In conversation with the Sharmin Ali, Founder & CEO of Instoried, a deep-tech startup on how the brand is using the principles of neuromarketing and the power of AI to optimize written content

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sharmin Ali, CEO, Founder, Instoried

1. Tell us about yourself and Instoried

My experience with various Fortune 500 companies made me observe closely and conclude that even large companies and brands are ineffective in communication and that their marketing decisions are based on how they feel about the content instead of using data to get better results. Instoried is helping marketers, content creators, social media managers, freelancers, and students create content that is human and empathetic in nature as our in-house tool can analyze the emotional quotient and suggest appropriate words/ phrases/ sentences.

The content then becomes easier to resonate with the audience and lets the consumer engage frequently. The culmination of my love for writing and passion for storytelling along with capabilities in technology gave me a head start while starting up. I’m happy to share that we are now starting a new service where we will be helping companies build products using ChatGPT. They will be able to set up consultation calls with us starting April 1st.

2. We understand that Instoried uses the principles of neuromarketing and the power of AI to optimize written content. Can you shed some more light on this? How heavily have you invested in technology to stay up to date?

Neuromarketing as the name states is ‘Marketing to the Brain’. It is a very well known fact that ‘Emotions drive consumer decision making’. Instead of using logic and selling to the logical brain of the customer, we strike the emotional brain which is way more powerful by telling the right story. Instoried uses the principles of neuromarketing to offer smart recommendations to increase or decrease a particular emotion in the content.

We help marketers create content that is more human and filled with empathy, so that it becomes easier to resonate with. The idea is to never let go of a customer and keep them hooked onto your platform. With our tool, content creators and marketers can optimize the tone and emotion of their content to match the ideal tone and emotion of their end consumers.

This enables you to hit the mark every time a new social media post is created or every time you send the user an email or show them an ad. Putting the user in the ideal mental state while consuming your content ensures the user is more likely to engage and take action on your content.

3. You have won various awards and recognitions as a woman entrepreneur to one of the fastest-growing tech companies led by a female in India. Can you share some tips/advice for the upcoming women in tech generation?

I think the greatest challenge that a woman entrepreneur faces is that she is a ‘woman’. A lot of taboos that have been rampant in our society have often restricted women from scaling up at their workplace. Times have changed and I strongly feel that women have to stand up and take a stand for each-other. I believe the only things that really matter are the grit and determination of a woman.

Along with oscillating hormones and long trending societal norms that have kept women away from pursuing their dreams, another major challenge that women face is that they are generally perceived to be technically deficient and more artistically bent, which is very circumstantial in my opinion. It completely depends on the career choices that a woman decides to pursue. Women coders are equally smart and efficient as their male counterparts. A woman founder running a tech company also is proof that women can lead both tech and non tech companies and have the same mindfulness and smartness to deal with data and arrive at meaningful insights along with patience. It’s high time we change the notion that women are bad at dealing with data and number crunching. My advice to women in tech is to focus on building value. Women have to work twice as hard in a male dominated world to make a mark but once value is created, often women founders and technology leaders create more impact and are better leaders than their male counterparts.

4. Tell us about some interesting deep tech trends in India.

I think the biggest trend right now is ChatGPT. Everyone wants to use it for building various use cases. Hence, we have also started a new service called ChatGPT experts.co. It’s incredible that Open AI has literally commoditised every aspect of artificial intelligence and we want to help startups ride this exciting wave.

5. What differentiates your brand from its competitors?

Instoried is the world’s first end-to-end content writing tool that not only does content generation but also optimizes your spelling and grammar, checks and edits tonality, and emotion. It also optimizes for SEO and checks for plagiarism. Instoried has over 5 million users worldwide and their Content Generation service has over 500 companies as clients.

We enable content creators (marketers, social media managers, writers, bloggers, and journalists) to create content that is more human and filled with empathy, so that it becomes easier to resonate with their audiences. We use a database of over 10 Mn sentences that have been semantically analyzed to provide our analysis and recommendation without changing the context of the original content.

Our in-house built technology and proprietary datasets render us a beautiful tool with recommendations that are both semantically and contextually relevant. We have worked on our technology from scratch with 15mn data points to arrive at our current evolved product that we all are extremely proud and passionate about.

6. Tell us about your innovation roadmap for the next 12 months.

We have already launched Instoried ART, an AI-based image generation tool. We are the first Indian startup in the content creation space that uses state-of-the-art technology to generate AI images based on text prompts. We will be expanding this product by adding more features and making it more robust. We are working on making ChatGPT’s capabilities more accessible for content professionals as well as for the lay-person. Instoried is currently focused on increasing the accessibility of our tool across multiple platforms such as Chrome, WordPress, and other Content platforms. Our APIs can be integrated with any Content Management system to let users access ChatGPT as well as Instoried’s features seamlessly. Instoried has moved to enable integration of ChatGPT and Image AI to our tool.