Prajwal, Co-Founder, Clueso | "Being a dev is like being a wizard who can solve a problem” | Ep. 14
In this episode of Best Place To Build, Prajwal, Co-Founder, Clueso | "Being a dev is like being a wizard who can solve a problem” | Ep. 14 explores from IIT Madras research to YC pivot and AI SaaS growth Clueso helps SaaS product marketing and customer success teams turn rough inputs (screen recordings, slides) into polished product videos and documentation, including AI-scripted, editable voiceovers that stay in sync with video edits.
From IIT Madras research to YC pivot and AI SaaS growth
Clueso helps SaaS product marketing and customer success teams turn rough inputs (screen recordings, slides) into polished product videos and documentation, including AI-scripted, editable voiceovers that stay in sync with video edits.
Prajwal traces his path at IIT Madras: exploring research (quantum computing) through the Young Research Fellow program, then building Desklamp during COVID to improve collaborative studying in PDFs.
Desklamp reached ~30K users, but YC pushed the team to confront monetization realities in student/consumer markets, leading to a difficult but ultimately clarifying pivot toward a B2B SaaS pain point they felt firsthand: customer education and documentation workflows.
The conversation also highlights founder-market fit, co-founder complementarity, branding as a differentiator, and IITM’s Nirmaan pre-incubation ecosystem as a catalyst—ending with Clueso’s AI-first roadmap toward “autopilot” product marketing and education.
Key Takeaways
Clueso’s core value is “professional output from rough input.”
The product is designed so teams can upload raw recordings/slides and receive branded, edited videos with effects and a replaceable AI voice track—reducing production friction while keeping user control for final tweaks.
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Customer education and feature adoption are business-critical, not “nice-to-have.”
They position product videos/docs as a solution to the common gap where users only adopt a small fraction of features; better content improves onboarding, retention, and the ROI of shipping features.
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Consumer traction can mask weak monetization fundamentals.
Desklamp’s growth to ~30K users felt huge, but YC helped them see that student/consumer willingness to pay is structurally hard—especially when discretionary spend competes with non-software priorities.
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YC’s application form is a clarity tool even if you don’t apply.
Prajwal recommends filling it seriously because it forces founders to articulate differentiation, market reality, traction, and why-now—preventing “narratives” from replacing evidence.
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A strong founder answer can be flexibility, not performative certainty.
In the YC interview, when asked what they’d do if the productivity product failed, they said they’d build something else—signaling adaptability and identity as problem-solvers rather than attachment to one idea.
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Founder-market fit accelerates pivots and iteration speed.
They escaped “pivot hell” by choosing a pain they had lived (support docs + product videos constantly going stale), making it easier to understand buyers and iterate toward a useful MVP.
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Brand can be a competitive advantage—even in B2B SaaS.
They intentionally avoided generic SaaS aesthetics (e. ...
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AI became central after initial traction exposed ‘upstream’ workflow pain.
They didn’t start “AI-first”; they adopted AI when customers struggled with scripting/storyboarding. ...
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Multilingual product education is a global SaaS growth lever.
Clueso’s translation and speech capabilities address a common scaling problem: English-first teams selling internationally need localized videos/docs, especially in Europe and emerging markets.
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IIT Madras reduced early startup risk through social proof + infrastructure.
Nirmaan provided workspace, small funding, AWS credits, and a founder peer group; professors offered practical support (feedback, credit/project flexibility), making entrepreneurship feel like a “safe bet” to try.
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Notable Quotes
““We’re building the world’s best video editor, and we’re also making sure you never have to use it.””
— Prajwal
““Accepting that you, as entrepreneurs, are not exactly what you’re building at that moment.””
— Prajwal
““Being able to write software and build products is honestly like being a wizard in a muggle’s world.””
— Prajwal (quoting a YC partner)
““There’s a history of a graveyard of products in the productivity space… So what will you guys do if it doesn’t work?””
— Y Combinator interviewers (recounted by Prajwal)
““Pick something you guys actually resonate with.””
— YC advice (recounted by Prajwal)
Questions Answered in This Episode
Clueso replaces original audio with AI voice—how do you handle accuracy, tone, and compliance needs for regulated industries?
Clueso helps SaaS product marketing and customer success teams turn rough inputs (screen recordings, slides) into polished product videos and documentation, including AI-scripted, editable voiceovers that stay in sync with video edits.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You mentioned customers can edit the script and keep perfect sync—what’s the underlying workflow (transcript alignment, scene detection, re-timing) that makes this possible?
Prajwal traces his path at IIT Madras: exploring research (quantum computing) through the Young Research Fellow program, then building Desklamp during COVID to improve collaborative studying in PDFs.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
In the Desklamp experiment, 25 US student interviews led to low willingness to pay—what did you learn about pricing psychology vs. product value there?
Desklamp reached ~30K users, but YC pushed the team to confront monetization realities in student/consumer markets, leading to a difficult but ultimately clarifying pivot toward a B2B SaaS pain point they felt firsthand: customer education and documentation workflows.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What were the clearest “pivot signals” that told you Desklamp couldn’t become a large business, despite strong user love?
The conversation also highlights founder-market fit, co-founder complementarity, branding as a differentiator, and IITM’s Nirmaan pre-incubation ecosystem as a catalyst—ending with Clueso’s AI-first roadmap toward “autopilot” product marketing and education.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You said 50–60% of YC companies pivot—what are the most common pivot mistakes you observed in your cohort?
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Transcript Preview
you guys have some clarity on what you're building? So what will you guys do if it doesn't work? Everyone finds, like, that peer group. We kind of felt uncomfortable if we're not doing something productive.
Yeah.
Biggest learning right off the bat, just accepting that you, as entrepreneurs, are not exactly what you're building at that moment. [upbeat music]
Hi, my name is Amrit. We've heard that IIT Madras is the best place to build. [upbeat music] So we've come down to the Sudha and Shankar Innovation Hub. We want to meet some people. These are builders. We want to talk to them about their work, and also ask them what makes IIT Madras the best place to build? [upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to the Best Place to Build podcast. Today, we are sitting with Prajwal, probably our youngest guest so far. He's only 24. Uh, he is a co-founder at one of the newer, hotter startups from IIT Madras called Clueso. Uh, Prajwal, welcome to the podcast.
Thanks a lot for having me, Amrit. So excited to be back in this space.
Let us start... Oh, yeah, and we are at CFI anyway.
Yeah, out of a CFI club. Yeah, yeah, for a long time.
Let us start with what Clueso does.
So Clueso helps product marketing, customer success teams at SaaS companies create high-quality videos and documentation. So how it works is they start with a very rough, raw input. This could be a video recording, it could be, like, some sort of slide deck, and what they want to get done is turn this into a really high-quality video that they can share with their customers, have it be engaging, have it reflect their brand. So what they do with Clueso is they simply upload this raw input, and our product takes care of everything else. So we transform that video into something that looks much more professional by adding all sorts of video effects, things like zooms, blurs, text boxes, rectangles, and, uh, branding. So we add, like, the company logo as an intro slide, outro slides, and perhaps most importantly, we solve the- one of the most challenging aspects of video production, which is audio. So we completely swap out the audio track of the original video and add an AI-generated audio track, where the customer has full control over the script. So the AI rewrites it in a way that already makes it more engaging, but whenever they want to make or tweak or add a point that they missed, they can do that instantly without any issues, and have the audio and video sync up perfectly.
Sure. So this, this is meant for, say, for example, I had a SaaS platform that, um, helps customers with their help desk or-
Mm-hmm
... uh, or something like that, and I made a- I made this tool. I'm communicating with a customer. My customer-
Absolutely
... just tell me how it works.
Exactly.
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