The Real Product-Market Fit Problem Is Emotional | Ravi Sawhney

Vit Lyoshin (00:00.874)
Welcome, Ravi. Thank you for joining me today.

Ravi Sawhney (00:03.931)
Pleasure being here. Thank you.

Vit Lyoshin (00:06.484)
Yeah, of course. the first question I wanted to ask is you work with so many teams and on so many products and what are some of the misconceptions that product teams have that the product is successful?

Ravi Sawhney (00:24.482)
You know, this has been a universal universal problem going back as long as I've been in design. Is I mean, of course there's a technology channel challenge that the technology has to deliver some value. On the other hand, it it appears and to be proven that you know, understanding the people who are going to use, adopt,

you know, buy, share, whether it's a brand, a service, a product, you know, any interaction, you know, all falls back on, you know, how well it resonates with those people. and yeah, you can overcome poor resonance if the benefit is so phenomenal that people will people will just, you know, deny that

It doesn't connect with them personally. But in general terms, you know, we accept things in our lives that give us meaning and and connect us with this personally, that it's it's you know, as a friend of mine used to say, Bob Deutsch, that it makes me something more. That, you know, we want to evolve, we want to evolve. So yeah, I would also say, these are great questions. you know, I would also say that.

Vit Lyoshin (01:42.806)
Mm.

Ravi Sawhney (01:54.242)
You know, sometimes we just alienate people. We don't give them a point of reference. You know, something's so new, the technology's so new, it's so spectacular, that people just mentally don't know where to put it as far as they would need a reference point. So, you know, it's it's easier to build a better mousetrap, you know, than it is to be the first one to invest in invent a mousetrap.

Vit Lyoshin (02:21.716)
Right.

Ravi Sawhney (02:22.858)
And and you know I don't know how it got invented, but back then, you know, it it had to be an interesting challenge. I guess there weren't enough cats around and someone said I'll figure something out. But you know the you know there are just things that even we've created that were just ahead of their time. People weren't people weren't like they weren't ready for it. They didn't know where to put it. We created

Vit Lyoshin (02:44.885)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (02:51.466)
a collapsing laptop desk that was that folded folded up beautifully into a nice small package and it unfolded and the eight legs unfolded and you could sit on a chair or a bed on the floor and it rested your laptop. And and and you know and it was just ahead of its time. Laptops weren't that popular at at that time. And we were ahead we're

Vit Lyoshin (03:18.901)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (03:20.958)
probably ahead of the curve by five years. And so the product didn't really take off.

Vit Lyoshin (03:26.506)
Yeah. Okay, and then the on the opposite side, do you have any examples, maybe or s or stories about a product that was technically functional, working well, but people users didn't embrace it.

Ravi Sawhney (03:41.034)
yeah, the most I think my most famous story is the one of the Minimed diabetic infusion pump. So Minimed came to us at that time. They were failing as a business, they took off initially, generated sixty million in sales, started free falling, and here is this diabetic infusion pump that could simulate the pancreas you could wear all the time.

And it would constantly give you insulin in your body. And if you had a meal, if you had a bowl of pasta, you could take it out and give yourself a bolus of insulin, just like your pancreas would do to break down the sugars. And they were and they were failing. And, you know, we studied it. We studied the people. We studied, you know, the the doctors who were prescribing it. And here was a case where

Vit Lyoshin (04:24.544)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (04:39.669)
you know, it increased the quality and length of life for diabetics and they were rejecting it. And what we found was that we we couldn't we couldn't crack the code on it until we became the diabetic. So we had them hook us up, we put the microcatheter into our abdomens, we carried around the the pump and we pumped saline.

Vit Lyoshin (05:04.725)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (05:08.427)
instead of insulin into our bodies. And we ate with it, we showered with it, we slept with it, we became the complete diabetic. And when we went out for lunch, and we would you know have that bowl of pasta or pizza or some carbs and we would take this this out to give ourselves a bowl of a bolus of insulin that it looks so overtly medical, even though it delivered a great benefit

That people, you know, glanced at you, and you could feel it. You could just feel that feeling that people were scared to be around you. And what we realized that the stigma of being ill is so great that people would forego their their own health rather than face that stigma that they perceived to be there. So at the time we transformed that that product.

into what looked like just a great pager. And we made it, this is after Swatch, but before Apple did their trans transparent blue. We made it in in this this transparent blue color. and now it looked like when you were in a restaurant public setting, it looked like you were taking out and reading a page.

And we removed the stigma. No one noticed that there was a little clear tube attached to it, you know, going under your shirt or your dress or your blouse. Right? Nobody paid attention to that. It just looked normal. Sales skyrocketed. Sales skyrocketed to two hundred and seventy million dollars three within three years and Medtronic acquired them for three point six billion dollars based on the market potential.

Vit Lyoshin (06:49.385)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (07:03.477)
And so I don't know how many diabetics how many diabetics lives we affected by that, but I'm sure it's it's a tremendous amount.

Vit Lyoshin (07:03.83)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (07:12.148)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great story. Interesting how psychological it is. People are willing to stay you know, unhealthy if you will, or feel the pain, if you will, and not use the great device. Interesting. Wow. So

Ravi Sawhney (07:28.093)
Yeah. Yeah, it's a stream ex extreme example of human psyche, isn't it? That

Vit Lyoshin (07:33.898)
Yeah. Right. another one I wanted to ask you is when company are going through this analysis and figuring out what doesn't work, what's failing, from your experience, what are the most likely blame as a root cause of the failure? Or maybe a couple of things that mostly happening.

Ravi Sawhney (07:57.794)
from my point of view, it's always persona resonance. It's understanding and just understanding the audience that who who are you doing this for? What's the deeper meaning of of what you're doing for them? Meaning that you can't be superficial when you are. it tends to be overlooked. It doesn't have true value or meaning. Of course, you know, relying on voice of consumer is a great starting place.

But that can also be a point of failure because people are not telling you, first off, they're only telling you their personal perspective, you know, of of and and and to add what people say they do and what they do, we're all we're all guilty of that. You know, what we think we should be doing and what we're doing are two different things. So if you can't, if you if you truly understand people.

Vit Lyoshin (08:46.251)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (08:50.325)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (08:54.359)
then you can project that how can you get them to do something different for themselves they might otherwise not do. And if you underst understand that, you can do something meaningful for them. And most teams, I would say that, you know, you know, we're trying to change that, but most teams are focused based on their discipline. So, you know, in engineering, you know, we're just

We're we're consumed by the challenge of can we do it? you know, and and assuming that if we can do it and if it's exciting to us, it'll be exciting to other people. But that's not necessarily true.

Vit Lyoshin (09:26.582)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (09:36.852)
Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting. I I feel like yes, engineering teams take a lot of pride in what they do and they should, but it's not necessarily that other people will love it as much as they do. That's always fascinating and interesting how how it works. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (09:54.029)
Yeah, design designers too. I mean they dis they Yeah, there used to be an old an old you know an old rumor going around that if you if you won a big design award, you were doomed for failure because the designers loved it, but but it wasn't ready for the masses, right? It was just esoteric and the designers loved it because

Vit Lyoshin (09:56.502)
designers too, yes. Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (10:18.687)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (10:21.642)
It was so cool and esoteric and they gave it an award. But

Vit Lyoshin (10:24.842)
Yeah. I I feel like it's the same in in the art industry. Sometimes I just don't understand what the art is, but apparently it's you know pretty famous and expensive. So yeah. Right, right. so you're known for inventing psycho aesthetics methodology or framework.

Ravi Sawhney (10:37.952)
Yeah, that's a whole different that's a whole different story.

Ravi Sawhney (10:52.854)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (10:53.28)
Can you tell us what it is for somebody who may don't know what it is and like what components it consists of and how to use it and things like that?

Ravi Sawhney (11:03.168)
Yeah, so psychostic, the history of it is that I came out of Xerox and Xerox Park, and where I developed the first GUI for a touch screen in the late 70s. And working with 30 PhD psychologists, and we had 200 programmers, we had Carroll Technologies, we had Xerox Park. I mean, everybody was in on this. unfortunately it was just one designer. That was me.

Vit Lyoshin (11:08.502)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (11:32.246)
Ha

Ravi Sawhney (11:34.332)
And and and you know what I learned too is about the human psyche and psychology, and that everything is human factors in the end. so psychoesthetics started with the underpinning in 1982. It's not how you feel about a design or an experience, it's how it makes you feel about yourself. So psycho aesthetics started by turning the camera by which as designers we're always looking at what we were doing.

Vit Lyoshin (11:43.766)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (12:02.589)
Expecting people to look at that. And what we did was we turned the camera and watched the person while they were looking at what we were providing. So that the history of it is that that became the kind of a human-centered mantra and way of working at RCAS. And in ninety-two, I created the term psychosthetics and made it into a tool set. later on

Vit Lyoshin (12:28.576)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (12:30.696)
Later on, CK Pralod, a very famous strategist who passed away now ten years ago, he, I and his his daughter got together and he explained to us about what we were doing and the how we should put it together in a in a toolkit for people so that people understand it, because we understood it here, but it wasn't scalable to where someone else could understand it.

And so today, so today psychoesthetics is in a Harvard case study on RCS design and psychoesthetics. There's a Harvard classroom exercise on how to learn psychoesthetics by designing a travel cup. There's the Wharton Business book that Deepa and I co-authored together called Predictable Magic. And then there's couple of self-published books on psychoesthetics. What psychoesthetics is.

Vit Lyoshin (13:00.298)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (13:20.597)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (13:29.768)
At the end, I'm gonna get to what it is. what it is, is it is a comprehensive methodology that's built on a suite of tools. But what we did is we took Maslow's hierarchy and we developed that into a mapping system. But what we do is we map self-actualization on the vertical and interactivity on the horizontal. And so on this map, we in the lower left.

Vit Lyoshin (13:32.054)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (13:44.97)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (13:58.497)
is a paper clip, low interactivity, low self-actualization. On the right is a skip lower loader, high interaction, low self-actualization. Upper left, for example, is a Mona Lisa, high self-actualization, but minimal interactivity. And the far right is a sports car, high interactivity, high self-actualization. And so we started mapping, and that's part of the importance of psychoesthetics, is that we build the personas.

Vit Lyoshin (14:11.221)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (14:27.102)
in such a way that we can map personas onto the map. And what happens is we map the personas and we map the competitive brands and we map the competitive products. But based on the personas and the interviews, we initially map voy based on voice of consumer. Where are they today? And that map is a and I have to say it's an interactive map. It's a team sport.

You know, you collaborate on a lot of debate, a lot of discussion. But eventually you want to project where will people want to go? Where do they want to land? And so, you know, that's that future cast, that where do we need to be? It looks at you know, the white space. So it's it creates future looking white space. And I know this is a lot of arm waving.

Vit Lyoshin (14:56.533)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (15:06.592)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (15:24.246)
But it's critical that by mapping and by personifying and we develop need states and pain states into help me statements. We took Joseph Campbell's work. if you're familiar with Campbell and the Hero's Journey, we took Campbell's work and we said, you know, it's our job as designers to put every person who's we're designing for on the hero's journey.

Vit Lyoshin (15:42.176)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (15:53.428)
So instead of it being about the great heroes and the great heroes in religion and great religious figures, what we said is that every person's on the journey every day of their life. So we in psychosthetics, we show how you use tools to attract, then to engage people. So the call to action, the test, right? You're testing, you're engaging.

You're getting microaffirmations leading to you know an adoption, which is which is where you actually adopt a new idea. You might be adopting from this room, be adopting the idea of psychosthetics. and then comes the moment of truth where you actually try something. If it's successful, then your body language changes, you have self-affirmation, which we're all seeking every day of our lives.

Vit Lyoshin (16:29.576)
Uh-huh.

Ravi Sawhney (16:52.639)
I'm seeking it from you, and we're seeking it from your audience, the self-affirmation. And when that self-affirmation occurs, our body language changes, our self-esteem changes, and then things can go viral. And so, in the suite of tools, you know, as I said, there's keywords, there's key attributes, there's key things that you must do, almost like a visual PRD. That how do you create emotional connection and resonance?

Vit Lyoshin (17:05.792)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (17:18.697)
Uh-huh.

Ravi Sawhney (17:22.097)
there also is performance criteria in there. and so it's a fairly full suite of tools, and it's been tested in business innovation and sustainability. it's been tested in product design, it's been tested in branding, it's been tested in UIUX. we use it to create a fintech company for student debt that I I founded called Finita.

Vit Lyoshin (17:48.629)
Mm.

Ravi Sawhney (17:50.476)
we use it to create a revolutionary guitar that was the first sustainable guitar. It's played by the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles, back Clapton records with them. you know, it's been kind of our secret sauce as to how do we create success over and over again. And we publish it, we publish it, but we probably do it the best at RKS. And that probably leads leads right into PA AI.

So what we did was so PAE is our taking about 16 months ago realizing that we could turn psychosthetics into the input into digital signal and then use psychosthetics to create the digital signal to feed an LLM to generate meaningful output.

Vit Lyoshin (18:21.577)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (18:50.505)
So it's psycho PAAI. It's interesting because it is LLM agnostic. So it's not a wrapper. It's not part of chat or Claude or anybody else's. It is it is what I say is that it is that LLMs are the engine. PA AI is a driver. Right? So it's a cockpit and a and a driver.

Vit Lyoshin (19:04.426)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (19:12.714)
Okay.

Vit Lyoshin (19:16.148)
Hm, okay.

Ravi Sawhney (19:19.325)
So what what PAAI now does, which puts which is a force amplifier and accelerator for psychosex, is that we developed a very, very strong ingestion engine. So this is about 14 months worth of solid continual work by by you know a six-person dev team using AI.

for coding, you know, and a six-person design team, and then you know, a combination of different executives all working together for the past 14 months to develop an ingestion engine. So instead of asking a question like you would on Claud or Chat, you basically ingest the documents like you would upload, I guess, into chat.

Except for we have an ingestion un engine that parses all the information.

Vit Lyoshin (20:23.54)
I see.

Ravi Sawhney (20:24.693)
So we parse the information and that goes into a dialogue that basically says, here are the key things that we need to know. And this is what the your ingestion material says. Is that right or wrong? Do you want to edit it? Do you want to go through it? Here's what we don't know. You need to tell us that or go figure this out. And then when that's together, you've done the hard work, you've done your hard work.

Vit Lyoshin (20:34.314)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (20:54.537)
You hit run, and then we go to work. And PAAI goes to work. And when PAI goes to work, it goes through seven, seven different modules, 30 submodules, and 500, it's actually 510 different analyses that are all interlinked. So it starts with the foundation, which is all psycho aesthetics foundation, and then it does.

Vit Lyoshin (20:54.88)
So yeah.

Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (21:18.23)
Wow.

Ravi Sawhney (21:24.541)
an incredible amount of intensive hard work. Out of that also comes an SPS score. A success potential score analyzes the market, the size of the market, the uniqueness and relevance of of the offering, and will it create personal resonance with the audience? And that will give it a score of one to a hundred and basically determine and advise

Vit Lyoshin (21:38.986)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (21:53.495)
and allow you to make adjustments or corrections or to abandon what you're gonna do before you go down this path. So it's it's a huge it's a huge tool. It it

Vit Lyoshin (22:06.228)
Yeah. Yeah. so I imagine it's like in the first step when you said with psychoesthetics, before the engine, right? The the setup or context step, you basically have to already gather all your documents, what you wanna do. Is it mostly like for personas or what type of documents are those to help PAI to analyze it better?

Ravi Sawhney (22:34.982)
It can be customer views, net promoter scores, business plans, marketing plans.

We've been pressure testing it now for months. in some cases, ingested the complete data room for a company. you know, it can you know it it can be an S1. We've ingested for for some companies their full S1 and analyze the S one. Clay so a political candidate. We ingested all of his speeches and everything about.

Vit Lyoshin (23:04.149)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (23:09.462)
Interesting.

Ravi Sawhney (23:11.644)
everything about about the state he was running for senate in and and it it yeah it we lead you through what to ingest and it's all kept confidential it's all resides with you paai we don't see it as a company and the llm doesn't see it but we use it to extract what we need to know and you know the revolutionary thing for me is that

Vit Lyoshin (23:16.308)
Yeah, interesting.

Vit Lyoshin (23:24.786)
I see. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (23:39.979)
know being the father of psychesthetics for forty-five years, it's showing us things that I never imagined I could ever get out of psychosthetics. It's giving us new inform new information, newest new analysis, new insight, new strategy that we otherwise would just never have. And it wouldn't matter how many bodies and how much time we spent, we would never get what we're getting out of it because of the the

Vit Lyoshin (23:49.918)
Wow.

Ravi Sawhney (24:07.231)
These the psychoesthetics drives it from a human-centered perspective. But it tells you what what you need to know, where to go, how to get there. right down to the team briefs. we were just with with one of my board members. He was just in and we're updating him on the output. So you've got the input of this incredible ingestion engine, and then you've got the the kind of the questionnaire that kind of sets the groundwork.

Vit Lyoshin (24:11.637)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (24:37.611)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (24:37.67)
And then you've got the engine that runs, right? The 510 analyses. And then the output, which which has evolved over the last months. We first first started running, we were getting a thousand pages of output. and and and then we got it down to you know five hundred pages, and then we got it today. What we're what we're generating is an executive summary.

Vit Lyoshin (24:52.66)
Wow.

Ravi Sawhney (25:05.512)
Which is probably a 10 page summary, because there's seven different modules. You know, it includes legal, it includes finance, it includes marketing, includes the you know, the strategy of how to build it, and and of course the foundation of all the psychoesthetics. So we do a provide the executive summary, then a full deck, then the HTML output. Somebody can format it.

Vit Lyoshin (25:15.968)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (25:33.844)
To like like their company or if they're a consultant to look like they generated it. and then we generate team briefs with as many companies as we've worked with. I have yet, and maybe they're out there, have yet to see where specific teams are all briefed based on the same foundation. Right? We typically get team briefs that are it's a brief about what we're doing.

Vit Lyoshin (25:38.709)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (25:57.002)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (26:01.525)
But not where it it pencils down to each, you know, here's what legal needs to know, here's what finance needs to know, here's what engineering needs to know, here's what RD needs to know, here's what industrial design needs to know, here's what what branding needs to know, here's what marketing needs to know. So it generates that and div generates a psychocytic canvas, which puts a lot of the psychocitics onto a single comprehensive page and it generates a business canvas.

Vit Lyoshin (26:11.882)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (26:29.522)
And it generates the output for a pitch deck. and I think that's I think that's enough that it outputs, but it basically does, you know, a business plan we could say and and and and and and and

Vit Lyoshin (26:49.126)
So so is this also s just trying to help people think about this system, is it like an analysis, market research? is it like a recommendation on how to execute on the feature or the business? or is it all above?

Ravi Sawhney (27:07.474)
It's it's it's all above, including competitive analysis and benchmarking. Yeah, it's it's it's even for me, you know, it's mind blowing. Every time I get every time I I I we run one and I see the output, we all just drop our jaws and go, I you know, I we don't know what to say. It's telling us things we would never know and that if we didn't know could make or break a new initiative.

Vit Lyoshin (27:10.601)
Okay.

Vit Lyoshin (27:14.975)
Okay.

Vit Lyoshin (27:24.426)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (27:37.12)
Do you have an example of somebody already like ran through this and launched something to the market or maybe still in development, but maybe like a success story, if you will?

Ravi Sawhney (27:49.566)
Yeah, I have one I can talk about. So as we had the early versions of PAAI, we're working with a company that makes a a product called Lynx. It's on the RCAS design website or it's on the Juice. Juice is the name of the company. It's called Lynx, L-Y-N-X. and Lynx is a great product. It's like a battery pack that goes on the back of your phone, except for it's a signal booster. And you

Vit Lyoshin (28:07.935)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (28:18.771)
Push up if you have if you have one bar or no bars, you push up the antenna, it turns it on, and the antenna comes up above the phone. It reduces the amount of radiation that you're getting, and it'll boost the signal, you know, up to four bars and five bars. and it's it may clips onto the back of the phone. so you know, it's a call, I guess a range extender is the category that's being developed.

Vit Lyoshin (28:19.039)
Okay.

Vit Lyoshin (28:36.627)
Okay.

Vit Lyoshin (28:47.445)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (28:48.317)
But it is a new product in the category. And we did RKS did the psychoesthetics, it did the industrial design, the mechanical engineering, the branding, the packaging, did the full suite for that client. But along the way, what we've what we did is we ran PAAI on it. And they were cutting it to where they wanted to sell it for $99. They thought, you know, $100 is is the threshold.

For this type of product. Now they didn't base that on anything else other than experience. And even at that, they had great margin. so even at that, they had 80 points of margin. What PAAI told us was that the mark the market is larger, the market adoption rate will be faster and greater, and the value perception is higher.

Vit Lyoshin (29:27.968)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (29:47.142)
At $150, and that people value the the product better at $150 than at $100. That the human perception of the of the benefit that it brings was was so substantial that we're able to move the price to $150. Of course, that changed the margin from 80 points, which was huge, to 90 points.

Vit Lyoshin (30:03.787)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (30:17.543)
Right. It changed the EV from a hundred million dollars to two hundred and fifty million dollars. Right. And we and we so it and it's something everyone everyone needs. Everyone needs that technology. But when you see the industrial design of it, that it's got to complement the phone, it has to look like your phone is is supercharged, can't look like a battery pack, has to make you feel

Vit Lyoshin (30:24.086)
Wow. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (30:45.851)
More confident, more safe, more secure. We all worry about being in a dead zone and needing our phone when we're in an emergency. You know, I I'm I mean I got lost. I got lost up in the hills here a few years ago. We made a wrong turn, my wife and I on our mountain bikes, and we ended up completely lost. not another cyclist around. it's getting dark, we're running out of water.

Vit Lyoshin (30:54.73)
Yeah, for sure.

Vit Lyoshin (31:05.46)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (31:14.343)
And I was just lucky I was on top of a hill and I had signal. and I was able to call the sheriff's department who walked me walked me out of how to get out of where I was where I was lost. so yeah, you know, y yeah, I mean that's a perfect that that's a perfect example of you know what PA AI can do, you know, and I believe it can do it for for everyone each and every time.

Vit Lyoshin (31:21.022)
Mm.

Vit Lyoshin (31:26.902)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (31:31.318)
Ha ha ha.

Vit Lyoshin (31:43.509)
Yeah, yeah, it's a great validation tool because we don't know what we don't know, right? And and it's always especially with things like pricing and product market fit, it's a lot of small experimentation, small conversations, small tests, and it's really hard to figure it out. And if such a tool exists that can like find you the best option or maybe a couple of options, that's an amazing, that's saves so much time and effort.

and it's faster to that like final phase of delivering to the user. that that's amazing. That's great.

Ravi Sawhney (32:21.723)
yeah. Yeah. That's you really get excit you really get excited when when you learn things that you that you didn't know and you realize, wow, I really I really needed to know this. And I might not know this. I might not I might not know this until we've already gone to market with a failure or we're already ha are three months or six months down the road.

Vit Lyoshin (32:23.647)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (32:37.738)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (32:49.223)
And even if you are three or six months down the road, you can still audit and see where you're at and and learn things that you might otherwise not know. Someone earlier today asked me, you know, you know, in in in in a few sentences, really, what value do it bring? And I said, you know, we we can show we can show you things that you would never never otherwise know and that you wish you knew.

Vit Lyoshin (32:54.474)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (33:15.24)
Yeah, yeah, it's also missed opportunity, right? Because if this company launches it at like a hundred dollars versus a hundred and fifty, it's a huge loss and they wouldn't know about it. And and even then people would even buy less, which is crazy, but that's how it is. And how many how many companies out there struggling with this? they have great ideas, everything looks fine, they validated it, but then the

Ravi Sawhney (33:34.366)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (33:44.882)
like the execution product market fit and some some things like that don't match up and and it's a failure at the end. And and that's not not very nice.

Ravi Sawhney (33:56.295)
No, and the failure is is eighty to ninety percent of new initiatives fail. And I've ran you know, we ran we checked the numbers over and over again, and the projection is that in the US alone, it's it's three and a half trillion dollars in in in losses. I mean, that's amazing that that it's it's that much. But when you're talking about eighty to ninety percent failures, and then you start to realize there's there

Vit Lyoshin (33:59.073)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (34:18.847)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (34:25.491)
You know, it's not that it's not that the engineers are getting it wrong. You know, the engineers don't get it wrong. There's you know, I I haven't I've yet to meet the engineer who got it wrong. You know, a I mean there might have been a bug or a flaw that had to be fixed after after afterwards that was undetected, but it's the resonance with the people who are gonna decide and adopt and and accept and hopefully love it so much they evangelize it.

Vit Lyoshin (34:32.245)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (34:38.389)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (34:56.234)
That's why product design and product management is so hard because you need to have a lot of tools at your disposal, a lot of patience, risk taking, all those you know, to make great products. So it's it's amazing. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (35:12.361)
And and and and team and team alignment. I mean part of part of the tool part of the tool goes to create and to to assist on team alignment. You know, I mean, you know, yeah, we all have this example. You know, I'm sitting here and the person across from me, in front of my eyes, who works for me, drifts, right? They they not intentionally, not intentionally, they go down a rabbit hole, they drift.

Vit Lyoshin (35:16.149)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (35:24.566)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (35:36.714)
Ha ha.

Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (35:42.273)
And next thing you know, you know, that we're not getting what we need on time. and they're really excited about they might even have worked all night or all weekend on it, but but it's not relevant to to what we're doing. And and and so yeah, that's you know, of course if it was easy, everybody could do it. you know, and maybe maybe with PA AI the success rate will be will be.

Vit Lyoshin (35:58.837)
Right.

Vit Lyoshin (36:06.12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (36:11.731)
healthier and companies will generate deeper meaning and more relevance for people and their success rate will go up. Maybe that means if success rate goes up, you know, the cost, the cost of products and services and apps goes down because they don't have to compensate for the failure rates. Maybe maybe everybody wins. I I hope so. That's a dream. But you know, you got to dream big.

Vit Lyoshin (36:19.434)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (36:33.568)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (36:40.042)
Yeah, we w yeah, we will see what's gonna happen. But another kind of question I had for you with all this AI revolution we can say now, how do you think the product management overall will change, let's say in the next like ten years with tools like yours or something similar, maybe in some other areas, not necessarily like design, but some other other things.

Ravi Sawhney (37:06.576)
I think there'll be I I think product managers will start to use our more advanced tools that are more management focused. and so they'll I I believe they'll feel less pressure on themselves because they'll have higher quality analysis strategy and tools for execution. I I see that, you know, these kind of tools, you know

Vit Lyoshin (37:23.104)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (37:35.024)
these kind of tools in the hands of product developers means that they're going to be more efficient and have with the same effort develop and cur create richer experiences and richer value. I also see that there could be there could be new new roles that are evolved. You know, perhaps there's a psychoesthetic specialist in the organization who's a black belt in PAAI.

And they teach others how to use it. you know, there might be a PA AI assistant. There might be, you know, there's I there there definitely could be new roles new rules, rules, new roles, in in the use of PA AI. I mean, look at the value they they that that they associate with some someone who can just write properly to get the most out of AI.

Vit Lyoshin (38:30.389)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (38:30.546)
You know, i I mean their salaries are phenomenal that they're offering. And what we're talking about is a level, you know, exponentially more valuable than that. So we are talking about creating a PAAI university or online training so that people can even even take it to another level. yeah, that's when it gets exciting. You know, and and and and by making it free to college students.

Vit Lyoshin (38:40.009)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (38:45.172)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Vit Lyoshin (38:52.51)
No, that's great. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (38:57.916)
you know, at you know, at a premium level where they'll get benefit. They learn the methodologies, they get to think differently about what they're doing. they get to they, you know, you know, we hope, you know, designers, entrepreneurs, innovators, you know, people who are in college, coming out of college, you know, that they have that entrepreneurial spirit that this will help them.

Vit Lyoshin (39:28.15)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (39:28.296)
if they learn the tool in college and they start applying it, it frees them up to think about more creative things, more strategic things, more about execution, more about what they should actually be doing and not not worrying about I can't figure things out. but it won't give it won't give them the answer. It we're not giving anybody the answer. We're doing is giving them the tools so human ingenuity, human creativity can flourish.

Vit Lyoshin (39:46.313)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (39:58.229)
Yeah, well I mean that's right, because if if they put it's like garbage in, garbage out, right? If you put something that is not relevant or some strange idea or something like that, it's not gonna work like with anything. so if somebody learns how to use this tool and use it applies it in the right way, then yes, it it's gonna be a huge benefit. And I mean I would use it also myself for my like personal projects I'm working on or

for some ideas I have and I just don't have time to like go through the whole research about it. So that would be great if if this is more available I guess. More people know about this. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (40:37.832)
Yeah. Yeah. And we are yeah, we are gonna we are going to do an an SPS generator that for a hundred dollars you can load your business plan, your you know, your concept, your idea in it, and it'll do it'll do a quick analysis and give you an SPS score and show you your strengths and weaknesses, et cetera. But most importantly, that SPS score becomes like a FICO score.

Vit Lyoshin (40:45.846)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (40:55.637)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (41:04.946)
That you start to read very quickly, it's like, okay, you know, and I ran that, I ran that on the electric guitar company that we built initially. and yeah, it wasn't such a great SPS score. Now we tweaked it and changed it, and we're able to get the SPS score up. But had I known at that time that how actually small the market was for electric guitars, you know, we would never would have invested.

Vit Lyoshin (41:05.472)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (41:34.45)
$5 million into building an electric guitar company. You know, it's just the margins are small. And in the US, the electric guitar c business, you know, it retail is like $1.2 billion. Right. And Fender, Fender, Gibson, Ibinez, PRS, you know, by that the time they take their market share, you know, maybe it's down to 300 million. And then you've got

Vit Lyoshin (41:39.06)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (41:51.478)
Mm.

Vit Lyoshin (42:02.835)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (42:03.846)
Then you've got a thousand, you know, guitar builders with reputations who work out of the garages during the day and giga clubs at night. And you know, yeah, we didn't, you know, if we knew if we knew then what we know now. You know, luckily luckily it created it created a famous, a famous guitar that people rave about. you know

Vit Lyoshin (42:13.236)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (42:21.78)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (42:28.576)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (42:32.712)
Sometimes risk paying off, right?

Ravi Sawhney (42:36.977)
Yeah, the guitar business was w a and it was fun. It was fun meeting rock and roll legends and having them rave about what you're doing and wanting to take you places to their concerts. And it's fun at first, but you know, when you go to sound check in the afternoon and you wait around for the concert and then they do the concert and then you have to go to the after party with them. You know, after

Vit Lyoshin (42:43.027)
Mm-hmm.

Vit Lyoshin (43:04.595)
Ha ha ha.

Ravi Sawhney (43:06.285)
After a year of that, you're y you know, you pretty much unless you're a musician, I like I was done.

Vit Lyoshin (43:13.162)
Yeah, it's a hard work. It's hard work. Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (43:16.421)
Yeah, I mean we were getting invited to go to go with Def Leppard to to Coachella, you know, come with us on the bus. And we got to fly in private jets and but I'm a designer, I'm a creator, you know, the whole time, the whole time I'm really wishing I'm wish really wishing I was back in the studio doing what I was made to do. Anyways, I don't I diverge the conversation.

Vit Lyoshin (43:38.933)
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's fine. That that's that's fine. so la at the end I I wanted to ask you if you have any sort of advice who's starting out maybe or product manager who wants to build something or thinking of some feature. Just do you have from like

design perspective, like where to start, some advice, like maybe small checklist, to do first two, three things that are absolutely essential to to kick start.

Ravi Sawhney (44:13.276)
You know, I I would I and I've tested this.

I would because we have we have a you know we have a kind of I I call it try it before you buy it. You could basically throw your idea, just even throw your idea into PAAI and see what it tells you. and if it looks like it's telling you, you know, encouraging things, maybe you buy a report. but

You know, you could go from it's what's readily available. You know, normally I would always do a Google search. you know, I guess I wouldn't throw a raw idea in without doing a Google Google search or an Amazon search or an Alibaba search if it's a product or if it's service. I would do a Google patent search always and see what's out there.

The last thing you want to do is invent something that's already protected. you know, I would do those th those type of things just so that you don't, you know, land land where somebody else already occupies. That's part of what what PA mapping does. It you know, a friend of mine who invented a a huge drink company said, you know, we want to go fishing where the fish are and where no one else is fishing. So, you know, that's

Vit Lyoshin (45:22.122)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (45:47.693)
That that in a nutshell says it all. and and so yeah, I would pull I would pull a few things together and you know and and I would even use AI to articulate your idea. 'Cause we'll ingest we'll ingest the material from from another AI. You know, if it's written material, you know, have it explore it and then we'll take it to a completely different level.

Vit Lyoshin (45:51.454)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (46:04.843)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (46:18.225)
But but if you ask if you ask Claude to do what we're doing, there's no way you can predict human behavior or emotion. You know, it can predict or I should say aspiration. I'll say if I take ten steps towards the door, it'll probably tell me that I'm gonna take another step, ten steps and go through the door. We need to know what's on the other side of the door. Why do you want to be on the other side of the door?

Vit Lyoshin (46:40.821)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (46:47.239)
How are you going feel when you get to the other side of the door? That's the part of humanity that we're doing, but we don't do it inside of AI. We just do it in front of AI and use AI as our engine. And AI is an I mean it's an incredibly powerful engine, but it's it's not it's not the driver, and it doesn't have a driver's seat and it doesn't have a steering wheel.

Vit Lyoshin (47:15.668)
Yeah. Okay, well Ravi, thank you very much for information and telling us about this product and encouraging people to try it. I'll certainly put all the links below. but at the very end I usually ask three questions, simple, hopefully simple c questions. It's my innovation QA. So I'm curious to know your answers. And the first question is can you define innovation in a few words?

Ravi Sawhney (47:48.111)
Innovation is the brilliance of creating something new that doesn't already exist.

Vit Lyoshin (47:58.067)
Okay, great. The second question is which one innovation throughout the history you think changed the world the most and why?

Ravi Sawhney (48:11.781)
I would s I would have to say

Ravi Sawhney (48:17.831)
Toss-up between it's probably three of them. I'd have to say the printing press definitely changed the world. the plow for agriculture definitely changed the world. And I think you know the sanitation systems definitely changed the world.

Vit Lyoshin (48:44.927)
Okay, great.

Ravi Sawhney (48:45.328)
So food, food, food reading and going to the bathroom. That's my that's my three answers.

Vit Lyoshin (48:50.634)
Yeah, on on the Maslow's basic needs, right? And the final question is which like device or thing or or software that we use today you think we will be laughing at ten years from now?

Ravi Sawhney (48:57.123)
Yeah.

Ravi Sawhney (49:12.212)
my god, that's these these are great questions. Which software will we be laughing at or

Ravi Sawhney (49:27.384)
I would I I would say the s software behind autonomous driving that we'll be laughing, we'll be laughing that, you know, ten years from now, two twofold was we'll be laughing that how come how come we were like not so excited about it as maybe we should have been, and that it's ubiquitous. And for people like me who are Porsche drivers.

Vit Lyoshin (49:50.869)
Mm-hmm.

Ravi Sawhney (49:56.88)
Well, I'll still have my Porsches. I'll be laughing because I'll still be driving, you know, a unique gas powered nine eleven. I'll be laughing. I'll be I'll be laughing as I pass those autonomous driving vehicles, enjoying my my my nine eleven Porsche.

Vit Lyoshin (50:04.766)
Yeah.

Vit Lyoshin (50:15.478)
Okay, great. All right, thank you very much for your time today. It's been interesting talking to you and yeah, we'll hopefully stay in touch.

Ravi Sawhney (50:23.61)
Yeah, wonderful Vid. Yeah, please Vid, yeah, reach out to me so I can get you access and very excited to see your feedback on PAI.

Vit Lyoshin (50:35.188)
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much. We'll talk again soon.

Ravi Sawhney (50:37.946)
Yeah, we'll f we'll follow up. You you don't have to reach out to me. I'm gonna I'll I'll reach out to you within days. All right. Thank you so much for having me.

Vit Lyoshin (50:42.977)
Sure. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. Bye bye.

Ravi Sawhney (50:50.823)
Bye bye.