"Do what you love and love doing it": Colby Tunick, ReFocus AI Co-Founder

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I don't believe it’s possible for someone to ‘just do a startup.’ It’s a mission you fall in love with over and over, it’s a passion to breathe the rarefied air of a fast-growing technology company, and it’s your child. All of these things simultaneously and sometimes in competition with each other. I caught the startup bug while working for a space technology company and I have never looked back. Later, I had the opportunity to work for one of the largest catastrophe insurance companies in the world, which provided the mental springboard to my own company.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Our company’s name is ReFocus AI. ReFocus AI is a data-driven sales enablement platform that derives insights from every interaction and helps match customers’ wants and needs with suppliers’ products and services at scale. Over 80% of people purchasing insurance will speak to an insurance professional, but when it comes to how insurance agents sell, there is a major disconnect. They have a difficult time weeding through all the prospects they could be contacted to find the fraction of the 80% that want to purchase today.

What is the origin story?

We started it as my kitchen table in September of 2021. Then BAM! COVID-19 popped onto the world stage. When we began the company, we knew there was a major opportunity to use the data that companies already have - locked up in their CRMs and data warehouses - to help companies make better business decisions. But that’s all we knew at the time. What proved elusive at the beginning was what the better decisions were for. So we picked up the phone and spoke to almost 100 people in 3 months.

Starting a business so close to a global pandemic may seem foolhardy. But what we found is that it actually pushed us to dig further into the problem we were trying to solve. I remember a conversation with a prospect 6-months in. They told us they loved our product (which compared to today was almost something else entirely). But unless we could increase their revenue, they would never consider purchasing it. And that was our light bulb moment.

Enter ReFocus AI as a sales enablement and opportunity management platform. We have not looked back since.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I could not ask for a better team. It’s also not the one we started with. Out of the three original co-founders, I am the only one that remains. A new addition to our team, Dr. Nisar Hundewale, is currently the second co-founder. As our Chief Data Officer, he brings 20+ years to the team solving complex lead and demand generation problems for Fortune 50 companies. We have an amazing roster of advisors and a great team that works tirelessly. Everyone is here for a reason, and they add value beyond what any one of us could do alone. As a group of individuals, we have an amazing echo effect where ideas are amplified and strengthened.

The problem we are tackling is a tough nut to crack. It’s forward-thinking which means that our prospective customers are not yet aware of the problem and from a technology point-of-view, it’s only now becoming possible to solve as companies realize their data is an asset. We are the team solving this problem because we are the people who have experienced this problem first hand in past (and for some on our team) current jobs. Pulling this off means we will change how companies interact with their prospects forever - and may just make traditional marketing obsolete as a result.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I haven’t given much thought to what I would be doing if it was not building ReFocus AI. Call it a bandwidth issue!

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We determined early on that to be successful, our machine learning models must be accurate. So we measure the F-Score and track it over time for all of the models our customers have in production. From a business health and growth standpoint, we also track our customer acquisition cost and burn rate.

Success for us is macro - we are trying to shift how insurance is sold. When the industry adopts ReFocus AI as its core enabler to make that happen, we will have won.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Our traction has grown exponentially. Perhaps the most exciting thing to me personally is that we have validated that companies can increase their revenue by over 10% by enabling their sales teams to target real-time opportunities. We have been able to validate this in both the insurance and logistics industry.

In the grand scheme of the universe, we have been around for less than a 2-year blip (at the time of writing). That we have been able to scale so quickly is a testament to our entire team’s vision and ability to break down complex problems into streamlined end-user-facing solutions.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

I am extremely bullish on battery technology that will literally power the world using sustainable energy. Making solar and wind power viable at scale to overtake fossil fuels requires the ability to store it cheaply and safely. In the last few years, we have seen breakthroughs in battery technology that will make a green future possible.

Blockchain technology makes me nervous, but not exactly worried. And I’m not referring to the underlying distributed ledger or cryptocurrency. The value in the blockchain is having the ability to come back and verify something later and trust its accuracy. Blockchain seems to be popping up everywhere and in everything. Blockchain is not a magic solution and honestly, should only be included where that later validation is required.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Getting published on HackerNoon was always a goal of mine. I consider it a professional accomplishment having now been published over 5x on the platform. I like HackerNoon because of the originality of the content and the quality of the ideas that are shared on it.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Do what you love and love doing it.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

We still have not communicated with aliens. The wait continues….