Author: Erin Daniel
Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhil10s/
A brand called Phitku got funded on Shark Tank few months back.
₹1.8 crores for 1% equity at a ₹180 crore valuation. Aman Gupta and Anupam Mittal closed the deal.
Quick context. Phitku sells alum bars. Alum bars have been around forever. I first saw one in a barber shop years ago, but did not know what it was. Three years back a reel explained it. Natural antiperspirant. Kills germs. I went on Amazon, bought a well reviewed bar for under ₹200, used it, it worked.
Phitku took the same alum crystal, shaped it into a roll on, branded it beautifully, positioned it around whiter underarms, natural antiperspirant, no chemicals, called themselves deo ke baap, walked into Shark Tank with a qawali entry, and priced it at ₹999. Three founders drawing 7 lakhs each in salary. WOW
But I am not here to talk about the margins. Or the brand strategy. Or their pitch on Shark Tank. I am here to talk about the call I got two days after the product landed at my door.
Her name was Maya.
Warm. Natural. She repeated back exactly what I said when nudged. I asked her the date and time. Maya answered instantly. I told her I had already given a review. She said you told me the product is amazing but I want to go deeper. She was shooting one question after another. I tried to disrupt her. She held her ground.
Anyone else would have left that call thinking they just spoke to a lovely customer service executive. But I do this for a living. I knew she was an AI bot, so I had to find the cracks.
She gave up when I asked her what she had for breakfast. "That is not relevant to our conversation." "Ending call." She literally said ending call.
Maya was an AI bot . And she was brilliant. In the pitch they mentioned calling 10,000 customers in a month. Now you understand how. Every sale tracked. Every response logged. Clean structured data flowing straight into their system without a human transcribing, interpreting, or dropping the ball.
At that scale, this data is a research engine. This is what AI in marketing looks like when done well. A ₹200 bar and a ₹999 bar both last six months. The difference is not the product. It is everything built around it.
Could it have been better. Yes. The pauses were too uniform. Two days after delivery is too early to ask for a review. If the call is made that early, start with the delivery experience, the packaging, the first impression. A few tweaks, a better script, and even I would not have recognised the difference. But look how far we have come.
Phitku showed what a modern consumer brand ops stack looks like when AI is embedded into ops. That is not the future. That is Phitku. Right now.
#AI #AIAgents #ArtificialIntelligence #SharkTank #SharkTankIndia #VoiceAI #0to100xEngineer
₹1.8 crores for 1% equity at a ₹180 crore valuation. Aman Gupta and Anupam Mittal closed the deal.
Quick context. Phitku sells alum bars. Alum bars have been around forever. I first saw one in a barber shop years ago, but did not know what it was. Three years back a reel explained it. Natural antiperspirant. Kills germs. I went on Amazon, bought a well reviewed bar for under ₹200, used it, it worked.
Phitku took the same alum crystal, shaped it into a roll on, branded it beautifully, positioned it around whiter underarms, natural antiperspirant, no chemicals, called themselves deo ke baap, walked into Shark Tank with a qawali entry, and priced it at ₹999. Three founders drawing 7 lakhs each in salary. WOW
But I am not here to talk about the margins. Or the brand strategy. Or their pitch on Shark Tank. I am here to talk about the call I got two days after the product landed at my door.
Her name was Maya.
Warm. Natural. She repeated back exactly what I said when nudged. I asked her the date and time. Maya answered instantly. I told her I had already given a review. She said you told me the product is amazing but I want to go deeper. She was shooting one question after another. I tried to disrupt her. She held her ground.
Anyone else would have left that call thinking they just spoke to a lovely customer service executive. But I do this for a living. I knew she was an AI bot, so I had to find the cracks.
She gave up when I asked her what she had for breakfast. "That is not relevant to our conversation." "Ending call." She literally said ending call.
Maya was an AI bot . And she was brilliant. In the pitch they mentioned calling 10,000 customers in a month. Now you understand how. Every sale tracked. Every response logged. Clean structured data flowing straight into their system without a human transcribing, interpreting, or dropping the ball.
At that scale, this data is a research engine. This is what AI in marketing looks like when done well. A ₹200 bar and a ₹999 bar both last six months. The difference is not the product. It is everything built around it.
Could it have been better. Yes. The pauses were too uniform. Two days after delivery is too early to ask for a review. If the call is made that early, start with the delivery experience, the packaging, the first impression. A few tweaks, a better script, and even I would not have recognised the difference. But look how far we have come.
Phitku showed what a modern consumer brand ops stack looks like when AI is embedded into ops. That is not the future. That is Phitku. Right now.
#AI #AIAgents #ArtificialIntelligence #SharkTank #SharkTankIndia #VoiceAI #0to100xEngineer