Interviewed By Bonnishikha Chowdhury, MBR Team

MBR: How did the idea of Alice Labs come into being? What motivated you to start Alice Labs?

Alice Labs : In 2017, I and my other three cofounders Jamil, Fahad and Munim started a dev shop: MisFit Technologies Ltd. Jamil has expertise in operations, Fahad has a sharp focus on strategy and vision, Munim is adept in marketing and sales, while my forte has been in engineering and product development. Being one of the founding members and CTO, I was involved in the technical decisionmaking and roadmaps to take the company forward. In the early days, MyAlice started as a project of MisFit Tech. Eventually, we decided to establish it as a standalone venture and I took over as the CEO. At Misfit, we were attempting to solve multifarious problems of diverse businesses. While working with multiple enterprises, I noticed a trend: customers preferred to reach out to retailers via social media rather than emails or call centers. Since the average attention span of today’s individuals range from 8-12 seconds, there’s a decent possibility that they’ll move on to another brand if their questions aren’t answered right away. A whopping 75% of online shoppers and potential customers expect help within five minutes. So it became imperative for e-commerce and online businesses to ensure seamless customer experience across all conversational platforms: Messenger, Facebook,
Viber, WhatsApp and so on.

During those days, I had a terrible customer service experience with a bank. While I was in Myanmar on business, I called the call center with a question, but the wait was exasperating. I also emailed them, but received a response three days later. In fact, 78% of customers feel irritated because they need to relay the same information to multiple employees of a company across different conversational channels. To resolve such customer inconveniences, I devised the
concept of MyAlice, which automates customer interactions and helps organizations reduce support costs and response time. It also structures conversational data which help enterprises to understand their user base, thus managing their customers from a myriad of sources. MyAlice’s proprietary AI learns over time from the interactions of human agents. Every day, the best D2C brands use our customer care solution and virtual assistant, from e-commerce to fashion, FMCG, and even banks.

MBR: Could you please give us an overview of Alice Labs in terms of services you offer, number of clients you have and the size of your business etc.?

Alice Labs : MyAlice is a multi-channel customer support platform for e-commerce and online businesses. Alice Labs develops smart tools and conversational AI solutions with a mission to streamline customer support and make it more efficient. Businesses can connect all of their customer-facing channels through MyAlice; automate the conversation for both sales and support through natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) while handling the rest through live chat.

MyAlice is currently active in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and Singapore. Through its subscription-based customer support plans, MyAlice works with over 50 e-commerce stores and enterprises throughout the region, including major brands and retailers like Unilever, Coca-Cola, Giordano, and Maybelline, among others.

MBR: How was the response of people in the initial stage? What is the core competitive advantage of Alice Labs?

Alice Labs : We received positive feedbacks and our business grew a lot initially through word of mouth. MyAlice has an edge in being able to serve markets that are often overlooked by large global players. With MyAlice’s conversational AI tools, clients can automate over 70% of conversations, reduce support costs by 33%, and increase sales by up to 20%.

MBR: What are the challenges Alice Labs is currently facing in general and how are you mitigating those?

Alice Labs : Initially, way before the seed fund, it was challenging for us to attain quick enough growth because MyAlice was a bootstrapped startup. When MyAlice began to gather momentum, that’s when I set my sights higher. For building any kind of startup, be it local or global, you should equally focus on the four dimensions: Market, Product, Channel, and Model. Make sure you give your product a core value, a hook, a time to value, and a stickiness factor. While going global, ensure that the markets you’re targeting have similar issues and that you can integrate your operations.

MBR: How has the pandemic affected your business?

Alice Labs : The pandemic hasn’t affected us much in terms of global client acquisition since we are a SaaS business. In fact it showed businesses the importance of such digital tools. But it did slow our rate of client acquisition in a few South Asian countries. It has also been difficult in terms of bill collection since other businesses have been affected due to the pandemic.

MBR: What are the strategic priorities of Alice Labs at the moment? How do you hope to scale up the business?

Alice Labs : A SaaS business doesn’t have any boundaries and hence, can be scaled up rapidly. Even for a new firm, SaaS can be a terrific method to get started and eventually grow into a milliondollar business. You can sell your services to any company in the world. However, if you don’t build a moat, your organization will perish. It’s critical for us to scale up as a tech startup. We used to primarily deal with FMCG, banks, and telecommunication companies. In the FMCG sector, however, because brand loyalty is typically high for these products, there are fewer opportunities to generate stickiness. On the other hand, most banks don’t even use Cloud, so scalability is near to unattainable. We decided to focus on e-commerce and online businesses. Customers flock to e-commerce stores in greater numbers. Retailers must respond to customer queries as soon as possible. As far as my knowledge goes, there are around 24 billion e-commerce stores worldwide. However, very few e-commerce stores are visible. 90% of e-commerce stores are on Shopify and WooCommerce. So, in terms of scalability as well as revenue generation, e-commerce is a niche and lucrative market for us.

I followed the 80/20 rule while picking my sales and marketing channels. To begin, we relied on SEOs and word of mouth within our networks. We started pushing our product on relevant E-commerce groups on Facebook. Due to its relatively low CAC and virility effect, Facebook has been a great channel for us to acquire customers.

However, these e-commerce stores could only handle 20-30 orders each day. For these retailers, we devised a $50/month pricing strategy. As you can tell, the ARPU was almost insignificant. In order to broaden our consumer base, we also resorted to influence marketing.

Since we are a B2B business, we decided to pursue Account-based marketing. In order to onboard the reputable brands, we introduced a 300$/ month pricing model. Our Sales and Marketing team would produce a list of the best-fit clients with the biggest ROI potential for MyAlice. Next, we would send them automated emails.

MBR: What are the lessons you have learnt in terms of growing a business across
different geographical borders? What are
the other future plans of Alice Labs?

Alice Labs: In 2022, we want to target the Australian and European markets, with the goal of entering the North American market by the end of 2023. However, we will perhaps not be developing new products for the next 2-3 years, but will focus on building moats around MyAlice. Because the development of a new product necessitates the evolution of your channels and business plan, so for the time being we want to be very focused on a specific vertical which is e-commerce.