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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and the Becker Business Podcast. We're thrilled today to be joined by a brilliant founder and CEO. We're joined today by Guy Weist. Guy is the founder, the CEO of Zen Zap. He's going to talk to us about their platform and what they do and why they've been so successful and why customers are loving what they do. Guy, can you take a moment and introduce yourself? Tell us about zenzamp and also a little bit about your background.
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C
Yeah, for sure. So thank you for having me. So nice to meet you all. My name is guy. I'm 37 years old, two kids running businesses for nearly 20 years now. Quickly about my background. I started in cyber security for a few years, then started the bootstrap company called Stucco Media with a partner. We served large companies like Amazon, ebay, Walmart, Target, some of the known brands in the E comm businesses. Back in 2012, 2015, we sold the business for tens of millions of dollars. We had this software to help those companies run their digital marketing in huge scales. So that was fantastic. That was my first company. I found it, then later on moved to, actually moved to live in London to run a media company that grew up through M and A. That's how we got acquired and I kind of like continue this path, buying around 20 businesses, growing the company to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and also hundreds of employees. Stopped doing that in 2018. Took some years off, did some investments, seed investments in some startups. Public markets. And then I met an amazing investor, Adam Fisher from Bessemer Virtual Partners and my two founders and we started zenzap. So that's my background.
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B
Amazing.
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C
I got.
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B
Yeah, amazing. It. Tell us a little bit guy. Tell us about Zen Zapp and what problem Zenzia is solving and tell us, you know, tell us about what you guys do.
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C
Yeah, for sure. So that's super, super, super easy. So most of businesses today, and we're talking about real businesses, real operations, non tech businesses, they run and they operate with personal messaging apps on personal devices, chat apps like WhatsApp, text messages, Telegram, anything that's private. That's basically what huge companies are relying on on a daily basis to run their business operations. And that's odd. You know, when you look at the tech scene, you have kind of like an old tool, Slack, which everyone uses for team communication, to separate work and private communication, to get control, to get connectivity, to get compliance and security. And for the other rest of the world, you know, slack is around 50 million users. But when you think about hotels, restaurants, hospitals, like any, any type of business, when you look outside of the tech scene, they really lack a professional tool that anyone can use and it's easy to use. So this blend of, of bringing on one hand a tool that is easy to use and is fun to use, as you would expect to have something like WhatsApp or iMessage, you know, text messages, but on the other hand fit all the business needs. Compliance, security, productivity, AI, help you separate work and private communication, control, governance. That's something that we felt like is missing in today's world. And that's the gap we're aiming for. And that's what we do from day and night for the last three years. We've just launched a few months ago and it's growing pretty, pretty nicely. So that's the ends up.
- [05:19]
B
Congratulations. And how did you get this started? How did you exactly start and how are customers started to use Zenzap today?
- [05:29]
C
Oh, that's a fantastic question. So in order to build and introduce a communication tool, communications means reliability. Nobody wants to have a communication tool. And when he needs to send up a message for 200 people for an update for, I don't know, a shift or a patient is sick and needs a medicine or whatever, nobody wants the message to not go through. Nobody wants things that never, you know, that it will never work when you need it. So building a reliable tool took us a long time, and I'm talking about long time because when you have, you want to have this amazing experience for users and mobile First Deskless employees would love to use it. But on the other hand make sure it's compliant, secure. You need to invest a lot in the technology. So it took us a lot of time to bring out the first customers and iterate with those initial customers to get to a point where they say wow, we love it. It's good as the tool we, we use but it's better because we have those features now for work. So it started with very small amount of, of, of, of of companies using the tool and then it started to grow. We started to advertise and to go out to the market. Now we have thousands of businesses from all categories like I mean any category you would think of are using our communication tool and basically that's how they operate and where they operate as a company. That's how they feel connected. So it started really slowly and then compounds with more and more users telling sharing stories about how they use Zenzap. You can check it online, you know, YouTube and stuff. How people share their experience of switching off from personal messaging apps into a professional platform place where you know they can have a dinner without their phone ringing all day long or when they on shift or at work or off work, you know, life just got back being normal. So it just grew and it compounds. Every month you see more and more users join but it couldn't happen without this long, long, long journey of building a proper tool.
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B
Thank you. And take a second and sort of the most. You mentioned a little bit of this but what are some of the most impactful results that you're seeing and that your customers are seeing so far?
- [07:55]
C
Well, it goes industry by industry. I'll take some because I know you have broad audience. I'll take some broader measurements to share. So we see burnout of employees especially in hospitality and medical space. Hospitality restaurants and hotels churn rate of employees is huge. We see their decrease of customers report us between 20 to 35 reduction of employees leaving the workplace for being burned out from this never ending messages going through their personal chat apps when they work twice or three times a week and they get annoyed all day week. So that's one number that is really strong. So think about when you run a thousand people operation, I don't know a hotel, you need to recruit 250 new employees every year. It's 25 a day, a month. It's one to two new employees per day that are leaving and joining just to keep your operation run smoothly. If you decrease that by 30, 40%, that's an achievement. So this is something that we see very strongly, keeping culture in place, bringing breath back to those employees. That's one hand, the other one is saving operational mistakes. So think about, I'm going to give you an example then that connects to a medical record systems. You have a patient going through this surgery, you know, released back home after the shift, the, the surgeon goes home and then gets a notifications on Zenza from the emr, the medical record system that the antibiotic was changed and that couldn't be done because he's at home now. But he still, he calls the hospital to make sure something is off because he knows the patient's already at home. So he calls the hospital and say, hey, I see that they said that the antibiotic got changed. What do you mean? So the intern said, yeah, he got back because he had something not going well. So he came back to the hospital and gave him this antibiotic. And the doctor says, well this antibiotic you gave him can cause him serious reaction. It's really dangerous. You need to change that immediately. So within three to four to five minutes, without the patient even knowing, they change the antibiotics and they save his life. So small details that runs through the operations to the right people, in the right context can change people's lives life. Another story about photos and updates and, and, and, and personal details going through messages, you know, through SMS ended up investigation and fines for $1.3 million. That's the largest amount we got from customers for fines for personal information of, of, of clients going through employees, private messaging apps. So a bunch of cases where they all could be, you know, be very dramatic but could be solved with just, you know, a simple work chat for the team that anyone would use.
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B
Just a more secure work chat. That's fantastic. And take a second guy, trends that you're watching, AI automation, business productivity, what trends are you watching closely currently?
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C
Oh, so I'm sure everyone is well known with the agents taking over our lives. And actually when you think about AI, everyone thinks about Chad, GPT or you know, Claude or Gemini. But the real truth behind AI is that the chosen interface for the next 20 years is chat. That's a decision being made by those big guys. So now the question is, if I run a hotel or a restaurant or construction company or a hospital, how can I integrate AI into the day to day of my employees? I have a thousand employees, how can I do that? So when introducing a native AI, native work chat app that includes smart search, includes the ability to connect agents and introduce them as human beings. So think about us in a group chat with another agent who in the chat looks like another contact on the group chat but we can speak freely with him, but he's connected to, I don't know, the shift management software and can help us change shift very quickly or it's an AI agent of the HR where I can speak with him about my vacations or my, my pension or whatever it is. So integrating AI and enabling AI into the day to day of the team communication and the team and how the team operates, that's the next big unleash that we see as the trend. This is the golden hour for how to unleash that thing. It's not just a single payer me speaking to AI, let's call it charge PT to reconstruct my email but it's now an agent works with me and with my colleague about my marketing thesis for the next quarter. So that's where we see the biggest impact for the next 24, 36 months.
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B
And take a second Guy, Fantastic what you're doing. Take a moment on what you're most focused on and excited about these next six months.
- [13:45]
C
Next six months. I think that from a business perspective, building a world where you know, any, any type of business can really afford and from affordability, you know, money wise and accessibility wise to have a proper tool to run their business on, I think that's, that's what we set up as a goal not just for the next six months but for the next 10 years. So seeing this going into life and turning Zenz up to instead of thousands of customers, thousands of companies to tens of thousands of companies from various industries, that's what we see now as our major goal. And the next second goal is, I would call the secondary goal is to see those employees which are super, super, super happy with using those purposely built tool for work, zenzap in this case, how we can help them integrate and how we facilitate AI into their day to day so they can become a better version of themselves. So if any employee, each employee in a construction company would use AI because he has now access to AI through zenzap with his team. That's going to be a win for us. That's going to be the biggest win. How can we create an impact and make those employees far more efficient, far more happy, far more productive with allowing them using AI in this, in the right context, in a secure environment.
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B
Fantastic again Guy, what a pleasure to visit with you. Guy Weiss, Co Founder, CEO of Zen Zap, brilliant entrepreneur. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Truly magnificent. Thank you, guy.
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C
Thank you so much. Thank you.