Welcome back to another episode of Ed Up LND, where we explore
the innovations, tools, and stories shaping the future of
learning and development. Today I'm thrilled to introduce
you to Shivali Guel, the founder of Troopier AI, a platform
that's truly changing the game for how LND professionals create
content. From her startup at Boston
Consulting Group to building in both Edtech and Fintech
startups, and now launching her own AI powered company, Shivali
has lived the startup journey from every angle.
In this conversation, we talk about the leap from big
corporate consulting to building your own startup, How True Peer
uses AI to instantly transform rough screen recordings into
polished videos and guides, why this tool is saving pros massive
amounts of time by boosting accessibility and
personalizations. Hello L&D professionals and
instructional designers, the reality of fundraising, what it
takes to build today's AI driven world, and her top three pieces
of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
This episode is packed with practical insights for anyone
and learning tech or even just curious about what it takes to
build something from scratch in today's fast moving landscape.
Let's dive. In Hi we're Ice Spring, an
international team of e-learning enthusiasts who help more than
60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online
learning. Our two flagship solutions are
ispring Suite and ispring Learn LMS.
Ispring Suite is an intuitive, all in one authoring tool for
creating engaging elearning content, and ispringlearn is an
innovative online training platform for onboarding,
upskilling, and certifying your teams.
We also provide tons of free resources for aspiring and
experienced e-learning professionals, conduct weekly
webinars with top industry experts, and organize annual
e-learning conferences, challenges, and championships.
We'd be happy to get to know you and pick a solution that fits
your needs best. Go to www.icepringsolutions.com
to learn more about us, download our resources, and connect.
Hello everyone and welcome to another amazing episode of Add
Up L&D. My name is Holly Owens and I'm
your host and I always say I'm excited, but I'm super excited
today. I'm really looking forward to
this episode because I have Shivali here who's the founder
of Troopier dot AI, and she is going to tell us all about the
different things that she's done in her professional life.
But Shivali, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Holly, for having me.
It's really, it's really a pleasure.
Of course. Well, we're excited to get into
everything troupe here. But before we do that, tell us a
little bit about who you are, your journey, where you've been,
all the things the audience wants to know.
How did you become a founder of this this wonderful company?
Absolutely. So yeah.
So like like you already mentioned, news flash, I'm the
founder of troop here dot AI. But yeah, like like everybody
else, my journey didn't start as the founder.
Of course, I started actually like very unconventionally.
I started working at a very large corporation very early
into my career. In fact, my first ever work
experience was a Boston Consulting Group as a management
consultant. So that's as large an
organization as it can get, right?
But I was really, really interested in technology from
the beginning, right? So even at PCG, I used to do
like large scale technology implementations and
transformation projects. And you know, that's how my
journey with technology started. But then very quickly I realized
that, you know, like large corporations don't give you like
the full room to explore your potential, right?
And you want to be able to figure way to put it at the
forefront of innovation. So I decided to move to
startups, right? So just to sort of learn how to
build my own startup. I first started working at a
really big tech startup. Then I moved into another
fintech startup, you know, in founding roles, operating roles,
and that really gave me a first time view of how to actually
build a stardom from scratch. So obviously the logical next
step was to actually build something of my own.
And it so happened that I was also really interested in AI on
the side, right? So I used to do a lot of my own
experimentation and tinkering with what can we do with AI,
what interesting things can happen.
And some of those explorations LED into some interesting
projects, and I started working with a couple of companies.
And that's how sort of the idea for Troopier came about.
And once I had enough conviction, I decided to move
out of my job and start this from scratch.
So it started like late last year, but we've been growing the
team and the business ever since.
Yeah, people know the name now. I mean, going like a year in, it
was just it's, it's something to be said about your marketing, of
course, and about the person that you are, that you spread
the information very well. And I love your journey, You
know, like getting to know all the things about how to do this
and then actually doing it yourself.
You know, often times people will feel a little bit scared to
take that leap into something of their own, but you're you.
You did it, you've done it. Yeah, absolutely.
It's it's scary, but once you do it, it's it like the that
adrenaline is like nothing else. You.
You feel like you'll. You'll do that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So tell us like for the audience
that doesn't know and of course we'll have all the information
in the show notes about where you can access Troopier and get
to know more about the company. But tell us what is, what is
Troopier and what does it do Let's you know for L&D
professionals because I know like I've used it in, it's just
something I'll let you talk. I'll let you talk about it.
I'm not going to give too much away.
Yeah, for sure. You know, like, you know the way
that we like to describe it, right?
Like if you if you just look at what's happening today in the
world of software is that it's become so much easier to build
software with AI, right? Like you can write code with
Shaji PD, CLOD, etcetera. But when it comes about actually
communication of around the software or the products, right?
Like essentially training people on how we use that software,
onboarding users on it, even marketing it, selling it, right?
There's that communication layer or the content layer which is
still really, really broken. And it's really hard to create
that professional quality content today, right?
So what we have essentially created is almost like
democratized that content creation for software and
products, right? So what you essentially do is
just like Loom, for example, you take a rough screen recording of
anything that you want to show on your screen.
But that's that's where the magic happens.
Like that rough screen recording then gets magically transformed
into a really professional quality video as well as like a
professional guide all written out for you and all made for you
completely automatically so that you don't have to put any of the
effort into creation of that great content, right?
So now you can publish videos, guides in a matter of minutes
and at 100th the cost that it usually takes.
So essentially like learning or LND, like we say, gets
transformed completely for for this sort of area, right?
You can join so much content at scale and you can make sure it's
really high quality. You can make sure it's
personalized to the users. You can make sure it's in the
language that the users actually want to listen to, right?
So all of that gets unlocked because of the power of AI.
I love it too, you know, like I, I wanted to say this to the
beginning, but I wanted you to explain it first.
The fact that it how much time it saves L&D professionals
because we would spend, we spend so much time creating like how
to guides, instructor guides, videos like those, those are
whole projects within themselves and thinking about standard
operating procedures for a company.
Like you just put that all in the trip here.
And then it's this nice clean layout and it has, it's
multimodal, which we love as instructional design for
accessibility purposes. And it's just like, OK, so now
we can really focus on like, what's the next step?
Or like thinking about truly what we need to do for the
learners instead of having to worry about like, did we have
grammatical errors or did this video get messed up somewhere?
Or did we not mention, you know, we didn't add the captioning,
the captioning and all that stuff is there.
So I, that's one of the reasons I was really drawn to it because
I'm like, Oh my goodness, this is going to save me so much
time. But also too is the fact that
how intuitive and easy it is to use.
Like it's not something like you mentioned loom, you know, some
other Ed tech companies or technology companies where
there's like a there's a vast amount of features, but this is
just so easy to implement. Yeah.
And that was the core idea, right?
Like the idea is to bring that professional video creation to
everybody, right? Like an LND professional does
not need to be like a professional video editor or a
script writer, right? Today they have to be right
because right. The tools.
Are just so complex and they're made for someone who knows all
of those finer things. So the idea was that if you're
able to explain something to a friend, you should be able to
create a professional video. So let AI handle all of that
heavy lifting and you can just focus on talking through what
what you want to communicate. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's if
it was my dream, like maybe 10 years ago as an LMD professional
to have a technology, it would be this one.
Because we I've worked through so many different tools and so
many different like when I stepped out of teaching, I was
an e-learning developer for about 6 to 12 months and we had
to create instructor guides and I was like, Oh my gosh, is so
taxing. It takes so long.
And you have to it was for the military, so for like Tricare,
the healthcare. So it had to be very by the
book. Yeah.
And this, this would have helped tremendously.
So tell us a little bit about what are some of your favorite
features or what have you heard from some of your customers when
they're the feedback that you're getting about Troop here and
what do they love the most? I know what I love the most, but
what are you hearing or what are some of your favorite features?
Absolutely. I think like obviously the aha
moment or that magical moment is the first time someone
experiences it, right? Like so I would actually urge
everybody who's listening to actually try it out themselves.
But like as soon as you take a screen recording and you click
on generate, it automatically creates that really great AI
video and a step by step guide for you in 30 seconds, right,
right. That's something that you're
like, OK, how did it happen? Like how did it understand
everything that I said? How did it understand whatever I
was doing? And how did it create like a
really professional output from it?
So that's obviously that transformation itself is
something that people really love.
But I think on top of that, there are a lot of workflows
that we have built to enable that ease of then the final fine
tuning, right? Like for example, the editor is
built out in a way that you can easily edit the text.
For example, like while recording, let's say you missed
out on something or you misspelled something or you want
to address someone specifically, right?
You don't have to do any retakes.
You can just edit the text in the video script and it will
automatically get adjusted. Yeah.
So you won't have to do any retakes, you won't have to do
any editing. You can do any number of changes
in your script and automatically all of that gets adjusted and
synced perfectly, right? So like editing video is as easy
as editing text in Roopio, right?
I love it. That's a great, yeah.
Yeah. So that's one.
Then the other thing is, you know, translation as a feature,
right? Like we've seen in a lot of
scenarios that people have to just make do with single
language videos because of their own comfort in that language.
But the users or the employees or, you know, people who
actually have to watch them may be comfortable in some other
language, right, right. So now we have one click
translate where for every guide or every video you create, you
can select out of 4050 languages, any language you
want. And then in one click all of
that content gets automatically automatically translated,
including the video, right. So in now have that same process
being explained in 10 different languages for 10 different types
of users, right? Then the next thing is for AI
personalization, right? Like one thing is to create like
a basic video output from from your recording.
But let's say you wanted to be in a specific tone or you want
it to be like a sales demo or you want it to be like a
instructional video or you want it to be a product manual,
right? So you can actually choose that
AI template or you can choose or you can instruct the AI to
automatically change the content As for that, right?
So you don't need to be like really good at marketing, but if
you instruct the AI that OK, make it in a marketing way or
add a little bit of a marketing tone to it, it'll actually do
that for you, right? So now we have engineers making
marketing videos because. Yeah.
I just had that context on dog. So cool.
I mean, like, yeah. And part of that too is like
true Pier is really a universal language for everybody.
I love the fact that you can translate into different
languages for people because like you're saying, it's no, I
know English is the most common language used around the world,
but a lot of different countries, it's just, there's
just so many different languages out there.
And I think also too, I love accessibility stuff that's great
for accessibility, you know, for giving access to everyone.
So you're really thinking on on a greater level here to give
people everyone has access, which I can really, truly
appreciate. And I know that people in our
audience do appreciate that as well.
Absolutely, absolutely. Like we, we've had so many
customers come up to us and tell us, OK, this is the first time
we're able to make these videos for that audience.
Otherwise, they just used to have to make do with English
videos. Yeah.
Well, you just made a big
announcement. So we're I saw some things in
the news. You want to tell us a little bit
about that? Yeah, absolutely.
So we we actually just announced our seed round of $3,000,000
from RTB Global. Congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Obviously, like fundraise is never a milestone.
It's, it's just an input to what we what we have plans to do, but
really excited about its potential to be able to, for us
to expand our team. And like we discussed, like this
product has global potentials. We wanted to reach everybody
around the world. So it'll just help us accelerate
that. That's fantastic.
And I'm so glad to hear, you know, especially and you might
be able to speak to this a little bit like around the
world, there's some different things happening.
I can speak what's happening in the United States with some
funding and like people are saying that funding is getting
cut or they don't have access to the resources.
So, you know, this funding definitely gives you the access
to give the support to the to the customers.
Can you maybe just talk a little bit about like being a founder
and like trying to find those resources and what that
situation's like? Because I know there's a lot of
people in the audience who may be thinking about starting their
own thing and they're just like, I don't even know where to
begin. So maybe if you tap in that to a
little bit and give our audience some insider insider scoop.
Yeah, absolutely. I think the first thing that I
would actually like to say from my own experience is that, you
know, it's become so much easier to build products now, right,
with AI, like it just enhances your capability so much more.
So I would in fact suggest that for anybody who wants to try
something or a start up at their own level, it doesn't like
funding doesn't even need to be like a necessary condition
anymore, right. Like, yeah.
Yeah, that's true. There are so many startups that
are now bootstrapped to like 5 million dollars, $10 million in
annual revenue, which is amazing, right?
That's something that was never possible before.
But now because you need, you have that capability in
marketing, you have coding agents, you have so much that
you can do with AI that you need much less resources, right?
So that that would actually be my first, you know, comment
here. But like regarding funding as
well, what I would say is that, you know, in AI at least there
is a lot of there's a lot of funding interest, right?
So if you look at traditional software, you will obviously see
less and less interest because you know, the whole world is now
moving to AI instead of software, right?
So if there are interesting ideas around AI, there are still
a lot of people who are willing to fund it.
And I think Angel investments is also becoming like a very big
way to source funding, which is to say that you don't have to go
for really big institutional investors, right?
You can actually crowd source funding from people who are
relevant in your space. So let's say if you have an A
really good LND idea, you can actually reach out to like LND
leaders across companies. If they like it, you can just
set up an Angel list account and get them to fund you, right?
And that's enough for you to. Get makes it that easy.
I'm fast, I'm I'm really intently listening because I've
never been on that side of it before.
And it's fascinating to me that now like you don't have to worry
about, you know, like here's the speaking from the states
stateside is that, you know, going after those big companies.
I think that was really a challenge and that probably made
a lot of companies in the past like they would just give up or
they would just say they quote UN quote fail, but they just
didn't, you know, this kind of stuff just didn't exist.
It's so cool. Yeah.
And like people are really interested.
Like I see a lot of interest from people who are experienced
in a space to want to invest in startups in that space, right?
Because they want to leverage their domain knowledge, they
want to be able to support those ideas because they have
conviction in those ideas. So Angel investment is actually
becoming like a really big thing.
Like even for us, for example, a lot of CIOSCXOSCTOS came upfront
that they wanted to invest in the idea because they believed
in it so much. So, you know, we ended up
getting a lot of those and you know, it's win win, right?
They they obviously get exposure to the startup and success and
we get access to their experience and their networks.
Yeah, absolutely. What what a, what a fun position
to be in, more fun and probably anxiety at certain times.
But I want to ask you because, you know, we have a lot of
people and I was mentioning this before we started recording in
in the audience that are transitioning out into different
peers. I myself made a leap that I'm
just not going to be working for somebody else anymore.
I'm going to be working for me, do some side hustle stuff, do
this podcast. You know, I don't necessarily
need funding for the podcast, but so for those people who are
thinking about stepping into this world, maybe doing a
startup or an entrepreneur, what, what's like 3 pieces of
advice you would say like somebody sitting here, they're
listening and they're like, I want to start this, but I'm just
scared too. You know what, what advice could
you give them? Yeah, I would say that the first
and foremost thing is to not have to not really worry about
building like a full scale product or for like especially
if you're building a tech startup, just build a really,
really quick and easy prototype, right?
Like a lot of ideas actually start as Instagram pages or you
know, they may actually start as just a chatty PE wrapper, but
that's enough for you to validate whether it actually has
potential and it solves a real problem, right?
So that would definitely by be my number one recommendation
that don't ever think of building a sophisticated product
as a barrier to starting up. Like you need to have
everything. Like people strive for
perfection too much, and in corporate America we call that
MLP, a minimal, lovable. Product exactly, exactly, right,
Like, for example, if you if you want to do something in fashion
or whatever, right, like you can just start an Instagram page for
it. Or if you want to do something
in L&D, maybe you start a Udemy course around it or you know,
like essentially start small, validated and then just think of
scaling it, right. That's number one.
And the second thing I would say is like talk to customers really
quickly, right, like potential customers.
And this is something that I've also learned a lot that, you
know, founders start to think too much in their head and they
start to sort of, you know, that confirmation bias steps in that
Oh yes, this makes sense, right? But as soon as you start talking
to customers, a lot of that can get get shattered very quickly
or it can get double the validation, right?
So even when you're talking to customers, try to be try to
expect them to be as brutal as possible, right?
Don't. Don't look for signals.
That need thick skin in this game for sure.
Constructive criticism is everywhere and you need to take
it absolutely. And tell your customers to be
brutal with you, right? Like there's this book, you
know, that's that talks about the mom test, right?
That, you know, if you're asking your mom, she'll obviously be
really awesome about it. And she'll be like, oh, this is
the most loveliest idea I've ever heard.
But that's not really validation.
So look for criticism. That's really important.
Yeah. And I guess the third thing is
like, have really strong support in terms of cofounders, right?
I think solo journeys are possible, but having a cofounder
or a couple of cofounders is just a 10X multiplier, right?
Because yeah, startups are just so lonely as an experience and
they're so draining that you always need someone who can pull
you up when you're down, right. And vice versa, right?
So right, that's something that always helps, like in my case as
well, like my Co founder does that for me all the time and I
do for him, right. But yeah, like it's, it's just
more joyful also because then you get to share that journey,
the ups and downs with somebody. Yeah, it's like a, it's a great
partnership. It's great, you know, to bounce
ideas off of other people because a lot of the time when
you said you're sitting in like maybe with these blinders on and
you don't realize what's happening because they're doing
so many different things for the company troopers.
Great. I loved, you know, trying it out
and I can definitely say and advocate for L&D professionals
to go try try it out. We'll have everything in the
show notes about that. Shivali, is there anything else
that you before we wrap up the episode that you want to mention
about Troop here yourself? Tell us where to find you.
Tell us all the all the things. Like I said, we're going to have
everything in the show notes, but is there anything else you
want to share? Yeah, absolutely.
I think like I said before, like we've made the experience in a
way that anybody can try it. So I would, you know, really
recommend anybody who's listening to just go to
www.rupia.ai to sign up and create a bunch of videos and
you'll experience the magic yourself.
Yeah. And.
It's magical, is very magical. People.
Be ready, yeah. And then if it looks interesting
or if there's something that you want to discuss, then please
reach out to me on LinkedIn. We can probably drop my LinkedIn
details in the show notes. Yeah.
It's going to, I think, I think it was put in the guest intake.
So we're definitely going to have all the places to find you
as well. Yeah.
But yeah, that's about it. Like always love to collaborate
and discuss and like especially because LND is such a close
topic to us as well. Like would love to collab
collaborate on how we can make it even better for LND
professionals around the world. Yeah, you're really you're
really changing the lives of LND professionals and making things
so much easier for us. So we appreciate that.
You know, I can probably speak for the audience and saying
that. So thank you for coming on and
sharing your experiences about troop here and all the advice
for the audience. Like I said, everything can be
found in the show notes or where to reach out to Shivali or go to
true peer and access the tool. It's wonderful.
So you need to try it out. So thanks so much for coming on.
Thank you, Holly, it was lovely. Thanks for spending a few
minutes with Holly. She knows your podcast queue is
packed. If today's episode sparked an
idea or gave you that extra nudge of confidence, tap, follow
or subscribe in your favorite app so you never miss an episode
of Ed Up L&D. Dropping a quick rating or
review helps more educators and learning pros discover the show,
too. Want to keep the conversation
going? Connect with Holly on LinkedIn
and share your biggest take away.
She reads every message. Until next time, keep learning,
keep leading, and keep believing in your own story.
Talk soon. Hi, we're Ice Spring, an
international team of e-learning enthusiasts who help more than
60,000 clients across the globe succeed with better online
learning. Our two flagship solutions are
Ice Spring Suite and Ice Spring Learn LMS.
Ice Spring Suite is an intuitive all in We'd be happy to get to
know you and pick a solution that fits your needs best.
Go to www.ispringsolutions.com to learn more about us and
connect.