Welcome to an exclusive edition of our Interview series on AllAboutAI.com, where we introduce various stakeholders and developers in the AI industry to share their stories, challenges, and insights.
Today, we are excited to interview Tarun Jain, co-founder of Waxwing, a groundbreaking growth tool. This conversation will include Tarun’s journey, the development of Waxwing, the challenges faced, and the impact of their tool.
Be sure to watch the full interview on our YouTube channel.
Now, let’s begin our conversation with Tarun Jain on his journey and insights.
Can You Tell us About Yourself, How Did You Enter The Tech Industry, And What Inspired You?
My name is Tarun, and I’m from IIT, one of the best technical institutions in India. My co-founder, Samarth Tripathi, and I are both from IIT. Samarth is the techie, while I focused on growth and marketing, leading growth teams for B2B SaaS companies.
Samarth, an AI researcher from Columbia University, was an applied scientist at Microsoft, where he worked on implementing ChatGPT with Bing. I always approached technology from an application point of view, focusing on how to apply what’s available to automate my workflows as much as possible.
Meanwhile, Samarth was more into research and deep tech. About a year ago, he began exploring agentic workflows. We started talking, and that’s how it all began for us. Our combined expertise—my application-focused approach and his deep tech research—came together to form Waxwing. But it was Samarth who saw the potential of AI before I did.
Can You Explain What Waxwing Is Like To Someone Who Doesn’t Know It? How Is It Different From Other Marketing Tools?
First of all, we are not just a marketing tool. It encompasses a little bit of product, engineering, customer support, and everything else. We are a growth tool that encompasses product, engineering, customer support, and more. We cover the entire funnel from awareness and acquisition to revenue and referral. Waxwing is essentially a future of work tool.
We believe the future of work is going to be async, remote, and human and AI working together. Waxwing is very much AI-native, with AI handling project planning and management and recommending strategies. Currently If you need ideas for growth projects, it will recommend you something!
What Challenges Did You Face While Developing Waxwing, And How Did You Overcome Them?
The AI space is incredibly fast-moving. It’s been a ride. Initially, like many others, we started with fine-tuning. Back when GPT-3.5 was the best model available, it made total sense to fine-tune our guides and data, making the outputs better than GPT-3.5. We were excited about the improvements.
Then GPT-4 came along, and suddenly our model seemed obsolete. GPT-4 was significantly better. We quickly realized that we couldn’t keep up with the foundational models.
So, now we focus on fine-tuning primarily for cost optimization. We don’t need a very large model for all the individual tasks in our tool. Fine-tuning is about optimizing costs, while the real game is in retrieval and knowledge graphs.
We’ve implemented a lot of prompt chaining, prompt engineering, retrieval, and prompt injection. Initially, we did all that, but eventually, we understood that we had to choose our lane. We didn’t want to compete directly with foundational models.
What Is Your Target Market For Waxwing?
Our belief is that LLMs (Large Language Models) by nature are general-purpose, allowing us to target a broader Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). As a result, our tool is very broad and can be used by anyone with a growth team, which is a very extensive audience.
In our go-to-market (GTM) strategy, we are more targeted. We are focusing on D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) companies and enterprises in the US, as well as prosumers in the US. While our product is designed for a wide range of users who want to execute growth projects, our GTM strategy helps us to narrow down and focus on specific segments.
In essence, we aim to replace tools like ClickUp, Asana, and Monday.com. We believe we offer a better solution for growth projects.
How Does Waxwing Enhance Marketing Workflows And Processes?
I can give you a quick example. Let’s say you want to launch a new product. We recently did this ourselves, and it went amazingly well, which is why I’m using it as an example.
Once you’ve signed up and onboarded, we’ve already collected all your data and completed the background work. All you need to do is go to our tool and enter “product launch.” One more click, and our AI will generate the entire plan.
It breaks down the project into 16 or 17 tasks, each with a detailed guide on how to execute it. This guide is personalized for your business. So, with just one click, all of this happens in the background. You, as the user, receive the final output with all the tasks laid out.
The tasks that require human intervention are clearly identified, and all the necessary content is generated. This includes your launch posts, community outreach messages, WhatsApp messages—everything you need before, during, and after the launch.
The first draft of any project happens in five minutes. Think of any project you want to execute, like launching your product in a new geography. Just write, “I want to launch my product in Brazil,” and with one click, you’ll have the first draft of the entire project plan, including all tasks and content.
We aim to enable users to quickly plan everything and then review the AI-generated output. There are, of course, tasks that AI cannot perform right now. These tasks are also laid out, with clear deliverables, so you can assign them to your team members.
Waxwing is a collaborative tool, allowing your entire team to be on the platform, where you can assign individual tasks and follow up to complete the project efficiently. We want users to be able to plan everything quickly, review the AI’s output, and then collaborate with their team to finalize and execute the project.
We want users to be able to plan everything quickly, review the AI’s output, and then collaborate with their team to finalize and execute the project.
How Does Waxwing Ensure Data Security And Reliability For Enterprise Use?
Enterprises are indeed very particular about their data. To address this, we host everything on their servers if and when they demand it. If an enterprise wants to ensure that none of their data leaves their server, we accommodate that requirement.
We trust cloud providers like Google, as they have contracts with us stating they will not use any of this data for training purposes. We and our enterprise clients trust them in this regard. For enterprises, the majority of the data resides on their own servers.
For all other users, we do not use their data for direct training. To clarify, we perform a lot of trend analysis, similar to what Google Ads does. We use users data to recommend strategies and personalize the tool for the user, but we do not take users data and use it for other purposes.
Users’ data is used to enhance user experience and provide personalized recommendations, but it remains secure and private.
Can You Highlight Key Features Of Waxwing That Make It User-Friendly For Both Beginners And Advanced Users?
We realized that while AI is inherently powerful, many people struggle to make the best use of it. Most users are novice or intermediate AI users who aren’t using multiple tools effectively. They often end up copying and pasting large chunks of prompts and context. To address this, we’ve made Waxwing very easy to use.
For beginners, the process is straightforward. When you start, all you need to provide is your URL. Waxwing handles everything else in the background, managing the context and extracting relevant information.
It offers immediate intelligence by providing insights into your users, target audience, the devices they use, and the social media platforms they frequent, similar to tools like SEMrush and By4.
With just one line about your project and a single click, our AI does the rest, making it very easy to get the first draft out.
For advanced users, Waxwing offers more customization options. You can manually upload documents and previous files, utilizing a central hub for intelligence where you can tweak the information our AI uses.
Advanced users can adjust both the central intelligence, which serves as the brain for our AI, and localized intelligence for specific tasks or projects. By customizing these elements, advanced users can significantly improve the quality and relevance of the outputs.
We aim to provide value to both beginners and advanced users by making the tool intuitive and flexible, allowing for various levels of customization and optimization.
How Quickly Does Your System Fetch Real-Time Data? For Instance, If I Give You A Prompt, I Need Updated Information On My Potential Client Or Customer. How Quickly Does Your LLM Retrieve This Data?
The concept of real-time data can be a bit broad. Yes, our system does have access to search functionality. However, there is some latency when a search is involved. Depending on the type of information you are searching for, it can take anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute or sometimes even longer.
The reason for this latency is that we don’t just perform a basic search. After retrieving initial search results, we crawl the top three to five pages to gather more comprehensive information. We don’t just rely on metadata from the search but go deeper to ensure the data’s utility, which naturally takes more time.
On the other hand, if the real-time data comes from your tech stack or from the intelligence you have provided, the retrieval is much faster. Data that you have already given to us is quickly accessible. However, when we need to go out and gather new information, it naturally takes more time.
This approach ensures that while there may be a slight delay, the quality and depth of the information we provide are significantly enhanced.
Al Can You Share Any Notable Success Stories Or Case Studies?
Since we just launched this month, there are only a few success stories so far. However, one notable user is a self-publisher of children’s books in the US. She reached out to us, expressing how much she loved the tool, particularly the ideas it generated.
Although she is not a marketer and doesn’t have a lot of marketing experience, she found the ideas and the plan generated by our tool to be very helpful. She was so impressed that she took the entire plan and outsourced it to someone on Fiverr to execute because she didn’t have the bandwidth to do it herself.
This was a great signal for us that people find our tool useful and are willing to act on its recommendations.
We also have some enterprise clients, but we don’t always have visibility into their use and outcomes unless they share that information with us. In the early days, when we worked closely with development and design partners, we executed tasks end-to-end for them.
Our AI provided the ideas and plans, and then we combined human and AI efforts to complete the projects. These projects worked as well as, if not better than, those done without AI.
How Does Waxwing’s AI-Driven Strategy Development Work? How Does It Tailor Strategies To Specific Business Needs?
In technical terms, our approach involves several components. We are not in the foundational model game; instead, we use a combination of models, such as GPT-4 Turbo and Gemini 1.5. Currently, we are using Gemini 1.5 Pro.
The process starts with the user’s query, where you can specify your goals or KPIs, such as focusing on RoAS, churn, or signup conversion.
The next piece of context comes from the intelligence hub, which contains all the information our AI has gathered about your business. This includes business summaries, target audiences, current products, product descriptions, and more.
We have compiled a proprietary database of strategies from numerous case studies and industry trends. These strategies have proven effective for others.
When these three elements—the user query, intelligence hub data, and proprietary strategies—come together, they are injected into a prompt and processed by the foundational model. This combination results in tailored strategy recommendations that are highly relevant and effective for your specific business needs.
How Does The Adaptive Learning Feature In Waxwing Improve Marketing Strategies Over Time?
This is a great aspect of our tool, especially for marketing and growth teams. Traditionally, marketers struggle with documentation. They often fail to keep track of their hypotheses, outcomes, and insights. We are all guilty of it.
Our tool helps address this issue by providing a one-click plan feature and mapping outcomes. As you keep using our product, we vectorize the entire process. This means all past projects on our tool can be retrieved by our AI.
We have an internal feature called “question GPT.” It’s not an outward-facing feature, but we use it to determine what information is needed to make a plan and then retrieve it from our database. This is how the adaptive learning works right now.
As you keep using Waxwing, our AI continues to learn from your activities. Documentation becomes key, and our tool helps ensure that your strategies evolve and improve over time.
What Role Does Marketing Gpt Play In Waxwing, And How Does It Assist In Content Creation?
Marketing GPT is essentially like any other chat feature, and chat functionalities are now omnipresent in many tools. Within Waxwing, Marketing GPT offers ideation and brainstorming with AI. You can brainstorm for ideas, get recommendations, and then, with one click, you get a complete plan. This is the core of our product.
For daily tasks, when a user wants to accomplish something specific, they might typically think of using ChatGPT. However, within our tool, there’s no need for that extra step.
Marketing GPT is deeply integrated. For example, if you are on an individual task screen and you click on Marketing GPT, it already knows about your business from the central intelligence hub. It also knows the project you are working on and the specific task at hand.
With all these pieces of context ready, you can simply type one line, and it will know what you are trying to achieve. You can literally just say “generate content,” and if the task involves content creation, it will generate the necessary content with all the relevant information. This includes any documents you may have uploaded related to the project.
Marketing GPT acts like a co-pilot, helping you at any point with the execution of tasks. It ensures that you have the right content and context, making the entire process seamless and efficient.
How Does Waxwing Facilitate Efficient Project Management And Team Collaboration?
At the end of the day, Waxwing is designed as a future-of-work tool. The future of work involves human teams and AI agents working together on projects collaboratively and efficiently.
With Waxwing, you can invite your entire team onto the same platform. This is a significant advantage over other AI tools because it allows the entire team to continue conversations with AI at any point.
The AI handles the project management and planning for you. While you can edit everything, you can also simply assign tasks to the appropriate team members. The team members can continue to use the AI to help them execute the tasks. If you need to know about the tools required for a task, you can just ask the AI or Marketing GPT.
This integration means that the AI is ingrained throughout the project management tool, which is what Waxwing essentially is. The AI supports all aspects of project management, making it easier for teams to collaborate and efficiently complete their projects.
What Trends In The Tech Industry Excite You, And How Will They Impact Tools Like Waxwing?
There are a lot of exciting developments happening in the tech space right now. It’s both thrilling and a bit intimidating because the competition is intense. One trend we’re closely watching is agentic workflows.
We’re particularly interested in the progress of Baby AGI and similar technologies. While the demos often look better than the actual products at this stage, the potential is definitely there.
If AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) becomes a reality, it could fundamentally change the landscape for tools like ours. However, we’re very excited about the advancements in foundational models.
These models are improving rapidly and becoming more cost-effective, which means the computational costs won’t be as significant a barrier in the future. This is great news for us because it allows us to deliver powerful capabilities more affordably.
There’s also a lot happening at the infrastructure layer and in the security domain. As breakthroughs occur in these areas, they tend to benefit tools like Waxwing.
The competition is fierce, but it’s fair and ultimately beneficial because it pushes us all to innovate and improve continuously.
Are There Any New Features In The Pipeline?
Absolutely! We’re at a stage where we are releasing new features almost every week, thanks to our fast production cycle. Recently, we launched a feature called auto content generation. With one click, all the content you need for a project is generated automatically.
We are also developing our own agents. You’ll be able to assign tasks not only to your team members but also to these agents. The next big step is auto-assigning tasks. We envision a button called “Execute,” where our AI will start assigning tasks one by one.
If a task is assigned to a team member, they will receive a notification detailing the task and deliverables, asking them to mark it as complete when finished. This way, the project can continue seamlessly.
Our goal is for Waxwing to function as a project manager. As a user, you will see on your dashboard the status of your projects, like “7 out of 20 tasks already done, currently pending on this person,” and so forth. We are aiming to release these major updates within the next two to three weeks.
How Do You See The Future Of Waxwing And Measure Its Success?
Our goal is for Waxwing to be the go-to tool for growth teams replacing tools like ClickUp and Asana. We track metrics like daily and weekly active users and the number of projects created. In the future, we’ll also track the outcomes of projects to measure our impact.
Do You Think AI Will Replace Human Creativity Or Resources In Planning And Marketing?
AI will replace some roles, sure, but we see it as a natural progression to a “human-in-the-loop” system. Humans will always be there, but their role will shift more towards reviewing and guiding the work rather than doing all the grunt work.
As AI progresses, it will handle more of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing humans to focus on the creative and strategic aspects. For instance, if the AI produces a plan or generates content, humans can review it, make necessary adjustments, and provide the final approval. This way, the efficiency and speed of the work can increase exponentially—10X, 100X, or more.
Humans will still be in control, ensuring that the AI’s outputs align with the desired goals and standards. They will act as the guardrails and guidelines, providing the necessary oversight. So, while some aspects of human work might be automated, the essential human touch in creativity and decision-making will remain critical.
Your Linkedin Bio Mentions Your Background As A Marine Biologist. How Has This Influenced Your Approach To Managing Waxwing?
Marine biology is indeed a passion of mine, particularly coral conservation. I pursued my master’s in marine biology, focusing on various aspects of marine ecosystems. Before venturing into AI and marketing, I was deeply involved in computer vision and machine learning projects related to marine conservation.
For instance, I worked on coral surveys, training computer vision models to detect the genetic diversity of coral species. This background has significantly influenced my approach at Waxwing. Being able to read and stay updated on research papers about new technologies like visual transformers and Gaussian region proposals keeps me on my toes about advancements in tech. This knowledge is invaluable in staying ahead in the AI space.
Additionally, my experience as a marketer and growth hacker has allowed me to merge these interests. For the past eight years, I’ve been working remotely, balancing my passion for marine biology with my professional career in tech.
This unique blend of experiences informs my approach to managing Waxwing, where we aim to integrate sustainability wherever possible. The focus is on creating solutions that are not only innovative but also mindful of their environmental impact.
In the future, I hope to see even more fusion between these fields, bringing sustainable practices into the core of AI-driven marketing solutions.
If You Could Collaborate With Any Tech Company Or Startup, Who Would It Be And Why?
There are lots of potential collaborations we’re interested in. We are looking to open partnerships in several areas. For example, we would love to partner with companies like One Impression AI or MidJourney.
Our AI breaks projects into tasks, and for tasks that require image generation, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we prefer to partner with those who are the best in the game.
The same goes for video generation, email writing, LinkedIn automation, Twitter automation, and web flows or landing page design. Essentially, anyone who is making an AI agent for specific vertical tasks is a potential partner for us. Companies like One Impression AI for influencer marketing and others for various specialized tasks.
We are looking at partnerships for task execution because we can’t physically or practically handle every individual task or build agents for each one. By opening up to partnerships, we allow other companies to execute these tasks for our users. This approach ensures we leverage the best tools available while focusing on our core strengths.
We’re excited about the possibilities and believe these partnerships will enhance our users’ experience significantly.
What Advice Would You Give To Aspiring Entrepreneurs In The Tech Industry?
My advice is simple: just start building. It’s true that it’s much easier to build things these days. You don’t need a lot of money to create something and launch it. I think it’s a standard piece of advice, but it’s really important.
Even we are guilty of trying to perfect things too much. We built our product for nine months before launching it, and I wish we had launched earlier.
When we finally launched, there were lots of bugs—it was never perfect. But the feedback from users and the energy you get from seeing real people use your product is invaluable. It energizes the entire team.
So, the best advice is to build, ship, and keep iterating. Don’t give up hope. Yes, there’s a lot of competition out there, but just let it be. Focus on your own path and keep building. As long as you have hope, things can work out.
So, just start. Give it a go, ship your product, and see what happens.
How Can Our Readers Stay Updated With The Latest News From Waxwing?
Please go try our product. Visit our website at Waxwing.ai and sign up. Once you’re signed up, you’ll receive regular updates on everything happening with Waxwing.
We believe our product is incredibly helpful and aim to provide real value to our users. This isn’t just a vanity project or a one-off tool; we are building Waxwing to last for decades to come.
We greatly value feedback from our users. My email is available, and I personally reply to all Intercom chats at this stage. We encourage users to reach out with any feedback or questions they might have.
If you wish to know more about Waxwing.ai, please visit Waxwing.ai. We at AllAboutAI.com are excited to bring you more inspiring stories from industry leaders like Kirill Sokol.
Stay tuned to Allaboutai.com for more interviews and updates on the latest in AI technology.
