The Origin Story: Building Before the Hype
Kaushal shares how Echowin started in November 2022—before ChatGPT was public—after he built a voice assistant on his Apple Watch using GPT-3. The lightbulb moment came when he watched his mom (a small business owner) drop everything to answer a phone call: “She was with her client randomly gets a phone call, she has to drop everything she’s doing, run to the phone, and she was speaking in a hurry… That’s when it all kind of clicked.” Within 15 days they had a working prototype. Within three months, paying customers.
Multiple Positioning Pivots: From Horizontal to Builder-Focused
Early on, Echowin positioned itself as a “full horizontal platform” for all small businesses. Kaushal admits: “Our messaging was very, I would almost say vague. Our ICP was not clear, so we were trying to gather to all sorts of different potential businesses.” Over time, they tested different value propositions: “Build your AI agent in less than 5 minutes” (which attracted the wrong crowd and caused churn), then “Build your AI agent” (which drew in builders), and eventually their current positioning around production-ready, no-code infrastructure.
The Expensive Lesson: When Messaging Attracts the Wrong Crowd
Ashish describes a critical pivot: “We were saying, ‘Hey, come build your AI in less than five minutes’ kind of messaging that drew the wrong crowd and got us in a lot of trouble because the mass market started coming in with wrong expectations. They didn’t understand the limitations of technology and we were unable to explain that clearly. And people would come in, pay for the platform and they would churn. It was an expensive lesson.”
Finding the Builder Persona Through Customer Behavior
The breakthrough came when they analyzed which customers were sticky. Ashish explains: “We went back, we did extensive cohort analysis of who was getting benefit out of the platform. We looked at our existing customers, the customers who got excited, who built it on their own. In some scenarios, we even offered help and they’re like, ‘Nah, I got this.’ We are seeing success again and again and again with this persona.”
Training Humans to Talk to AI
Ashish shares a fascinating insight: “One of the interesting things that we’ve seen is we are in the process of training these agents. At the same time, I feel like sometimes we’re training humans to talk to AI too, because over the course of the last 20 years, we’ve been trained to interact with these bots—press one for this, two for that. Now, anytime people hear anything robotic, they’re smashing their zero on their phone.”
The AI Hype Cycle and Messaging Fatigue
Kaushal describes how they adapted their messaging as AI became oversaturated: “It even got to a point where the hype cycle with AI was in full motion and people were just dismissing things without even fully diving into what the platform does. Just because everyone was throwing the word AI but not delivering properly. So instead of that, we wanted to emphasize what the platform does—in this case, answers calls.”
Messaging That Matches Buyer Awareness
The current Echowin homepage speaks directly to solution-aware builders with specific, technical language: “Quick training,” “Production ready,” “Build for free.” Kaushal explains: “Now that we have a much clearer idea of who we’re targeting and who the messaging is for, we can already assume some of the things about them. They know what agents are, they know what these things do. When these builders come to our platform, they’re not looking for the high level of what these agents can do. Instead they’re looking for, why should I pick this platform over all the other ones out there?”
The Role of Data and Customer Conversations in Messaging
Both founders emphasize being data-driven but adaptive. Kaushal shares a tactical example: “We use Fireflies internally. We take the transcripts from our Fireflies calls with some of the agencies and we’re like, ‘Hey, Claude, find me all the top questions here.’ And then we use that as information as well.” Ashish adds: “Nothing beats interacting with customers. You would see their eyes spark, honestly. They’d be like, ‘My goodness, Echowin is such and such on steroids.'”
