Interview with Kanad Bahalkar, the CPO of Potion [2023]

Hi, my name is Kanad Bahalkar and I’m the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Potion. I’m an engineer by trade. I have worked in small startups and all the way up to big companies like Endurance and Google, and I currently run product at Potion. Potion is a video personalization platform for sales professionals. Potion allows sales reps to auto-generate personalized videos at scale.

I’m not a salesperson, so I kinda stumbled on this idea by chance. I was trying my hand in cold outreach and realized that if I sent a personalized video in my cold email outreach campaigns, I was way more likely to get a response from a prospect. But, it is impossible to scale this approach. So, I thought of using AI to solve this problem and that’s how we started building Potion.

Potion allows you to record a video template once and then it automatically generates thousands of personalized videos for you. For each prospect in your email list, you can personalize the greetings with accurate lip-sync, customize video background, and also get a fully branded video landing page.

Work-life balance is always off-balance when you are running a business, especially a tech startup where your team is fully remote and distributed. You have the responsibility to be online almost 24/7. The things that keeps me fresh are my morning and nighttime routines. I meditate and actively try to stay in touch with my friends & family on a daily basis during my routines, and exercise in the evenings. But apart from that the rest of my time is dedicated to work. 

Synthetic media and generative AI are now buzzwords, but they weren’t when we started working on Potion about 2 years ago. We could clearly see that auto-generating contextual content – text, video and audio – will reshape the way we do business today and it touches a lot of different areas of the business – from marketing to sales to support and even engineering. ChatGPT is a great example of that. So, at Potion we are trying to do with video & audio synthesis, what ChatGPT is doing with text synthesis. 

Like every startup we did face many challenges before and after launching Potion. Before the launch, we had to figure out the technical feasibility of synthesizing videos. It was a massive challenge and our head of AI, Marcus Kirchberg, came to the rescue. Markus figured out ways to build these AI models that can automatically generate videos directly from text and audio inputs. After the launch, our biggest challenges became making the product scalable, getting as many customers as we could, and providing the best possible customer support to customers. 

My advice would be to start with the first idea that you can think of. You are going to change and pivot very frequently anyway, so it doesn’t matter what you start with. Your idea doesn’t need to be perfect or unique. All you have to do is start.  

Our 5-year goal is to build a platform that allows people to leverage synthetic video and voice generation capabilities in their own applications. So, any developer or team could create applications on top of our AI. We are also extremely cautious about the safety and trust implications of synthetic media. Our goal is to build our platform to prevent bad actors from creating malicious content, while allowing people to have a safety layer built-in in their synthetic media applications.