BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneurs Feature — Lucep

In this week’s Entrepreneurs Feature, we speak to team Lucep, a startup which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate a lot of what goes into generating leads and then acting on them fast. Lucep is currently incubating with STARTUPAUTOBAHN Singapore, a corporate co-innovation platform powered by Mercedes-Benz focusing on several domains including Customers, Automotive Retail, Aftersales, Corporation and Infrastructure Management.

1. What is Lucep and how did the idea behind it come about?

Lucep is an instant response call back tool that helps businesses to manage all of their online lead channels through one integrated system. The Lucep tool is designed to connect business prospects with the best person available to speak to them. If a customer wants to buy your product or service, they shouldn’t even have to wait for 10–15 minutes before an informed member of your team contacts them and is able to answer whatever questions they may have.

2. Describe your typical day.

There is really no such thing as a typical day in my life, but I will try to answer this question. I will usually get into the office around 9 or 9.30 after clearing the morning emails before I enter the workplace. Usually first thing in the morning, over a cup of tea, I will sit down with my co founder, Kaiesh Vohra. We go through each other’s schedule for the day and any pressing issues that need to be addressed. Kaiesh, as well as being CEO, looks after our tech development along with our CTO. So it is vital that these exchanges of information happen, so we can direct product development in the way customers want. After that my day gets filled with customers’ and partners’ calls or meetings. I feel like I have my earphones plugged in for most of the day as I am always on a phone call at all times of the day. We work with customers and partners from all around the world, especially in South America, which means that my calls can last easily till midnight or 1am due to the time zones. If I don’t have such calls, I usually finish up in the office around 7.30pm and take my evening and night calls from home.

3. Where do you see Lucep in 5 years?

As an already profitable business, Lucep has huge potential to grow over the next 5 years. We have reinvested all of the profits into the business and are looking for strategic partners to help us grow. We are targeting to continue our trend of doubling revenue every year. In the next 5 years, I see Lucep continuing our march to help all kinds of businesses engage with their prospects as fast as possible, and convert more of their leads to sales. We have targeted having more than 7'000 businesses using the platform.

4. What differentiates Lucep from its competitors?

Lucep focuses on what is important for the customer, more than how it fits in with the business process. For high value or B2B products, most customers want to speak to someone before they decide on buying a product or service. Lucep turns any customer channel such as websites, emails, social media platforms, mobile apps or EDMs into opportunities for converting leads to businesses. Consider Lucep to be a leads version of GPS, it doesn’t matter which channel you enter in, Lucep will make sure that you are directed to the best person available and that they have the information needed to help move the sale along.

5. What are some of the greatest challenges in the course of your entrepreneurial journey and what did you learn from them?

It is hard to accept that you don’t know everything, especially when sometimes it feels like as a founder, you are supposed to know everything. However, I found out that it is okay if I do not know everything. I can always learn. Being able to pick up the phone and call the right person, who can give you a well placed answer, can save you hours and hours of time. I have found that you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help for things you do not know. You aren’t supposed to know everything, but you should have the resources or the ability to go out and get the answer you are looking for.

6. What is your favourite aspect of being an entrepreneur?

The freedom it gives me. Although most entrepreneurs will say that they are devoted and chained to their business, the reality is that you are free to choose your own destiny. We have imparted that sort of thinking to our employees. Lucep’s employees get a great amount of flexibility once they have shown that they are committed to the business and our vision.

7. What are the benefits of joining the Start-up Autobahn accelerator programme?

It provides us a first hand look at what makes a company like Daimler think. It gives us the chance to showcase our technology to a group of people who may not have seen it before. We are also able to demonstrate to Daimler how this can improve their dealership sales, by responding to leads as quickly as possible.

8. How did Lucep build your customer base?

We built it one customer at a time. It sounds painful but it is true. For the first year, I am sure that either myself or my partner had spoken to literally every single customer that signed up. Doing this made sure the customer knew exactly what it is we were offering and it helped us to understand from the customer, the value they saw in our tool. There is no shortcut to talking to your customers; it helps us in so many ways from customer development to new groups of customers we can attract. On top of that, we have a content marketing team, whose job is to churn out as much relevant content to attract people to the top of our funnel, and then hope that our funnel converts them.

9. What was your most memorable moment in BLOCK71 Singapore?

BLOCK71 was actually the first place we ever got a term sheet. We did not actually end up taking that term sheet as we did not think the terms were very fair to us, but it gave us the confidence to believe in ourselves and our product. We have bootstrapped the whole company from that point on, working hard to develop clients and most importantly, profits. I think without knowing that other people believed in the idea enough to back it, we would have really struggled to push through that barrier.

Are you an entrepreneur working on a cool product and looking for more than just a co-working space ? Do apply for a hotdesk here and become part of the exciting community that we offer at BLOCK71 Singapore.

For more great entrepreneur themed articles delivered weekly to your inbox, subscribe to the BLOCK71 newsletter here!