00:00:00 – 00:00:07 Nitin Bajaj

Hey everyone, welcome to The Industry Show. I’m your host Nitin Bajaj, and joining me today is Sneha Saigal. Sneha, welcome on the show.

00:00:08 – 00:00:17 Sneha Saigal

Hey Nitin, thank you so much for having me. It’s so good to be here. I know we’ve been connected for a while and I’ve been a fan of the work you do at The Industry Show, so excited to be here finally.

00:00:18 – 00:00:27 Nitin Bajaj

Great to have you here, and yes, it took us way longer than it should have, but here we are. Absolutely. Let’s start with the big question. Who is Sneha?

00:00:29 – 00:00:40 Sneha Saigal

I love this question because I’ve learned over time that I think we often give ourselves labels and define ourselves in a 9 to 5, like Sneha is a PR expert or Sneha is a business owner.

00:00:40 – 00:00:52 Sneha Saigal

But I realized the multi-hyphenate is how I love describing myself because I, yes, I am a PR specialist. I do have an agency, so I’m a business owner, but I am also a wine sommelier because that’s what I discovered I enjoy doing outside of work.

00:00:52 – 00:01:03 Sneha Saigal

So I’ve become the wine whisperer of the family. So pressure is on me when we’re out for family gatherings or events with friends. It’s always the one who’s looking at picking the wine for the whole group.

00:01:04 – 00:01:22 Sneha Saigal

But other than that, I do enjoy my Bollywood movies. I’m a big Shah Rukh Khan fan for those who probably don’t know. But yeah, that’s what I love to do in my downtime. And I think the most important thing for me is connecting people and just creating impact wherever I can and helping people in, in any possible way.

00:01:22 – 00:01:35 Nitin Bajaj

So yeah, that’s amazing. Next time we meet, I know I don’t have to worry about the wine, right? Because absolutely you take all that stress, all that pressure, which also means you have to do a lot more of those tastings.

00:01:36 – 00:01:59 Sneha Saigal

Yes, absolutely. It is something that I’ve learned to train my nose and understand. I feel like it was one of those things which people think of as very far and like something that’s just too complicated, but actually when you start enjoying it and understanding a little bit, you realize that It’s not such a big deal also. It’s part of the game of having a palate and just as good as saying you’re a connoisseur for the best, I don’t know, black dal or something like that.

00:02:00 – 00:02:12 Nitin Bajaj

True. True. Now you mentioned branding and strategy. Tell us a little more about that. Tell us what is Geeks and Experts. How did you end up starting it and why?

00:02:13 – 00:02:49 Sneha Saigal

Geeks and Experts was born a couple of years ago out of the sheer need of actually meeting incredible founders. Founders, business owners, leaders like yourself, and especially in a place like New York, I was often meeting amazing entrepreneurs. They were immigrant founders or they were side hustlers who were keeping their full-time but doing incredibly amazing things on the side, but they didn’t leverage the power of storytelling or media. And to me, that was something that really had a lot of potential, like trying to create a space where I can give them access to some resources and some guidance to actually move the needle for their business.

00:02:49 – 00:03:26 Sneha Saigal

So maybe it was partly like from a personal experience of going through that myself. I’m an immigrant. I moved here 7, 8 years ago, not knowing anybody and had to build out my circle from ground zero with just going out for networking events, building that personal brand, so to say, which has now become a very common coined term. But I think more and more people are realizing that your business also needs to like see you as the person up front. You need to be doing as much as you can to like talk to people about it and build that because nobody’s coming to actually toot your horn, you have to do a lot of it yourself, at least in the initial days. So that was how Geeks and Experts was born.

00:03:26 – 00:04:03 Sneha Saigal

And we cater to everybody from a solopreneur and a book author to a Series A founder who’s raised multimillion dollars in funding to the bootstrapped entrepreneur who’s also done incredible work over the last several years and is now at that stage when they wanna take it up a next level. That’s the beauty of the space is the skills are transferable, but you also are able to use that in different shapes, ways, and forms for depending on where the client is at. Even nonprofits like Ahsaan, other ones we’ve worked with, it’s amazing because there are so many different ways that you can bring visibility to a business no matter what stage or what type of business they are. So that’s how we were born.

00:04:04 – 00:04:54 Nitin Bajaj

Amazing. Thank you again for all the help and guidance and mentoring you’ve done for Ahsaan and putting us on the map, literally. And the— I see a trend here that wine connoisseur is also a connoisseur of stories, of experts, and brings and blends that expertise into storytelling. And it’s amazing how you’re able to weave those things in, find these platforms to help enable, get the word out, because as they say, if a tree fell in a forest, did it really fall, right? So we do amazing work, but if nobody learns about it, it really makes your own life difficult. And I know many businesses, many entrepreneurs think they have failed because their story didn’t get across or get to the right people. So thank you for doing what you do.

00:04:55 – 00:05:31 Sneha Saigal

Yeah, and I just want to add to that, Nitin. I feel like also sometimes founders or business owners or any leader tends to self-reject and think that they’re not big enough or they’re not ready enough. And that is something that I want to demystify when I meet somebody who’s even curious about the space, I always encourage them to try and start doing just even a little bit of this outreach on your own, because you really realize that you don’t have to have that big badge of being a VC-backed company, or you don’t have to be like thinking about only once you lock in millions in revenue, are you ready for PR? So I feel like that’s one thing that has really helped me help a lot more people.

00:05:32 – 00:05:37 Nitin Bajaj

That’s amazing. Give us a sense of the impact. You and the team have been able to create.

00:05:39 – 00:06:05 Sneha Saigal

Yes, that’s an amazing story because I feel like that’s what keeps the job exciting and wanting you to do more and more is highlighting businesses and seeing how it actually moves the needle. So for some of our clients, them getting face time with their potential audiences or with strategic partners is a big needle mover because they’re in the B2B space. These are massive contracts that these companies are signing, but how do you get them in the right room?

00:06:05 – 00:06:21 Sneha Saigal

And so what we did was very strategically carved out opportunities where they can be a speaker at some of these key conferences. And these are very niche conferences I’m talking about. That is where you’re able to actually connect with other business owners, strategic decision makers, and C-level executives.

00:06:21 – 00:06:43 Sneha Saigal

So from that one opportunity, what ended up happening is this client met a journalist in the audience who was interested in a story, so they got a piece of coverage. They also got invited to an executive forum with other speakers who were at the event. That led to somebody inviting them for another conference to speak at and give a keynote. So you can see the trickle effect of one opportunity just opening so many more doors.

00:06:44 – 00:07:07 Sneha Saigal

So that is the kind of impact that we want to create is helping people just keep hitting those different spots. And I like to call it increasing your luck surface area. Constantly tinkering. And that’s why it’s always like a marathon, not a sprint. Because if you treat it as a sprint, you’ll probably burn out and say that this is not for me, I can’t do this. And that’s, you know this as somebody who’s been in the space for long, you have to play the long, the long game and, and have that mindset.

00:07:08 – 00:07:27 Nitin Bajaj

True. And it’s great to have someone like you who has good visibility into the entire spectrum, and you can say this piece fits into this spot for now, and then maybe in 3 months or 6 months or next year, we want to move this here.

00:07:28 – 00:07:28 Sneha Saigal

Yes.

00:07:28 – 00:07:49 Nitin Bajaj

It’s one, it’s important to cast that wide net and play the long-term game, But only if you have someone who understands this board in a way where you can move the pieces around. So extremely invaluable asset to have on the team, someone who understands the whole landscape. So, and I find your work really interesting.

00:07:50 – 00:08:44 Sneha Saigal

Thank you. That’s really, and I feel like that’s also a little bit of the educating and helping people understand because sometimes what you don’t know, you’re scared of, or you don’t understand, so you just stay away from it. And so oftentimes when people think about PR, they’ll think just about the top-tier outlets. They’ll think only about the top features being on the front cover of a magazine. But actually to me, it’s, you need to think where your business is. Of course, those are great for metrics visibility standpoint, but if you are trying to reach a very particular audience of, let’s say you’re trying to reach specifically moms of ADHD children or something very niche, then there are podcasts for that. There are outlets which focus specifically on parenting or schooling. Those necessarily don’t have the millions of views, but they’ll have your engaged audience. And those are the people you want to actually— those are the qualified customers or audience that you want to tap into. So that somehow helps with seeing the numbers, but also seeing the quality approach behind things.

00:08:45 – 00:09:10 Nitin Bajaj

So true. Now, this is a very big landscape. And as you mentioned, you work with people in different industries, domains, bringing different needs and niches to the fore. I can think of so many challenges that can come about as a result of that. Instead of me guessing, I wanna ask you, what’s the biggest challenge you want to highlight?

00:09:12 – 00:09:37 Sneha Saigal

I think the biggest challenge is the space that we’re looking at right now. AI is of course everywhere. So a lot of people are talking about being AI-powered, AI-enabled, disrupting with AI. So I feel like. Challenge arises when you don’t have a very unique value proposition or you’ve not tested the product or idea and you’re just doing PR for the sake of it.

00:09:37 – 00:09:59 Sneha Saigal

I feel like that is where the challenge comes and that honestly makes the work for both sides complicated because if you don’t know who’s your, even your initial ICP, or if you don’t have, and by ICP, I mean your ideal customer persona, or even your early signs of product market fit, then we’re just going in circles with the messaging by just bagging on to the AI race. So that is where I would see is a challenge.

00:09:59 – 00:10:26 Sneha Saigal

If you’re just trying to chase trends and your business is pivoting as and when the trends are changing, that can pose a problem. But I think the most successful founders and business owners or leaders are the ones who are staying true to their path. And of course they adapt, they know that they need to make adjustments and tweak it, but not everything is reliant on that one one spike or one event that’s taking place. So I would say just being careful of that is important.

00:10:27 – 00:10:36 Nitin Bajaj

Yeah, and it doesn’t help when you hear a shoe company or a car rental company is going into AI and their stocks have shot up 100x or 600x.

00:10:36 – 00:10:39 Sneha Saigal

I wish I bought that stock, but yes, I know what you’re talking about.

00:10:39 – 00:10:44 Nitin Bajaj

Now, on the flip side of challenges come opportunities. What’s the one you’re most excited about?

00:10:44 – 00:11:05 Sneha Saigal

Oh, I love this question, especially because you’re a podcast host and you’ve done this for a while. I feel like While the, while it’s getting crowded to get just thinking about news channels and everyone talking about AI, the beauty is that the landscape has shifted and it’s become so dynamic. Thinking about several years ago, what was considered PR or personal branding has evolved so much.

00:11:06 – 00:11:43 Sneha Saigal

While we do see newsrooms collapsing or shifting and shrinking, and unfortunately there have been layoffs for journalists, those same journalists have actually gone on and started their own mini media companies. And that’s what I call them because you’ll have incredible journalists who are starting their own Substacks. These are journalists who have great wealth of work and body of experience in the past, and they are starting newsletters which have the most engagement. They have the highest open rates. And so there is a solid opportunity there with trying to get visibility to your product or to your service or to the initiative that you’re running through these different channels.

00:11:43 – 00:12:22 Sneha Saigal

So I would say when you think about PR, we need to take a step back and think about What is actually PR today? Is PR just the top-tier outlet? No, it’s not. It’s the Substacks of the world. It is also your LinkedIn presence. It is also your presence at events because the more there’s AI tools online, people are getting a little fatigued with a lot of written content just being written by AI, but AI cannot yet be on a stage for you. They cannot yet be on a podcast for you. So how is that being used or what are you doing to actually get Behind the scenes, show yourself as a founder or a business owner, just showing a little bit of your personality or a little bit of who, what makes you, you, and why should people think about working with you.

00:12:22 – 00:12:35 Sneha Saigal

So I think in a nutshell, it is, this is the opportunity to create trust because that is what we’re going into. We’re going to go into a trust economy where people are still gonna be just a human who’s pressing buy, not AI that’s pressing buy.

00:12:37 – 00:12:48 Nitin Bajaj

I love that perspective and I’m 100% aligned with you that the more things are getting technology-enabled, the more the human touch is becoming important. So yeah, I’m super excited.

00:12:49 – 00:13:11 Nitin Bajaj

Now, as we look forward into the future, I love to pause and reflect. I would love to invite you to share two moments from your previous life. One where things did not work out as you had expected. There was disappointment, failure, lessons. And another where things exceeded your expectations and became a success beyond your imagination?

00:13:13 – 00:13:19 Sneha Saigal

Oh, wow. These are such reflective questions. You’re really making me think and reflect, which I don’t actually spend a lot of time to do. So thank you.

00:13:19 – 00:14:24 Sneha Saigal

I would say the one that didn’t turn out the way I expected was when I first started out, Geeks and Experts was a very different model product. We were more tech-enabled. We were trying to build something that would have more of a micro consulting portion where entrepreneurs can reach out to experts and actually get real-time advice. Very quickly realized that we need to pivot a little bit. If you’re starting out as a business owner, you don’t necessarily have the funds and ability to be able to pay somebody for expert advice. So there were a lot of lessons learned there about just how the startup ecosystem works. I think the biggest lesson there though was the amount of time I took to start or pivot or make changes. I could have done that much faster. So I feel like as a first-time business owner or founder, we tend to like overthink and over-imagine. We imagine the actions and impact of our small step, whereas in reality, like, nobody really cares. Pivoting from that, being messy, like not having everything like super perfectly aligned, was the biggest unlock for me. So I would say I took that lesson as something that I continue to implement now.

00:14:24 – 00:15:04 Sneha Saigal

If I try to do a few things in a week where I put myself out of the comfort zone and just— it’s— I celebrate the rejection, whether it is like me giving a TED Talk, which hopefully one day I will, but getting rejected from that is, is not a no, it’s like a not yet. That’s what I see it as. So what I took from that learning was now implementing that when I have a big project that comes my way, instead of shying away from it or feeling scared, I’m like, you know what, I’ll take it. Let’s see where this lands. And so I ended up using that mindset for a really big event that we did earlier in this year. And again, it was my first time hosting something, having a big sponsor, having a big audience come up to the event and taking ownership for it end to end.

00:15:05 – 00:15:40 Sneha Saigal

The results were amazing. I didn’t realize that was how much I loved being in the room, organizing everything end to end, taking ownership of the concept of the event. So I think that was a big unlock for me. So that exceeded my expectations like anything, because I’m one who would just be like, oh my God, this is gonna be too much of a logistics. And I, I’m not really big on like public speaking, even though like that’s part and parcel of building your brand. But it just speaking to yourself and saying that I’m just deciding it’s going to be great. It actually turned out to be great. So I feel like sometimes we need a little bit of that delusional mindset as well to make us do things.

00:15:40 – 00:15:56 Nitin Bajaj

So true. It’s, that’s a great perspective of the lies we tell ourselves on both ends, right? One where we convince ourselves that this is not for me, I’m not going to enjoy it, but then we say this is going to be great. And in both ways, we are essentially fooling ourselves.

00:15:56 – 00:16:00 Sneha Saigal

Absolutely. You can talk yourself into anything and out of anything.

00:16:01 – 00:16:09 Nitin Bajaj

Now, speaking of which, what do you do to step off the gas and get away from all of this?

00:16:10 – 00:16:26 Sneha Saigal

Wow. I live in New York, so I think museums are a big part and parcel of just having that different headspace and just going back into whether that’s history or culture. So I’m a big fan of that, especially you can imagine the brutal winter we’ve had. I think that was the only way we could really escape.

00:16:26 – 00:16:44 Sneha Saigal

But other than that, I do enjoy the outdoors. I love being in the park. Park, taking a book and sitting there, just having that time to realize that all of this is pretty much just life and all of it is a part and parcel of it. So I try to incorporate that a little bit more and more in my day to day, but it’s hard to do that sometimes. You get so caught in the messy things.

00:16:45 – 00:16:50 Sneha Saigal

So books are always a great escape. That is something that I’ve really leaned on through the last couple of years.

00:16:51 – 00:16:56 Nitin Bajaj

So let me double-click on that. And is there a book that is a favorite? And maybe even a podcast?

00:16:58 – 00:17:03 Sneha Saigal

Podcast, everyone should follow The Industry Show. I think there’s some incredible founder stories here, business owner stories here.

00:17:04 – 00:17:28 Sneha Saigal

For a book, I think a couple of ones that come to mind, Ryan Holiday definitely is one. So a lot of his books, but I think Ego Is the Enemy was one of the big ones for me. It always stays top of mind, especially because being a business owner is very humbling. You need to remind yourself that. Have that thick skin, not let rejection put you down or have that perseverance. And I feel like the way it’s summed up in that book really put a lot of things in perspective for me.

00:17:29 – 00:17:38 Nitin Bajaj

Great. Thanks for sharing both. Now onto my favorite part of the show. We call this the one-line life lessons. And Sneha, I would love for you to share your life lessons with us.

00:17:39 – 00:18:07 Sneha Saigal

Okay, great. So one, I realized after really spending days packed with a calendar full of things and then seeing what did I do today, like where did my time go? Managing your energy is managing your time. That is what I have realized. Just when you think of different hats you have to wear as someone who’s running an initiative, running a nonprofit, everything feels like it’s demanding your time, but actually the energy that you give to things is where the time ends up going. So managing energy is equivalent to managing time.

00:18:07 – 00:18:34 Sneha Saigal

And the other one that I’m trying to make my life motto is, if you don’t ask, the answer will always be no. So there’s no harm in asking. You never know what comes out of opportunities and things. So anyone who’s even listening to this, if you’re ever hesitating, if you even wanna reach out to me, just reach out. I feel people should not think, overthink that because I feel like there’s a lot in the unknown that needs to be unlocked and explored. So that’s definitely something that I would stick to.

00:18:35 – 00:19:01 Nitin Bajaj

Sneha, thank you for making the time to share your journey, your story, your life lessons, but most importantly for doing what you do. Because I do believe having the right storytelling, having the right perspective, and having the right people alongside makes the entrepreneurial journey a lot better because by design it’s a very lonely one. So thank you, and I really appreciate everything you do.

00:19:01 – 00:19:03 Sneha Saigal

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Key Takeways