A design degree. A sales job.
A gap nobody was filling.
I grew up in a school that taught me to think holistically, IB at Pathways World School. Then a Bachelor of Design Computing with a UX major at the University of Sydney. I came back wanting to build things. SaaS, software, products that actually solve problems. I had the ideas. I had the design instinct. What I didn't have was sales experience.
So I went and got it in the hardest place I could find, high ticket real estate. The kind of sale where a single conversation can be worth crores, where trust matters more than any pitch deck, and where following up at the right moment is everything.
Tried every tool.
None of them worked.
Here's what nobody tells you about real estate sales in India, WhatsApp is the entire pipeline. Every lead, every follow-up, every site visit confirmation. It all happens there. And it never stops.
I tried the self-serve tools. Set up flows, built templates, tested every option available. None of it felt right. They were rigid, robotic, and built for a Western buyer who fills out a form and waits. Indian buyers don't work like that. They message at odd hours, they switch between Hindi and English mid-conversation, they ask the same question three different ways, and they make decisions based on feel, how quickly you responded, how well you understood their situation.
The tools I found couldn't do any of that. So I started thinking about what one that could would look like.
AI changed what
was actually possible.
The moment I understood what large language models could do in a real conversation, not just keyword matching, not just button flows, I knew this was the gap. Not a small gap. A massive one. Every SMB in India with a WhatsApp number was losing leads they didn't even know they were losing.
I had the UX background to design conversations that felt human. I had the sales experience to know what a good qualification question sounds like. And I had a very specific, very personal understanding of the pain.
This is one piece of
something larger.
TeamSprout sits under Sprout Micro Ventures, my long-term vehicle for building and acquiring a portfolio of focused, profitable businesses. TeamSprout is where I'm learning operations at the sharpest possible edge. Every client we onboard, every agent we build, every conversation we analyse makes the platform smarter and makes us better operators.
This isn't a stepping stone. It's where my full focus is. But it is part of a larger vision, one where the best-run small businesses in India have access to the kind of infrastructure that was previously only available to enterprises with crores in budget.