Indranil Mukherjee is a first-time entrepreneur. He took the plunge in the early days of Covid, after 25 years of consulting and product engineering experience in the Tech industry. He lived and worked in India, US and Canada (current).
His company, Emozo Labs was recognized by the CIO Review magazine, among the Most Promising Tech Companies in Canada in 2022.
In this episode of Inspiring Tales with Bindu, you will know more about entrepreneurial journey, passion, challenges of Indranil Mukherjee to build Emozo Labs.
The interviewer, Bindu Sharma is Founder and CEO of Origiin IP Solutions LLP, a leading IP and legal services provided firm.
Bindu: Thanks for accepting the invite to participate in this program, “Inspiring Tales with Bindu”.
First of all, I want to know that having worked in corporate world for a long time, what inspired you to start your business and build this wonderful product, Emozo? Please share your entrepreneurial journey with the readers.
Indranil: I saw an opportunity to dramatically transform some areas of media and advertising research way back in 2016, after witnessing my wife (senior research professional) struggle to commission research studies and get accurate insights quickly.
She was in charge of assessing how a television commercial (featuring a top celebrity in India) was resonating with the intended audience. The method, as prevalent in those days, involved recruiting and gathering respondents in a physical location and getting their facial expressions and body language (video recorded as they watched the commercial) decoded by behavioural psychologists. The whole process was laborious, error-prone and just plain painful. It took weeks to get any meaningful insight out. Weeks that the business could scarcely afford. And, this wasn’t a one-off. I had seen this happen earlier (and later too).
As emotion detection technology was maturing and becoming more mainstream, I tried to think of ways the pain could be lessened and thus was born the idea behind Emozo. We had 2 false starts, in 2017 and again in 2019. We had come close to creating a good solution in 2019 but there were problems in the team I had assembled, and we disbanded. We started again in 2020, during Covid and this time we could succeed. It doesn’t sound good if I say the Covid slowdown helped us create a great first version of the platform, but it is the truth. I wish Covid never happened, but I am grateful for the time and space it allowed us to shape our initial thinking.
We launched our platform commercially in Q3-2021 and have been refining it ever since. A significant part of our initial success were two academic institutions – ISB Institute of Data Sciences (IIDS) and the DATA Initiative at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. The professors and students we collaborated with helped shape our thinking and refine our approach and algorithms. I remain very grateful for those partnerships.
Any note on our journey will not be complete without a mention of the first set of folks who took a chance on us. A few young companies in India and APAC saw enough promise in us to give the platform a spin or two. And there were those friends and ex-colleagues who walked us in through the first set of doors at potential customers. They are as much a part of our journey as anyone else.
When we started, we never thought that we’d morph into a platform-based services company. However, that’s what we have become to adjust to the dynamics of the markets we found ourselves in. We extended our platform to be a lot like conventional survey tools but even today we try to remain true to our initial calling – helping people understand how to create and deploy digital content that resonate with their audiences.
Bindu: Please tells us little more about your product, specially what is the core problem which your product/Services are capable of solving?
Indranil: We help our clients create and deploy Better Digital Content, with Higher Confidence, whether they be videos (advertisements, educational / entertainment / gaming content etc.), images or interfaces (web / mobile apps).
Emozo is a Do-It-Yourself research and feedback gathering platform that’s focused on helping brands collect high quality emotional and behavioural data from audiences, in response to digital stimuli of different kinds. This is important because 95% of all decisions on the digital channels are driven by emotions. Unless one understands how one’s content resonates (emotionally) with one’s audience, driving the desired outcomes (via said content) may be problematic.
With Emozo, one does not need to depend on behavioural scientists, data analysts, software engineers to collect and decode this data from a global audience. The platform does it all. You can sit in your location and launch studies anywhere in the globe and collect reliable data in a matter of days. All the respondent needs is a camera enabled, connected digital device. Reports are produced in minutes, and one doesn’t have to wait for weeks to get feedback.
Emozo may be used to:
- Inform your intuition with valuable data and make the right calls;
- Get great insights into likely in-market behaviour before you commit to a big production and/or media decision;
- Compare and contrast across multiple candidates to ascertain which is likely to work best with your audience;
- Get feedback on any type of digital content (videos, images, streaming media, application interfaces, etc.); and
- Leverage pre-built templates for quick survey launches and retain your own survey data control.
Built on real science and proven mass communication theory, our fully secure, digital platform leverages the powers of AI to enable qualitative research at scale and with speed. We are built to support all forms of iterative design-development and test & learn processes. Our proprietary ACE framework triangulates data on Appeal, Commitment, and Engagement to shed light on how customers feel about brands and experiences. The end result is meaningful info that establishes robust connections to human behaviour.
On the surface, we are a Market Research Services company that uses its own proprietary software platform to deliver breakthrough results for our customers. Ours is a full-fledged survey platform in the lines of Survey Monkey etc. Our clients have the option of using us for plain vanilla surveys of all kinds (without collecting any attention and emotion data). We provide Consulting services for customized study design and execution when our clients need us to.
Some of the kind of work that we do, include:
| Advertising Effectiveness Studies | Content Strategy Analysis |
| Brand Messaging Testing | Influencer Marketing Research |
| Brand Health Tracking | Product Development & Testing |
| Market Segmentation | Customer Satisfaction Surveys |
| Customer Journey Mapping | Customer Feedback Surveys |
Bindu: Managing teams and employees is one of the main pain points in any organization. Please let me know how big is your team and what values do you prioritise in your organisation?
Indranil: We have a small, fully remote team, spread across India, Canada and Singapore. Given our geographical spread, we value proactive, efficient and transparent communication the most. Right after that comes Accountability and Ownership of our individual actions and goals.
Bindu: For any business, customer satisfaction is very critical, and I am curious to know what is your Unique Selling Point (USP)?
Indranil: We offer a platform that’s truly differentiated in terms of its capabilities and the experience it provides our users. We also provide tremendous global reach (to empanelled respondents) and a price-point that’s very, very competitive.
Bindu: What’s one question you wish people would ask you about business, but don’t? What would be your answer?
Indranil: How do you build value on an ongoing basis (in the context of our platform)? The answer is through relentless customer-centricity and patience and by refusing to cut corners.
Bindu: While running a business, one has to manage a lot of things and keep a stable mind. How do you keep yourself motivated?
Indranil: I find having a few stretch goals at all times and diligently working towards them automatically brings in a sense of discipline and motivation. For good mental health, I find that there’s nothing better than playing sports and regular human connections, be it with colleagues, friends or family.
Bindu: You started business after spending a long time in the corporate world. Are you happy with what you are doing? Do you have any regrets?
Indranil: Revenue pressures and the general slow pace of progress always put pressure on business owners, and I am not immune to that at all. That said, I really like what I do and the variety of things that I have to do, to move forward on a daily basis.
I won’t call it a regret, but I do wish I had started on the entrepreneurial journey earlier in my life.
Bindu: Who has been your role model and why?
Indranil: There are and have been many. In different aspects. I have always considered my father as a role model for many areas of life. There are (and have been) corporate leaders who I wished to emulate too.
Bindu: The word Emozo sounds very stylish and trendy. I would like to know how did you come up with the product name Emozo and what does your logo represent?
Indranil: The logo is simple. It represents the first letter of our brand name. We had initially considered the names Usemo and Emorite, but they didn’t work out for a variety of different reasons. The current name was suggested by one of our co-founders (no longer with the company). He’s from eastern Europe and he combined the core of the word “Emotion” with a suffix (“zo”) that has roots in his native language. The rest of us liked the name and it stuck. That’s how we came up with the brand name, Emozo.
Bindu: What is one piece of advice you would give to budding entrepreneurs or new businesses?
Indranil: One of the many early mistakes we had made was to focus completely on building the product and not on marketing the concept/idea. Our mistake was to believe that we needed something concrete built before it could be marketed/sold. In hindsight, we should have put equal emphasis on both, right from the get-go.
Now, more savvy, budding entrepreneurs will probably not make this mistake today. However, if there’s one piece of advice, I can offer to folks who are just starting out to build new software platforms, it is this. Product Development and Marketing needs to go hand-in-hand. Not only is it crucial from a revenue standpoint, but you will also build a better product in the process, because of all the feedback you receive from all the people you will fail to convince with the initial ideas.
Bindu: Thank for very much Indranil for sharing your Inspiring Tale.
Indranil: You are most welcome Bindu. It was lovely to have this conversation with you.
To know more about Emozo and book a demo session, please contact Emozo Team here:
Email ID: indranil@emozo.ai
Company name: Emozo Labs, Inc.
Phone number: +1 (519) 807-3026
Linkedin URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/indranil-mukherjee-a4347a1/
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