Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Streaming is big time. YouTubers stream their morning routines, video gamers stream their campaigns, and some influencers just chat away – answering questions from fans and viewers. It’s a huge industry.

A pair of brothers, Shazor and Shaheer Khan, the founders of Scaylor, are using streaming differently. They are turning on Twitch to give people an inside look at what it takes to build a high-growth startup. And their transparency throughout the process has encouraged other entrepreneurs in Chattanooga to follow suit.

You may be wondering…. How is that possible? What about client data? Trade secrets? Proprietary code? 

Rest assured, the streaming isn’t up close and personal. Viewers cannot depict dashboards, but rather they take a bird’s-eye view of the creative, early-stage startup process at the Brickyard in Chattanooga.

Shazor laughed, recalling how it started.

“The camera used to be on my laptop, and it used to be my brother’s and my face. But people would jokingly do annoying things behind the camera, while we would be steaming. It was a learning lesson,” he laughed. “The bird’s eye is less distracting for everyone.”

Today, you can watch Shazor and Shaheer building their startup, Scaylor, alongside other members of the Brickyard in Chattanooga.

Scaylor is unifying data into one platform

In the age of data glorification and data-driven decision-making, the Khan brothers see a shortfall for middle-market corporations. These companies collect a bunch of data, but it’s all pouring into different platforms, generating separate reports, and requiring several departments to gain simple insights.

“You’re looking through four to six different software systems and data sets to put reports together. And in our experience, we’re hearing that there’s on average a two-week turnaround period between asking for relevant data and having it presented ot upper management,” Shazor said.

A big part of the problem is that platforms like HubSpot, QuickBooks, Workday, and other applications don’t speak to one another. Scaylor would sit atop all three, sending data to a translatable interface for the user to access.

Shazor said it operates as an LLM in the sense that the end user can ask a question or provide a prompt, and Scaylor will present an answer. 

How to use hard data to answer subjective questions

After creating the user interface, the Scaylor team quickly discovered a challenge. A manager may use specific phrasing to ask for one dataset, while the employee may describe the same dataset differently. There has to be unification– not just of the data – but of the people asking for it.

For example, a sales representative may want to learn about client retention. The marketing team calls it customer churn. The CEO is wondering why the company is having to replace so many revenues month to month.

“We’re much more of a context management company than we are anything else. People label things differently. So, our platform consistently says: Here’s the data we’re presenting to you. This is our understanding of your definition and the timeframe the data collection falls in. Is that correct?” Shazor explained.

He said that he and his brother spend time with each service line during onboarding to help teams better understand how to work with Scaylor and ask better questions.

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