The Story of Spur: How Rohan and Royal Built an AI Agent for 600 Brands

Meet Rohan Rajpal.

Rohan is based in New Delhi, India.

Rohan and his co-founder Royal Tomar are both engineers. Rohan majored in Computer Science at IIIT Delhi, while Royal majored in Computer Science and Design.

Rohan and Royal met in college, and in their final year decided to build together. Rohan had a job offer from Goldman Sachs, but there was still a year before he was due to join, and he had always wanted to build something of he own. So they used that year to start building.

The duo built Spur, a multi-channel AI Agent for marketing and customer support.

Royal and I tried out a few ideas in quick succession, and each taught us something: a product can be too ambitious, praised but not valuable enough for people to pay for, or simply launched at the wrong time.

During India's second COVID wave, we built CowinAlertsBot to help people find vaccination slots. It started as a tool for friends and family, but spread to 150,000 users across India in a single day.

The turning point came when a Mumbai user asked us to build a bot to sell his atta (a type of whole-wheat flour used to make flatbreads) and offered to pay.

That project gave us the validation our earlier ideas had not: a real problem, a paying customer, and something we could build.

We moved from Telegram to Instagram and spent months doing the work manually, using ManyChat to run automations for small businesses and e-commerce brands. We did not build our own product until we had around ten paying customers and understood the problem deeply.

We also ran a varsity-jacket business ourselves, where we saw brands buried under the same questions: price, size, and how to order.

So we built one focused feature: connect a comment to the right Shopify product and send the link in a DM (Direct Mail), while tracking the sale.

We launched the Shopify app in August 2022 and added WhatsApp soon after.

From our first paying customer, it took a couple of years to reach the first 100.

It was a slow build, not a viral launch. Direct outreach, referrals, going to events and selling one on one, customer results, and teaching brands how to make money through messaging worked better for us than paid marketing. Building too much too early did not.

These days we focus a lot on content and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to bring in new customers.

Spur is a SaaS. We charge a monthly/annual subscription fee.

Spur is built on this:

We have now been running Spur for four years.

We are still fully bootstrapped, with a team of 12 serving 600 brands across 25+ countries.

We are getting extremely aggressive about going head-on with Klaviyo and Gorgias.

Our ambition is to bring marketing and support together in one AI system - an AI that markets and serves. Spur can answer a support question, recommend the right product, recover a checkout, or follow up after delivery in the same conversation.

Our biggest lesson is that distribution and customer context matter as much as product.

Talk to customers, do the work manually first, and build only after the problem keeps repeating.

You can find Rohan right here:

See you next time.

Thanks,
Jakob Jelling

I’m on X. Come out and play.