Interviewing Dan Thompson and Rory Brown, Co-Founders of Kluster— Key Takeaways

Last week we were very fortunate to interview Dan Thompson and Rory Brown, co-founders of Kluster. They kindly shared the story of their entrepreneurial journey, their vision for Kluster and the current challenges they are facing.

Below are the top 3 unique insights from our interview with Dan and Rory:

What made you want to leave your full time jobs? How did you to meet? [2:45]

Rory: So Dan and I are very good friends from university. We used to meet in the pub and discuss how we could potentially apply AI and data science to the world of sales. I know that in the world of sales we collected so much data. In my business we would charge a percentage to the client and I asked Dan to build a small calculator that would work out the opportunity cost of the sales director’s time. So we built a little model and I would use this to try to charge more to our clients, because they can save an ‘X’ amount of time. That kinda snowballed and Dan started to code in R and built a Shiny tool.

We used that and showed it to many people in the market that I knew. Was the problem big enough? Yes. Would you spend money on it? Yes. How much would you spend? Just validating as much as we could with our little version and just kept going with it really.

What specific problems are you trying to solve? What’s your vision for Kluster? [6:19]

Rory: So the problem we are trying to solve is — we have a lot of commercial teams who have now been gathering on cloud CRMs quite a lot of data. There are two main problems: mental and visibility. Starting with visibility — although they have all this data, they are getting too close to result day, before they know what is going on. That means you can’t react, you can’t anticipate, you can’t help people to come back from anything that is bad. The second thing is mentality, for some reason many people think ‘my data is not good, my data is not good’ and what they don’t realise is that they collect a lot of it and it is very usable. So there is a bit of a mentality shift that we are trying to solve as well in that you can make a lot more of this data than you are and that it is a lot better than you think it is, so you is. Vision — Dan?

Dan: The vision for Kluster is that we want to be Europe’s leading provider of sales analytics, our mission is to help our clients to grow and to grow smarter in more efficient way.

What are the biggest challenges you are currently trying to solve? [11:10]

Rory: I would say the main one commercially is how we sell quicker and how do we increase the value of what we sell. Interlocked with that is the technicality and scalability of the product. I am trying to sell loads of it and make it sell faster. That means these guys need to have a product that is both flexible and very very scalable and that’s a big challenge. They are doing a brilliant job but it something that isn’t easy to do.

If you are short on time, you can listen to the interview on SoundCloud.

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