Obed Eugene is no stranger to startups. The tech entrepreneur and software engineer has more than a handful of successful startups under his belt, after all.
Consider his work as co-founder and CTO of SocialCapital, which was funded by the likes of Techstars and Angelhack.
“I really learned a lot through that experience," Eugene said, such as building a network, engaging customers and running a business.
“UpTech was great. It was really good to help us refine our product ... "
These were lessons he leveraged into his newest venture, Convolytics, a June 2017-founded startup based in San Francisco. It's a tool that records and analyzes sales calls, providing deep insights so sales reps can improve (such as how they discuss pricing, a client's competitors and their pain points).
It works, in part, like this: A sales manager has 10 sales reps. Each is making 300 calls a month, which equals about 3,000 calls per month for the whole team. With numbers like that, it would be hard for the manager to go through and analyze each call — or at least even a decent amount of calls to provide his reps with valuable feedback. Enter Convolytics, which, using data mining, simplifies the process.
The creation of the startup came about as a result of Eugene's previous work, too.
“At the time, I was doing a lot of meetings and a lot of sales calls,” he said. “And, what I wanted to do was try to figure out a way how I’m sounding and how I’m doing on these calls, so I just started recording my meetings and sales calls.”
This made him realize he could build a product that could extract value from conversations, especially when he married his work in data analysis. The rest is history.
Eugene's Californian startup came to the Queen City by way of UpTech, the Covington-based tech accelerator. It participated in the most recent cohort's Demo Day in January.
“UpTech was great,” he said. “It was really good to help us refine our product, refine our value proposition and understanding how ... we make sure we’re articulating and communicating what we’re doing to our customers."
While the startup had been successful at previous hack-a-thons and pitch competitions, Eugene added that UpTech was the startup's first accelerator and their first investment thus far, as Convolytics has been bootstrapped (UpTech invests "up to $50,000 per startup in the form of a convertible note with a $2.5MM cap.").
Post Demo Day, Convolytics will be focusing on building its network and working with Midwestern companies.
