Aaron Lim is the co-founder and CEO of Privyr, a SaaS startup that raised a $6M Series A. Before Privyr, he was VP of Knowledge and Collaboration at GIC.

👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

We build an app that helps salespeople and businesses contact and convert their leads into clients from the comfort of their phones.

We're especially loved by salespeople who spend most of their day interacting with customers through WhatsApp, SMS, and phone calls.

🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

Even though we're a tool for salespeople, we don't have any salespeople or sales processes ourselves! We're fully self-serve from signup through subscription, which has allowed us to expand to over 50,000 salespeople & businesses across 80 countries globally despite a small team.

🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Building Privyr from scratch, especially our amazing team. While fundraising and global expansion have been fun, I'm most proud of my colleagues that have trusted and stayed with us through the thick and thin.

I'm stoked to share that we've had zero employee churn so far, despite our earliest team members joining over 3.5 years ago!

🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

WhatsApp-based integrations, particularly what is allowed via WhatsApp Business and WhatsApp API. There are a lot of imperfect, complicated, or hacky solutions out there because of what Meta does and doesn't allow on WhatsApp.

It'll be super interesting to see how this evolves over time, and how it affects the ecosystem of startups and use cases reliant on those decisions.

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

While doing customer research to validate our idea, the most memorable quote we heard was, "don't make it easier for me to do something I don't want to do. Make it easier for me to do things I already do or wish I could do."

This advice is particularly useful if your customer is the end-user (as opposed to a decision maker or corporate buyer that won't actually need to use your product).

🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

How to test and validate startup ideas within 24 hours.

It's crazy how much can be achieved quickly once we seek to prove/disprove instead of build.

🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Movie: Lord of the Rings; TV Show: Arrested Development

🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Belgian Chocolate