Who Is Chetan Singh?
Chetan Singh is a serial entrepreneur who knows that most businesses face two challenges - how to get more customers, and how to manage business efficiently to maximize earnings. To overcome these challenges, he created Arkchat, a messaging platform that seemingly does more than messaging.
In today's fast-paced business environment, the line between communication and collaboration is increasingly blurred. How often have you found yourself juggling multiple apps to accomplish a single task or to communicate a simple message?
Enter Arkchat – a revolutionary platform that reimagines messaging, transcending the boundaries of conventional platforms. Today, we sit down with Chetan Singh, the visionary behind Arkchat. A serial entrepreneur, Chetan's journey is filled with innovation and relentlessness.
In this deep dive, we'll explore the inspiration behind Arkchat, how it stands out in a crowded market, and where the world of business communication is headed.
Spotlight: Arkchat was created to address a specific market gap – help businesses attract more customers and optimize their earnings. Could you share the inspiration behind Arkchat and more about this gap in the market?
Chetan Singh: I became an entrepreneur at the age of 23. My business was my business school. During my career extending over 25 years, I’ve continuously experimented with different ways to do things better. I’ve set up multiple businesses, and while managing them, my biggest problems have been getting new customers and managing the business efficiently. I’m sure no one will disagree with me because getting business and managing business is core to every organization. Finding an innovative solution to these problems inspired me to create Arkchat.
While there are thousands of technology platforms and software to address both problems, they each have their own nuances. Some are excellent but unaffordable, some don’t provide a comprehensive solution and as a result, organizations must use multiple platforms and software, and all of them require teams to enter a lot of data to get the desired output. These nuances made me think out of the box to solve the problem of how to manage the business and get business with no effort and without breaking the bank.
The market is filled with communication and collaboration platforms. What key features differentiate Arkchat from similar products and make it stand out?
Communication platforms serve as the backbone over which messages and files are sent and received, people communicate in groups and have voice and video calls. Popular communication platforms include Slack, MS Teams, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Arkchat is also a communication platform so it can be included in this list.
Collaboration platforms number in the hundreds. These platforms help users collaborate on various aspects of their business. For example, Figma is a collaboration platform that helps create amazing graphic designs. Jira is an excellent collaboration platform that software developers use to track bugs.
Asana, Basecamp, and Monday.com are excellent collaboration platforms for task management. It is important to note that collaboration platforms aren't communication platforms. Things became interesting when we innovated around messaging and made it central to a collaboration platform to manage tasks, approvals, and presales collaboration between buyers and sellers.
This innovation sets us apart from giants like Slack, MS Teams, WhatsApp, Asana, Notion, and many others because we help users accomplish a lot more through simple day-to-day messaging.
The following key features differentiate Arkchat from its competitors:
- While sending a message, Arkchat users can convert day-to-day messages into tasks and approval requests by clicking a button. Just a click provides valuable analytics related to tasks and approvals and also gives team members’ performance information. Such effortless tasks and approval management help manage operations.
- Users in groups can communicate privately and share documents amongst themselves whereas in other messaging platforms, everyone in groups and channels views messages and attachments.
- Users can save messages and documents in groups topic-wise for easy reference.
- Users can communicate with each other in their first language. Arkchat auto-translates messages into the recipient’s first language.
- Users can use Arkchat generative AI for day-to-day activities and share the findings/work done through generative AI with other team members as information, or they can assign the finding/work done as a task or an approval request.
- Google and YouTube are integrated into Arkchat. Users can use them in their chat workflow.
- Arkchat has a built-in marketplace. Users can post their products, professional services, freelance services, and job listings. The organizations that use Arkchat can find vendors and job seekers. As soon as someone shortlists a service or product post, a buyer/seller group is automatically created for pre-sales conversations and a lead is triggered for the seller. This is how organizations find vendors and sellers to get new business.
For a business owner or decision-maker looking to add new tools for his team, why should Arkchat be on their radar?
Business owners should choose Arkchat as the preferred tool for their business because using Arkchat, they can effortlessly manage their entire business and get new business just through day-to-day messaging. Using Arkchat, they can accomplish a lot just by sending and receiving messages and not doing anything extra.
If they opt for Slack, MS Teams, WhatsApp, etc, they must separately subscribe to task management tools, lead generation platforms, and generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Furthermore, neither of these tools, except Arkchat, is integrated, and business owners must pay a separate subscription for every tool.
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Could you share some examples of companies that have benefited from using Arkchat?
Companies in the Architecture Engineering & Construction industry (AEC) are happily using Arkchat. Arkchat provides a very strong use case for the AEC industry. Using Arkchat, different teams composed of architects, multiple engineers, contractors, and product sellers collaborate while working on a project.
These teams can assign tasks, seek client approvals, and find new vendors. Any industry that has diverse teams working together will benefit by using Arkchat. Some examples of industries that benefit from Arkchat are event management, advertising, film & media, and manufacturing.
As a new player in the industry, what are the key challenges Arkchat is facing and how are you navigating them?
Since we’re a new platform and have created something that rivals industry giants, our biggest challenge is how to convince users to try Arkchat. This is a big challenge because people are reluctant to try something new and change how they work day to day. We are navigating this challenge by positioning Arkchat as a messaging platform that does more than messaging.
We educate users about task management, approval management, pre-sales collaboration, and similar topics.
We understand that the key to success lies not through sales, but through building trust by educating customers. Persona mapping for specific target industries and specific geographies is critical to marketing Arkchat. We have started marketing Arkchat to the AEC industry and will gradually start marketing it to other industries.
Arkchat’s marketplace is still in its early stages. What are your plans for expanding this aspect of the platform?
As we have not yet launched commercially, the Arkchat marketplace doesn’t have a large number of product and service listings yet. The Arkchat marketplace is free for all users. When an organization signs up, its employees also sign up so everyone can collaborate. As a result, employees can post their freelance and job listings.
Similarly, organizations can post their product or service listings. Gradually, the marketplace will have more listings.
We'll expand Arkchat's marketplace by educating users about its powerful pre-sales collaboration features which are unique to Arkchat - no other marketplace matches them. The marketplace will grow automatically as users find new business opportunities.
Arkchat operates primarily as a mobile app. Are there plans to expand the platform, perhaps to include a desktop version?
When we launched the beta version in April this year, we discovered that the greatest demand from users was for a desktop version. We’ve started building a web version. It will be in sync with the mobile app. This web version will be available to users by mid-October 2023.
What is the next big thing in the business communication and management platform industry and how will Arkchat adapt to this trend?
We’re all aware of Kodak’s failure to adapt to changing times. If we don’t change as the market changes, we will soon be wiped out. Today, everyone knows that AI use cases are gaining momentum. AI will radically change everything. The communication and management platform industry won’t be the only one affected by AI, all industries will be equally affected.
Keeping this in mind, our tech lab is continuously innovating with AI and how it can help make simple chats more powerful. Bringing generative AI into the user workflow and auto chat translation are the first steps towards adopting AI in Arkchat, and we’re not stopping.
Keep up with Arkchat on LinkedIn and read more Spotlight interviews with industry experts!
Edited by Ricardo Esteves
