1880 – Shaping the Future of Professional Excellence with Criya’s Deboshree Dutta

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0:58with us right now it's deb dada deb you are the ceo and founder of crea you're found on the web at crea.co that's c-r-i-y-a.co deb thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for having me josh it's a pleasure well this is pretty cool because let me just read what it says on your website, just kind of lay some introduction to what CREA is, your personal brand in one click with AI. Launch your AI-generated free professional website in 20 seconds. As of when we're recording this, you're kind of in a beta right now. But what a cool, compelling offer for you to be able to provide the market.

1:43This is exciting. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, it comes from a lot of like my own personal journey and how personal branding has been important to my career success. And it's kind of become my life's mission to make it accessible for others. You know, I'm thinking of folks that I work with in my world, and we work with a lot of people that maybe were working professionally in an industry, and now they're stepping out and they're maybe serving as a consultant, right? And, you know, so when someone goes independent like that, you know, it can be kind of a steep curve to get something meaningful.

2:19And again, you don't need much, but at least something, right, that, you know, indicates your personal brand and communicates your superpowers. And I think historically, we've seen some decent website builders out there and, you know, certainly template driven. But would you mind sharing just a little bit about how Kriya is different and why this is a little bit of a game changer? 100 % look Josh I think if you need a resume 10 years ago you need to have an online presence today right I mean this is not just about going independent when we started CREA it was a little bit more focused towards solopreneurs and independent consultants coaches and so on and we focused the platform to be a little bit more about making monetization easy and so on but having been in the business now for some time what we've come to know is it actually doesn't matter like even if you are looking for a job a hiring manager is going to google you Right.

3:10You're looking for that next leadership position. They're going to Google you. You want to speak at a conference. They're going to Google you. You're looking for fundraising. An investor is going to Google you. Yeah. Oh, this has gone far beyond just personal branding for the sake of it. Right. And a lot of this has also gone beyond just posting content on social media, because I think that's become noisy. I think what people are looking for is I'm going to give you maybe five or six seconds to figure out. Do you impress me? Basically, it's that. Are you going to slap a black and white resume and then hope that they see the beauty and the glory in who you are?

3:44Or maybe you present your key accomplishments, your milestones, your metrics, and so on, right? And you're able to quickly communicate the value that you bring so that they're willing to make that call. They're willing to book that call or invite you to an interview or take that next step with you. So just talk about the use case of just someone who might be kind of working their way up professionally and, you know, they're going to be applying for promotions in, you know, in the years ahead, you know, if they say, oh, come on, Deb, does me having a personal website really matter? Isn't my LinkedIn profile good enough?

4:20It's a great question. So as we look into more leadership roles, and this is what CREA focuses on, like we even have this whole comparison between what your LinkedIn looks like and what your CREA website look like depending on your persona kriya develops different types of websites for you and we create these recommendations so for example if you're a sales professional straight up you'll have content for you to easily fulfill to fill in talking about whether you overachieved your sales numbers whether you had you had made president's club these are come as a say some of the case studies from your you know big client engagements and so on that's what a sales leader's website could look like.

4:57If you are, let's say, an investor, you want to talk about your investment portfolio. What kind of mission-driven successes have you driven for the founders you've supported? If you're a student, we're actually in conversations and starting a pilot on Monday with an extremely renowned university, piloting this for the MBA students. So for job seekers, this is a completely different content. So the content is generated based on what you should be displaying for your website. LinkedIn is not going to do that for you. LinkedIn has a headline, featured logos, and you're done. Yeah. And certainly, you know, with your own personally branded website, I mean, it really gives you 100 % control on a lot of, you know, kind of the emotional feelings around, you know, the qualifications of a consultant coach, or, you know, even someone that might be applying for top position, certainly, you know, investors, we're all doing our due diligence.

5:56And the reason why maybe, I mean, this is kind of my background. So I want to hear your perspective on this. You know, why is it that you feel the consumers and hiring managers and investors and potential customers, why are they doing this extra step of due diligence before there? Why do they make that now a part of the decision-making process? I think there's two parts to it. One is it's the due diligence, right? To verify and validate what you claim is true. But the second thing truthfully is I think there's just so much competition, Josh. No matter what field we're applying in, you need to stand out.

6:34If you have something in a way that makes you stand out, maybe on LinkedIn, maybe it's one of those featured articles you were published somewhere, or you were invited to a conference, there's that extra to you that makes that convinces the hiring manager beyond okay, this dude just shows up at work does his job and goes home. So there needs to be something that gives them that reason to make an exception for you, you know, like to make that call and give you their time. And I think that's basically why they do it is, can you give me more than, you know, the regular nine to five? Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely true.

7:06So just kind of my background. So I've studied and led on consumer behavior since 2007. I mean, this has just been an area that I've been fascinated with. So, you know, all along the way, you know, my big, I'd say, point of view is, you know, encouraging consumers to not just reply to an immediate marketing message, but to take a pause for a moment and check them out. And again, a Google search is kind of the default standard way we do that. And again, you had mentioned, Deb, just a bit about first impressions, right? And so let's maybe just talk about where CREA fits in terms of displaying or generating that professional impression that might be a little different than maybe like a Wix website or a GoDaddy type website?

8:02How does Kriya perform that for this use case? Great question. So we've spent a ton of time researching for our own selves. I wanted to build my own because I applied to a lot of speaking engagements, right? And trying to build out my own website on like a Wix or a Squarespace. There are great templates. What we've come to realize is a lot of website builders are stellar and the templates are very much based around on service providers. So you are either building a service or you're offering services. That's kind of how the templates are built around, like your name, about me, services you provide, contact me, location, and things like that.

8:36A personal brand website is completely different. I may want to highlight, let's say like a big, nice banner about myself. We even do AI-generated imagery if you are interested in things like that. A nice executive bio that we create based on your like couple of keywords of input, right? and then we break it out into things like I want to showcase my speaking engagements there's an entire section like it's like one click speaking engagements it creates a whole section on speaking engagements where you just plug in literally from your phone you can just drop your youtube links it'll fill it out you have articles yeah literally it'll just fill it out so you don't have to create the sections we built it for personal branding so speaking engagements if you have a book literally click add my book and like pre-generate text saying pre-order my book or whatever drop drop your link and you're going to be able to order it so it's it's completely different from a typical website it has pre-built section if it's about me it'll import your content from linkedin and you click one button it'll have your entire professional resume presented for you don't even have to edit like you don't have to do anything to edit it logos uphold so it is a completely different way to look at building out your resume or your website with your professional content or journey and experience content.

9:53Yeah. Yeah. And I think most of us, like I said, it's like we have bits and pieces of this maybe already written. I guess what if someone says, oh yeah, I do have something, like I have been doing some speaking, but I've just really never put together a speaker page or I haven't really written anything about that. Does the platform assist with that? Like if they do need to create something from scratch? Literally. So hopefully they have maybe like a picture of themselves at some point speaking or like a video of them speaking somewhere. If you have that, literally log into Kriya. There's a button called add speaking engagements.

10:31It'll throw it up for you with like pre-populated stuff. Add your video link. It'll create the video and you're set. If you want, you can edit the content over there saying speaker at Women in Tech Conference or whatever, right? But it's 30 seconds and it's done and you can hit live and you're done. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about where Kriya came from, where you come from. How did Kriya come to be? It's a very personal story for me, Josh. I grew up in India and I came from a very middle-class family. So for me, my whole American dream was get a job, pay off my loans, send money back home. To be honest, entrepreneurship was not an option for me.

11:07um it just so happened that I you know I I was I grew a ton on Instagram this is back in the day I have about 170 ,000 followers on Instagram and I started coding the first version of Kriya I'm a programmer I have a master's in computer science from Carnegie Mellon I started my career as an engineer at Microsoft and eventually was head of product at PayPal for several years as to lead the whole AI driven customer success agent platform I coded the first version of Kriya just as a fun thing to be able to offer my own expertise. And then 100 days, I started offering that to other users, just for fun, had 100 users in 100 days.

11:41And then I was like, oh, shoot, I should make this a business. I should register this as an entity instead of doing it in my name. And then the guy at the bank was like, Deb, you don't have a green card. You cannot do this. And so I had to go to my lawyer and he said, Deb, you have a 15-year wage to get your green card, even though I was already head of product at PayPal. his exact words to me were they're like there's a way to get around this which is when you send your application to that dude sitting in Washington DC at USCIS he doesn't know you he's going to spend five seconds on your application he needs to make that exception for you what can you do and this is when personal branding became important to me so I took a year started writing for Forbes starting speaking engagements blah blah put that case together and one year I reapplied I got my green card in 14 days and launched Kriya.

12:29So my life's mission is basically about how do we get people to make you the exception. And that's true. Just because you have a lot of experience with this, and I've heard this before, right? What is the, like if you're applying for your green card and or assistantship, there's a special classification. What is it? Notability or significant? There's some extraordinary. extraordinary um it's like the extraordinary something eb1a or o1 and things like that those are the categories yeah yeah and so you're you're suggesting that this might be pretty valuable for someone that's similar oh tell me more i i don't know oh my gosh we literally have people on the platform like we've been made up for some time we literally have people who've gotten their green cards like with their clear platforms i'm not kidding like i can list at least more than five people who've actually got green cards within the last one year with their CRIA membership.

13:26So yes, 100%. Man, that is incredible. Okay, so the website is cria.co, C-R-I-Y-A dot C-O. How does someone get started? Oh, we're going to be opening this up tomorrow. So people can just come in. They'll just enter the LinkedIn URL. 20 seconds later, it generates a website for them. and the website is generated with like some of it obviously has your own content but a lot of it also has recommendations for what you guys should be adding because we maybe we didn't find on your linkedin you'll hit one button and say claim and it becomes yours and then you can just edit it from your phone it'll already have all the previous sections just like fill in the blanks kind of stuff right like just add a few details you can go live in 10 minutes after that wow okay and obviously we're recording this in the past to our friend that's listening to the conversation And guess what?

14:16It's live. It's ready for you right now. And again, the pricing may change. Is the model just kind of like a monthly recurring or annual type? Yes. So we've actually started to see a lot of different use cases. So we have students all the way to investors and so on wanting this. So we wanted to make it accessible. So there's always going to be a free tier where you can come in. You won't get your, you'll get like a, you know, a dev.create.ai or josh.create.ai. It'd be a nice one pager. You can put in as much detail in that one page. Think of it as a one-pager website. You want to slap on your own domain name and add multiple pages, be able to schedule meetings.

14:53Like you have a scheduler built in like Calendly and all that stuff, contact manager. That'll be the next year. You can go on further from there and monetize your expertise as well. That's a next year. Very cool. Deb Dutta, again, founder and CEO of CREA, the website CREA.co. Again, C-R-I-Y-A.co. So very cool, completely AI enabled. Let it do all the heavy lifting for you. You've already probably put together most of what you need. And even if you haven't put it together, just go through the interview process and Kriya will design your personally branded website for you. I like it. Very, very cool.

15:32Deb, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Josh.

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