Almost $2m Monthly Revenue 15 Months Since Launch w/ Varun Bhanot | Magic AI

00:00
Varun Bhanot:
It really is the largest in the world of its kind. Now We've built the ChatGPT of Computer Vision AI Personal Training. Tonight I was reading this comment on our Facebook group about, I think there was a lady who was recovering from cancer and our mirror helped her sort of get back into her state of exercise since she'd recovered for all the, you know, crap you deal with on a day to day basis as a founder. And then you come home and you actually like pull open your phone, read something like that. It's like, okay, this is why we're actually building this. The bottom line is all of this time I thought I was building a startup, but what I really realised is how much it's actually the startup that's building me.

00:45
Amardeep Parmar
Returning to the podcast today, we have Varun Bhanot, co founder and CEO of Magic AI. Now, Varun came on this podcast, episode 14. So if you want to hear his origin story, you can go back to there. But today we're going to really go into the detail of that scaling side, right? How did he get from where he was two years ago to where he is today? So it's a great episode for all of you listening if you want to get to our next stage and really want to be able to understand how he got to 2 million in revenue and how he's looking to raise his next round, how he's selling out and how so much is going really well for him.

01:17
Amardeep Parmar
So hope you enjoy this episode and it's the first time we got somebody on to fight us in this way, so let us know what you think. And I'm Amardeep from The BAE HQ. So Varun, you're here for the second time and you started two years ago and you made so much progress since then. But what I really want to know is if you could talk to yourself from two years ago, what would you tell him?

01:38
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, tough question. And thanks a lot for having me back on. I'm glad. You know, the first time wasn't so bad that I warranted to come back after 200 episodes. So, yeah, great to be here first of all. So I guess there's a few things. The first is just how difficult the journey was going to be. I think when I came on back in, I think it was 2023, I didn't realise how bad the market was going to be for fundraising and we at that point, I don't think we'd even announced our first raise and now we've just completed our second and over the course of 2023 and 2024 had literally no idea how bad the market was going to be and how difficult it was going to be to raise.

02:22
Varun Bhanot:
I think there's a lot of things I'd let, I'd teach myself about investing and fundraising and VC and everything right in that world, which I would probably tell myself now. The big one is that a lot of them have no idea what they're talking about half the time. So I think that's the first big one that I would say is don't rely on their opinion. Don't, you know, have conviction in what you believe in your following. Because if you have an inkling or your intuition is telling you that your idea and your business is the right, you know, fit and you can clearly see signs behind the scenes of that product market fit, then you're probably right. And, and just because you had a 30 minute meeting with an investor, they didn't, you know, you can't take what they're saying as gospel.

03:06
Varun Bhanot:
So that's the first thing. I think the other part is just on a personal level, how difficult it is to balance building a startup, fast growing London based tech company, and then balancing that with also sort of raising a family. Because yeah, I became a dad around end of 2023. Congratulations. Thanks so much. Yeah, so it's been about 15, 16 months now and I think. And then that also coincided with kicking off the raise which, you know, it's hard enough doing the raises. I just, as I was just explaining and then doing that at the same time as having a, having a baby. Well, that is one thing you don't want to do. Yeah, don't, definitely don't do what I did.

03:47
Varun Bhanot:
It's like it should literally be like a Red Bull extreme sport while doing that because it will take its toll on you sort of, you know, mentally and physically as well.

03:58
Varun Bhanot:
So.

03:59
Varun Bhanot:
But we got through it and I think the key thing is just sort of ruthlessly prioritising what's important. Carving out time for work and then carving out time for family and there will be times where those are, there is an imbalance between the two as well. And I think that's just part of the life we've chosen. So I would say that's the other thing as well. But the bottom line is all of this time I thought I was building a startup, but what I really realised is how much it's actually the startup that's building me. And so going through this entire process has been very much not so Much me building the company, but me kind of going through all of the difficulties and challenges that have come with it and ultimately coming out of it as a sort of stronger, more resilient person.

04:47
Varun Bhanot:
And so, yeah, it's been quite an adventure to say the least.

04:51
Amardeep Parmar
So obviously you mentioned there about how investors, obviously many of them don't know as much as maybe you might think and especially I guess in your space. Right. Because in the hardware industry, so many people stereotypically say, oh, it's not a good area to invest. Yeah, sure. But at the same time you've been able to raise investment, you've been able to continue to grow. What would you say to people who may be considering starting a hardware company or hardware and software company. Yeah. Who are put off by a lot of the noise around it.

05:19
Varun Bhanot:
So a lot of people say hardware is hard. Most of those people typically are investors as well, who've never started a hardware business and for that matter may have not started any business. So I think the reason why people do say that is because there is a much. So obviously there's a big shift around lean startup. I'm sure you've got the lean startup right, which is, you know, you test, you build, you get feedback and then you iterate on the idea. The problem with hardware is you can't do that well because once you've built a prototype that in itself can take so long and then once that's, you've got through all the complexities of manufacturing and supply chain, then you've got to test it on people and then the feedback loop is so much more difficult and expensive to get right from that point.

06:07
Varun Bhanot:
It's not, you know, fast and agile as software development is and app development. So and of course that comes with a massive expense as well. Right. Because you know, you're building sort of bits and chips and not just, you know, not just coding. Right. So I think that's why people say hardware is hard, because of the feedback loop, the supply chain, the costs. But here's my point, and this is what I feel is that once you've already developed that and gone through that R and D phase, you've got that product, you've got the prototype, it's in people's hands, it's working, it's doing what it says it does. Once you've got over that initial hump, you now have a product that is actually ten times more difficult to get to market than an app or a software based product.

06:56
Varun Bhanot:
So you have inherent defensibility just by the virtue of it being so difficult to bring something like this to market the first place. And the second thing is, and this is so funny how, you know, when we spoke to a lot of investors, and I would be very candid, some of them said no to us because they didn't. Yeah, they got nervous over the hardware part. And then look at their portfolio and they've invested in like crisp and healthy food and, you know, drinks and things like that. And I'm like, how, you know, what's the defensibility with it? And so what we realised is the supply chain and the manufacturing process is actually no different to hardware than it is to a lot of CPG and FMCG type products.

07:43
Varun Bhanot:
But at least with hardware you can argue that you have inherent defensibility because it's a technology product, you could probably file patents on it. I mean, we file patents on our product, which are very difficult to argue against. And that's real defensibility. Right. You know, software, as far as I recall, especially in the uk, I think in the US it's different, but in the UK you can't even patent software here. So I've always felt battery hardware is actually a far more defensible kind of model because it's just. Just by sheer virtue of how difficult it is to copy. Look at the most valuable companies in the world, right? The most valuable company world is Apple.

08:17
Varun Bhanot:
Right.

08:17
Varun Bhanot:
And their entire product is all hardware. And what's funny is actually not only that, but none of their products, not a single one, from the laptop through to the iPad, the iPhone and the watch, not a single one of them were the first to market at all. In fact, I think in many, they were the fourth or the fifth with the Apple Watch and they were the last to the market. Right. So I think it's really interesting how people sort of. They're very selective in what sort of criticism they want to give about hardware. And that's generally my take on it.

08:49
Amardeep Parmar
Yeah. And obviously the numbers now showcasing your belief in your product. Right. And when you last came on, what you said is you had a number in your head of what's the most important of what you're targeting. Right. And that number for you was all about how many sales you're making a month. And I've seen recently what you've been posting online about how some of those numbers. Yeah. In a such short amount of time have gone astronomical. Can you tell us, like, what's been the progress there in terms of sales?

09:13
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, we've grown very quickly. I think we spent sort of the first kind of 12 months since we launched the product just figuring out how to sell this thing, which is kind of a good idea whenever you're selling, starting a business is how you're going to sell this damn thing. So we tested a lot of stuff, we made a lot of mistakes, but we very quickly started to realise, well, firstly who our core customer is. Like, what is the age demographic, who is that person? And for us, we didn't realise this, but they're actually vast majority, about 75% are over 35 years old and predominantly female as well, which is something we didn't quite realise on day one.

09:58
Varun Bhanot:
And so what we realised is, well, if we just lean in more to this particular customer group, we tailor all of our paid ads, performance marketing to that Persona. We could basically just double and triple what we're doing sort of month on month. And yeah, I mean, I think we're in sort of month 15 or month 16 since we launched the product. We, yeah, we're doing, you know, over a million a month. I think, I think last month it was almost $2 million. And I think we just sort of trying to kind of manage that growth. Now. We're still a very small team. I mean, we've just expanded to 12 people full time in house, but we're only five actually for the vast majority of our lives up to this point. So we're just trying to keep the reins on it.

10:48
Varun Bhanot:
But I think the key thing is, and this is the key takeaway for people listening is I think there' kind of feeling that you have to try everything and do lots of stuff to try and sell your product, get all your service, get it out in front of people. So people put budget into Facebook and then Google and then they put, they start engaging influencers and then they start spending money on events. They might go into retail. You know, if you have a bit more budget, you might even start thinking about radio and TV and billboards. But the truth is in the first 12, 18, maybe even two years, you should just try and find that one or two channels that will produce like 80% of all the revenue. And for us, that we very quickly realised that was performance marketing.

11:34
Varun Bhanot:
So Meta and Google, so we spend only really on those channels pretty much 99% and that's all we, even to this day, that's all we do. So we just realised if this is working for us, we're getting good return on ad spend, which we do get. Which is profitable. We can just double down, triple down and do more of that. And yeah, now I think we're spending like, yeah. 10 times what in January, what we spent the previous January in terms of. On those channels. And we're just going to sort of scale from there.

12:08
Amardeep Parmar
It's one of the classic things I see, right. Is that everybody, they want to start new distribution channels, but not really consider how much work goes into each channel. Yeah. So by focusing on the channels you're doing, obviously you know exactly how that works out. Yeah. Whereas some people, like, oh, we'll start a podcast too. Oh, we'll start doing that. And it's when you start to do these things, you don't get to the level of competence to really know is it working or not. Yeah. And did you try different things or how did you work out that these are the right?

12:33
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, we did spend a bit of time, to be fair, dabbling and stuff. Like, I think we still have. So we don't do anything on TikTok. We have no Pinterest, we have no podcast, we have no newsletter, we don't even have a newsletter that goes out to people. But, And we did try all these things in some way or form and just realised weren't seeing like the return on ad spend very quickly from it. And. But because we saw one or two channels that were bringing it in, we're like, okay, well let's just double down, triple down on this. And only when you get to that point of feeling like you may have exhausted it, then start maybe experimenting with. With others. But yeah, I think nowadays there's this kind of.

13:12
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, exactly as you said, this reliance that you have to Suddenly be on TikTok and you have to have a podcast and the. Have this weekly substack newsletter that's going out to people and blah. And I think people are just tripping over themselves. They just need to find that one or two channel and just go all in on that. And if you're running a consumer business, if it's a D2C type play, whether that be a physical product or an app or an online web app, web store, literally just nail meta in Google. I think that's really where everything is. And to an extent, TikTok you might want to look at, but it depends on your product.

13:44
Amardeep Parmar
Because you must get.

13:49
Amardeep Parmar
The same thing I get. Everyone's like, oh, why didn't you do this too? Why don't you do that too? And yeah, it's really difficult because sometimes they don't realise, like, that's just distraction so much. Right. And it's keeping yourself focused makes such a difference.

14:02
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah.

14:02
Amardeep Parmar
And obviously when, as you said, you were trying to fundraise at the same time as having a baby and all these different things going on and you obviously raised like a nice big round. Can you tell us a bit about that? How did you able to do that and prioritise that while also running the business?

14:17
Varun Bhanot:
Yes, you're absolutely right. When you start a business, everyone becomes an advisor to you everywhere you go. Have you tried that? Have you thought of this? Why don't you put your product here? Why are you not doing this? It's so funny, but when you're actually in the trenches, as you are, you realise how difficult it is to actually do all those things. And actually it's only probably one or two things that are bringing 80% of the, of all of the input. So the fundraiser was very difficult. I'm not going to like dress it up and say that, oh, we're such a flash company and we're so strong that we just sold. Then we woke up one day and there was a term sheet sitting there.

14:54
Varun Bhanot:
I've definitely spoken to founders that give that vibe sometimes and that's not a reflection of the market at all. I don't believe it's because there's weak companies or weak founders or weak products out there at all. It's. It's just a lack of funding that's been going around amongst investors, VC funds, angel groups, they just don't have the capital that they did in 21 and 22. And secondly, the ones who do have it have not been deploying it in the same velocity that they were. I mean, we spoke with some of the top tier consumer funds, the people who you would think were prime for this product, Right. And you talk to them and they would literally waste your time having three, four, five meetings, often in person, over the course of many months.

15:41
Varun Bhanot:
And at the end you either didn't hear from them or they were like, yeah, we decided we're not doing any investments right now, or they would say something stupid like, oh, we don't invest in hardware. Which they could have told us in the first meeting, the fifth one. And what we realised is we're on Crunchbase and we researched a lot of these firms and the first thing that popped up is a lot of these guys have done literally two deals in the last 12 months or three deals in the last 18 months. And, and many of the time, much of the time they're actually just deals into their existing portfolio companies. They're just reinvesting, you know, doubling down on their own companies who they probably bagged back in the 2021 craze.

16:24
Varun Bhanot:
So what we realised is we can't take any of this to heart because frankly they were bullshitting us or wasting our time and the ones who are genuine just don't have the capital. So we realised that. So we got a lot of no's.

16:39
Varun Bhanot:
Right.

16:39
Varun Bhanot:
We got over 100 and maybe almost as many as 150 no's from all, all types of investor groups. And we didn't take any of it personally. I feel, I think there definitely were a couple of times where I might have taken a little bit personally and, but you kind of just get immune to it and numb to it in a way I think actually helps up the market. It kind of makes you not take it so personally as well. You kind of have an excuse to fall back on. But we got there in the end and it took a long time. I think it was 12 months from doing the pitch deck all the way to signing the, in fact, not even just the sign, but actually getting the money into the bank was a full 12 month process.

17:21
Varun Bhanot:
And so I think for any founders who are thinking about raising. I always used to laugh when people are like, oh, you need to plan it 12 months before, but you really do need to plan it 12 months before and also make sure your assets are all ready. You know, your pitch deck, data room, financial model, all the, you know, FAQs, everything's ready to roll.

17:40
Varun Bhanot:
So that's, that's a key thing I would say.

17:43
Amardeep Parmar
I think interesting thing there as well about a quick note. And I think so many people undervalue this.

17:47
Varun Bhanot:
Oh yeah.

17:47
Amardeep Parmar
Because they want to keep getting meetings. But there's no point having a meeting with somebody who, like you said after the fifth meeting is going to say no. So asking really direct questions in terms of like, do you invest in hardware? Yes or no?

17:57
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah.

17:58
Amardeep Parmar
And that's what we found now because, so we've launched the patron stuff.

18:01
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah.

18:01
Amardeep Parmar
And like, there's no point in, like if somebody is kind of flirting with it. It's like, yeah, you even know, you don't know. And sometimes it's good to just get the idea of like, is this a strong possibility or not? Because if it's not, there's just no point because. And I think the other side of that from an investor angle is sometimes people just, they feel really bad about saying no. And it's just. But they're actually just wasting people's time.

18:23
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah.

18:23
Amardeep Parmar
And they've got. It's like investors listening is like, if you're not going to invest, it's better to just let somebody down straight away.

18:28
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah.

18:29
Amardeep Parmar
Than to drag it out. Because I'm guessing the ones you took personally are probably the people who led you on.

18:34
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, yeah.

18:35
Amardeep Parmar
And then said no. Rather if somebody says, like, we don't invest in hardware. Cool. That's your policy. Fine. If you didn't say that. And then like 10 days later or like 10 years later, it's like, it's still like extremely healing.

18:46
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah. I think, I think what I realised, and you'll probably learn this in one of these books over here as well, about raising money, is typically investors are not in the no business, actually, funnily enough, because if they say no, it means they're out of the running. So what they typically do is they have this wait and see mentality, which is we're not going to say yes. We probably will say no, but we're not going to say no because we want to wait and see. So they just string founders and companies along for many weeks to see what happens with the round. You know, does a Tier 1 fund from Silicon Valley come in and lead this round and then if I've already said no, I'm already out of the running. So they. No one. And the thing they hate the most is fomo.

19:31
Varun Bhanot:
Right. Fear of missing out. No one wants to miss out on the next big deal. So that's what they. That's how they. That's basically how they operate, which is to the detriment of founders, especially in a down market.

19:43
Amardeep Parmar
Hello. Hello. Quick interruption to let you know about BAE HQ with a community for high growth British Asian entrepreneurs, operators and investors and you can join completely free at thebaehq.com/ join. There, you get our CEO pillars, sets, content, events and opportunities direct to your inbox every week so you can get involved and it can help you to further your business and your career. We also have a free startup course called BAEs Startup Foundations, where if you think about starting a business someday or at the early stages, it gives you all that information to help you hit the ground running and to thrive in this new world. Back to the show. I think it's just important for founders to know that. Right. Because I think everybody's done it. Right. So you get really excited, think oh, they're really excited by this, right?

20:29
Amardeep Parmar
They haven't said yes and haven't even, like, really firmly said that. But because they keep wanting more meetings, it's a natural place into your hope, right? You think, okay, this is going somewhere, you're getting excited, you're telling your mates, like, oh, I think this person's going to invest. And then when it doesn't come to fruition, you just feel so much worse, right?

20:47
Varun Bhanot:
That's happened if you touch. In fact, there was one point where that did happen and. And we actually thought it was in the bag and were about to get a term sheet and. And then they just disappeared for a week or a month or two. Honestly, man. Yeah, it gets to the point where it really does test you and you really have to have that sense of resilience to get. To get through it. But look, if you really believe in your idea, you have conviction in your product and the numbers also have to be there. You have to have solid traction and show that you are growing and you are a product and you've got that product market fit, then you should raise and you deserve it. And I think that was the mentality we had throughout.

21:32
Amardeep Parmar
One thing you've done incredibly well in the last couple years too, is on the press side. Okay, so you've been in time, you've been on like, ITV you've been everywhere, Right. And I guess there's a couple different angles of that, but just tell the story about how did you get those in the first place and then how helpful have they been to the business? Is that something which has really helped you guys?

21:49
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, well, we've been really lucky in that we don't. So we've never had like a PR agency or even any kind of freelancer or anything like that working with us. We've just been very fortunate that. Well, first of all, we're building quite a buzzy kind of product because it's a consumer product, but it's AI and it's. There's not many hardware consumer AI products out there. Obviously there's ChatGPT and all the software apps you see. So I think that helped massively that we're building this very kind of visual product that people can see, touch and feel and test out in the wild. But also it's in a space which there isn't really much direct kind of competition. There's not really a huge sort of industry around AI, personal trainers. So we very much are pioneering that in that space.

22:36
Varun Bhanot:
And in fact, our data set, the Computer vision tracking that we've built, which tracks your form and gives you life. It really is the largest in the world of its kind. Now we've built the chatgpt of computer vision, AI personal training. And so I think that's kind of captured the imagination of a lot of sort of press and journalists and investors as well, which was how we got through it. But it mostly came inbound, which was very lucky. I mean, even, you know, Lorraine Kelly, when went on ITV that. That came sort of. We got an email from the producer on like a Thursday saying, will you be willing to bring this in on the following, like Monday or something? And it was just a mad dash after that.

23:16
Varun Bhanot:
Like we had to get it into an Uber and figure out how to like get it to stand up on its own when actually our product is actually a leaning. It leans or mounts on the wall. It doesn't actually. So we had to figure out all these things very quickly. Yeah, I think the big, the two big ones last year were definite Time magazine getting us into the best inventions. We actually applied for that ourselves and we previously, we eventually applied for it in previous years. It's a very rigorous process they run throughout the whole world. You have to do like application form, one hour interview with the journalists. They do their own due diligence and research and not just in the uk, across the entire world, including the us.

23:54
Varun Bhanot:
So for us to get that was really, yeah, one of the best achievements, I think, for us and it has helped the business because, you know, we are still in the grand scheme of things. A relatively new company is a new product, it's not that cheap and you know, relatively speaking. So people do need a high level of conviction and trust in what we're building. And those press and accolades, whatever you might think of press and accolades in general, they do give people that general sense of trust and validation that this is a product that people are enjoying and loving and buying, which they are. So it help. Absolutely. I would say.  well.

24:32
Amardeep Parmar
With that as well. So I know recently you just launched a community. Right. As well.

24:35
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah.

24:36
Amardeep Parmar
And obviously as you're dealing with the sales, there's real people using this product every day and from people using the product and get used to it, has anything that surprised you or maybe you realised was a lot more important to people than maybe you initially thought?

24:49
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah. I mean, last night I was reading this comment on our Facebook group about. I think there was a lady who was recovering from cancer and our mirror helped her sort of get back into her state. Of exercise since she'd recovered and it wasn't that practical for her to get out into the, you know, into a gym and all that. So our product was basically like a lifeline for her. And I think reading stuff like that, it really, for all the, you know, crap you deal with on a day to day basis as a founder and then you come home and you actually like pull open your phone, read something like that. It's like, okay, this is why we're actually building this. And it reminds you about the importance of you. Not just what you're building, but why you're building it.

25:30
Varun Bhanot:
And I think there was another one on trustpilot I was reading the other day about, you know, someone who again a mum, new mom's got like two kids and this is, helped us like lose like three stone or something because, you know, since you became a mom, it's been so difficult to get out in there. And that was particularly inspiring to read as well. And so it's great. And I think when you start building that community and you start seeing those sort of posts and that feedback coming organically, so it's not like you're actively going out and asking them, they're organically posting that. It's very fulfilling.

26:07
Varun Bhanot:
And I always said, and I said this to the team as well after we closed the fundraise when we did like our kind of internal celebration and I said, look, if this company, you know, doesn't work out in the future, I'm still very proud of the product that we've built and the impact we've made on really thousands of people's of and I think they'll always stay with us.

26:28
Amardeep Parmar
I think that's one of the truths about styles that people don't think about is that if you've been going for it a while, have impacted some people, that's still better that you exist than you didn't exist. Yeah. And people sometimes always worry about the future, but you have to take stock of. Like you said, you've helped that cancer survive, you've helped this mom, you've helped so many people through your product and it's so easy to lose sight of that as you're chasing the next thing. Right. And obviously you've just done that fundraise.

26:53
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah.

26:53
Amardeep Parmar
You've been growing the team. What's the next milestone you're looking for? So let's use someone again in two years time.

27:00
Varun Bhanot:
Oh yeah. Okay. We make this every two years be our date. So two things. One is expansion horizontally, so we're going to be going into new markets and the other is sort of expanding vertically, so we're going to be going deeper with our products. So in terms of new markets, the US I think is kind of ripe for what we're doing. It's a much maturer market. In terms of connected fitness as a category, purchasing power is much higher over there. I mean, it's quite normal to spend $11, $10 on a coffee in the morning. I mean, you know, their consumers are in a completely different place and headspace compared to, you know, really Europe. But I wouldn't rule out Europe either just because it's obviously huge market for fitness and wellness. Germany, I think is I think the second largest market in the world.

27:50
Varun Bhanot:
So we're keeping our options open but expanding internationally and second is expanding in terms of the offering within the product. So up until this point we've spoken a lot about how our product is like an AI personal trainer, as a fitness trainer for people. But one of the areas which we've seen on a macro level which has seen the most kind of growth is health and health monitoring and data driven insights into how you're doing on your health and ways of quantifying your health using data. Which is why we've seen, you know, Whoop and Aura and Fitbit, of course, those sort of companies sort of literally taking the world by storm when it comes to. So one of the things we're developing in the product is that it's going to now move in more in the direction of being a health coach.

28:40
Varun Bhanot:
And so the camera will take a reading into your bmi, your muscle mass, your body fat. It will be able to actually work out whether you're, you know, in the right place and then also look at your metabolic age and determine a plan based upon, you know, your goals and where you want to get to.

28:57
Amardeep Parmar
Obviously as a product has evolved. Right, so you're getting more people involved because I just said like originally you weren't the technical founder. You've had to hire the right people, get the right technical people on board and cost them. Yeah. How do you manage that? Because I think a lot of people worry about that if they're not a technical co founder, how do they make sure that all of that product is really running smoothly and how do you have that alignment?

29:19
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, great question. I think so. I think every founder needs to have some basic understanding. It depends what the product is. Right. Like what we're building is essentially a deep tech product. Right, it's, you know, there's hardware, there's chips, there's AI, there's computer vision. It's not a straightforward product play. So I think everyone needs at least a high level idea about how the technology works, even if you can't code and yourself. My own learning came from having worked in a startup previously for 5, 6 years in a tech startup. Right from the early days when were a team of three and then I think when I left were about 60 people. So I had rode the whole cycle of building and a company from the inside. So I think having a basic understanding is really important.

30:12
Varun Bhanot:
And look, if you're a lot of people in the early days might work with an agency to build their first V1 of their product or a freelancer. And equally you don't want to be, you don't want them to sort of take the piss and kind of not stick to what you've agreed and things like that. And so I think having a very high level understanding of tech is really important. It's not that difficult nowadays, right? You've got GPT, you've got lots of different ways of just figuring out what's what and you just have to spend a bit of time kind of researching. I didn't know anything about computer vision before we went into this.

30:48
Varun Bhanot:
I just spent a lot of time reading about, reading up on the different technologies and the applications, becoming a consumer of a lot of products, which I think is so important. If you want to build something, become a consumer of those products as well. Try everything that's on the market, you know, become fanatical about them and you'll start to get smarter about it.

31:07
Amardeep Parmar
So obviously you've come a long way so far. What are the things you're working on right now that you're improving on as a founder over time?

31:14
Varun Bhanot:
So I think as your team grows, you suddenly move from not just being the founder but also like a manager and I think learning how to manage and also empower a team because you're basically like, it's like a real time reality TV show where we've literally taken 12 people from different corners of the, you know, of the city or even the country actually because we have people that come in from Wales and Reading and places like, and we're bringing them all into the office and we're hoping that it all gels together as a team. It's harder than a reality show because they all have to literally work together. Like how, you know, sailors work on A ship, right. And I'm like the sort of captain or co captain who has to steer the ship and make sure everyone's sort of pulling in unison.

31:58
Varun Bhanot:
So it's a little bit like that. And so learning to be a very good civ manager, I think the key thing is learning first how to hire well, because if you hire right at the beginning, you should obviously it'll make your life easier, you know, for the next 12 and 18 and 36 months afterwards when you're having to actually work with these people on a day to day basis. The big thing for us was hiring some very senior or at least quite senior people very early on. We don't have any juniors in our team. We don't have any really any mid level people. There's no interns, there's no graduates, very few freelancers. It's all just high level senior people who've been in the industry 10, 15 years. If you can raise money to do that, then I would advise you to do that.

32:41
Varun Bhanot:
Because even if it costs more money in terms of salary and things like that, the headache saving and the cost efficiencies and savings, you probably end up getting actually far outweigh the opposite. So that was what I learned as a founder. I'm still, I don't know everything, I mean, you know, getting better at it month by month. But yeah, we'll get there longer term again.

33:06
Amardeep Parmar
So looking at that dream for, say when magic has reached its peak, what would that peak look like? What would that end state look like?

33:13
Varun Bhanot:
So we want to get to a point of critical mass where we have one of our products in hundreds of thousands of homes all over the world, if not millions. In the same way how Peloton has done, I think what's interesting is we have a easier entry point into people's lives because it's a mirror, it's zero footprint in the home, it can literally mount up on the wall and also is very inoffensive in terms of interior design and decor. It fits in very seamlessly and beautifully into the environment. Even when it's off, it serves a purpose. It's not just a, you know, a treadmill or a bike that might end up just becoming a Clayus hanger. So I think we have a very interesting entry point into people's lives there. I think becoming that health coach I think would be really dynamic and transformative.

33:57
Varun Bhanot:
Right. Like if you imagine a family of five, they wake up, they come downstairs, each person can have their, you know, vitals scanned, their biometric scanned and then not just getting the reading, but also an actual plan as to what they can do about it from that point is really quite, quite amazing. And we're seeing a lot of interesting trends going on with preventative healthcare at the moment. There's some incredible startups coming even here in London. We're seeing some amazing companies coming out who are working in this space. So I think being able to actually diagnose and prevent conditions for people on mass scale without the necessary intervention of having to go to a doctor, I think could be very interesting.

34:41
Amardeep Parmar
Awesome. So we're going to get to a quick fire questions now. Okay, so you've done this before. So first one is who are free British Asians you think are doing incredible work and you'd love to shout them out today?

34:52
Varun Bhanot:
So this was easier the last, first time I did it because you were just starting out the podcast and now I think you've had every successful noteworthy British Asian on this podcast already. So the first two will be current investors of ours two angels. So first is Omid Ashtari. I don't believe he's been on the podcast yet, but he was a president of Citymapper and also at Foursquare. I think he was the managing director of Foursquare in Europe. So super personality, great mind. I highly recommend him. Second is another investor in US called Yasmin Desai, who amazing product manager. She's worked at some incredible companies in London. Highly, highly recommend her as well. And she's a great investor and backer of people. And finally my sister, Dr.

35:40
Varun Bhanot:
Ravina, who is doing some amazing stuff in Femtech at the moment and she was on the BBC last week doing, talking to them about the latest developments. So yeah, those are the three I would say next was how.

35:53
Amardeep Parmar
Can people find out more about you and more about Magic?

35:56
Varun Bhanot:
So our website is literally just Magic fit. So magic.fit. My Instagram personally is Varun Bhanot: or my LinkedIn Varun Bhanot:. Those are pretty much the main channels that we post out on and where you can follow our story.

36:13
Amardeep Parmar
And is there anything that people listening today might be able to help you or help your mission?

36:17
Varun Bhanot:
So we're always looking for customers. So Ara will send you the BAE HQ discount code, I'm sure. But actually the big thing for us is actually just getting lots of great feedback about the product and that's actually why we want people to test it and try it. So we'd love to speak to anyone in that space who would be willing to try the product and give us feedback on it, and finally, any contacts in retail, because over the next 12 months, I think we're going to definitely start leaning more into offline retail channels. So anyone who can help us on that front would be cool.

36:49
Amardeep Parmar
Awesome. So thanks so much for coming again.

36:51
Varun Bhanot:
Yeah, and congrats to BAE HQ and everything you've achieved in the last two years. Actually quite crazy to see the growth of you guys since I first schlepped to that studio in Hackney. And now you guys are here in this amazing space with such a huge community and following behind you. So congrats to you and Gurvir on what you've built.

37:10
Amardeep Parmar
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time. 

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