Analytics Don’t Close Deals. Answers Do with Ajay Bam
Ajay Bam had already built and sold a shopping app. He’d run global ecommerce at Nokia. He understood how people buy. By 2019, it was clear that video was taking over the buyer’s journey, but no one was indexing it.
Shoppers were relying on reviews, unboxing videos, and how-to guides to make informed decisions. Brands were investing heavily in production. But none of it worked if people couldn’t find the right clip.
Pages had 25+ videos, but there was no way to filter for the details that mattered, such as child seats, leather interiors, or a specific use case.
Marketers didn’t have time to review their own content. Consumers clicked random thumbnails. And most of the videos, over 90%, never got watched.
Vyrill was built to fix that.
The insight wasn’t about creating better video. It was about making existing video useful by making it searchable.
From Insight to Impact
Most early products start with a hunch. Vyrill didn’t. Ajay and his team were already aware of a massive blind spot: brands were investing millions into video content, but had no scalable way to extract insights or value from it.
Their first real test came with Porsche. Not through a flashy pitch deck or startup hype, but through Ajay doing the hard, early work: knocking on doors, leaning on his network, and landing a connection with the Porsche racing division in LA.
Building with a Real Problem
What Porsche wanted was simple: find the influencers who were filming at their events, analyze what they were saying, and figure out which voices were actually moving the needle. What didn’t they want? Sifting through 10,000+ videos manually.
That’s where the foundation of Vyrill’s tech came in. They developed a system to extract video content from YouTube, analyze sentiment, identify influencers, and even detect whether a video was filmed at a racetrack, utilizing AI to assess the scenes in the background. From that, they could surface the 2,000 most relevant videos and break them down by audience, keywords, competitors mentioned, and tone.
Porsche didn’t care about vanity metrics. They had 10,000 racing event videos on YouTube and zero visibility into who was posting, what they were saying, or how much reach they were getting. Watching them manually wasn’t an option.
Ajay’s team built a system to analyze that content automatically, identifying influencers, sentiment, engagement, and even whether the video was filmed at the track. It wasn’t a mass launch. It was a paid pilot. However, it identified a genuine issue and demonstrated that brands would be willing to pay to address it.
Refocusing Around What Matters
Early traction came from trusted intros. Porsche, Revlon, and the champions who believed in the vision and gave honest feedback. However, when it came time to scale, Ajay made a classic mistake: hiring a senior sales representative before establishing a repeatable sales motion.
That forced a reset.
Instead of pushing harder, the team widened their testing. They launched smaller pilots, ran more conversations, and paid closer attention to what customers actually valued. Insights were interesting. But the only thing brands really cared about? Revenue.
That realization pushed Vyrill to pivot away from analytics, toward outcomes. They built a Shopify app that makes videos searchable within the buying experience. No more guessing which clip might help close the deal, just fast, precise, high-converting answers.
The shift worked. Timing helped. TikTok had already trained the market to care about short-form video. Now, buyers just needed a way to make that video useful.
Vyrill gave them the missing piece.
From Early Wins to Ecosystem Scale
After five years of building, Vyrill is finally in motion: signing two new customers a week, expanding through partnerships, and growing brand awareness from the ground up.
But the inflection point? TikTok.
The platform tapped Vyrill to support 500,000 merchants with scalable video review capture, moderation, and analysis. Why? Because moderation isn’t optional. It’s mission-critical. Every retailer needs guardrails: no minors, no brand violations, no unlicensed clips. Vyrill’s system flags those risks automatically and filters content before it ever goes live.
This isn’t about influencer content. It’s about infrastructure. Whether you’re a Walmart-scale operation or a Shopify brand with 30 SKUs, Vyrill’s platform is built to help you collect, evaluate, and deploy video content programmatically at scale.
And scale is what’s next.
Conclusion
Most GTM teams don’t have a messaging problem. They have a clarity problem.
If buyers can’t find what matters, they bounce. If your product can’t connect to urgency, it stalls.
The fix isn’t louder outreach or more content. It’s sharper focus:
- Build for speed, not depth.
- Prioritize answers over analytics.
- Solve the problem that gets someone to act now.
Everything else is optional.
Reach out to Ajay to learn how Vyrill is reshaping the go-to-market strategy through authentic user-generated content.
Stop guessing, start scaling. Predictable growth doesn’t happen by accident. If you’re a founder stuck before your first $1M, or trying to scale past it, talk to Collin.
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