We had the opportunity to speak with one of the founders of InsightzClub, Mritunjay Kumar to share with us what it’s like to bring Artificial Intelligence and Big Data into nowadays businesses for brands to understand their consumers on a deeper level. Born and bred in India, Mritunjay (MJ for short) moved to Malaysia 12 years ago and had since been working in industrial consumerism before InsightzClub was established. He had the idea of creating InsightzClub at Starbucks and that became his office for 6 months. From that, he gained his first client, funding and his constant thrive to grow. His insightful exposure and experience dealing with worldwide brands such as Nissan, Campbell, and more have paved his way to handle multiple big roles to deal with large market capacity.

He and his co-founder felt like industries are slowly seeping towards the digital era because the consumption of goods and services has shifted online. While he believes that many industries are still sticking to traditional methodologies in understanding consumer needs and analyzation of data, he felt the need to assist brands in going for an easier approach by doing it digitally.

Putting themselves in a brand, it’s a necessity to understand consumers and their uses of products and services. How everything is equally unique, important, and different. And this is the opposite of practicing claim data as it’s inaccurate where certain actions are claimed to be precise but it’s not. For brands and marketers to understand more behavioral and passive data, InsightzClub delivers to the ecosystem by differentiating each category within the said industry. Each time a user interacts digitally, there’s data generated. Big data allows you to deep dive and understand consumers’ persona, demands, and expectations to create beneficial strategies based on the consumers’ sentiments resulting in better decision making.

More options have been introduced to consumers for them to achieve their ideal product and services. It can fall in any category with more specific features such as style, layout, design, etc. The current pandemic contributed to the growth of e-commerce, though it’s not a natural change or adoption. This is when data science comes in to slice and dice the understanding of multiple frameworks behind multiple category segmentation. This keeps them ahead of the consumer to oversee their actions while having good growth and services.

InsightzClub revolves around machine learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) heavily in their business model. The usage of it is to predict data based on historical data, trends, and understanding of consumer behavior will help brands to predict the next step accurately. While they are successful and upscaled, MJ does not shy away from sharing his challenges and failures when it was starting up. With a great team in his hands, he manages to break through multiple hardships, making them grow exponentially. They now proudly serve between 40 to 50 clients, with increasing numbers of employees and offices located in Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh and soon to be in Thailand. Hence, their goal is to cover all SEA countries before going fully international.

When asked about what tips or advice he would tell fellow entrepreneurs, MJ mentioned that it’s critical to use data. Big and small brands are equally important because they have the same goal of understanding their consumers and products. He advised us to not fear utilizing data, as sometimes we tend to fail because we do not believe what the data is telling us. He also added that small growing brands are to learn from big ones by asking critical questions like “Why do they invest millions of dollars into the market, and why invest in understanding marketing consumers.” Though the scale may be small, there will always be value in what you invest in. 

Due to this pandemic, InsightzClub is being a little conservative in terms of expanding, however, their big goal is to go global in the next 4 to 5 years from now. By being global, they aim to achieve 5 million dollars in revenue. Their vision is to bring more efficiency to the market by offering data, solutions to brands for better ROI. 

His final advice is to surround yourself with great people. While following great and successful entrepreneurs can be a good idea, always be ready to fail down the road, because that’s when you learn the most. With the failures and experiences of getting back up, you’ll be able to find the ultimate solution. MJ believes that he is blessed and lucky to have a great team with like-minded people by his side to grow.