Inside Docket's Demand Agent: Arjun Pillai on Showroom Features, Marketing Factories, and Cracking Buyer Attention

Alex Theuma (0:03)

Every decade or so, the rules of software change completely. This is one of those moments. The AI Revolution Show is the intelligence podcast for B2B software founders navigating the platform shift. The founders building through it, and the founders already on the other side.

Arjun, thanks for coming on the podcast today. Good to see you virtually. Obviously, next week, we're going to be seeing each other in Barcelona.

Arjun Pillai (0:30)

Yeah, no, great to be here, Alex. I'm looking forward. Barcelona seems to be shaping up really well. I got a bunch of speakers.

We are having conversations about catching up over coffee. I'm excited. Thanks for having me.

Alex Theuma (0:42)

Nice, nice. Yeah. And those that perhaps have maybe missed some of the previous podcasts when I'm just not going to Barcelona to have coffee with Arjun. We are running a conference there next week, Shift AI Europe. We've got a lot of great companies that are building either AI native companies like Docket, and we'll get into that. Or existing SaaS companies that are transforming to become AI first companies and getting both audiences together under one roof and talking about the shift in the AI platform era in what will be sunny Barcelona. It's been very rainy Barcelona this week, but the sun looks like it will be shining for us. So it'll be a great couple of days. So tell me, Arjun, in one sentence, what is Docket for those that haven't come across to you before?

Arjun Pillai (1:26)

Yeah, Docket is a demand agent for your inbound traffic. So the world is at a point where everybody is outsourcing their searches to ChatGPT and Cloud. And then when they reach your website, they have very specific questions about what you're offering. They don't want to submit on a form and wait for days and days for your sales team to get in touch with them. They simply want to ask a question, get an answer, and you need an agent to handle that. That's who we are.

Alex Theuma (1:53)

And why did you decide that you're the best person to build this? What were you doing before and why take this on?

Arjun Pillai (1:59)

For good or bad, I have been in the go-to-market technology space for about 14 years, Alex. So my first company was a sales intelligence company. This was before sales intelligence was a space. This was 2013

Then my second company was a conversational marketing, account-based marketing sort of a product. And in between, I've been the data strategy of Full Contact, which was another data company. I sold my second company to Zoom Info, which many of the listeners are aware of. They are publicly listed, probably one of the best go-to-market technology companies in the world. I went and built the marketing platform for Zoom Info. So if you look at the Gardner Magic Quadrant, there is Six Sense Demand Base and Zoom Info Marketing, and that product was built from scratch by my team and me. And then I became the chief data officer and had an opportunity to speak to a lot of customers. So across my track record, revenue leaders is who I have always worked for. That is the persona I know really well. That is the landscape tooling, everything I know in that space. That's the only space I know.

So if you look at the whole thing, right, the whole revenue stack, when somebody is on your website, they are 1% likely to submit on the form, just 1%.

99% likely they are going to bounce off your website. Do all this amazing marketing, spend all this money to get 99% of that bouncing off, right? So if you look at the entire revenue funnel, this is the lowest hanging fruit. If you have an ability to convert more people who are thinking about you at this point in time, that's like a massive unlock for you. So this problem statement I knew really well. I know the marketer behind, the demand gen person behind, and what their daily life look like, and I know the tooling and I know how to build. So that is what makes me at least one of the best people to build in the space.

Alex Theuma (3:44)

And building this, I guess, the time of the AI sort of platform era, did you start off with a VibeCoded solution? How did you come to create the first version of what is Docket? Because obviously right now, I wouldn't say easy, but the barriers to entry to creating great software products, is probably no better time, right?

Arjun Pillai (4:07)

We did not start VibeCoding because when we started VibeCoding was still catching up. You had to have the models reaching a certain level of a landing before the VibeCoding became like this really awesome thing. Anybody who tried it before was like, yeah, it kind of works, right? And then there was like a step function shift when models improved. So when we started VibeCoding was not an enterprise tooling ready system. Even today, I kind of, unless you are doing it for some internal app, for like a small indie app sort of a thing, for the kind of use cases that we handle, which is for enterprise and upper mid market sort of use cases, I challenge the VibeCoding thing. You can certainly get started, but you cannot kind of scale out the whole company with just a VibeCoding app is my two cents for what it is worth. See, the way we have built out is AI has made it extremely easy to build. That is 100% true. I asked my team, hey, do you want to hire more people? They're like, nope, more tokens, please. Right. And this has been going on for the last 10, 11 months, something like that. The team has implemented what you call as a code factory, which is the software is getting created by the software itself.