The BAE HQ Q1ish 2024 Update w/ Amardeep Parmar | The BAE HQ

Amardeep Parmar: 0:00
Welcome to the quarter1 ish 2024 update for The BAEHQ. This will be a short episode of just me just running through some of the highlights so far and what you can expect for the future. If you don't know who I am, I'm Amar and I'm one of the co-founders of BAE HQ in charge of media. So I've had a really busy start to I can't believe it's already March and we're about midway through and we've had different things. So I'm gonna run through them all quickly. So, if we start on the event side, we've had a few big events. So flagship event was the HSBC Innovation Banking panel. On February the 7th, we had an all-star panel of Ash Arora, Omid Ashtari, Raj Khaira and Rupy Malizia and we had 195 signups for that and those events are always manic fresh, right, so we had so many people in there but so many new friends were made and we got really good feedback about the panel because all of them, what they really cared about and what we pick is that they were giving insight and value to the audience rather than just talking about themselves and trying to pick themselves up. So real big thank you to all the people in that panel for helping us to do that. The next big event public event was the Fire Side Siddhi Mittal which was a few days ago, and for those of you who don't Siddhi , she's a great character. We're good friends and we're hoping to have a bit of fun with it. So we had 120 signups and it was just for International Women's Day and we had a lot of audience, engagement and interaction. So one of the good things about having those events where it's just me and the person I'm interviewing is that we can really bring in audience. So it's a different kind of vibe to the panel events, which feel much bigger and much more overwhelming. But when it's a small group like that, well, I'd say small. It's about 80 people turned up with 120 signups, it really gives you that opportunity to actually get to know people a bit better and have a bit more of a laugh.Amardeep Parmar: 1:48

Then we also had other events too. So we had a football match against HSBC Innovation Banking, who are our headlines sponsors this year. That's one of the big things this year is that 2024 is packed by HSBC Innovation Banking on the podcast and a lot of our ESG work. So when we played them. It was five, one up to us, then it got to five five, and then we're two minutes left to go. It was seven five to them. So we did lose that, and if you're listening to this and you're good at football, we need you get in touch. We're gonna make sure we're winning these games in the future.

Amardeep Parmar: 2:21

We also had an event with Joelson, which was who are exclusively Legal Partners, and that was all about how to raise your first round, and we got a bunch of about 20 founders, who were all in that pre seed stage, to be able to ask all of their questions directly to lawyers, completely free, and that's a big part of what we're doing too. We hope to do more of these kind of workshops. So big thanks to Joelson for supporting us on that, and we've got a great feedback from the audience on that as well, about how much they enjoyed and how much they learned as well. So we are looking to do more of this kind of workshops in the future as well. Then, on the university side, so I went to go and give a talk at the University of Bar for Accelerator program, and that was really cool to see people who are students coming up with great ideas and they're so much further ahead of where I was at their age and it's really exciting to see that next generation come through. I also gave a talk at their engineering student entrepreneurship society which was all about getting them ready to be able to pitch their companies, which is something which for a student, is quite intimidating understandably, I think, for many of us is quite intimidating. But we're doing a lot more of that work now in the future as well. So, coming up to upcoming events in the future, we've got an event coming up with Female Founders Rise which we're gonna be announcing pretty soon and you can sign up to that. So Female Founders Rise is a great community, obviously focused on Female Founders, and that's just. We have a lot of people asking us to collaborate all of the time, but any fast behind that incredible and definitely somebody who we'll probably work with more in the future too. We've also got events coming up with Google and AWS which we can't announce just yet, but there's gonna be big events, huge crowds, so make sure you keep on that to sign up, and we're really excited to showcase that appreciation talent in those situations.

Amardeep Parmar: 4:03

Then, of course, the podcast is Motoring Along, so we're now at, I think this episode 120, 121, today's episode, I mean, we've had a series of incredible guests. I'm not gonna try and name them because it will miss people out and I will get it wrong, but make sure you check that out. I remember every Tuesday is the LAB episode. LAB episodes are with experts in particular topics. So that's the bit where you really get to learn about a particular topic that's gonna help you succeed in your business. And then the BAE podcast on the first day, which is the most curious of founders and how they got to where they are today. So I hope you see that as one that's inspiring you, about showing you the journey and giving you that reality behind the scenes, and the other one is about giving the actual means and tools that you need to succeed in that environment. So you need both fighting, both inspiration and to learn. So that's keeping going. We've got a huge amount of guests coming up very exciting. Again, I don't name anybody individually because I will miss people out who are exceptional and you've just got to check it out on the website and find out more about that too.

Amardeep Parmar: 5:01

The team itself has been growing. So Aamir, who's our video content lead, has now come to three days a week well, three days a week, full time, but you don't understand what I mean there. So it's increasing his hours and that means that more and more is being delegated from me to him, which frees up my time for some of the other things that we're doing as well. We've also got another video editor coming on board as well to help him out, Lou, who's joining us, so we'll tell you more about her as we get along as well. Then we've announced some more ambassadors as well, so we had Neda announced at the end of last year. We've also announced Shamik Parekh, who's an investor at Octopus Ventures. We've announced Siddhi Mittal, who's co-founder of yhangry. We've announced Dhruvin Patel, who's a founder of Ocushield and also one of my English investments, and we've also announced Jasp al Rai, who works for SwiftScale. There's other people who are announced as well behind the scenes or we've agreed to sign up, we just haven't announced them publicly. So there's lots of people getting involved in that and there's a huge amount. We feel the love from the community on that side, where I've always people wanting to get involved and help out.

Amardeep Parmar: 6:01

Another big announcement I did the other day is the launch of BAE Studios. So, for those of you who don't know, majority of everything you see publicly is all not-for-profit, right? So we've got two different entities; a not-for-profit entity and a for-profit entity. That for-profit entity has been not really a focus for us, right? So what we've been focused on is getting the not-for-profit side built up. That's where the team was involved, that's where HSBC Innovation Banking and got backing us and that's the key reason why we started it right.

Amardeep Parmar: 6:29

But at the same time, I haven't paid myself since October 2022, and I'm not that rich. So we have to make this a sustainable business, right? Because if me and Gurvir aren't feeding ourselves or eating, then this can't survive. So we've got to have both sides of the business and the not-for-profit side will be veryer v e about there. If people , that people invest in that, then that doesn't come to me or Gavir and we're not taking a salary from that, then the for-profit side of Bay Studios is basically leveraging our content expertise. So I've done over 280 something episodes. Now I know podcasts inside out. I've talked to a lot of the top podcasters. We can manage people's podcasts very easily and make sure it's a high quality and take away all the stress. Right, because I've had to build up a team from scratch after editing over 100 episodes myself, and we have the systems in place that I know as a podcast myself about what I need and how to make it effective.

Amardeep Parmar: 7:23

We also offer ghostwriting services, both in blogs and LinkedIn. So LinkedIn ghostwriting is obviously you probably hopefully follow me if you don't go on me please and you can see like how to build that relationships, because what's important on LinkedIn and even with blogs as well, isn't how many people read it or how many people like your posts. It's the depth of the relationship and despite so, I've got about 5k, I think. On LinkedIn, I get a huge amount of inbound because the way I convey the messaging enables people to come and reach out to me right, and that's what a lot of people are founders and people who work at funds want, but they don't have the time to learn it. So that's a premium service offer there, and some of the blog writing as well is that, rather than a founder or investor learning how to write themselves, you can take a long time and if it's valuable, you can outsource it to us and we'll handle it.

Amardeep Parmar: 8:15

We hope you're enjoying the episode. So far, we just want to give a quick shout out to our headline partners, hbc, innovation Banking. One of the biggest challenges for so many startups is finding the right bank to support them, because you might start off and try to use a traditional bank, but they don't understand what you're doing. You're just talking to an AI assistant or you're talking to somebody who doesn't really understand what is you even trying to do. Hbc have got the team they've built out over years to make sure they understand what you're doing. They've got the deep sector expertise and they can help connect you with the right people to make your dreams come true. So if you want to learn more, check out hbcinnovationbankingcom.

Amardeep Parmar: 8:51

We also offer one-to-one coaching, so there's all different areas that we have expertise in. Obviously, I've interviewed a million people, got the right inside. There's investor coaching from Govir all of those kind of things that we can offer. If you want a one-to-one time pass, which is quite difficult to get now on a free basis, just because we've got so much impact, it's quite hard for us to deal with. There's so many things to pay. That enables us to make things sustainable and means we can give out more for free for the general community. We also have group coaching. So this is for people who are large organizations, where they want to get us in to talk to their team and to build up a skill set of their team, and we love doing that side too, because that values us at the correct valuation, where those companies have the budget and have the money to do that effectively. And for the corporate side of things, we're able to charge an amount which we know will give people an ROI. So that's the Bay studio side and, to be honest, we only need a few clients at a time. We're not trying to be a mass market thing. If we can get about five clients to begin with, that pays the bills and reduces the stress on us and that means that we've got more brain space for the Bay HQ not for profit side and everything can keep ticking the way it is. So really excited about all of that too.

Amardeep Parmar: 10:02

Then, if we just zoom out, how is this entire thing doing Me and you talking right now? Am I happy with the Bay HQ? I'm happy with our progress. Are we in a good position? And the answer is to all these questions is yes. This is growing in a way that even we couldn't really imagine.

Amardeep Parmar: 10:18

And what's really exciting for us is that we're now more and more embedded in the ecosystem, in that we were kind of those plucky outsides to begin with, and now all of these people from all these different major organizations all want to talk to us, and what we represent in there is because we're able to grow as quickly as we have. We've been able to build the trust in the way that we have. It's how can we now leverage that trust to make a difference? By collaborating with other organizations, by learning from those different groups as well and making the impact at a higher level. And when we talk about collaborations, what we mean is that we're able to work with some of the biggest companies in the world and people with a huge amount of influence and power to really make a difference. And it's been quite surreal.

Amardeep Parmar: 10:58

Now who's in my LinkedIn inbox and some of you may know that I've got autoresponder, and to try to keep track of this high quality inbound is great challenge for us, right, but it's a good problem to have that. We have these people who want to reach out and want to help us. So on that front, things are going very well, and we're also between me and Gerber, so Gerber has now been full time for a bit longer, which makes that we can separate our roles a bit more clearly and as a team comes in, we can work out where you want to spend our time, because in a minute we're kind of a start of ourselves. In many ways. We've been going for about a year and a half, so we're going for all these different learnings and things too.

Amardeep Parmar: 11:35

So Gerber is really focused on investor side. So anybody wants a pitch deck reviewed, anybody wants to look for investment. Here's the guy you're going to, and a lot of people obviously come to me because I'm the guy on the camera talking right now. But Gerber is your man for that Right, and we've got the people that support him on that as well, who we don't always reveal because of privacy and everything like that. But he's really building up that part of the business, which is really exciting as well. So it's been so much growth in the last couple of months. It's incredible and I feel like we're in such a stronger position than we were three months ago. And as part of that, massive, massive thank you to HGT Innovation Banking for partnering with us and giving us that freedom to learn the way we have, because the backing they've given us has enabled us to keep growing and to keep learning and gives us some stability, right. So big, big thank you to them. Big, big thank you to Jolson and exclusive legal partners as well, who, again that workshop they gave us a founder's made a huge impact, and also just to support the other thing that's behind the scenes. Huge, huge help too.

Amardeep Parmar: 12:39

And is there anything else to mention? I probably am forgetting things. This is the nature of the beast, right? And people ask me what's my average day? Like, there is no average day, but we're excited what's happening, we're able to continue growing, hope to get better systems in place, because we know there's so many of you now who want to get involved, want to help out. And make sure you go to the website, right? There's so much of this on the website. If you go to thebayhqcom, you go to the about section, you look at how we can help, how you can help us and get in touch on those kinds of lines, right, because sometimes people get in touch about I'd love to learn more about what you're doing or I'd love to help out, but if you can tell us something which is on our list of things we want to do and give us that. It just keeps them so much more streamlined and easier.

Amardeep Parmar: 13:21

Because one of the things we're struggling with at the moment is like how do we manage this huge community and this huge good will? And we're trying to make sure that we do things in a prioritization. So that prioritization is like how does that prioritization work as we scale and as we get bigger? And it's a real big focus on like how do you make a difference? So there's so many things you can help on. One is anything to do on the for-profit side is amazing, because make sure I get food. But the biggest thing that we really care about is that school and university work. If you're at a school, regarding university, you can get us down there and we can talk to the kids and the students and we can tell them about this world that they don't know about and get them involved and set up their next generation. That's gonna make me feel good. That's gonna make us really believe that what we're doing is actually making a difference.

Amardeep Parmar: 14:12

And the other big thing I love from the event is where people come along and they just meet a bunch of like-minded people and they feel like they're part of it, and that is the bit that just makes me super, super grateful that we've been able to do this, and I always say we're barely even begun. Right, we're a year and a half in. This is like so much more to go, and sometimes it's hard to smaller the roses about the partnerships we've got, the people we're working with and the impact we've already made in some ways of people who feel welcome and feel like they've got a community set that didn't before. But I see it as like we're only just begun. There's so much more work to do and I'm really excited to keep doing that.

Amardeep Parmar: 14:49

So this wasn't properly scripted, so I probably have forgotten stuff, like I said, but thank you so much and I really hope to see you at our future events. Make sure if you're not signed up to Newsletter, you sign up to Newsletter, because that is the best way to keep you in touch of everything that we're doing. So take care. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.

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