Alex Sambvani is the CEO and co-founder of Slang.ai, a voice AI platform helping restaurants handle phone-based customer interactions more effectively. Before founding Slang in 2019, Alex worked worked on the data science team at Spotify, which fueled his interest in applying machine learning to solve problems for small businesses.

In this episode:

- Lessons from Spotify on building scalable AI solutions for real-world problems

- Why voice AI is ripe for disruption in the restaurant industry

- Slang.ai’s journey in narrowing its use case and defining an ideal customer profile

- How founders learn pricing on the fly and why pricing and sales should be taught in school

- Balancing market adoption with pricing experimentation

- Strategic decisions behind Slang.ai’s current $399/month pricing model

- Preparing for the complexities of multi-product pricing, including bundling and unbundling

𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀:

Start Small, Iterate Based on Data – "Early-stage pricing is exploratory. Start low to validate demand and refine based on willingness to pay and ROI conversations."

Know What You’re Optimizing For – "Pricing is about trade-offs. Be clear whether you’re optimizing for market share, profit, or another metric, and design your pricing accordingly."

Prepare for Multi-Product Complexity – "As Slang.ai evolves, Alex recognizes that bundling, unbundling, and addressing legacy plans will be critical challenges as the company scales."

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction and Background

06:02 From Spotify to Entrepreneurship: Why Voice AI?

14:18 Customer Conversations and Narrowing the Use Case

21:45 Designing Simple and Scalable AI Solutions

30:29 Early Pricing Experiments: Finding Willingness to Pay

37:12 Why Pricing and Sales Should Be Taught in School

39:15 Learning Pricing on the Fly as a Founder

42:25 Optimizing for Adoption vs. Revenue in Pricing Decisions

44:40 Future Vision: Preparing for Multi-Product Pricing and Complexity