For When Sales People Aren’t The Best Writers
Innovation Made in Berlin ‘Creatext’ uses AI to identify prospects and create appropriate text snippets.
If your B2B customers are engineers or in finance or HR or even in sales, then Creatext’s artful solution can help you root them out and address them with contextualized phrases and sentences. Creatext is a sales tool that makes cold outreach easier by crawling internet platforms such as LinkedIn and Google and finding posts or articles by people who work in the sector you’re selling to. It then suggests an outreach message such as, “I just read your article about accounting best practices, really interesting!”. The idea is that the people are so flattered that they will answer, so you’ve established a dialogue, allowing you to turn them from a prospect into a lead. Of course, before your salesperson calls the prospect, we suggest they read the article about accounting best practices.
Most sales tools out there help your sales team to organize their leads and deals. This one actually helps them to write emails to your potential customers.
We spoke to co-founder Lukas Kemkes.
This series is called “Innovations made in Berlin”. What is your innovation? When did it originate, and where? Can you describe the place, and who was involved?
The foundation for Creatext was laid 9 years ago here in Berlin when my co-founder Jérôme and I met during the first week of our undergraduate studies in economics and statistics at HU Berlin. During our university days we spent countless hours working together on school and side projects, from hackathons to building a book recommendation AI to consulting one of France’s largest banks on data science. We really liked working together and both wanted to create something really big and exciting. So when we got our Master’s, it was only logical for us to continue working together by building a startup. For our master’s theses we had conducted research on text generation with state-of-the-art AI models. With Creatext, we are building on top of that to create a new kind of AI that helps professionals communicate better, starting with a product for sales teams.
What do you sell and why should someone buy it?
Our first product is an AI that helps B2B sales teams contact the right people and companies with the right message. This allows them to increase revenue and make more money. Many B2B companies are really good at building amazing products but struggle with their sales. It’s a huge problem, especially in Europe. We tackle that with an AI that finds relevant companies and people to reach out to, prioritizes them, and generates a draft for a message to send out. The human employee and the AI work hand in hand. Companies should buy Creatext to scale their sales pipeline and reduce their customer acquisition costs.
How did you find funding for Creatext?
We received an investment from Techstars, one of the world’s top accelerators, and from smart money business angels.
What advice that you got at an early stage helped you the most while starting and growing your business in Berlin?
Be aware that people lie to you. When you ask people for feedback on your business or product idea, very few people will tell you that they don’t like it. But that negative feedback might be super important to get. So you need to find a way to get it. For me, the book “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick was super helpful for learning how to ask questions that cannot be answered with lies.
How did you manage to establish contacts to potential clients?
In the early stages, you really have to hustle. We used our network, help from Techstars and our angels, and cold outreach. You might be surprised how many people are willing to help a founder validate or challenge their ideas with 30 minutes of their time if you send them a nice, personalized LinkedIn message.
“Be aware that people lie to you.”
What do you want to achieve in the next six months?
Two major milestones for us in the next 6 months are opening up our Beta to more salespeople and acquiring some big sales teams as customers.
How do you find the right people to work with?
So far, we’ve mostly hired people through our direct network or our extended network, so for example people recommending their friends. One of our interns found us via a list of top AI startups, which was nice as well, of course.
What is the biggest challenge for Creatext right now?
We have to achieve product-market-fit as quickly as possible so that we can scale sales at rocket speed in 2023.
What is your reason why Berlin is the place to be?
There are so many cool startups and founders here in Berlin. I really appreciate how easy it is here to meet others who are part of the ecosystem to exchange ideas and support each other.
“You can create your own luck.”
What have you personally learned so far on this journey?
So much! One of my main learnings is that you can create your own luck. By being consistent and working hard, you increase your chances of being lucky, and thus becoming successful.
Thank you, Lukas.
Look out for more Innovations Made in Berlin!
Interview: Olaf Bryan Wielk, ideenmanufaktur
Header image: © Pexels/Andrea Piacquadio
