere
puts a lot of power into our users' hands.
And so we spent a lot of time thinking
about security and privacy of our end-users.
Firstly, we held flexible permissions.
So we let our end-users control
when their screen's being shared
and what level of access they grant our customers.
So if our, if our, if the end-user is granting permission,
only if the end-user grants permission to control the screen
where our users be able to take control.
We also have flexible permissions
like not being able to click or scroll,
but just be able to guide users for certain workflows
for certain industries where compliance may be a challenge.
- So yeah, I mean, we talked about some things
that were technically a challenging and hard.
You know, what else, you know, why now
- The move to the Cloud has been accelerating.
Where you have these legacy business workflows
there'll be moved to software.
As a result software is getting hyper-verticalized.
It's getting more and more complicated
because they need to support a lot more things
that you know, map from the old way to the new way.
And as a result in order to get people familiar
with the software make sure that
they can get the most value out of it.
They know how to use it the most effectively,
you need to onboard, train and understand the workflows
and the tools for doing that just are not very good, Garry.
- We totally see that in the marketplace.
You know, every thing that people do
that used to be paper and pencil
now needs to come over to software.
But you know, with that, these are some
of the largest and most complex industries that exist.
So it's no surprise that the need for onboarding
just suddenly went up 10 or a hundred X and that, you know
you're sort of hitting the market right at the right time.
You know, you have a bunch of customers
that are already seeing huge value right now.
What are some of the ones you're most proud of?
- Yeah. So one of our customers, Canix,
they won, the TechCrunch Disrupt tournament this year
but they do a software point of sales
and warehousing infrastructure for cannabis companies.
And the onboarding is exceptionally complicated
because they are basically replacing
the entire back office local business.
So what they've told us is that they have
a lot of customers who are not technically savvy.
So even getting them to screen share, you know
on a zoom, setup,
is super complicated compared
to just giving them a phone call.
The response from their customers has been insane.
There are agents when they're supporting someone
they just say, yeah, I can already see what you're doing.
I'll just go ahead and click that.
And one of our customers VS24,
they make Virtual Staging Software for real estate agents.
Their customer base is usually less savvy.
And oftentimes they need to get support
and for the product over the phone.
Before, you know the customer would call them up
or contact them in the live chat.
They'd go back and forth a ton of times, you know,
how do I do this?
What does this mean, and set up.
And oftentimes they would just get frustrated
and churn and not end up converting from products.
So now the workflow for them is way simple.
They just get the customer on the phone
click a button to get their permission to see the screen
and instantly guide them through the issue.
And this has helped them turn a lot of, you know
frustrated leads who might not have gotten
through the workflow into lifelong customers.
And before it would take over 30 minutes to get the customer
through signing up an onboarding and setting up the project.
And now it's like 30 seconds.
- That's amazing.
It sounds like a Swiss Army Knife
for customer success basically
but it's not just customer success. Right?
It's also, PM's probably love this as well
because short of actually sitting next to a user
you often don't know what people are doing
and what they're getting stuck on.
And there's nothing quite like seeing a super visceral
just like, you know, are they going to get it done?
And if they get it done, you're just going to feel so good.
And on the flip side, like if they churn, you know
you start to get that pattern match to understand like
you know, do I have the right mental model for the user?
Do I have the right call to actions?
Maybe they're getting lost.
I mean, it's just a very, very fat pipe of, you know
visceral experience from your user.
But you know, PM's also get
in addition to the customer success case.
- Yeah, definitely like, you know, one
of our customers has mined during the latest YC batch
and with Cohere they do instantaneous guided tours
from leads coming in from the webpage
where the customer gets to play
around their own accounts that they set up for them.
And before oftentimes, you know, they,
the PMs they wouldn't be on these customer calls
for the most part because you'd have
to go through all that scheduling stuff.
And now they're just able to, you know
instantly guide the customer through the platform.
I think we mentioned this before, but some
of our customers tend to leave Cohere
on a second monitor and just to watch people poking
around their app or through usage issues
and like really understand the user journeys
through the product.
And what they've told us is focusing
on the stuff that's live,
lets them proactively reach out
and identify things that would have otherwise
had taken a lot to figure out.
- At the end of the day Cohere seems
like just this silver, it's nearly
a silver bullet for not just customer success, but also PM.
And then you could argue sales.
And if you can touch that many parts of the business
and you know, it does feel like in the future
we'll sort of wonder how we created web services
or products period without Cohere.
It sounds like the other thing
that's a really big milestone for Cohere
is that this is great for small startups
that are just starting out.
But it's also ready for billion dollar companies.
And, you know you have some that you can't talk about yet
but they are already using you that scale
Basically you're enterprise ready
is the amazing thing.
I think one of the other things that we have failed to
mention is, kind of just got started last year, actually.
- Yeah. We were
in the YC Batch last year
and we did demo day last August.
That's when we got a chance to meet you guys at Initialized.
- It turns out that some of the people
who have the biggest need for a solution like this,
are larger tech Unicorns who have
a lot of dedicated customer support.
- We're also excited to report that we closed our
our first large SaaS Unicorn earlier this year
Their supplier operation now runs on Cohere
and they report that they're able to get
through calls faster,
help their users better and get more power users
on their platform.
So, you know, for those who are watching, you know
what's the best way to get started with Cohere?
- You know, all you got to do is go to our learning page,
sign up for an account and add the scripts to your app.
It takes about five minutes total setup time.
And you know, we'd be happy to help you out.
You'll be instantly able to see what users are
doing on your application and guide them through stuff.
The moment you stick to script on the app.
- So cohere.so?
- Yep, that's the, that's the domain.
- Good times.
And then, so there's no like beta or Gates or,
you know, if anything, when you sign up
it sounds like you guys might be
the ones who drop into a Cohere session and help
with any of the sharp edges in the experience.
- Yeah, definitely. You know, we use our own product.
We've identified a whole bunch of issues
at the onboarding flow that, you know
we've since been resolved, but it's super simple.
It takes about five minutes
and you'll be able to see what it does for your app.
Instantly.
- Everyone needs to use it, whether you're a tiny startup
or a giant company that has millions of users already
you know, it sounds like you're ready for any scale.
And it's so helpful
for so many different parts of the business.
So thank you so much for on the YouTube channel.
I'm always excited to be able
to share some of our best investments,
especially when they help other founders get
to the success that we all want them to have.
- Yep.
- Thank you Garry. - Thanks for having us.