Transforming Cloud Marketplace Sales With AI With Trunal Bhanse
- Quik! News Team
- 7 hours ago
- 27 min read
Trunal Bhanse is the CEO of Clazar, a platform that helps software companies sell and grow revenue through cloud marketplaces like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. He previously held engineering leadership roles at Confluent, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, where he specialized in marketplaces, billing systems, and product growth. At Confluent, Trunal led teams focused on cloud marketplaces and monetization infrastructure, which inspired the creation of Clazar. Today, he helps SaaS companies simplify cloud marketplace operations, accelerate go-to-market execution, and improve customer experience.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
[2:15] Trunal Bhanse discusses how Clazar helps software companies grow through cloud marketplaces
[5:45] The three major stages of cloud marketplace success and optimization
[8:56] Lessons from Airbnb’s customer experience culture and leadership philosophy
[11:55] Why Clazar defined its core values before naming the company
[14:21] Trunal talks about hiring for culture fit and building transparency in remote teams
[16:33] Obsessing over product details and designing intuitive enterprise user experiences
[18:40] Maintaining human connection and customer trust in the age of AI
[21:51] How AI will reshape software companies, team sizes, and entrepreneurship
[26:32] Trunal compares AI-powered software creation to the rise of 3D printing
In this episode…
Selling software through cloud marketplaces can create unexpected operational and technical challenges for growing SaaS companies. Many businesses struggle not only with getting listed on platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, but also with turning those listings into scalable revenue channels while maintaining strong customer experiences. How can companies simplify marketplace operations while staying customer-focused in an increasingly AI-driven world?
Trunal Bhanse, an expert in cloud marketplaces, SaaS growth, and customer experience design, shares practical insights for building scalable go-to-market systems and customer-first company cultures. Drawing from his experience at major technology companies, he explains the importance of educating customers, creating operational efficiency, and obsessing over user experience at every stage of the customer journey. Trunal also discusses how leaders can use AI to improve efficiency without losing the human connection that builds trust and long-term customer relationships.
In this episode of The Customer Wins, Richard Walker interviews Trunal Bhanse, CEO of Clazar, about scaling SaaS growth through cloud marketplaces and customer experience. Trunal discusses lessons learned from Airbnb’s company culture, the balance between AI automation and human interaction, and how AI will reshape the future of software businesses and entrepreneurship.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Quotable Moments:
“We think of ourselves as not the people who help you sell your software, but also the people who will help you understand and educate how that process even is.”
“We obsessed over every single detail. And after having gone through that experience for several years, nothing is the same for me.”
“We picked the values for the company before we named the company; before we started thinking about the product.”
“We are banking on the fact that people want to talk to other people, and we want to be building a company that really, really cares about the customers and nothing else.”
“Because writing software is so easy, there will be a lot more companies that are being born and a lot more problems that otherwise would not have been solved.”
Action Steps:
Build customer education into your sales process: Many companies struggle to understand how cloud marketplaces work, so educating customers early builds trust and helps them recognize the long-term value of your solution.
Define company values before scaling your team: Establishing clear cultural principles early creates alignment as the company grows and helps attract people who naturally fit the mission and customer-focused mindset.
Obsess over customer experience details: Improving workflows, usability, and responsiveness strengthens customer loyalty and reduces frustration throughout the customer journey.
Keep humans involved when using AI for customer interactions: Maintaining human oversight alongside AI preserves trust, empathy, and relationship quality when customer needs become more complex.
Use AI to solve highly specific operational problems: AI allows businesses to create customized solutions faster and more efficiently for challenges that were previously too expensive or time-consuming to address.
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Episode Transcript:
Intro: 00:02
Welcome to The Customer Wins podcast, where business leaders discuss their secrets and techniques for helping their customers succeed and, in turn, grow their business.
Richard Walker: 00:16
Hi, I'm Richard Walker, the host of The Customer Wins, where I talk to business leaders about how they help their customers win and how their focus on customer experience leads to growth. Some of my past guests have included Suvrat Bansal of Clarista, Adrian Johnstone of Practifi and Dan Zitting of Nitrogen. Today I'm speaking with Trunal Bhanse, the CEO of Clazar. And today's episode is brought to you by Quik!, the leader in enterprise forms processing. When your business relies upon processing forms, don't waste your team's valuable time manually reviewing the forms.
Instead, get Quik!. Using Quik!. You'll be able to generate completed forms and get back clean, context rich data that reduces manual reviews to only one out of 1000 submissions. Visit quickforms.com to learn more. All right.
My guest, Trunal Bhanse, is the co-founder and CEO of Clazar, a platform helping modern revenue teams unlock growth through cloud marketplaces. Before starting Clazar, Trunal built his career at companies like Airbnb and Confluent, where he worked at the intersection of engineering infrastructure and go-to-market systems. Today, Clazar helps companies accelerate revenue across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud by simplifying everything from marketplace listings and co-selling to billing and revenue recognition, all in one unified platform. Trunal. Welcome to The Customer Wins.
Trunal Bhanse: 01:47
Thank you so much, Rich. I'm really excited to be here today. I know we've talked about this for, for some time now, finally making it happen. So I'm really excited for the conversation today.
Richard Walker: 01:57
Me too. So for my guests who haven't heard this podcast before, I love to talk to business leaders about what they're doing to help their customers win, how they built and deliver a great customer experience and the challenges to growing their own company. So I want to understand your business a lot better. How does your company help people?
Trunal Bhanse: 02:15
Yeah. So it all started with my time at Confluent, where I was the head of engineering for marketplaces, billing and growth. I have a deep engineering and a product background. I worked at, as you mentioned, I worked at companies like LinkedIn, Airbnb, and Confluent was my latest place where I spent a lot of good learning time before I started. What we do specifically is the following.
A lot of the companies out there have fantastic software. They want to reach as many buyers as they want. They really want to showcase their capabilities so that they can help as many people out there that that possibly can be utilizing their software's. But selling the software is extremely challenging. One of the latest and newest ways of selling your software is via the marketplaces.
The hyperscalers, as we call them, AWS, Azure, and GCP. They have their own marketplaces through which you can sell your software and really get access to a lot of these enterprise customers who can then utilize the committed spend that they have already committed on one of these hyperscalers. This is a newer channel that I was fortunate to get an insight into while at Confluent. So I thought maybe if, if we are able to help Confluent, why not try to see if there is a bigger need for something like this and try to help a lot more people out there. And you know, we've been in business for several years now and we have more than 300 customers and growing.
So that hypothesis that we had is now alive. But this is what we do. We help our customers rely on us and our expertise to help us, help them sell their software via the marketplaces.
Richard Walker: 03:51
You know, as an entrepreneur myself, my mentor said, go work somewhere. Learn what the problems are and then build solutions for those. This is a perfect example of that, where you found a hidden problem that truly has friction, and you're making it easier for people to do it. How hard is it to get a customer to see the value of what you're doing then?
Trunal Bhanse: 04:12
Yeah, it's I mean, it's a constant. I would say it's a constant battle, a constant challenge. Because, when and as you know, this Rich, like when you're trying to affect change out there in the world, when you're trying to bring something new, especially in the world of technology, where there's so much noise out there, it is definitely a challenge, right? So we are constantly we think of ourselves as not the people who help you sell your software, but also the people who will help you understand and educate how that process even is. Because there's a lot of gap today.
Right now, the industry is still growing. You know, as AI is growing more and more, more software will be built. It's already being built, building a lot of software, even in today's world. So I feel there's a bigger gap in terms of education, which is why we spend a lot of time educating our customers and prospects.
Richard Walker: 05:03
Yeah, I think that's really important because the thing I've missed in what I just said was in trying to get people to see the value, it's because that friction is always there. They don't know it could be easier. So oftentimes you just overlook it. I've had the same problem with forms. I've had customers say it's their job to fill out the forms.
Why would I make it easier for them? And it seems counterintuitive at this day, but I imagine some of your customers are like, well, no, this is just the way it is. If we want to make money in the AWS marketplace, we have to put a listing. We have to go through those steps. But I mean, look, you guys have been super successful at this.
You must be teaching people what you guys have done to become successful. So what does it take to get listed and then actually connect the dots and make money?
Trunal Bhanse: 05:45
Yeah. So there's several pieces to this puzzle and it's a very complex puzzle. And over a period of like the past several years, I've gotten different flavors of it. And now I think I personally feel that even though I'm learning in this phase, I've had the fortunate opportunity to see a lot of the experts who have been operating in this world. Right?
So first is getting listed, which requires some engineering resources where you are supposed to deploy the software into the hyperscaler's infrastructure, wire it up properly, security, all that good stuff, right? So that's bucket number one. But it's real.
Richard Walker: 06:19
Craigslist ad, right?
Trunal Bhanse: 06:21
It's not what I wish it were. No, it's not a Craigslist ad. No. I wish it were that simple. But yeah, so that was the listing.
But as we work with a lot of advanced enterprise customers, where the real challenge lies not in the listing, a lot of the times they already have the listing or they have to know how to get the listing up and running. The challenge is, is, is twofold. One is how do you actually make this listing operational from a GTM standpoint, like having a listing is one thing, but having a listing that makes money for you is a whole new ball game, right? So that is the second bucket, which is where we help in terms of, okay, you have a listing, but what, what now? What, what should you be doing next?
So that's the second bucket. Third bucket is I have the listing. I know how to make it work. It's working so well that we are buckling under the pressure of all of the deals that we are getting, all of the revenue that we are getting. Can you come and help us optimize it and bring in operational efficiency?
That's the third bucket. So we typically go in these three different buckets and understand the customer needs at a deeper level and really try to unlock the value that they deserve. We just help and make sure that the value unlocking is accelerated.
Richard Walker: 07:29
Wow. That's awesome. Yeah. Because it's a new world. Not everybody is in a marketplace.
Okay, one more question about the marketplace. Can just any company list? Can anybody start a product and say, I want to be on there and go list?
Trunal Bhanse: 07:42
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, if you have a software that is to be bought by a, in a B2B fashion, which is not for consumers. So it's like, not you and I could go and buy stuff off of the AWS marketplace. We could. But it's typically driven by my need for the company that I work at, there are other marketplaces out there in the world like Airbnb and Uber.
Airbnb is one of my favorite ones because I spend so much time there as a worker in that organization. But those marketplaces are different and these are different.
Richard Walker: 08:13
Yeah. Look, one of the things we bought through AWS marketplace was a data migration service. And it's great because Amazon didn't have what we needed, but their partners did. And that's really the value. Okay, let's shift gears.
Let's go talk about Airbnb for a minute because I mean, come on, that's one of the best experiences out there as a consumer. My mom just booked a place for us for the summer, and we were debating on different things. We could both see it and we could play around with it. It's such an amazing app. I've used it so many times, I can't think of a negative experience from the Airbnb side.
Maybe the place I rented wasn't so great, but service wise. So arguably, I would argue that they have one of the best customer experiences out there. How has that formed and shaped you?
Trunal Bhanse: 08:56
That's such an interesting question, Rich. I'll answer that in two parts. Like Airbnb has had a profound impact and who impacts on who I am as a leader, as a person, as a, as a person who wants to serve others. Airbnb had literally nailed this down as an organization when I was a part of it. I worked there from 2013 to 2018 very early, early on.
So that's one piece that has shaped me. It has also shaped me in terms of how do you actually be obsessed about the customer's value? Like we used to spend so much time at Airbnb thinking about every single pixel, every single step, every single flow that we are putting in front of our customers. And for me, those customers were hosts, the people who actually list their home on the platform. There was a separate team for guests, but we obsessed over every single detail.
And after having been gone, after having gone through that experience for several years, nothing is the same for me. Like I have to go through and obsess over every single pixel, no matter what we do. And that is kind of what we have brought to the laser platform. And I'm hoping to bring it to, you know, for the rest of my life. But that's kind of the profound impact that I've had because Airbnb was just such a wonderful place to work at.
Richard Walker: 10:13
How do you think Airbnb achieved that culture, that mindset? I mean, did you go through thorough training or was it just punished if you didn't do it? What is it? What was the mechanism?
Trunal Bhanse: 10:22
No. Yeah. It's it's, it's such an interesting case study. Actually. There was no punishment as such, like when I was there.
So I was the engineer number 90 at at Airbnb. I clearly remember that number. And everybody when I walked into that building, this was in 88. Brennan. And in San Francisco, the moment you walk into that building, you would feel the energy.
You would feel that this place is special. Everybody was super friendly and everyone was after this mission of helping hosts and stuff like that, that entire culture was instilled by the founders into the company's DNA from day one. I wasn't there from day one. I came much later, but even when I came, it was so apparent that, you know, this company is really mission driven and that when you do that across one, two, three, four, five, ten, hundreds of people in a company that starts to compound. And then any force that has to change is really difficult, even though the founders don't have to repeat that on a day to day basis.
Right? So I think they really caught lightning in a bottle, to be honest. Like I, I've not seen that kind of a culture ever. And I joke with, with my, with my, with my founder who's also from Airbnb, by the way, that, you know, if, if there is one thing that I can go back that can pull me out of is the 2013 Airbnb team and that kind of environment, because, you know, I would, I would, I would pay anything to go go back to that kind of environment.
Richard Walker: 11:46
Oh, man. That's an amazing thought. How do you bring that to Clazar? How do you mimic that and, and bring it to your team?
Trunal Bhanse: 11:55
Yeah. So one of the things that we implemented internally is day one, literally when I myself is my co-founder, we started thinking about building a company in this space. This is a problem that we want to solve. These are the people and companies we want, we want the opportunity to serve. One of the first things that we did is we actually wrote down our growth and core values.
We wrote down what it does, what does our DNA look like? And, and this was so early that we hadn't even picked a name for the company. We picked the values for the company before we named the company, before we started thinking about the product, before we started thinking about the people that we want to onboard. So that was very critical for us. And this is a playbook that we've taken from Airbnb, like Airbnb, like their core values were extremely clear, written down literally on the walls.
So if you walked into the office, you would see the core values written down. It was so ingrained into the culture and the process that your performance reviews would be written on top of those core values. So you would have to write, okay, I did this XYZ thing and was aligned with this specific core value in, in everything. So like that is the process that we are bringing to our now of course, process is one thing. The implementation is actually culture and the mission and having the people aligned to that mission, that is also a problem, albeit maybe a harder problem, you could argue.
So that's the process that we are going through. Even if we are, you know, if we can build a culture that is even like 20% of what Airbnb had, I would, I would be, I would, I would be very happy.
Richard Walker: 13:26
Man. I really relate to this because before I started Quik!, I knew what company culture I wanted. And it's because I worked in so many different places. I never felt I was empowered to do my best work. I could get 50% of my potential out, but not 100%.
So I was seeking what are the factors that would help me be my best. And that became the foundation of Quik! before I even knew the name, before I started the company. And so we went into this with a very strong cultural identity up front. However, I lacked the mechanisms and the understanding of how to implement it. And so you mentioned one of the hardest problems is hiring for culture.
Otherwise you won't get it. It has to be part of who they are, otherwise it won't get it. And I think that's one of the things that Airbnb must have figured out, because if you saw that energy as you walked in the office and everybody was buzzing with it, it wasn't like they all took a shot of something. They naturally felt it right.
Trunal Bhanse: 14:21
Yeah, that's exactly how it was. And it is not something that you can manufacture. That's also what I've learned over the years, it's like you can learn some, but you have to have that drive, that energy. And, because you have a certain kind of culture, you will attract a certain kind of people towards that culture. And that is the team, that culture that forms almost.
So, for example, we had this like rituals within Airbnb and now also where it was a very open culture, like people could go walk to walk to anybody in the office and talk. You could have this culture confluent to like all of the documents were open pretty much you could open any document. And in the earlier days, even the financial documents were open. I, as a person in engineering , could just go open up all of the financial documents and take a look at, you know, how the company is doing for my own opinions and have access to that data. So we have taken some of those cues also and implemented them closer.
Richard Walker: 15:19
That's scary.
Trunal Bhanse: 15:21
It is. It is. Yeah, yeah.
Richard Walker: 15:23
People have access to this information. What are they going to do with it? What does it mean?
Trunal Bhanse: 15:26
It again goes back to the kind of people that you that you want to have and that you want, want to build the culture of, of course, like not all the information can be, can be completely easily available and stuff like that. Trade secrets and all that. HR also the specifics of, you know, some some confidential thing that's going on. So stuff like that is, is always there. But by default, we want to keep the information public.
Like we are a fully remote company. We are a hybrid company. More on the remote side. That also means that we have to have places, cultural norms in place as to how do you actually interact with your remote, remote colleagues and stuff like that. So some of those pieces are all grounded into the reality of what culture we want to build at the company.
Richard Walker: 16:10
Okay, so you mentioned being obsessed with the pixel, and to me, that's the user interface experience. That's the upfront interface that people have. Therefore they experience the product. But how do you think Clazar is acting intentionally or unintentionally to create the personal experience with customers and how they feel and perceive your company through this obsession with the pixel and, and customer experience that you have?
Trunal Bhanse: 16:33
Yeah. And let me take you back to like where I started in my career. Like I actually started as a front end engineer. What that means is my job was to make amazing, intuitive user experiences. This is this was back in yahoo where I worked at as I was an intern, then came back full time.
Then I worked at LinkedIn. We built at LinkedIn. LinkedIn also had a very fantastic culture, just like Airbnb and Confluent and all of these other places that I've also worked at. But we also obsessed over the the pixels, every single flow, the tabs. I used to work on this mobile and iPad apps back at LinkedIn.
And these tabs would, you would be surprised, like we would try to reduce the number of tabs to get to a certain, certain outcome. And if it's like three tabs, that's two too many. Sometimes, like, you know, you had to get it within one tab. So that is the kind of culture that was inculcated into the into the entire ecosystem. Now, when you bring this to closure, you have to start thinking from first principles a little bit like the kind of customers, the kind of users that you have and what are they actually trying to get to?
What is the outcome that they want? You have to think from not only the person who's using the platform, but who's the platform, who's setting it up. Like in consumer world, we don't really have the problem of somebody setting it up and somebody using it. Like, you know, I download an app, I go to Uber, I go to Airbnb, I look at myself. But in an enterprise setup, it's completely different.
Like the implementation, the security, the, the CRM team, they are all different people than the people who would use it. And so you have to think about that user experience or that touchpoint with the platform at every single stage. And you have to constantly optimize it and make it better and better and better every single day. That is the process that we follow internally.
Richard Walker: 18:16
Yeah, I'm going to point out something else because we've been a customer of Clazar for over a year, and you reached out to me, this is how we met. And I was kind of stunned. I'm like, is this really the CEO? Like, am I really having the CEO reach out to me and care about my problems and challenges or my goals and aspirations. But it's true.
I mean, you did what? What makes you be that engaged at that level?
Trunal Bhanse: 18:40
Yeah, I think look, we are we are living in the age of AI where a lot of the things are going to be so automated and so transactional that people are going to we are banking on the fact that people want to talk to other people, and we want to be building a company that really, really cares about the customers and nothing else, right? We are very AI forward ourselves. Like we are very efficient engine. We use a lot of AI ourselves. But what we also want to do is we never want to lose the customer touch, right?
We want to make sure that if like, look, Rich, you came to us, you became a customer, you interested to get some outcome done on your behalf, right? And that faith and that confidence that you have shown on Clazar and me as, as, as a leader of the pack, I want to make sure that you never feel like you've, you've like we've let you down in any way that we've we've done everything that we can in our capacity to come and help you. So I, I love talking to customers. I, I, I feel like I don't spend enough time with our customers with, with our customers actually. So I'm, I'm going to try doing it more and more and more.
But yeah, so that is, that is the reason why I reached out, to be honest.
Richard Walker: 19:51
No, I love that you frame it first with AI because you're right. There's a lot of a lot of human touch that's going to start going missing if it's not already missing because of AI. And in fact, I think we're going to have agents talking to other people's agents to get things done. And it will be these proxies, and it won't be for a good reason. We'll think it's because it's efficiency, but we're going to lose the rapport.
We're going to lose the true understanding of what's going on. So as you're thinking about how you guys use AI, how do you strike that balance between efficiency and automation versus that obsession with the customer experience?
Trunal Bhanse: 20:28
Yeah, I think everything starts with the customer experience first. I mean, we use a lot of AI in our various parts of the company. Customer-facing, non-customer facing. But every single point we always ask them, hey, is this something that could be fully offload to AI? Can AI agent take it completely off the plate of a human's plate, and will the customer be still happy about the fact?
Right? If the answer is yes, you know, then it's all AI. But many of many, many times we do get the answer the opposite way. Hey, look, you know, AI can optimize it to a very good level, but the human touch is absolutely necessary in those situations. We put a human in the loop and making sure that whatever the AI's output is, is verified by human, it is aligned with what the customer wants or an internal stakeholder wants.
But the human is always exists because the stakes are higher. Stuff like that. So that has been our barometer so far. Look, AI world is changing so fast. I don't know if you ask me the same question three months down the line, I might give you a different answer.
But right now, this is it.
Richard Walker: 21:28
Yeah. Okay. Let me ask you a harder question, because I think many of us who have businesses at some point in the last few years or will in the next couple of years, ask, is AI a threat to my company? Is it potentially going to change how I can or cannot do business? So as an example, couldn't I use AI to create a listing for me?
Would that be competitive? Is that put a threat in your eyes? What do you see as a threat with AI?
Trunal Bhanse: 21:51
Yeah, I think so. At a at a global macro level, I'll tell you what I think will happen. I don't I think AI will write a lot of software. If not if, if, if it's not already writing a lot of software. But that doesn't mean there'll be lesser of a software and fewer companies being formed.
What I think will happen is because writing software is so easy, there will be a lot more companies that are being born and a lot more problems that otherwise would not have been solved. Will getting will be getting solved now, right? So that the pool of companies getting started, the pool of things available for an enterprise buyer to buy are going to just go through the roof. And now what does that do to individual businesses that also shapes? I do think the company size will be smaller.
Like if you if you look at what's happening out there in the industry, some of these newer cutting-edge AI companies like a cursor and a lot of the others are very small, small teams doing a lot of things. Right. So the, the, the, there's a GitHub repository also, it's called paperclip, which literally is, is helping people build a one-person company. You can hire whatever employees you want. You can get an office, you can set up teams.
All of that is completely done autonomously for you. The only human there is the person who started the company. Nothing else. Right? I think that's that's, that's too much of an extreme of an example, I do think, but that's where the world is headed.
So teams and companies will get smaller, but the number of companies will explode. So I don't think that there needs to be a hey, what happens to my business kind of a situation? If you are into a business where there is no moat whatsoever outside of just execution, then it is absolutely a threat.
Richard Walker: 23:34
Yeah, I okay, I think that's really smart. I also do think that there's the idea of a one person business, and it just makes me question what happens in customer service. I mean, either the product is so simple, there's just not much need for customer service, or you're relying on AI to be your customer service. How would that feel? Have you had an experience like that yet?
Trunal Bhanse: 23:57
Yeah, I mean, like these days, like for the products that I use, a lot of my questions are answered by AI and sometimes I feel good about it. Oh, you know, like I didn't have to wait for five minutes to get the, for the rep to come on the call or the other times I actually feel like, no, you know, it wasn't really a good experience overall. I do think like the, the human connection that we talked about earlier, like, look, I sent you an email, you hopped on a call, right? Like, because there was this human element involved. If an AI had sent you an email, I bet you would not have.
We would not have taken that call, or you would not have responded to that email saying, you know, I'm looking forward to talk to you. Hey, AI, that doesn't happen. I gotta.
Richard Walker: 24:35
I gotta tell you.
Richard Walker: 24:36
I had the first thought of like, was this AI-generated pretending to be the CEO, with the CEO really reach out to me. I didn't have a concept of how big you guys were or anything. I was just like, wow, I'm a CEO too. So maybe I make customers feel this way too, I don't know. But yeah, I definitely think the human touch is super important and I'll share a story with you.
I had to call American Express yesterday, and you know how it is. You have the interactive voice response system, and I tried to use it to get what I needed. And then I just said representative. And I don't even mean 10s later. Hi, this is Tracy with American Express.
How can I help you? And I'm like, oh, thank you. Thank you for being real. Thank you for being so fast to stay real. And it's that level of service that I still love having when I need it.
Not every time. I love AI to solve problems, but when I need it, it's there. And it sounds like you guys are like that. In fact, I'm going to share something else with everybody on this. The team actually shares a Slack channel with us so we can talk immediately.
Do you do that with every customer that that uses Slack?
Trunal Bhanse: 25:35
It is. Yeah, it has been there since day one. It's something that we really appreciated. We wanted that to have. And it's as you called out, Rich, it's for regardless of which tier of customer you are, how much you have paid us.
Every single customer gets a dedicated Slack channel. There are humans in there. There are agents in there. And we like it started with just humans being in there. Now we've grown a lot, so we have to bring in some efficiency.
So there are AI agents in there as well. But absolutely every single customer gets a Slack channel and there's a human being in there.
Richard Walker: 26:03
All right. I'm going to touch on another point that you were starting that I think was being implied, and I want to get a better answer on this. One of the things that I'm fascinated about with AI and my own experience, is that I can get it to do things I would never have paid a human to do. And it's and it's things like details that humans don't want to do extra steps humans wouldn't want to do. I wouldn't want to pay for.
But AI, hey, it can do it. So are you seeing any advantages there for your company and what you can bring to market with AI servicing it?
Trunal Bhanse: 26:32
Absolutely. I think I'll give you a parallel example that that I have found really fascinating. Have you seen those like 3D printers, Rich.
Richard Walker: 26:41
3D printers.
Trunal Bhanse: 26:42
3D printers, right? Yeah, yeah. And one of the biggest use cases of those 3D printers is the following. Like, let's say, if I want to make something for my desk that's extremely custom, no company would ever make that component because it's just not business viable, right? Like they unless and until somebody can make that component and sell thousands of them, they're not going to make it right.
So I'm stuck with this suboptimal experience in my life, but I still want that component. 3D printers come into picture where I can go and exactly print that piece of hardware, make it exactly the way I want and fit my this very specific use case right now. Translate that to the software world in AI. AI is that for us? Like I have some very specific use case, very specific thing that nobody will ever write a software for, but I don't need need them anymore.
I can write that software myself, make it extremely custom for my use cases. Deploy it just for me. It works for me. That's it. Nobody else needs to touch it.
That's the world. That's the world that that we are going towards. And I think it's absolutely fantastic and fascinating to see that.
Richard Walker: 27:41
Oh my gosh, I'm going to steal that analogy. As soon as you said 3D printer, I was taken back to when I lived in Southern California, I was lucky enough to go take a tour of space X. I had a friend that worked there, and they had a machine shop that was doing 3D printing with aluminum, and I think titanium unreal. Like I'd seen the plastic filament, but metal 3D printing. And they showed me this gear set that was impossible.
That oh my gosh, so fascinating. But what a great analogy to talk about with AI because you're right. I'm seeing customers of mine. I'm seeing people in the industry say, why should I buy something off the shelf if I can build what exactly what I want versus try to force something in that doesn't give me what I want, then I have to patch and integrate it, blah blah, blah. You're right.
This is like the 3D printer of our world right now. Wow. Look, we're getting kind of close to the end. And there's this one question I always love to ask. So before I get to that, what is the best way for people to find and connect with you?
Trunal Bhanse: 28:39
Yeah, absolutely. I'm very open on LinkedIn. I, I don't know if I have the time these days to post as much, but I always look at all the messages that come through. So LinkedIn is the absolute best way for me to get in touch with me. I've also worked at LinkedIn many years ago, so there's a special spot for LinkedIn in my heart.
Yeah. So absolutely LinkedIn hit me up, send me a request, happy to chat.
Richard Walker: 29:00
And your website is.
Trunal Bhanse: 29:02
It's dot io. So if you're interested in selling your software via the AWS, Azure or GCP marketplaces, you know, more than happy to see if you're the right fit for you or not. Feel free to come on, on our website, browse through. And if you want a personalized demo, there's a scheduled demo button as well that you can click.
Richard Walker: 29:19
Awesome. All right. Look, this is actually one of my favorite questions. Totally different question. Who has had the biggest impact on your leadership style and how you approach your role today?
Trunal Bhanse: 29:30
Yeah. That is when you ask me that question. There's two people that come to my mind very specifically. And this, this has all happened through my formative years as I was growing up as a leader, trying to understand what to make of this world and how do I make my own space in this world. One person is the.
This. He is now a good friend. Also was a colleague before. His name is Lenny Raczynski. He was a PM at Airbnb when I was the engineering manager, and I've just been very fascinated.
I was already very fascinated with him when he was my peer at at Airbnb, but since then he has gone on and done amazing things in life. He's now has his own podcast, he does interviews. He is giving it back to the community in a way that whatever he has learned or whatever other leaders have to share. He has really built this amazing forum where people can share the the their wisdom through Lenny's newsletter. It's a very popular newsletter.
If you haven't subscribed, please, please go subscribe to it. I read it every single time it comes out. That's person number one. What I liked about Lenny a lot is his his meticulousness about the about pretty much every single thing. And if you talk to anyone who's been around Lenny, you would probably get the same answer.
So that's person number one. The second person is this person named Ganesh Srinivasan, who was out of the four companies that I worked at two times, he was my manager and I've been learning a lot about execution. I learned a lot about how to manage human emotions, how to actually get the best out of the people that are around you from him. So I've been very fortunate to be to be able to learn from these amazing leaders. And my goal right now is to whatever I've learned to pass it on to others.
And hopefully that can multiply in multiple ways in the years to come.
Richard Walker: 31:17
Oh, I love that inspiration. Thank you so much for sharing that. All right. I want to give a big thank you to Trunal Bhanse, the co-founder and CEO of Clazar, for being on this episode of The Customer Wins. Go check out journal's website at clazar.io.
And don't forget to check out Quik! at quickforms.com, where we make processing forms easier. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. We'll click the like button, share this with someone, and subscribe to our channels for future episodes of The Customer Wins Journal. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Trunal Bhanse: 31:49
Thank you so much for having me. I had so much fun and I look forward to seeing you again.
Outro: 31:55
Thanks for listening to The Customer Wins podcast. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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