Your network is your net worth: that’s the catchphrase in startup circles, yet very few can use the strengths of their network to generate business and revenue.
Indeed, the value of network connections is invisible to us. Satish Patil, an entrepreneur, identified this gap and built an advanced platform, “Mitibase”, to synchronize, map and understand relational data from customer relationship management (CRM) tools, contact books, social networks, communication flows, publicly available data and third parties. party sources.
Mitibase enables individuals and companies to discover opportunities through a network of collective relationships.
At first…
Satish Patil holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a BTech from the University of Mumbai. With two patents to his name, Patil realized the importance of data in 2009-2010 and returned to India to pursue his entrepreneurial dream.
“Data analytics was very rudimentary at that time. I had started a health data analytics consultancy shop. I struggled for two years and got my first Flipkart assignment for the one of their customer service issues. In 2015, there was a boom in data science education. Many academic institutions and business schools approached me to design courses and give talks. My business took over from there,” says Patil.
“I created another company, “Crysagi Systems”, which was aimed at Indian startups. In 2019, data analysis started to become commonplace. Building a data analytics vertical organically hasn’t been easy. I wanted to get into the product and leave the service industry. Crysagi was acquired by CoreView Systems and I left in 2019,” he says.
Competence vs Relationships
At Crysagi, Patil has advised global pharmaceutical companies, e-commerce giants, industrial organizations, healthcare companies and fintech companies on data strategy and algorithmic capabilities to solve business problems. He had seen how technology evolves and needs to be built, from scratch.
Patil says, “One thing I realized that no one taught me at school, at home, in the office or in any other workplace, is the importance of relationship. Competence is important and necessary for business success, but having a good network and relationships can be one of your company’s competitive advantages. If we invest more time, money and energy in relationships, we can progress 10 times more. We can hire skills, but not relationships and scope. Relationships are an unfair advantage and whoever has it will progress faster.
“Another mistake we often make is viewing every opportunity as a transaction rather than a relationship. Successful people act on it, but they don’t say it. I realized that as a person or organization we don’t value relationships because they are not visible. To some degree we are aware of our immediate near network, but almost unaware of the real-time wide area network. At the organizational level, this is practically non-existent. Many organizations have customer relationship management (CRM) software, but it only captures customers, leads, and leads. It does not capture the network of their top management, employees, customers. We therefore have a relational capital which is not used because it is not visible. I said let’s make this visible to organizations in real time,” Patil said.
Relational capital
A person’s or organization’s network is not static. It changes every day so it’s an opportunity to cash in.
“Relationship Discovery” is a major aspect that Mitibase solves through its platform.
Patil says, “Most people would say what’s up? They claim that they know the relationship is important and may also do it manually, intermittently and sporadically. The challenge is to bring it to a platform and that too visually. Another problem with data available in the public domain (on Google, LinkedIn, company websites) is that we cannot monitor it on a daily basis. Moreover, it is not interconnected and is not mutually known to us. Mitibase brings the direct and extensive network of individuals and organizations to a visual platform.
“I wanted to create a knowledge base of relationships around the world. Obviously, this knowledge would be stored as data. ‘Miti’ is a Sanskrit word for knowledge and therefore, instead of database, we coined the name ‘Mitibase’, which means a ‘knowledge base of relationships across the world’, explains Patil.
Patil says, “We are targeting two major segments. The first is the investment community, including venture capital funds, private equity funds and investment banks, and the second is mid-market business sales (B2B, start-ups well funded, companies at IPO level). We look for sufficient value in our email extraction offering. »
“Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, we have focused more on product development than sales over the past two years. During the pandemic, we had accelerated our product development. Now we have need funds to grow. Of the total amount raised, 70% will be used for sales and marketing,” he added.
Funding
Patil says, “So far, excluding the founder’s salary, we’ve invested $0.5 million since May 2019. We’re at a point where we expect a Series A in the next 90 days. We are raising $5m and are actively talking to institutional investors based in India and the US. As an entrepreneur, I started out for three years. I built this technology and we also have paying customers. We want to raise funds because it will add validation and help us scale.
relationship management
Today, there is a common understanding that structuring and democratizing data is key. “All successful people design their relationships, but for entrepreneurs, all new relationships are by chance. Besides discovery, how to build my strategic relationships in the future is the question every entrepreneur faces,” says Satish Patil .
“Each platform has its own challenges. There is no context for new connections. People use a Sales Navigator as a database tool, but it is poor for relationship management because the hierarchy in connection mapping is not maintained. This valuable information is missing,” he says.
“On the Mitibase platform, we gave filtering options in the connection hierarchy. We define these positions as decision makers. The user of our platform has the possibility to filter any connection by hierarchical order. We also know the background between the two people and the interaction between them – like the emails they send to each other or their investments in any company etc. Eventually, the whole vision is that our platform will become the largest CRM – Collective Relationship Management Software,” he adds.
– Strategic relationship building needs:
– Discovery of the relationship
– Relational Intelligence
– Management of relational workflows
The dilemma of the Chief Experience Officer (CXO)
According to Patil, “If we keep meeting the same people, we don’t get any new insights discovered, and over a period of time everyone has the same information. The “serendipity” is flattened out and this is where people start looking to new people for new information. CEOs, senior executives and decision makers face this dilemma but cannot find a way out. We need information asymmetry and that is why we see valuable information from outside our network. We call this discovering information over a weak connection.
Relational intelligence
Patil said, “We currently have a team of eight people, including members of the product development and research team. We will only focus on corporate sales in the industry and the private market investor segment. It will take us about 3 years to conquer this gigantic market of about 25 billion dollars.
“Our go-to-market strategy is in place. We begin our operations in the United States this year. We are also in discussions with a few companies for the integration of CRM with our platform. Businesses using CRM software can use our platform for automated relationship insights. Our platform will redefine CRM software – employee relationship management software,” Patil said.
