Revolutionizing Professional Connections: Unveiling Recontact with Ankit Sanghvi, the Next-Gen AI Networking App That Remembers for You
I had the pleasure of interviewing Ankit Sanghvi, a dynamic Product Engineer from Mountain View, California, and the visionary founder of Reconect. Ankit, with his impressive background from Carnegie Mellon University and IIT Madras, is a force to be reckoned with in the tech industry. Excelling in transforming ideas into successful, tangible products, Ankit’s hands-on approach in the garage, rather than in a cabin, has enabled him to achieve significant successes. Over the past three years, he has worked with three Y-Combinator-backed teams, built and ran an academic operations software company, cleaned office floors, engineered products impacting over a million users, conducted door-to-door sales, led recruiting and training programs, spearheaded research projects, acted in an advertisement, consulted for student entrepreneurs, and much more, all in the pursuit of creating real value.
What motivated you to launch your startup?
Coming from a humble middle-class family in India, I understood the importance of reaching out to the right people at the right time in my career. It was crucial in helping me learn outside class, think beyond jobs, gig at a startup, and even raise funds for personal endeavors. However, I realized that while reaching out in networking is easy, storing contacts, remembering to keep in touch, and finding the right people in our networks can be incredibly difficult.
My research showed that 95% of professionals believe face-to-face connections are key, yet only 48% actively network, and they often under-leverage its full potential. With recent AI technologies, we’re enhancing the ease of contact storage, staying in touch, and searching for the right person at the right time. Recontact aims to reduce the time spent on managing and navigating one’s professional network by 75%, while simultaneously increasing the number of connections users frequently engage with fivefold.
What excites you about what you’re building?
The most thrilling aspect is the underlying platform technology we’re developing — specifically, the data pipelines allowing customer data to flow seamlessly across multiple apps. Even sales teams, who rely heavily on this data, spend 40% of their time managing it and often struggle with this task.
At its core, Recontact is creating the ‘Segment of Customer Data’ to enable effective data capture from any app in any form, making it structured and searchable in any desired destination. By utilizing Generative AI, we’re crafting the most straightforward and precise set of data connectors for a complete and personalized context about your network.
What has been your biggest challenge in growing your startup?
The immediate challenge is onboarding the first set of users and finding Product-Market Fit with them. We’re focusing on our key performance indicator — to reduce the time spent on managing and navigating one’s professional network by 75%, while also increasing the number of connections users engage with fivefold. The early stage challenge is building a product that ensures our customers’ success.
What are your future plans for your startup?
Our immediate plans are to roll out the application in the first week of December 2023 and start generating early revenue. Once we achieve about 40% of our KPI, we will alpha launch and scale up. In the long term, we aim to build the best contacts app and leverage our data connector technology and intelligence layer as an enterprise solution for teams handling customer data.
If you had to share ‘words of wisdom’ with a Founder about to start their own startup, what would they be?
I wrote a blog about this the last time I started up. My biggest learnings are:
- Focus on driving customer value in whatever form it takes. If you’re not having at least 5 hours of customer conversations per week, that’s a concern.
- Be prepared to stay motivated and endure challenges for a long time.
- Be intentional, disciplined, and consistent with your time and efforts. Find the 90–10 solution; hard work without direction is a dangerous pitfall.
- Concentrate on a few crucial things. Everything else is optional. Write code, talk to users, and do things that don’t scale.
- Be kind, stay healthy, and have fun in the process.
Relevant links
- Pitch deck — link
- Product trailer — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TKagCf0KY
- Product website — https://recontact.webflow.io
- This product won the best Audio hack category at the Generative Hackathon organized by Stanford, Anthropic, OpenAI and LanceDB on 8th October 2023. Here’s the video of me pitching it — Pitch Video
How can our readers follow you on social media?
- LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanghvian
- X (Twitter) — https://twitter.com/sanghvian
- Personal website — https://ankitsanghvi.in
- Blog — https://blog.ankitsanghvi.in
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
